On Cowboy Poetry, Elko, Teresa Jordan and Blogging
Betty and I will soon be off to Elko, Nevada for the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of the American West and an effort to preserve our western heritage.
This year we are going early so that I can attend a two day blogging workshop taught by writer Teresa Jordan. Teresa is noted for her books of non-fiction. My favorite is Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album, which is a memoir of her younger days on the family ranch north of Cheyenne, Wyoming. Sometimes I think that those of us not out rounding up and branding calves think that cow folk have vastly different lives than we do. Teresa’s book shows us that though they may have a hard physical life, ranch people have all the same issues the rest of the world deals with. I like knowing that our trials and tribulations tie us all together.
Teresa is also a great blogger so I am hopeful that attending the workshop and hearing more experienced bloggers talk will spur me into writing timelier and better blogs. I write two blogs and like most things in my life, when I began them I had lots of torment and anxiety to write about and I think some of the blogs were pretty fair country writing. But after two years, my energy has waned and I am tired of the routine, the demands I have created for myself. So…on to Elko
I recall reading in a book that a lot of the academia responsible for educating America’s writers is concerned about the level of writing and reading in America today. People aren’t writing nor are they reading, or so the conventional wisdom goes. But after becoming a blogger, I have discovered an immense community of young people out there both writing and reading blogs. It’s not Jane Austen or Ernest Hemingway, but a lot of the stuff I have read is very well composed, whether in a technical vein or something more in the creative non-fiction milieu. I suppose blogging doesn’t match up to Homer or Virginia Wolfe, but I still think that since people are writing and reading that writing, discourse and democracy and thought and discussion are still going on and that’s what matters. And some of the blogs are really well written…downright exciting.
Some things about blogging are technical. How to set up a page and put in plug-ins and widgets and compose in HTML. A lot of the technical stuff is beyond me. In my earlier years I would have crashed into the technology head-on, but these days, if I can’t figure it out ricky-tick (as Michael Deede, one of my sergeants in Vietnam used to say), then I hire a pro or flounder around.
But a lot of things about blogging have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with story. Is there a compelling conflict, or obstacle the blogger or someone the blogger writes about must overcome? How that conflict or obstacle is tackled is what makes the blog work, or not work if the writing doesn’t meet the challenge thrown down by the task. It is not so important if the obstacle is overcome or not, but how it is written that matters.
Besides obstacles, are the people in the blog interesting? Can we see the people through the images the writer chooses to describe them? If there is a setting, is that visual and are all the five senses involved in the writing? We are visual critters, but words that evoke smell, sound, touch and taste also add to the complexity and rich texture of a blog. Is the language peppy and musical and appropriate to the mood of the piece?
Is the blog about something important? When I say that I mean does it delve into the essential questions that we encounter in our lives. I’m not saying it has to be composed as if the blogger is Plato or Francis Bacon or George Santayana, but we often read to discover how someone else solves the common problems we all deal with: love, hate, war, death, and the wide array of emotions that rise from the bottom of our cowboy boots to the tops of our Stetsons, every single day.
Just standing here composing this is energizing me to get down to Elko and work with Teresa and the rest of the people who will help me become a better blogger. While in Elko, we will also be taking photographs, talking about making films, talking about music and poetry, listening to music and poetry and prose, talking about the past and future heritage of the American West. And yes, I will do some blogging.
Gesture
Four days before Christmas last Betty and I ventured to Socorro, San Antonio and the Bosque del Apache on the Rio Grande River in central New Mexico. We went in search of photography and nature and hot chili.
Dodging uncharacteristic assaults of big blizzards, we spent a day and a half seeking and photographing the great migratory birds; cranes and snow geese. We went in search of the Owl Cafe and green chili cheeseburgers. We sought raptors, songbirds, waterfowl, cottonwood trees, fiery skies, roseate sunrise and sunset. We found all of that.
Bosque del Apache, San Antonio, New Mexico
At dawn the sandhill cranes awoke and began their morning gestures. They skraked, croaked, walked and pranced, flapped their great gray wings and pirouetted against each other like high school kids sparking at an after-football-game dance.
Sandhill Cranes
Then the snow geese rose off the water and flew in wide formations towards their corn field feeding grounds. They reminded me of upset old drill instructors yelling at each other over recruits, this all magnified by the thousands. The geese’s great World War II bomber-like formations etched against the dull gray skies that threatened us with foul weather.
The racket bounced off the flat water and hustled up to the sage covered hills. It was cacophony. Music. Conversation.
Bald eagles watched from dead snags in the middle of ponds and pintail ducks with their elegant necks dabbled, quacked and whistled. Ladderback woodpeckers ascended the trunks of cottonwoods, the willows captured solstice light with a color quality of polished Spanish doubloons. Patches of cattails blew puffs of cotton-like pollen that gleamed in the glare of the sun.
Redtail Hawk
Avian mayhem carried the day punctuated by cries of alarm when fancy-coated coyotes sneaked around with their tongues dangling from the sides of their snouts. Javelina gangs rooted in the roads. Roadrunners lifted fancy crowns, then hid them, then lifted them, as if sending us signals.
At the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, where Conrad Hilton cut his teeth, green chili burned our lips, our palates, made our foreheads sweat. Not once, not twice, but three times, we let the savory flare of chili reconnoiter our mouths and conjure our ancient New Mexican memories.
Threats of a big blizzard kept showing up with other rumors: an Aplomado falcon on the south end of the preserve, a herd of elk grazing in one of the corn fields, mule deer bucks locking horns along one of the ditches on the east side, a bobcat darting across the road just below the visitor center. For us, these rumors all remained unfounded.
Sandhill Crane
We went armed with our photography gear, waiting for the gestures, the moments that told us something was afoot not tied to our Anglo-Saxon lexicon. Something in the way a wing gets lifted, or how the sun shines off the white pate of a bufflehead duck. Gestures that communicate something different from what we know. Or that tell us something common to all of us: humans, birds, New Mexican dirt, the aurora borealis, the universe.
Maybe we found it. Maybe we didn’t and imagined that we did. I am not sure there is a difference. The thrill often lies in the quest. Seeking holds much meaning.
The bird song, the crane cries, the goose flight, the rough coats of the javelina illuminate my thoughts.
Leaving Socorro, where we spent the nights, specks of snow dotted our windshield as we went in search of our next adventure.
Canyon de Chelly
Recently Betty and I journeyed to the Southwest to show our film and visit family members who live there. On the way back to Idaho, we visited a few places that we had not seen for many years as well as a few places that were on our wish list.
One of the destinations was Canyon de Chelly on the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. I was born and raised in Arizona and yet had never ventured there. My father often talked about us visiting Canyon de Chelly. (He pronounced Chelly, as Shelly, instead of the Spanishized word “Chelly,” which has been incorporated into English so that it is pronounced “de shay.” The Navajo word for the canyon is “Tseyi” which was borrowed by the Spanish as “de Chelly” and incorporated into English from there.) But we never went and I suppose it was because my father did not like to go anywhere too far from his house, his job, his business, and I also think he didn’t really want to go much of anywhere with me. My saying as much isn’t to rebuke my father, because I was a handful when young, always getting into messes in places I had no business getting into. I talked incessantly and asked a lot of questions. I had opinions—strong ones—which when expressed, often made my father’s face turn the red color of the cliffs in northern Arizona.
In the summer of 1963, I worked on the Navajo Nation in a little slaughter house that killed dry ewes. The packing plant sat on a small piece of private land outside of Window Rock, not really that far from Canyon de Chelly. But I never ventured to the canyon, just hung out trying to see if I liked smoking cigarettes, getting trucks stuck in the snotty clay of a wet summer, dreaming about sex and being scared near to death about the sin of it all, the chilling thrill.
But two days before Christmas of 2011, Betty and I met Leon Skyhorse Thomas, a Navajo guide, musician, filmmaker and native ceremonial officiate, at the visitor’s center of the canyon. We climbed into his beat-up white Jeep with our camera gear and drove into the heart of Canyon de Chelly. The walls are the color of terra cotta when the light is right, and almost orange when the light is right a different way. They shoot right up like someone cut them with a cross-cut saw, then used an adze to shape them. It was early and cold and the breeze was like Kit Carson’s saber when he drove his U S Army troops into the canyon in the 1860s to destroy the native strongholds and their beloved peach tree orchards.
First Ruin
The ride in was rough along roads that seemed to change like the tracks of sidewinders in a wind- driven sand. The walls were narrow and Chinle Creek was mostly frozen. I asked about the notorious quicksand of the canyon and he laughed and told me he’d buried three vehicles in the canyon. After hearing that, I seemed to sit lighter in my seat as we jounced and bounced and battered our way down the track between the narrow walls. Several times Leon stopped, got out, and surveyed which route might be the best.
There are still farms in the bottom of the canyon, and people live there in the summer. The way the light lit up the warm, south-facing walls of the canyon played against the dark walls of the cold side and we were rocking and reeling back and forth between the dark and the light.
White House Ruin
Leon spoke Navajo to us. A lot. He sang to us in Navajo, too, and he chanted a prayer. And he took us to First Ruin and White House Ruins and to natural alcoves, one where Navajos had scratched pictographs in charcoal that documented a Ute Indian raid into the canyon. We saw Anasazi petroglyphs and Hopi petroglyphs and both ancient and more modern native pictographs. Petroglyphs are art sculpted into rock. Pictographs are painted with pigment onto rock. And the wind knifed through the bare limbs of the cottonwood trees. And the cold pelts of the resident cattle and horses were fluffed up to deflect the cut of the morning.
Canyon de Chelly Petroglyphs
Once, parked next to some rock art, Leon began to explain the Navojo sensibility vis a vis the canyon. As he spoke he changed from English to Navajo. We didn’t know what the words meant but we understood the emotion of them as they flew away from Leon and married the sculpted and concave walls of the towering cliffs. His words began to echo, around and around us, through the trees, along the fence lines, and back against the walls.
Canyon de Chelly Pictograph of Ute Raid Into the Canyon
For visitors to Canyon de Chelly, there are motels with clean rooms and good food. The Navajo people are friendly and attentive. I suspect summertime is very busy and very hot. The fall might be the best time to go, because as Betty likes to say, the fall is always the best time to travel.
Bah Humbug and All Hallows Even
It’s Halloween time around our neighborhood and as you drive down the streets the colors of the aspen and the maples play a nature-coordinated decorative tune with the orange of the pumpkins, real and fake, whose black eyes match the colors of the plastic witches dangling from tree branches and the black of their flimsy, battered capes plays with the gray plastic RIP headstones that appear to rear out of frost-killed yards, and the gravestones’ gray hints enhance the white filaments of faux gossamer dotted with fake black widow spiders.
The air has turned crisp and sharp and hints at direr moments to come like wind and snow and ice. On FaceBook I read “Happy Halloween,” and the next three days, all over town, the church parking lots will be filled with cars and “trunk parties” so that the kiddies don’t stand the chance of being poisoned or molested or…Happy Halloween everybody.
Happy Halloween? The origins of Halloween are somewhat obscure but one of the most prominently espoused origins is that it is Celtic in nature and marks the time between summer and winter, a line in the sand so to speak, between bounty and famine, life and death…and as such, the lines between the world we live in and the world of spirits becomes blurred, where intelligences can go back and forth between what is and what has been but is supposedly dead. Is that something to be happy about?
Originally known as All Hallows Even, the date has become a good one for libation, drunkenness, and spending lots of money which I think is responsible for a lot of the growth in popularity for the day…making money…candy, costumes, stuff to hang around the yard, parties and the concomitant cookies, cupcakes, candied corn and booze.
And yes there has been a massive explosion in the date’s popularity, with the hype often reminding me of the days of my youth when the run-up to Christmas created a fever pitch in us kids. Christmas season has moved on to begin three months early, and now Halloween feels to me like Christmas did when I was a kid.
I may be guilty of being a Halloween humbug because I don’t delight in the thought of it. I often recall my days as a kid when a bar of soap to write on windows of houses and cars was more in line with what we did instead of trick or treating. Marking your territory, so to speak, and when getting older, stealing outhouses from the farmsteads where they were still employed and hauling them down to the high school and putting them up on some porch or portico or piazza for everyone to see. I delighted in that. Most people laughed, or knowingly smiled back then about our shenanigans, all except the farmers who grumbled about lost privies. Now the law would turn their dour jaws on us and investigate.
Oh, back in my day we charcoaled our faces, put on baggy outfits and ostensibly went trick or treating, but we were more intent on mayhem and things that pointed to mischief and not good…won’t give me a treat? I’ll give you a trick.
But now it’s about keeping everyone good, which, in our efforts to get accomplished, seems to fail, as the percentage of hell raisers and mayhem creators remains the same, and always will. But we sure can help those retailers cash in on some miniature boxes of Milk Duds and Whoppers.
As for Betty and I, we will be out on the town, the lights of our house turned off, no gossamer in our aspen or dogwood, nor bowls of candy to rot the teeth of little children. Maybe a movie…maybe two. And just maybe a big box of Whoppers or Milk Duds.
Leaf Peeping
I am a desert rat and have since childhood mouthed dialogue about the beauty of the mountains vis à vis the desert. The mountains generally have no sand and wind that drives the sand and pits the paint job on your new Mercedes Benz, no short-legged plants, no spiny cacti, but trooping phalanxes of spruce and fir and pine. But here I am after a life lived and I’m still in the desert. The mountains are close, but I still hover around the roots of the big sage, the bitterbrush, the winter fat.
Once it was mesquite and palo verde and saguaro and Indian wheat. The names have changed but the milieu remains the same. Relatively dry, relatively warm. Big open vistas, a certain beauty to the landscape, even if it is harsh, or its ambiance is harsh.
Yet the harsh nature of the desertscape is no more dangerous than what one encounters in the pine-clad high country to the north of Boise, Idaho, where we live. I’d say fifty below is harsh even if it inhabits the pristine beauty of a winterland of ice crystals and frozen mist and miles and miles of spear-point spruce sheathed in an armor of ice. Maybe that is why I stick to the lower extremities of earth.
Regardless of my obvious preference for desert climes, for six years I lived in the high mountains of southern New Mexico and the legacy it left me, among other things, was a love for the turning of the leaves. Once I read an essay in The New Yorker Magazine by Stephen King about “leaf peepers.” When I saw the title I was curious about leaf peepers and what kind of insect they might be that sat on leaves and peeped their lives away in search of sex, breeding and compliance with the ultimate command to all life on earth: survive. When King described the leaf peepers, I was surprised to find out they are the people who come to Maine to watch the colors of the maple trees change from green to red and gold. As I read that article, I knew right then that at heart, I was a leaf peeper. I admit it. I am a tourist of foliage, a consumer of ripe reds, and orange tones that look like phosphorescent tints, and rusty hues that are redolent with memories of old Caterpillar engines left out in the rain for ages.
Two weekends ago, Betty and I, along with friends, ventured to Sun Valley, Idaho for a number of reasons, one being to take part in leaf peeping. We arrived on a Thursday evening and were disappointed with the color, but it was spitting a mixture of rain and snow and there was snow in the high country and I figured as soon as it cleared off, the frost would arrive and then the color change would accelerate.
On a Saturday morning that broke clear and fresh, we pulled out before sunrise and headed north out of the Wood River Valley, over Galena Summit and down into the Stanley Basin. As we broke over the summit, the Sawtooth Mountains on the west of the basin and the Boulder-White Clouds on the east reared up with their high shoulders, their peaks covered with fresh snow. The sunlight was just breaching the dawn and lighted up the peaks of the Sawtooths snaking from south to north. Sawtooth is an apt name for the peaks that remind one of the saws lumberjacks used to employ to knock down the big trees, long before chain saws showed up. Saws with large, sharp teeth that could bite into live wood, or flesh.
Fog and mist and nary a hint of air pollution hung in the air. Pronghorns grazed in the pastures of cow and sheep outfits with names like Busterback Ranch and Stanley Basin Ranch and Sawtooth Mountain Ranch.
I love aspen and learned it I suppose from the huge groves that cape the cold sides of the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico. Aspen grow in huge gangs there, and love places where the snow gets deep and stays deep into the spring. Elk and deer and black bear seem drawn, as do I, to the groves.
When autumn arrives, the trees know (do they know like we do on some epistemological level?) that they need to go into survival mode to make it through winter. The green color in the leaves vacates and leaves the underlying golds and reds behind. The sugar in the leaves gets trapped and the frost, when seared by sunlight, reacts with the sugar and the leaves take on even more brilliant hues. This is what I adore, this chemical reaction turned into art….art….art.
When I was young, I went on camping trips with the Boy Scouts up to Holly Lake in the White Mountains of Arizona. It was usually August, so the leaves had not changed by then, but I still wondered at the way the Rocky Mountain Maple leaves reminded me of Picasso-like hands and how the sunlight caught in the dimples of the aspen leaves and shimmered as they quaked in the alpine breezes. (The locals called them “quakies.”)
One summer as we loaded vehicles to head out of the high country, we discovered a porcupine climbing an aspen. Since porcupines tend to be nocturnal, I suppose it was climbing up to find a notch in the limbs to sleep the day away, or maybe it was headed for an aspen leaf breakfast. I watched with…with…with what….horror? as some of the bigger boys bombarded the creature with stones, then large rocks and big rounds of aspen we had cut down for firewood. I recall the porcupine fell to the ground and I refused to look at it as they laughed and finished it off. I walked away and got in the back seat of an old green Chevy Suburban and we drove out of the mountains, back into the Sonoran Desert.
But on this latest leaf-peeping trip of a couple of weeks ago, the violence of humanity was not so readily apparent. Nestled in the coves, the rincons, the draws of the mountains and foothills lining Stanley Basin were stands of aspen in varying degrees of leaf peeper heaven. Yellow, gold and a red tints that seemed to capture all the glitz of Times Square as they shined at us, neon-like, as we drove the road toward Stanley. And they shined something else at us, a promise…a promise of more color to come.
The Cave of Forgotten Dreams
When I was a kid in southern Arizona, I went caving and spelunking with a guy who was a middle school teacher in the town where I lived, Casa Grande, Arizona. We walked into basalt cave mouths in the Silver Bells and Silver Reef Mountains, and into our own little Sawtooths. We sniffed around for the scent of gas as he told us about canaries in coal mines. He was from coal mining country. We pitched rocks down mine shafts that had claim markers that looked like they were still maintained by prospectors. The rocks clicked and clacked and often we heard the rattle of diamondbacks climb out of the shafts. I wondered if they were albino rattlers or if they climbed out at night just like the ones we killed with forked sticks and shovels. I wondered if they captured and swallowed kangaroo rats and other small things, wrens, and such. Sometimes there were windlasses and big containers that would lower you into vertical mine shafts, but I was always frightened to go down in. The possibility of snakes scared me, and the thought of the ropes breaking scared me too, and that I might end up dying down there while the teacher and his two sons ran back to town in an effort to find someone to save me.
I have always had a primal fear of going into the bowels of the earth and admire miners with the way they go miles down into the tunnels that wind and penetrate below the surface. Likewise, I admire the men who go into caves and search below the earth for life and remnants of life.
Last Wednesday night, Betty and I went to see the Werner Herzog documentary film titled, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The film is available in 3D but our art house theater didn’t have that option, so we watched the film in two dimensions. Earlier this year, I heard Herzog talk about the film and one of the things he said was that it was the only film he would ever make in 3D.
But even in 2D it was impressive. The cinematography was outstanding from beginning to end with some very odd frame composition that worked, I think, to help set on end our modern arrogance about how smart we are. The cave, Chauvet, which is in southeastern France, is mostly off limits to anyone but scientists studying the geology; or the Paleolithic era information about cave bears and wolves and cave lions and horses and bison; or the astounding artwork, some as old as thirty-five thousand years. Human activity inside the cave presently is limited so the film crew was restrained as to the types of lighting and camera equipment they could employ. What they created is truly a fine work, particularly given the limited gear they could take into the cave.
All great films have obstacles that must be overcome by the characters on the way to reaching goals and in this documentary, the physical restraints and the restraints imposed by the French government become the obstacles that must be defeated. Herzog, who narrated the film, gives us this information right up front so the requisite tension to keep us interested is created.
What is on the walls of Chauvet are astounding paintings at least twice as old as anything previously discovered on this planet, and the likenesses were amazingly correct, not primitive like some of the old Hohokam rock scratchings that we used to find in the caves of southern Arizona, but sophisticated artwork displaying not only the fauna of the time, but fauna behavior that included breeding and hunting. The cave paintings included great, stunning murals of horses and bison being hunted by lions and bears; and wooly rhinos fighting each other. I think I was doubly stunned because of what the images told me about the intelligence of the people who created this ancient art. When T. S. Eliot came out from viewing the sixteen-thousand-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux, he is reported to have said something along the lines of, “We haven’t changed a bit,” and I could see that, I could see what he meant, as if Picasso or Klee or Matisse or de Kooning had been down there, painting away, or at least their spirits encaved in the bodies of Cro Magnon man.
I also liked the music in the film. It was often melodic and spiritual like the milieu it described, especially at the end, where the narration takes a holiday and lets the camera work. The fine lines of the cave drawings along with the choral voices allow us to step back into our racial memories, our racial minds, and contemplate the long run of humanity on this planet. They allow us to ponder what is possible, what might come to pass.
At one point in the film, Herzog takes us out of the cave and on a cinematic sojourn to the University of Tübingen in Germany where a large exhibit of small sculptures of Venus and animals of the Paleolithic era is housed. We get a clinical analysis of these artifacts‘ relationship to the paintings at Chauvet (evidently they are all from the same time period, give or take five thousand years) and how Cro Magnon could carry on so advanced a concept as paintings and art while his neighbor Neanderthals were not capable of creating anything of the sort. All of this was interesting, but to me, felt as if the magic created by the paintings, their rendition in Herzog’s film, and attention to the power of art were all defeated by the measuring stick-and-caliper outlook of the sciences of studying ancient peoples.
I was glad when that train of thought ended and we returned to the magnificence of the paintings, what they said about my ancestors’ intelligence, their powers of observation and creativity. Some of the paintings are five thousand years older than others, so the time frame in which the cave was used as a ceremonial site, but apparently not lived in, is as long as the history of the written word in our Homo sapiens sapiens sub-species.
Given my innate fear of caves, I sat and wondered if I would go down to look at these images and I have to say yes, I would. In the film, Herzog points out that he and his crew often felt as if they were being watched by the ancients, and he remarked that the anthropologists, the geologists, the paleontologist also had the same sensation, so maybe my old fears are not without grounding in the human psyche.
I would definitely recommend that you go see this film. It is a visual masterpiece, and to boot, stimulates the imagination. The Cave of Forgotten Dreams will force you to ponder various issues, how far apart we are from the artists who created the Chauvet paintings, and how alike we are. They were smart, as smart as the men who built the windlasses that lowered miners down into the vertical mine shafts that we investigated in my youth. As smart as we are now. Not yet with the tools that make us what we are in this time, but smart enough to understand the world they inhabited and to record and interpret what they saw.
Putting Up String Beans
Tuesday I went out back into the garden and picked a mess of green beans. Of all the things I harvest back there, the beans are my least favorite, not because I dislike their flavor but because they grow at just the right height for me to have to bend my knees and lean in to pick them. After a while, my knee joints and back hurt. The leaves are verdant and lush and the beans hide in among them, a strategy, I suspect, developed in the long millennia before we domesticated and hybridized them. That ability for the beans to camouflage between the thin stems and the broad leaves means other things are hiding in there too—yellow jackets and arachnids—and I might get stung or bitten on the bare hands that I snake in to find the beans.
But I had no mishaps except a sore back and knees and I picked myself a mess of string beans. That’s what my father used to call them, and I remember when I was a kid we used to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on the big wood-cased radio that sat in the front room, and there was a character called String Bean on that show who strummed a banjo and cracked corny jokes. My dad used to laugh at him a lot, but he wasn’t always so jovial when he demanded that I eat my string beans at dinnertime. The only ones we ever got in our house were the kind that were canned somewhere in California or came frozen from Safeway. Not like the ones I picked on Tuesday.
I picked them, and washed them and cut off the ends and then sliced them into inch long cuts and then blanched them in boiling water, chilled them in ice water and then froze them, but not until I had eaten a plate full…just plain, no pepper, no salt, no butter. Just plain. They were sharp and sweet. And even though they are frozen now, when we pull them out in November, when the slant of the sun’s rays lay like back porch light refracted off the icy bird bath, they will still be mighty fine chow.
There is something about growing and harvesting beans and broccoli and squash and tomatoes and beets that sets my mind at ease. I don’t know exactly what creates the satisfaction. The work is simple, things I learned long ago that besides the vagaries of the weather and water, seem to work no matter what, and I get a crop and I share it with friends and eat it and put it up. It is ….hmm…is it fun? No, I think it is more than that.
I always wanted to be a farmer since my high school days back in Casa Grande, AZ. The majority of the economic activity there was agriculture related so it was in the blood, so to speak. I even owned part of a farm one time in Lordsburg, NM; a big, twenty-five-hundred acre corn farm with ten wells and houses and a mule out in the trap behind the barns. The farm sat just below the foothills on north side of the Pyramid Mountains and the upper fields were steep with long runs so the irrigation water was like a torrent when it sluiced into the bottom end. We never farmed it. It was in the 0-92 program with the United States government. If we grew zero crops on it, they would pay us ninety-two percent of the historic yield of the crops grown on the place.
We got the farm from a bank in a trade and I doubt they knew about that particular largesse or they probably would have kept it. We spent the money on other things besides seed and fertilizer and tractor parts.
When I told all my farmer friends we were on welfare with the 0-92, they got a little antsy in their pants, because most of them were on some form of income redistribution where the government transferred money from the United States Treasury to their pockets for growing a particular kind of crop, or as in our case, no crop at all. A lot of those farmers used a strategy where they farmed the subsidy program, and not wheat, or cotton, or corn.
I used to get a chuckle when I heard them talking about the state of the nation and all the poor folks in Phoenix and back in Chicago on the take from the government. I pointed out that so was I, and so, in many cases, were they. According to their ways of looking at it, their kind of income redistribution was okay, other kinds not. Occasionally there were sharp words thrown around, some threats and then a wife or two would have to step in to keep the peace.
Once my partner and I palavered about planting a field of beans on that Lordsburg outfit because beans were outside the 0-92 program and we had a patch of land that we could have tilled and sown and watered. According to the professors at the agriculture college the price of beans was high right then and if we hit a lick we could make some money. Above and beyond our welfare payments.
But we didn’t. It might have turned out to be a lot of hot work; sore knees, sore hands, sore back. Instead, I think we went bird hunting.
Skywalker Ranch Redux
Tonight Betty and I and a few other people, mostly the employees of Skywalker Ranch, will view our film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor, at Skywalker Ranch in the redwood country of West Marin county, northern California. Last month we mixed the film there and now we return not as a client, but in a different role, the role of presenter. What is particularly gratifying is that Skywalker Sound invited us to do the screening.
It is very warm here in Sonoma County. Too warm for our pleasure, but it is not unusual for a heat wave to bubble up this time of the year in this piece of geography. At night the peepers crowd the air with their warm melodies and the scent of harvest sweetens the air—apples, grapes. The bounty of the normally fine climate.
We showed the film on Sunday afternoon in Santa Rosa to our donors, old friends and acquaintances, new friends and acquaintances. Betty and I were nervous. Would they like it? We think they liked it. People seem to look at us with a different kind of regard now. We are gratified.
One of the unforeseen results of folks viewing the movie is that they borrow the pathos of the film and apply it to their own losses. A mother dies and her surviving children and spouse draw on and gain solace from the wisdom of wounded warriors. Tonight’s Skywalker Ranch crowd should be younger and for the major part, they will not know us and to boot, they will be folks affiliated with the craft and latest technology of filmmaking in this eleventh year of the new millennium. What will they think of these age-old stories and the way we’ve employed them in the movie? Some of the techniques we have used for the wedding of sound and interview are unusual and we wonder if we will hear some “You can’t get away with that,” or even some complaints.
We are a little nervous.
On School
Last weekend Betty and I spent our Saturday and Sunday in a classroom for nine hour days to learn more about making movies. And we are taking a regular college class at Boise State on how to become film producers, this after having produced a film.
Sitting in the classroom, I thought about class and school. More than once in my life I vowed I was through with it. When Mrs. L made me sit in the corner for blacking M’s eye in the fifth grade and when Mr. N popped me on the ass with his special-made paddle with the holes drilled in it when he heard me use an expletive or when I got kicked out of high school for a day-and-a-half when I was a senior because I wouldn’t tuck my shirttail in, I swore I would blow off school as soon as I could.
It took me thirteen years to complete the requirements for my BS in Business Admin and more than once on that journey, I quit Arizona State University in disgust, cussing dumb professors who didn’t have a clue about the real world. Intermittently, I joined the Marine Corps, I got a job, I got married.
And after getting my MFA at 53, I said that was probably it. But it wasn’t, and here I am again, jamming up my life, hanging with kids young enough to be my grandchildren, learning from them about a life I never could have imagined back in 1965 when I escaped good old Casa Grande Union High School.
The essence of education is my ability to sponge up energy…creative and intellectual energy…from those I am around. Faculty, students, you name it, all have something I want, and I try to see if I can absorb it. Often I can’t articulate what it is I am after, like air, it’s just out there, waiting for me to inhale.
If I think back on it, I can see all kinds of things I’ve learned in life from the formal and semi-formal education process:
How to see Dick and Jane run, how to shoot a rifle, a shotgun, how to take the part of a clown in a Shakespeare play, how to use a compass, complete a balance sheet, use a dictionary, compose in Latin, read Italian, understand the relationship between hydrogen and helium, how to drive a tractor, how to throw a grenade, how to scan a line of poetry, how to judge the liberal nature of John Stewart Mill…on and on. Classes about how to bust up anti-war demonstrations and how to properly cuff an AWOL sailor, how to niche Chesty Puller into the mythology of the Marine Corps, how to set up a special interest political party, how to understand what causes the weather, how to write a good short story, how to artificially inseminate a cow. And now, learning about how to run a movie set, break down a script, shoot a scene, put together a proposal seeking half a million dollars so Betty and I can make another documentary film.
It makes me chuckle and then shudder when I compare that with grenade-throwing class. Standing in a hole at Camp Pendelton, the mist still hanging on the oak-crowned hills to the north, a grenade in the right hand, an instructor behind me. My heart pounding like an oil pump gone berserk. His words, not the least bit soothing. My worries; am I going to kill someone? Kill me?
Quite a range of things I’ve learned in school. And it isn’t over yet. I’ll still be swearing off classrooms when I’m ninety.
On a different subject, Betty and I are off to California for private screenings of our feature length documentary film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor. I will be blogging about the experience as we move through the next two weeks.
Dreaming of Tularemia
Last night I had a dream about killing rabbits. Trails of coyote scat loaded with desiccated mesquite beans and the small bones of rabbits. Now that I try to recall the dream’s details, maybe we were hunting coyotes. The mood of the dream—you know how dreams have moods even when you don’t know what the dream was about? When dreams like that arrive I often wake up with the mood on my back like a western saddle, all day, maybe into the next night for a repetition of the dream, or some sequel that drifts off to some other surreal moment. Often it’s war dreams that come like that, but this isn’t a blog about war dreams, or maybe it is; all my dreams could be version of war dreams.
Anyway, my dream last night owned the mood of something a la Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing or Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men. Harsh stories about wolf murder and freedom and the angel of death and the angel of retribution. Last night’s dream was populated with companions who I don’t think I even know, all chambering rounds in weapons; rifles, shotguns, pistolas. We dug around in stringy coyote scat with big-bladed knives we pulled out of leather scabbards that hung off cowboy belts with our names etched in the back of them, but right now I don’t recall any names.
And I don’t recall how the dream ended, or maybe it didn’t, maybe it just segued into another dream, something about my mother and her long-gone-ness or about my father spitting verbal rebukes and fireworks at anyone who crossed him. He and I used to hunt a lot when I was a kid but he wouldn’t let me shoot the rabbits. Not that he was averse to killing, we hammered dove—back in those days, the early 60’s, I recall you could kill ten mourning dove and fifteen white winged dove—twice a day over the Labor Day weekend and we shot quail and once or twice we chased desert mule deer through the stab-spined thorns of ocotillo cacti that guarded the slopes that led to the scrub oak groves below the caprock where the big bucks with the nice sets of horns liked to hide.
But we never killed rabbits. He claimed, as a kid, that dove and quail kept all sixteen of them alive in the thirties, the sixteen who lived in the little board and battened, tarpapered shack my grandfather called a home. I wonder if they tried to eat rabbits, too, but couldn’t overcome fears of tularemia, a bacteriological disease one can get from uncooked or undercooked rabbit meat in the months that have no “r” in their name. May. June. July. August. That was the rule of thumb for my friends who did shoot and eat rabbits. No May, June, July, August.
They wouldn’t hunt in the months with no “r” in the name, but come fall winter and spring, they’d stuff their pockets with boxes of .22 longs and holster their .22 rifles in makeshift holsters and ride their bikes, and take me with my BB gun out into the flats north and west of town where big chunks of desert still allowed plenty of jackrabbits (which are really hares) and cottontails (which are really rabbits) for us to shoot at. I say shoot at, not kill, because when they moved it was fast, and when we shot (I don’t believe I could have killed a rabbit with a BB gun, I needed a .22, too, but had none; father didn’t like them), we were bad, standing, firing offhand, as rapid-fire as we could while the jackrabbits bounded and veered and the cottontails darted and veered. We could see the dust fly above and below them as we followed them along, stitching up the desert with our poor aim. Rarely did we kill anything and if we did, one of the others who was not afraid to eat them, would gut them and skin them and oftentimes we could spot the places where the flesh looked sick and malignant and those rabbits and hares got left for the carrion eaters.
Sometimes we went into town lucky enough to have a hare or rabbit or two tied to the handlebars of a Schwinn or a Huffy. Whoever it was who did the killing usually liked to find someone, usually a crowd of girls, and show off the kill. It was never me and I went home while they tried to style the gals about how cool they were because they killed and gutted a rabbit or two. Only a few of the girls showed any interest. Usually they turned up their noses and shooed the hunters off.
Over the years, I hunted and occasionally someone would shoot a cottontail and it would end up in the pot with dove or quail and lots of jalapeños. It was a leap of faith for me to eat it though, I guess because I could hear my father back in the recesses of my memory rebuking me for taking the risk. While I was masticating the meat, everyone would ooh and aah over the sharp flavor of wild cottontail, but to be honest with you, I never thought it that good. It may have been damned good, but the onus of taking the risk with tularemia probably made it taste like it needed to be upchucked out in the pink eye weeds.
My father never was a risk taker, so of course, I tended to take risks. Early on I wanted to get into the sheep business. It was pretty high risk and I hung around with all my sheepherder friends and built fence, and moved sheep on foot, and tore down fence and vaccinated and drenched sheep. One of my friends managed some of his family’s herds down in the desert between Phoenix and Yuma, at a place called Welton. Once he called me to come help him kill rabbits.
I said, “Why?”
He said, “They are eating all my alfalfa and I need it for the sheep.”
I said, “You have hundreds of acres of alfalfa.”
He said, “I got thousands and thousands of rabbits.
Visions of rabbit herds like sheep herds came into mind. Like a dream, I saw myself shooting them as they ran by me, as if I was plinking targets at the carnival. I told him I was in. We loaded two Dodge Chargers full of beer and boys and shotguns and rifles. He made us put the weapons in the trunk as he chuckled and mumbled things about overkill.
We got to the fields at night and parked. Instead of lush green, the pastures were buff colored like rabbits. We piled out of the cars with their head lights left on and our host handed us bats and clubs and laughing said, “These are all you will need.”
There was no sport in it, at least for me. But he had bought us beer and hamburgers and said he’d give us each twenty dollars, so I waded in. The hares and rabbits didn’t even run, just looked at us with alarm as we dispatched them….thunk, bonk, whack, thump, thunk; further into the fields we charged, the rabbit carcasses, tularemia or not, left to spoil in the desert heat. The great horned owls who showed up flapped over our heads as if they were chagrined. And why not? They’d had easy pickings. And so did we.
I am not sure we saved any pasturage for my friend. We did get drunk and we crowned a lot of rabbits and hares. Maybe there is a reason they keep showing up in my dreams. Like war dreams.