Traveling with Crows

Lean and Hungry for Art

Art, Life  & Everything

Lean and hungry for art.  That’s what I’m thinking these days.  Capillaries’ nuance of love, intensification of desire.  For Metaphor.  The poet and my thesis advisor Jim Whitehead settled in his chair, his photo on my office door, reminds me, I am where I should be.  Should is one of my worst enemies.  I realize I have no idea where I am supposed to be.

 

The openness of an artistic personality allows for curiosity.  I let the future unfold.  My son sometimes is mystified.  If it has been raining for weeks and the sun suddenly comes out as we’re leaving a grocery store parking lot, I will turn west, toward Whiskeytown National Park, rather than back east, toward home. 

“Where are we going, Mom?”

“The sun came out.”

“So?”

“I thought we could watch the sun set over the lake.”

“But where are we going?”

“I don’t know yet.  We’ll see where the best view is when we get there.”

He has integrated my artistic personality into his psyche now; he understands that we sometimes go where the front of the car takes us.  This summer, we decided to go to Disneyland by way of Pismo Beach, because it was famous and beachy, and because I had not been there yet.  He was quite annoyed with the long stay on the cold beach in the morning.  “Shouldn’t we just keep driving?” he asked.  “It’s cold out here.” 

 

We live in Redding, California, and yet we call the whole state of California home.  That’s because I’m not afraid to drive it.  From the Sierras to the Trinities, the high desert of SoCal to the Siskiyou summit. 

 

I do driving outdoors artistic adventures.  I used to call them nature adventures.  I have come to see the two as one and the same.  My artistic temperament was formulated a long time ago, when I used to walk the property line with my father to inspect the magnolia blossoms, the azaleas, the rose bushes (always eaten by Japanese beetles), and the corn and the tomatoes.  Later in life, my father went out each morning to feed the fish he had caught in the Delaware River and at Lake Nockamixon and then stocked in our own back yard pond, Purina Trout Chow from a small enamel basin.  He loved to watch the channel cats come up from the bottom first, their cloud of sediment announcing their arrival, then their whiskers appearing briefly on the surface between the churn of sunfish and largemouth bass.  The fisherman became a sentimental old fool who just wanted to look at the fish.  He too was an artist, down underneath it all.  We all stood on the bank of the pond beside him in his delight in our morning adventures.

 

The artistic temperament comes from the earth.  The elements that pound that shape the earth call forth the artist within all of us.

 

That’s my theory.  I grew up learning to love art by loving the natural world, the turn of seasons in the cold of Northeastern Pennsylvania.  I grew up with the importance of going and looking.

 

In a few weeks, I will be in San Diego again.  I visit one painting by Peter Hurd that is part of the permanent collection at the San Diego Museum of Art.  I have an art print of that painting, “The Eve of St. John,” on my wall at home.  A young girl stands in the twilight of the desert, sheltering her candle from the inevitable wind.  Her beauty and happiness and the quality of light draw me back to the painting every year.

 

Bullhead and Balboa

 

Standing in Balboa Park in San Diego, California, looking down the long reflecting pool near the museum populated by artists and photographers, jugglers and musicians, I feel I am in some version of paradise, California style.  Open sky above me is constantly blue, or rainy for what seems like a few minutes, and the only troubling aspect is the parking lot.  I walk the length of the pool, looking at the large koi, pondering their life among tossed coins.  Then I stop, shocked.  There, below me, not three feet away, is a bullhead.

 

Nothing beautiful about a bullhead.  This ratty catfish resident of swamp waters comes from my hometown in the Delaware River Valley, Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania.  Bullhead is native to brackish ooze, littered with rotting leaves, bullfrogs, and rich, cold blackwater.  The Delaware River has swift, unpredictable currents that fold into layers of shale and have sucked many a good swimmer down under.  The current is legendary.  I lived in fear of the underwater demons of mud, of dying down there with those bottom feeders.  “They make a good chowder,” I remarked to my friend.  You don’t want to eat a whole slab of bullhead.  Too muddy-tasting.  But in a soup with plenty of butter and salt, you can stomach the bony flesh. 

 

I could not help but remember then Abbie Hoffman’s last stand, the Point Pleasant Pumping Station, the brainchild of the misnamed Neshaminy Water Resources Authority.  Hoffman joined the protest to “Dump the Pump,” an attempt to save the environment.  The water would be sucked up from the river bottom and pumped to draught-suffering areas of Bucks and Montgomery Counties, and to the Limerick Power Plant in Philadelphia.  The protest was eventually lost when company appeals took the case to the state level, where politicians were wined and dined handsomely.  The grassroots movement, blocking the roadway on my drive to work in 1983 with shouting protestors bitter with Pennsylvania cold, died, as did Hoffman, of suicide. 

 

In Balboa Park in January, wearing a light jacket, this memory seems biblical.  Something mythic that determined the fate of everything that followed.  Eye to eye with a bullhead in a reflecting pool in Balboa Park.

 

 

Delaware River Chowder

 

My father taught me to fish when I was very young.  We’d hike along the Delaware Canal to a place he called Widewater.  We cast our lines and pulled up bluegills if we were lucky, carp if we weren’t.  One day, I even snagged a snapping turtle.  He fought me all the way to shore, but once we were eye to eye and I lifted him toward the bank, he took one great from claw and swept the hook out of his mouth.  I guessed that on all fours, he simply fought me, but once I began to lift his legs, he took his freedom and his last chance in one swipe.  I remember how like a hand the claw looked as it raked the claw free.  Then he was gone in a cloud of sediment. 

 

In the early days of his river antics, the whole family would meet him after he’d spent the night out on Bull’s Island, an island in the Delaware accessible only by pedestrian bridge.  We were young teens by then, and he took us along on boat trips to Lake Nockamixon.  My mother sent bologna and cheese sandwiches.  I can still taste the massed ooze of earthworms on my fingers whenever I eat bologna.  Rarely, my brother and I agreed to go together in the ten-foot john boat.  Our bickering disturbed the fish, my father said, and he preferred to take us one at a time.  We traded off until summer’s end, when we were all tired of bluegill and pumpkinseed sunfish on Friday nights and bullhead chowders on Sunday afternoons.

 

My father never let us fish the river with him.  The dangers of the Delaware’s undercurrents and the steep, muddy banks were too much of a challenge.  He fished the river solo.  When he brought back bullheads, we ate catfish chowder. 

I pulled up a bullhead now and then along the canal.  My father showed me the barbs behind the pectoral and dorsal fins, the wide, roving eyes, and the whiskers.  We watched the fish suck at the air, and then we threw them back.  “They clean the bottom,” my father would say, as they disappeared into the merciless slime.

 

The last time he fished the river, he slipped on wet leaves and catapulted down the bank while straining to pull up a bullhead.  He broke his finger.  I saw the jagged finger no longer held its steady direction, his right ring finger.  He was in deep pain.  A trip to the doctor and a few weeks on a splint, and he was healed.  However, there were people around when he fell.  He was near the boat ramp across from Tinicum Park, and a whole host of young fathers and their children ran over to help him out of the muddy sandpool that had captured him.  They landed the bullhead for him.  He could never live it down.  We both quit fishing then.

 

 

Stone Quarry

 

Summers along the Delaware River in Upper Black Eddy were not all that hot, but they were humid.  Clothes and small gnats would stick to skin and need to be peeled off.  We swam in the stone quarry upriver near Kintnersville, parking along River Road and marching past the No Trespassing signs to the clear, deep pools where the land had been raked clean of stone.  Rain filled the cavernous pocks in the earth, and when the sediment cleared, we could almost see the bottom.  The steep mounds of earth provided a good lookout toward the river and a good diving board.  If we walked in slowly, our toes gushed with slime until we could float away from the bank into the cool still water.

 

Most of the people I knew who swam here on dates dropped out of school to have babies, then raised their children while they worked at the James River Paper Company, a Virginia company that bought out our local paper mill.  They took their kids swimming down past the No Trespassing signs.

 

The river current was a powerful psychic force churning in my imagination.  The distance along the Delaware Canal from Easton to New Hope is about forty-three miles.  Kintnersville is about seven miles north of Upper Black Eddy along the river and a long way from Easton.  On the way north, the view along the river is stunning, revealing, and harrowing, as the road itself seems to wind precariously along the small stretches of land between the river and the canal, crossing over the canal sometimes to lean into the river itself, and crossing back along the locks of the canal over old one-lane bridges.  Most of these spots flooded annually, and recently, almost all of downtown Upper Black Eddy washed into the river.  It is lowland, unpredictable.  My father told a story about a dam breaking during the flood of 1955.  He was standing in ankle deep water swirling upward around the axles of his car, and he managed to jam the car into drive and wash across the rising water before it engulfed him.  Others were not so lucky.  Whole houses washed downstream to Philadelphia. 

 

In summers, when I was old enough to ignore the warnings about the river from my parents, I drove the distance halfway to Easton where a small island extends out into the Delaware, an island called Hog Island.  There is a small parking lot at the canal lock, as the whole length of the Delaware Canal is a protected state historic park.  The island is barely visible through the trees, and only a native dweller of the region would even know of its existence.  Well north of Bull’s Island, this particular island is green with strong maples and oaks, but frequently, much of it is underwater during the winter months.  In summer, sometimes it is dry enough long enough that a person can walk across the stones of the shallow area to reach the island.  Otherwise, one needs a canoe, like the dugouts used by the Lenni Lenape.  A slender and agile boat is best in these changeable waters. 

 

At eighteen, I waded out alone to Hog Island and stayed up late to watch the sun set, made camp and dozed by the fire until morning to watch the sunrise over the river fog.  The edges came unfurled.  I walked the stones to the island’s headwaters to watch the current crease and walked the stones back down stream to watch the waters converge.  I fell in love with American impressionism born from a long night in river fog.

 

In between my sophomore and junior year at the University of Delaware, I went to work for my mother, the administrative assistant to the newly renovated James A. Michener Art Museum.   I helped transport some of the paintings of the New Hope School of American Impressionism  collection to their new home within the museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  One of my favorites was by Redfield, “The Frozen River.”  I rented a small apartment along the river bank on the river’s east side, looking back at Redfield’s New Hope. 

 

Steelhead and Heroism

 

The painters and the fishermen have the river in common.  Here in California, I am astounded at the division between environmentalists and sportsmen.  Hunters and fishermen are the people who are out there all day.  They know better than anyone else how the environment has changed.

 

When I moved to Trinity County, California, an angler’s paradise, I studied the fishermen angling for steelhead.  They did not “pack it out,” but left their beer cans by the side of the river, their human waste, even their bait and hooks.  I’ve been told they aren’t refined like the fly fishermen, and that respect for the river and the fish are a matter of an elemental education.  Fishing is only environmentally sound if it is coupled with meditation and contemplation.  Respect for life comes from this sensibility.

 

My father threw back the most heroic fish.  He could not eat them.  Big, beautiful fish had lived a long time.  He would sit back on his heels and examine the fish and whistle.  If there were other snapped lines dangling from their supple mouths, his sentiment neared that of Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “The Fish.”  Her speaker romanticizes the battle this fish has won; he is adorned with “medals with their ribbons/ frayed and wavering, / a five-haired beard of wisdom / trailing from his aching jaw.” Bishop’s poem is reverent in its regard for the fish, for the fish’s personal achievements: “victory filled up / the little rented boat.”  Bishop allowed her speaker to be transformed by the fish she held, and then she let the fish slip back into the ecotone.  My father brought some of those heroic fish home to stock his pond, the channel cats he claimed would clean the bottom.  He didn’t bring bullhead, because he said they disturb the bottom too much, creating muck.  He wanted catfish to clean up after the largemouth bass fingerlings he stocked in the pond, purchased from a local fishery.  He hurried out in the mornings with his enamel pan filled with Purina Trout Chow. 

 

All the fish died in the summer of 1995.  He died just after Labor Day.  The insurance claim he filed for reimbursement of the fish he stocked as fingerlings paid his funeral expenses to the penny.

 

I stood at the kitchen window one last time looking out at the pond with his binoculars before I said goodbye to this good place, my home in Northeastern Pennsylvania.  We kept our family binoculars in the kitchen windowsill and looked out upon a landscape and small pond on the last crest of the hill before the long drop into the Delaware Valley.  We could see New Jersey from the kitchen in the winter time.  In between our supper and New Jersey, a slate-colored junco, a red-headed woodpecker, some whitetail deer.

 

Nothing special crossed my field of vision that day, nothing but the ongoing stillness.  I am always in the right place when it comes to art and life.

 

Beginner's Mind

I have learned to tolerate beginning again when it comes to running.  I urge my old legs through the first mile and wish for a better feeling, like the feeling that I have ever run one mile before in my life (I have been a runner for over twenty-five years), but now as I get older, the first mile goes by, and I still must tolerate the beginner's mind, the frustration with how hard it is.  After forty-five minutes in the rain in the 41-degree temperatures, I feel good.  All over.  Blood and lymph have rearranged.  Lungs have cleared.  I remember that I can do this, something not many people my age would choose to do.  That feels good, too, beside my dog, trotting back across the footbridge.  I must keep moving.

But the task of beginning something altogether new is humiliating.  I could not for the life of me play ukulele in the key of B this week.  I got no good sound out of those strings.  I felt I could not play the ukulele at all, and that's because beginner's mind is so hard.  Yes, my fingers do not work.  Yes, I have not yet learned to coordinate my hands.  It's not the physical that is holding me back, though -- it is the mental effort needed to have patience with myself.  Beginner's mind seems harder than any single task.  When I try to force my fingers into the shape of the B chord, my brain feels like it will fall out.  I serve myself under intense fire and passion, trying to engage my fingers with my will and move into something beautiful.  Like magic, I want it all at once.  This is not the truth of the beginner.  The truth is, it may be some months before I like my own sound.

We have rain.  Almost enough rain to call it normal, almost enough rain to begin a spring season.  We have spent days inside listening to the steady drive of it outside.  It does not matter at all what I think.  It either rains or it doesn't.  The rain is good at raining, and it sounds beautiful.  I turn to tune the instrument again today, after my run, after the internal lecture on patience.  Steady, now.  My friend and teacher, James Russell, reminded me, "What's hard is still hard."

"Even if you're good?" I asked him.
"Even if you're good."

Making a Wish

Raven croaks in the tree above

bare branches

while below and yet above me

on a lesser branch

quietly

there is the eagle.  What if

I had not looked up?

What if

the raven did not croak?

Later that day, I turned back

toward the new-falling rain.

Rainbow.

Schwarzenegger and Rain: The Locomotive is Coming

I was on the couch enjoying my coffee yesterday when the Governor delivered his State of the State address.  We're half a dozen inches behind seasonal here in the North State, which supplies water for hundreds of miles in California.  I had just come back from San Diego, driving the whole length of the state, passing signs in agricultural fields that read, "Dust Bowl Created By Congress," among others.  When Schwarzenegger promised to end the "war on water," I wondered if he was going to do a rain dance.  He admitted, "Our economy cannot grow without water. Our population cannot live without water. It is our state's lifeblood." Right now, we need at least fifteen feet of snow to fall on our mountains in order to fill our fields, and we're not even halfway there yet, though we're halfway through the "rainy" season.  In a full-on drought of finances and rainwater, California struggles on, but the governor managed to make me feel good about it.  Most of the hype about his speech has criticized him for just this particular quirk, that he was "Arnold being too positive"; the rest of the hype (see Los Angeles Times article) focused on how he had reversed his decision on Obama's healthcare platform.  I thought I understood Arnold's speech, but I came away from the hype realizing that I had not truly heard the man. Somehow, I understood him to be stating that California needs more return on the dollar from federal programs, including health care; I understood him to say that he had reason to be positive, and he backed up his argument with statistics and more hype from Time magazine; and I understood him to be promising the impossible, better drinking water for California, better education.

Let it rain. Not one organization has assaulted the governor enough for his education fix, tying standardized tests to teacher performance. When class sizes push 35 students or more, academic research shows that student performance falls. No teacher can overcome crowding in the classroom. We need rain, and we need to decrease class sizes. We've got too many people in California, and we cannot support them. Driving home from San Diego, I was happy to escape to my mountain home, but every year that I do, the push northward reveals new housing and development. Our great state has limited pasture. Smart as we are, there is not much we can do about that.

In my final sip, I felt a little bit satisfied that Governor Schwarzenegger had at least mentioned two key points: he wants to protect higher education in the state budget and reduce prison spending; he is concerned about veterans returning home from Iraq and their mental states.  These issues are related, but only those of us who work at the three major institutions, prisons, higher education, and veterans' affairs, would really appreciate that. What he didn't say is this: Federal spending on mental health treatment for returning veterans would not only reduce suicides, it would reduce crisis response teams and violent events on our campuses and would reduce the incidents requiring the incarceration of returning veterans. But he cannot do anything about federal funding of veterans' affairs, either. California is interdependent with the rest of the nation. That's what I heard.

Deering and Stone

On the freeway in San Diego, California, between the Deering Banjo factory and the Stone Brewery, I knew I was nearing enlightenment of the beer and acoustic music flavor. I have become a born-again singer-songwriter, banjo flavor-lover music nut. Back in the early nineties in the Ozark mountains, and the old-timey banjo flavor left my ears ringing. No one would have guessed that fifteen years later, I would spend my spare time traveling to great bluegrass shows where the banjo-player makes the afternoon sky brighten with surreal light and sets you down beside snowmelt-running water, or that on New Year's Eve I would thrill to a tour of Deering Banjo before my lunch and microbrew. This renaissance of my life interests in due entirely to Tony Furtado, whose show two years back in Mt. Shasta stilled my heart, and The Infamous Stringdusters, whose show in Davis left me spellbound. The Stringdusters are due back north here in a few weeks, and though my hometown is three hours from Ashland and the show is midweek, I am going to try to get there.

I live in Redding. A folk guitarist and good friend here bought a Deering banjo and took me to see Furtado, and that began my journey. Since then, I've spent afternoons under tents at the Colusa Fairgrounds with banjo, guitar, bass, mandolin, and fiddle players. I'm prepared to do more bluegrass festivals and roadtrips this year. I'm just listening. Yes, it is high time I tune up myself, but there's no way I can meet the score of the people I enjoy. I'm sampling, drinking it in. The next 'dusters show is coming up soon, in Ashland. Like Springsteen, the 'dusters give and give and give, a high energy show with unparalleled musicianship and unforgettable lyrics. Music and poetry and the ethereal hum.

This is the story of the bluegrass roadtrip.

No One Knows

Given the tree of grief,

the long road of psychology,

the ancient weather of politics,

a few sad grins over beer,

I want long summer nights

to glow over the mountains

the sun to set on bliss

and leave it just so.

 

Still, the empty hands there wave

still there is more to reach for

still the eagle rises just

above the cool water.

 

A few armies of ants arrive

on the kitchen table

A few marches of syllables

appear beneath my itching fingers,

always trying to say

whatever might make time stop.

 

I strum a few tunes though

am pointless in my wayward

glance toward wilderness

toward peace

when all humanity tries

for personal justice.

 

Not enough to go around;

on the lip of the glass,

a liquid pools and breaches,

above gravity's arm

full and sweet.

Be Still When Money Is Talking

After Labor Day, just before fall, I am finally back where I began, in June, with prairie dogs.  I am reading Terry Tempest Williams’ book, Finding Beauty in a Broken World.  I have traversed two hundred pages in four months.  In the in between, I have read six books and taken ten graduate units in writing (from Stanford University) and teaching writing (from CSU Chico’s Northern California Writing Project).  I am a writing instructor at a community college in Northern California; I have a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry; my poetry manuscript hasjust been resubmitted, again.  I am finally back where I began, monkish, contemplating the prayerful life of prairie dogs.  Terry Tempest Williams has just made me cry.  I stir my boiled tea and remember.

            This fall marks the first fall of the first year of my adult working life.  Although I have worked straight through my life since age sixteen, this year is the first year I have worked without a break, straight through summer.  By most standards, my life has been lazy.  I have taken six weeks off each summer and two to three weeks off from work each winter.  I have written poems and meditated.  While almost no one knows this secret, I know I need this lifestyle like tomatoes need water.  However, I live in America, where the prices continue to rise.  The state of California is in a solid depression, with no sign of improvement.  I have not received a raise in years.  I must take additional units and try hard to network as a writer and publish my work.  I have little choice.  My son will one day go to college, but even before that happens, my culture dictates that he deserves to see Disneyland.  Most kids of parents who work year round have seen Disneyland.  My son has not: an English professor does not bring in enough dough to travel the planet with her son.

            But if I take a few units, I can raise my income.  So I do.

            I cannot wait to see the final medical bills.  I have very nearly averted surgery from an impacted gut.  My diagnoses range from appendicitis to biliary colic, but in the final analysis, I manage to escape surgery and spend only one day in bed, after a CAT scan, a radiologic infusion test, an ultrasound.  To find out what has been wrong with me, I have been exposed to all manner of radiation.  It might have been better to take the summer off and go wander around some nuclear testing site.

            Terry Tempest Williams’ brother Steve, the baby who was in her mother’s uterus when Terry witnessed her first nuclear test on the horizon in Utah, has just died.  I mean, he has just died in the passage that I am reading right now as the book rests in my lap.  His death feels like right now, because of my summer, because of my history of reading Terry Tempest Williams’ writing, because it feels real.  A squirrel scampers across my roof.  My walnut tree raises a few leaves in a slight breeze.  The weekend here in Redding promises to be a brutal 100 degrees.  I have no doubt about the impact of human life on this planet.  The impact of human life on this human body is my acid test.  If I were a normal working mom, I might have succumbed to colon cancer or several gall bladder surgeries or an appendectomy by now.  Working all year round in a caffeinated world leads to sickness and death.

"We all wanna get rich quick, but your whole scheme kinda makes me sick. I'm gonna lay my head beneath this old oak tree."

– Jim Dyar

            Let me count the days off this summer.  There were eight days between graduation on May 22 and the first week of June, during which time I prepared for my presentation at the Northern California Writing Project in June and finished the grades from spring semester.  Those days do not count.  When the Writing Project finished on July fourth weekend, I went away to Monterey and rode a rented bike along the coast to Asilomar, following a handsome man on a similar rented bike and squinting off into the waves.  Those two days count.  I got back home and had to make up assignments I had missed while I was away, so I worked a little bit of double-time. 

            Then my son wanted to go to Arcata.  From Monday through Wednesday, we ran around on the beach together.  I was so tired that each day, while he made sand castles, I literally crashed out and slept right there on the sand, my dog standing sentinel beside me.  When some fool in a helicopter flew too close over the beach, the dog bolted.  I watched my son chase after her as she ran around in utter terror.  My most beloved duo, off in crisis, and I could hardly move my butt off the sand.  Good thing my son is strong.  He brought the dog back to me and said what he always does, “Don’t worry, Mom.”

            When we got back to Redding, it was 113 degrees outside, so I didn’t even mind staying inside and writing and reading intensively, making up for the lost hours online with a steady march of study, study, study.

           

            Much of our world is a fabrication, a fiction, a manufactured and manipulated time-lapsed piece of filmmaking where a rose no longer unfolds but bursts.  Speed is the buzz, the blur, the drug.  Life out of focus becomes our way of seeing.  We no longer expect clarity.  The lenses of perception and perspective have been replaced by speed, motion.  We don’t know how to stop.  The information we value is retrieved, never internalized.  (Tempest Williams 196)

            I have internalized the message of this crazy world.  I have been quite ill for a number of weeks.  But I remember how to undo this.  The undoing involves a chaise lounge, a ukulele, and some poetry.  When I read Tempest Williams now, I stop to contemplate.  I write in response to her writing.  I teach my students about this, an act of intimacy between the reader and the page.  One of my students today promises to shave his face like the author Rich Cohen does, in the storied mustachio of Hitler and Charlie Chaplin.  He wants to embody the results of stares and queries.  He wants to report his live experience of the essay our class has been reading, “Becoming Hitler.”  I think my student is getting the message about critical thinking, how thinking requires some internal change and external effort.  None of this effort, however, is similar to cranking up  a million hours of computer screen time.  The embodiment of true wisdom requires energy and slowness.

We can no longer say, “Let nature take care of itself.”  Our press on the planet is heavy and relentless.  A species in peril will most likely survive now only if we allow it to, if our imaginations can enter into the soul of the animal and we pull back on our own needs and desires to accommodate theirs.  What other species now require of us is our attention.  Otherwise, we are entering a narrative of disappearing intelligences.  (Tempest Williams 203)

            From my desk I hear the train whistle in downtown Redding.  In my mind’s eye, I see the train crossing from the east side always, as I sit in my car heading west.  The last great frontier is out there, California wilderness.  I have seen mink, bear, mountain lion, coyote, jackrabbit, rattlesnake, osprey and bald eagle out there.  The western horizon is the reason I live here.  There are a couple hundred miles of wilderness between here and the coast, and most of those acres, one hundred thousand of them, burned last summer.  Without those acres and the time to witness them, I will not survive.

            Downtime.  None of my students would ever call me lazy.  They wish.  I pack their semesters with information and writing assignments.  In order to succeed, they must contemplate; the classes I teach are a conundrum.  I work them very hard, but to succeed, they must connect the disparate parts.  I teach like Terry Tempest Williams does, drawing all examples together, revealing how the smallest detail of our waking life, like the iPhone, needs to receive the examination and attention of our contemplative capabilities as a world power citizenry, as personal observers of squirrels on the rooftops.  I cannot imagine living any other way.

            Meanwhile, I have cancelled my trip to Surprise Valley this weekend.  I will not be riverside for the blues festival.  I probably won’t buy tickets to the beer and wine festival.  I will wait by my chaise lounge for the right moment to practice the ukulele, and I will update my Whiskeytown National Forest pass for another year.  I will probably swim in the lake, surfacing and diving among the bass and perch in the cooling waters of approaching fall.  Having cancelled everything, I will probably live until September 30^th, when I next get paid.  There is no guarantee.

            From my chaise lounge, I will write questions and comments on their papers. 

Reading and interacting with their thoughts is my highest privilege.  No doubt there, it’s not always fun, but it is highly provocative.  To confront the human mind on the page, to delve into the reality of another person, is a profound gift.

            My ethics as a teacher and a person are definitively Buddhist.  To grade an essay holistically with the sense of purpose and audience and to honor the mind that has written the essay fits with one of the tenets of Buddhism, the contemplation of the precious gift of human life.  To spend hours in the wilderness hiking or just observing the wildness is a Buddhist practice, honoring all sentient beings, including myself.  To slow down and think of the whole world and remember “the smallest sprout shows there is really no death” is operationally poetic, the poetry of an English instructor, but is also a way of embracing reincarnation, the possibility of the interconnection of all lifetimes. 

            Buddhist ethics are common to literate people, thanks to the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh.  There are many other similar philosophical stances among the world religions; for example, many of the values I have expressed are also definitively Christian.  Monks and nuns all over Christendom, both Protestant and Catholic, are honoring other human minds, spending hours in observation of all life, slowing down and remembering the world in prayer.  Though Christians may not embrace reincarnation in the same way that Buddhists do, they remember Christ’s promise of eternal life. 

            Terry Tempest Williams is a Mormon.  She quotes the Tao Te Ching throughout this book I am reading, Finding Beauty in a Broken World.  She also quotes Einstein and Albert Sweitzer and some Islamic philosophers whose names I do not recognize.  Tempest Williams remembers that we are living in a post-September 11^th world.  Last Friday was September 11^th.  This Friday, my critical thinking class will be reading about Hitler’s mind, Hitler’s fascination with power. 

            The squirrel uses my roof to avoid the neighborhood cats.  He has intelligence and a strong desire to live.  A Native American medicine woman I know has predicted a strong winter.  The squirrel seems to agree.  Did we forget about the planet while we were organizing our lives?  Did we forget about our bodies when we planned for constant work and activity in search of the American dollar?  Did we forget about the expansive footprint of humanity in search of silly green pieces of paper and gasoline in our engines?  I know we did.  I just don’t know what to do now.  Heal myself.  Heal myself with my hands on the earth.

Gathering the Stones

Small rocks on the beach, palm-heft
blackened under seawater, aged under foot—
the long walk to the freshwater lagoon
where the river comes in

handfuls of rock held close under waves
washed clean in sunny saltwater,
stones for prayers, one for each spot
on the body where the sky touches

horizon so near like a hair’s breadth
sand between my ready toes
horizon of all worlds—your gentle hands
holding mine

return to the shore, waves at my calves
echo triumph of the walking in
against the mark of tide into you
where we barefoot meet, where beach

finds asphalt, the inevitable road,
handfuls of rock, the long drive
seagulls
buffeting wind

the healing we all wish for
earth’s gravitational pull,
the medicine we receive.

--Kathryn Gessner, from the manuscript, Gathering the Stones

Works Cited

Dyar, Jim.  “Ain’t No Time.”  Magical Land (CD).  Jim Dyar Band, 2009.

Tempest Williams, Terry.  Finding Beauty in a Broken World. New York: Random House, Pantheon Books, 2008.

Prosperity in the Time of AIG

I tried pronouncing the word on my TV screen.  AIG comes out age.  This is the age of the decrepit financial institution.  It's also the time when all my friends are struggling to do business.  Gas prices are inching back up again, the state governments wallow in neglect.  In these times, the strangest things happen.  I've observed: 1) Those who were mostly nutty before this AIG have gone completely berserk. 2) Those who were imminently sane to the point of ennui are the most interesting. 3) People who have a tendency to focus on wordly events have developed even greater skill in communication.  4) People who are hermits by nature are coming out into the open a bit more, because we need them more.

Maybe I'm just talking about my friends, but there seems to be a collective personality shift.  The degradation of unsavory greed-based economies has allowed the greater humanity to turn toward each other.  Surprisingly, I feel some of this shifting is for the best. 

I am praying for a new kind of prosperity, the kind where the most sane develop enough base economy to assist others in greater struggles.  This, too, is a reversal of fortunes.  In the recent past, celebrities and their fashions drove the economy.  If ordinary, sane people could drive the economy, we could become more sober as a nation, more full in creative power and initiative.  The earth needs us to turn toward our most sensible, generous self.  We cannot avoid this crisis now.  We must cultivate our newfound skills.

Thermals and the Underworld

Mind brightens in eagle’s presence.

Is it any wonder

you would

put a camera

in the eagle’s nest?

 

Great horned beetle

walks through

imagination’s woods with my son.

I tell him the beetle has horns

He says, so does the scabbard

Then

More apple juice please

I ate all my noodles

 

Where he sits at the table, I know a man

who last week sat there, ate lamb,

told me lyrics he will write

when Angelina Baker speaks:

I think she will say the dough she makes

kneading it into loaves

brings a man to her

all his relics shining.

Sense of Direction

A union organizer's compass and a poet's heart --

drifting across fields and battlezones as if they are the same --

a little banjo music tending the flute of the ear, a little drift

on an ancient riverway, wondering where it comes in

to the saltmarsh, the ecotone of bliss.

I don't know what form it will take,

how it will rise, like the Great Blue Heron, slow

or straight to wing like the Bald Eagle, never accustomed

to leaving the talons in the mud.  A ripple across the water

is all that's left, and the tribunal of the black stark

meeting against the white, while on the edges

just the snowcaps and the dark, open branches,

the forest outreaching draws us skyward from the swamp.

Revisions on a Sunny Morning

A murder of crows assaults the pecan tree.

Steady, they deliberate, attack the nuts,

replace the space an ordinary nut

falls through to muddy ground, treat

the delicious interior pulp as gold

mined from the highest branches laced with frost.

Crows fall through my windowpane at angles,

springing up later as marionettes;

dance down, and then again rise up, accost

the still point furrowing my quadrangle,

black curliques in a paragraph vignette

riding the blackness of the deep frost.

Cold chair, light from the window, wish for wings.

The pace of crows is exactly what it is.

Office Windows

Cold Sunday in the office, snow piling up outside, the vision of tiny hands touching the flakes for the first time, nostalgia.  I call my son.  He says it's not snowing there.  All day, I drift into the window pane between tedious computer work.  The fight to stay alive in the human realm.  Feeding the soul requires a little dip and snuff -- I peruse the bluegrass postings on youtube, listen to songs in between posting grades.  My feet never warm.

Sundays too, I get up early.  The dog at my bedside, the reminders of the way into the wilderness.  For a Sunday or two, I have to check back, lean into the blinking cursor and find the snowflakes' envy, the warmth of a rapt attention to detail.  Time skips toward darkness.  I drive to Raley's to buy some chicken for dinner.  Baking it with garlic and rosemary, walking the dog in evening snowfall, the crunch underfoot, sensing the pierce of stars around the billowing gray curves of clouds, I find the slight inclination of spirit.  This is all there is.  I could walk until midnight if there was somewhere to go.

The chicken won't wait; the oven is on.  I have to press on past the lighted alleys and decorated homes in midwinter glamour to find the flavor full and sweet inside.

Writing Gonzo

I should say that I teach writing.  That disclaimer allows me to admit I haven't read anything interesting lately.  Although the writing I read is summarily more proficient than any of it was, say, ten years ago, the overall proficiency pronounces apathy in slow tones and predictable syntaxes.  The subjects stray sometimes into the range of mighty pit bullian struggles in suburban backyards.  Just yesterday, within the city limits, a grandfather shot a neighbor's pit bull at the fenceline.  Each member of the pit bull's family claimed she was something other than a pit bull -- a rat terrier, a lab mix, part boxer.  That fact alone, though not highlighted by the ever-correct journalist who merely reported the details, reveals the truth, that the dog was mighty vicious, and we're all better off now that she's dead.  Simply put, each family member proclaimed her "not vicious," but since they each had a different story about her breeding, the tendency to exaggerate the truth cannot go unnoticed.  But the sentences and the scene were drawn with the bland perfection of a paragraph with a topic sentence.  I read the story over coffee, recovering from my dreams.  Before I went to bed, I watched Hunter S. Thompson in the documentary, Gonzo.

Wouldn't it be something, to watch someone tense at a typewriter?  For real?  Just that, the mere act of awaiting genius, tossing out wild hours of television viewing to seek some fine verbiage, would pepper my landscape with semiautomatic thrills.  I guess I have to move in with Jimmy Buffet and order steady margaritas and cocaine.  Hunter S. Thompson was a bit more complicated than drugs and alcohol, according to the movie.  He was all about the story.  And some of him missed the best of stories -- he seemed to be a man in pieces by the end of the documentary. 

I thought how so like me, he must have been out of step with contemporary life.  People I know would be hard-pressed to comprehend his motives for filming a gangbang by Hell's Angels, let alone writing sentences about the men behind the curtain.  I get the sense that he wasn't happy about those bikers and their drift and paunch, their tongues.  Yet he wrote them down.  Deviance interested him.  He made an art of it. 

I used to teach his essay, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved."  Some who read it loved it.  The main impact of the essay, however, became some fascination with the woman who assigned it as reading in a college course.  Gonzo journalism doesn't have meaning in the current web of pop culture iconography.  Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are not deviants.  They embrace common culture.  Irony is almost completely beyond their comprehension.  They take off their underpants and get out of limos because someone has a camera, not because they are making a statement about inhibition; and they are uninhibited because they are uncouth, not because they are wise.  Hunter S. Thompson, crazy wisdom, you are missed.

Yellow

Yellow was the first color I noticed on the Mill Creek Trail.  I meandered uphill at a moderate pace behind the man and the dog, trying to etch the tree colors into my memory.  By next weekend, a good wind could bring all the yellow down.  We'll be on to the new color, then no color at all.  I'm predicting rain, long winter rain.  For now, since there has been no summer, no walking in the wilderness until the smoke cleared, every step is more precious than the last.  I'm just glad it's all still here.

That's something.  Yesterday, we took the long walk up to Whiskeytown Falls.  Water and the cool rush of wind brought the sense of a new ecosystem.  In the valley of that mountain, carved by the water itself, there are dogwood trees.  On our way to the trailhead, we quickly drove through the damage on Benson Drive.  Rock Creek from Highway 299 was deceptively regular, even after we crossed the bridge.  Soon patches of brown appeared, where I guessed spot fires had taken the vegetation.  We turned around after the first glances up the dirt part of Benson.  Like the day I toured Dutch Creek Road in Trinity County, the dance of fire tourism led to depression.  Once we were on the trail up to the falls, though, the magic of the forest had returned, what was salvaged, the way in.  I savored every step, every crunch, every uphill breath.  Doing it just to do it.  I could feel muscles that had been forgotten.  It was good. 

No other exercise invigorates me quite this way.  I come to the base of the trail and feel the slight challenge of the uphill climb against my thoughts and obsessions.  My heart becomes what I listen for.  I also watch for bear, the tranformation of bear inside and out.  Last week, I sighted a weasel, though I had never seen a weasel before.  Tonight it was a gray fox, lingering in the road.  I come for the wild moments, for the letting go.  I know the weekly hikes have kept me sane.  Every step up every trail since the fires has seemed like the last hike before winter.  Friends who never spoke of death before are writing about it.  I am leaning in.  Here at the upgrade, meeting what is.

A Rock Through the Eye of the Needle

White wine completes fresh fish at the spa resort,

enough to take it all in, douse the fires,

chew on the stories of the sharks in the reef –

we’ll leave out the song about the rock

thrown through the passenger window

of our rental car, the tedium we met

each morning over coffee as we tried

to recover documents lost, spend less,

absorb the sense of enemy in our ribs.

It’s not the violation, exactly,

nor the stress on the phone with American Exprress

or Chase or United Mileage Plus –

it’s the world as we know it

bladders full of clean gasoline

that run us toward our destiny –

those left beside the road with empty tanks
find a rock, rejoice in the shatter

of all the glass we think we look through.

Acoustics

Up late culling metric feet as sex slices through
fiddle music fresh flowers in the wind. I've filled out
forms for house repairs, the jeweled water shooting
straight from the hot water heater, little beadlets
forming on the ceiling, rivulets disappearing into
baseboards sweetly tucked white there for all
posterity, just nailed down right.

Clicked on send.  The next phone ring will come
too early, a cold shower will be friend of the day.

Architecture of Vertical Seeking Horizontal

I make coffee and look up the word equivocation
finding its juxtaposition
next to erection
beneath equestrian
(complete with photo of horse and rider)

it occurs to me
all these patterns of duplication
where one person seeks reflection
in thought, word, and deed
to quote another ancient text

mind's answer to the indignation
discovering what we truly fear --
no one out there can tell us
what's in here.

Coffee is ready though.
That's enough.

War Zone

It's the ash out here that's a problem.  I am hanging my white wash in the ash, thinking it could be dry before it turns grey.  There is a stiff wind, and most of my undies are dry in ten minutes.  The fire is burning swiftly up the mountain in the direction of The Ranch, my friend's place near Keswick Dam.  If the fire burns at the dam, an environmental cleanup site, maybe hundreds of fish downstream would die of the acidic conditions.  No one can really predict the worst case scenario.

I'm thinking about the young bears I saw this spring in Whiskeytown Park, ambling up steep grades that are now completely blackened.  I wonder where they are now.  I wonder if the firefighters have seen them.  Fire is one of those natural disasters that obliterates everything in its path.  A few structures are nothing to a blaze on a hundred-and-fifteen-degree day.  What I wonder is, whether or not to volunteer to help or get out.  I have an online course to upgrade.  Work goes on, wherever we now are.

I suppose that's what happens in a war, too.  Thick smoke chokes everything, and there is the terror of constant air traffic overhead.  I've become accustomed to low-flying copters and water bombers, to the sound of the whole airfield activating at eight in the morning, the turning of propellers as clear as day when I cannot see across the nearby school yard.  Work and life continue, and a woman hangs out her wash in the ashy wind-driven heat.

backyard and day-weary

Grass sticks on soles' green walk
patient like anesthesia
forged in sun's accompaniment.

Woman in sweatpants
distills every mother's prayer
uncut hair of graves.

Chest rhythm abiding
rising into rose blossoms,
their open fragrance.

Mourning it is then
fettered waste of ribcage
sweet kiss of magpie.

Remotely Coyote

As evening rolls into my living room, I flip on the television to watch the news, lifting my remote from the rubble of newspapers that grace my coffee table.  I feel a pang of regret as I glance at the Opinion pages and see Jeff Osgood’s headline, “Forget the outdoors: Where’s the remote?”  To manage my temporary guilt and drown out the patter of light rain on the roof, I tap up the volume a bit.  Osgood argues that video games, the internet, and television programs have become the best place for America to watch nature, citing a Nature Conservancy study that finds “the number of visitors to national parks is declining, and fewer people are hunting, fishing or camping.” I agree that I enjoy watching nature on DVD, Animal Planet, and nature programming in general and that I frequent internet sites thrilling with nature’s ambiance; yet I would argue that the Nature Conservancy could not possibly know that I am visiting national parks now more than ever.  I haven’t hunted, fished, or camped for more than a year, and I haven’t registered these activities in any national park log.  Apparently, the study only measured historical trends; more of us who are “quietly subversive on behalf of the land” (Tempest Williams) might be trailing our way into the backcountry from a neighbor’s yard or day-tripping on a well-marked trail rather than registering for a tent space on the measurable valley floor of a national park.

Twenty years ago, when the Nature Conservancy recorded healthy numbers of national park visitors, I was on the roster, too.  I rented a campsite at the Buffalo National Riverway, along with some sixteen others, for a weekend retreat, using University of Arkansas rented camping gear.  We had to explain where we were going and get the camping gear back on Monday morning.  Everything about that trip required registration and planning.  Fast forward to my life ten years later.  I was living in the Trinity Alps, and the Trinity National Forest served as my view in every direction.  When I left my property for a walk to the post office, I walked through national forest territory, as did the black bears who ambled down the mountain to eat blackberries beside the Trinity River.  We often eyed each other from safe distances; sometimes, we were suddenly too close for comfort.  Osgood states that people are staying home because “the media construct a reality for us that’s so dangerous we’d best leave these places alone.”  I must be crazy: I not only visit wild and dangerous places more often than I used to, I do so without ever consulting a park ranger or registering for a hunting license.

I admit I am a bit of a stranger to contemporary life in 2008.  While my friends are enjoying garage sales on a Sunday morning, or heaven forbid, gracing the pews of the local churches, I am most likely walking some city greenspace, having some hot coffee, and then packing for my day hike in Whiskeytown National Park.  I have an annual pass, which I post just inside my windshield, but this pass is also good for a day hike in Lassen National Park or a day at Burney Falls.  Typically, I could be heading into any of those places.  I don’t know how the Nature Conservancy counts numbers.  Each week, no matter how I vary my hikes, I see some of the same people on the trails.  We are a group of people so addicted to state and national parks that we have chosen to live our whole lives close enough to one that we can walk right into it from our homes.   My life plan becomes fitting in my work and relationships between my afternoons in national parks.  Yet I haven’t counted as a number on any visitor’s roster for a very long time.

Let me think back.  There was a time on Easter Sunday when my son was small that I drove to Big Sur and went horseback riding on the beach.  I registered with the park service for the ride.  When I later walked among the redwoods, I found myself among European and Japanese tourists.  English was a second language, and all the American idealism about this beautiful place evaporated in the bump and bustle.  I drove through Yosemite once, about seven years ago, paid the park fee and registered my vehicle.  I could hardly get out of my vehicle in such traffic, and English was not the first language I heard.  I hiked out of the Grand Canyon in 1992, finding one other American to hike with.  Most of the people I encountered were European.  If everyone in America is just like me, we have found ways to enjoy our national parks without feeling like we have just entered a major European metropolitan area at the height of international tourist season.  I want my nature walks to be free of the need for translation.  One day last summer, the summer of 2007, at a remote trailhead in Whiskeytown National Park that is close by a road, my hiking partner and I encountered a German couple and their ten-year-old boy.  They asked how long the hike was to the falls.  We told them.  But they declined to force their son away from his Gameboy for the venture, saying to one another across the top of the rental car, “They look healthy.” 

Maybe it’s not the cost of REI gear, the scary “wild places” the media portrayed, or even the seduction of television nature programming.  Maybe it’s just that to hike to the falls requires a certain amount of stamina; and maybe you have to be part of the “Coyote Clan” Terry Tempest Williams organizes on her website, a part of the group of people who doesn’t want to be seen or spoken to all day while trudging miles into the woods.  We are a rare breed.  And we’re not on anyone’s rosters, if we can help it.

All that said, I own some expensive REI gear and a two thousand dollar mountain bike.  I don’t have a Nintendo, cable or satellite, or any other video gaming available in my home. On cold, rainy nights in winter, I have watched Winged Migration and Grizzly Man on DVD, and I’m looking forward to watching Into the Wild.  Still, my behavior has become more radically outdoorsy.  I can only concede my behavior may not be observable or measurable in any way, as I prefer it.  Osgood states that “a love for electronic media, namely the internet, television, and movies” are to blame for “97.5 percent of the decline in visits to national parks” (A4).  Maybe I can love all that electronic media almost as much as anyone else in America and manage my two to ten miles a day on a trail in a national park at the same time, but no one may ever know that I am there.

I admit I have to have my critter fix up close and personal.  Osgood asks, “Why go searching the Rocky Mountains for the sight of a bighorn sheep, marmot or pika when you can tune into an episode of ‘Meerkat Manor’ to get your critter fix?”(A4).  Osgood misses the fact that many species are endangered.  I spent a weekend in Death Valley National Park in the fall of 2005 and never sighted a bighorn.  Television might be the only place I’ll get to see one.  And mink are even harder to sight here in the Trinities, although they do exist.  I know many people who have seen cougars, too, but I’ve only seen a tawny flank disappearing from my flashlight beam.  On television, I have watched bighorns evade cougars; I have seen entire cougar families grow up; I have seen the mink moving through underbrush.  No doubt, if I had been a trapper during the 1840’s in California, I might have seen all these critters with my own eyes.  My real daily sightings in parks are less threatening and much more exciting.

Now I thrill to the osprey driven from its line of flight by an aggressive bald eagle.  I see seagulls, Canada geese, crows and red tail hawks on their migration routes or nesting and feeding.  I take my camera in the fall to see if I can snap one photo of a black bear that hasn’t been poached for its gall bladder.  I live to glimpse a bobcat or follow a small band of wild turkeys.  I heard the turkeys gobbling just yesterday, though I didn’t see them, and I frequently hear coyotes, though they are tough to sight.  And coming up a slope, tired with ragged breath and near-heatstroke, I have almost ridden my mountain bike right into the knees of a twelve-point buck. I could never shoot one.

I sponsor my visits to the national parks greedily each year, happy to slap down my twenty bucks onto the counter for another annual pass.  I don’t know if the Nature Conservancy counts that as one visit or 365.  Either way, they’re still far from my truth.  I visit my national parks sometimes twice a day for hours at a stretch.  To me, they are our greatest national treasure.  I am sorry no one seems to know about us, those of us who don’t even notice how much our hiking boots cost because we simply can’t find anything else to spend our money on.  If Jeff Osgood and the Nature Conservancy are right, we are an endangered species.  But we could also be behaving like hunted animals, “quietly subversive” and disappearing into the underbrush, leaving nothing but a glimpse of our tawny flanks.

Sources:
Osgood, Jeff.  “Forget the Outdoors: Where’s the Remote?” Opinion pages, Redding Record Searchlight, March 26, 2008, A4.       

Tempest Williams, Terry.  Coyote Clan.  Author homepage.  March 25, 2008.  31 March 2008 http://www.coyoteclan.com