Month: March 2011

Posted on

Vernal Equinox

Last Sunday, when the equinox bumped into Boise, Idaho, the wind scattered last fall’s leaves around and around the patio. Sullen clouds in both the east and west grayed the day as the full moon reveled in its gravitational attachment to earth, or so I imagined. Betty and I ventured out and tried to capture on camera this “supermoon” but haze and clouds obscured our moment. Like some kind of super moment, I thought, or wished, a marriage of moon and season, but actually it was just another advent of spring.

 Most people I know like fall of the year best, but I think I am partial to spring. In Idaho, I definitely believe it is the best time of year. Southern Idaho is a harsh landscape to the eye, anyway, but now the grass will green and the hills will take on an ephemeral, emerald hue. In northern California, where Betty and I just visited, spring was erupting in greens and yellows. Like blares of horns announcing a new symphony, they showed up along the roads, in the meadows, in the marshes, in the vineyards, and the apple orchards. Yellow and green mixed with dabbles of fruiting-tree blossoms painted pink, and lavender and white.

When Betty and I lived in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico, lambasting snowstorms roared in during spring. Twenty inches on the first day of April, and later in some years, and you would think that spring would never arrive. But when it did, the grass’s music rang as true as any tune out of the beaks of mountain bluebirds, and the pollen of Douglas fir scattered over the land like Moses’ manna, a dusky gold that blanketed cars, roads, patches of ice, the ferns that struggled to recover from a cold winter.

In Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, spring, if any amount of rain showed up, would turn the sand and powdered caliche a short-lived green, peppered orange and purple with Indian wheat and filaree and six-weeks fescue, pink-eye weed, poppies and lupine with buds as big as the end of your thumb. Spring is a strange time in the Sonoran Desert, but balances on a short span of time caught between a winter, which many places call summer, and a summer which Dante might have imagined while penning The Inferno. I recall going to work one April morning at 4:30 under a clear, starlit sky. I rolled down the window and rain drops blew in. A storm front thirty miles away announced its life-giving arrival. In the star-spangled sky I was seeing Lynx and Leo, Canis Major while tasting the pure dew of raindrops on my tongue. The anomaly shocked me into understanding how the things we think are opposites are really just parts of the whole. 

In Vietnam, where I spent two springs, the first was wet and hot and delivered doses of heat prostration, leeches and bamboo vipers; the song of the AK-47 rang out, too. But lucky for me, the song was just slightly out of tune. My second spring was cold and wet—fog and mist and fog and mist and rain, rain, rain, and the song of napalm and M-16—death and decaying flesh’s stench were the only flowers I noticed in 1968. If beauty existed, I don’t recollect it. The only beauty I saw that spring was the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro when my plane landed in California, where it was ….green, green, green.

Back here in Boise, the starlings seem to be a harbinger of spring. Three weeks ago they arrived in my back yard, black bodies in late winter plumage, speckled with yellow and hints of red and indigo. They strutted around in my grass and then got on line like Marines policing the parade ground. They goose-stepped across from end to end, probing and gleaning I don’t know what…worms, larva? It’s gotten to be a ritual here: every year, just around the turn of spring, they show up, front yard and back, c leaning up whatever it is they clean up.

Last spring robins nested in the crook between a rain gutter, an eave and the corner of our house. That little drama went on for several months.  We photographed the three blue eggs, the nestlings dressed in their voracious voices, their first flights crashing on the ground; rising, then falling, then rising and flitting like tunes on an iPod over to the ash tree in the corner of the yard.

Once, in an earlier spring, Betty lay on the couch listening to robins in a neighbor’s pine tree. The young ones were raising a ruckus with their constant ravings for more food. But a raven barged in and gobbled them up. You could hear mom and pop robin as they shrieked for what…. for help, or to scare the raven away? I don’t know. Whatever their goal, it was futile. I watched it all transpire as Betty put her hands over her ears to defeat the dissonance.

This bird world is a nasty place sometimes—spring, summer, winter, fall—but not unlike our own world (and I mean that in the sense of our own ken). I suspect the drama of birds reflects the drama of our own existence, without the BMW or the HD TV, but still it reflects, emulates; birth, life, nurturing and death. Winter and spring.

Posted on

Traffic

For twelve days over the last two weeks, Betty and I crisscrossed parts of northern California visiting family, old friends, new friends, birthday partying, reading poems, looking at art and working on our movie. Since we moved from the region in 2005, some things have not changed. One of the most obvious is the traffic.

During rush hours commuter cars jostle and crawl like ancient beetles thronged on a lemming-like quest. Horns honk, brakes squeak, plastic lids to coffee bought at Starbucks fly out windows and careen around like flying saucers. There are cell phones jammed up against ear lobes even though it’s against the law to jabber on those things while driving. People shoot you the finger and stick out their tongues and flap their arms like great speckled birds turned angry at intervening species who alter a migratory flight plan. Ouch, it’s California.

And it’s not just California; it’s Detroit and Denver and Phoenix, oh my, it’s definitely Phoenix, it’s D C. Even little old Boise has its moments acting like its big sisters surrounded by the claws of suburbanism, choking the roads at 7 A M and 4 P M.

But California is like a big winter freeze at those hours, every little bump and grind on the freeway causing people to slam on the brakes in fear? Shock? They gawk and brake lights rule the day the way they blare. Bright red eruptions like the hints of death and maiming that lurk beneath the tires and the hedgerows of nerium oleader that choke the roadsides.

In Sonoma County the roads are either battered like last year’s black-necked stilt nest or are under renovation in a decades late acquiescence that there are more cars than roads. All the 15 years Betty and I domiciled in Sonoma County, we railed about the inadequate roads. My northern California friends cooly reminded me that better roads, more roads, brought more people. I felt as if I was a seer lost in the wilderness as I saw the county grow and swell with folk as the roads stayed static. Like air corridors in the Pacific flyway crammed with geese and passerines, the early morning rides of forty miles often took two hours. Ditto at nightfall and of course all that rapid-fire brake light mania. The roads didn’t grow at all but the population did. Everyone looking for the cheaper, securer nest.

Between the Sierra foothills and Sacramento, four lanes wide, rarely does anyone move along in the HOV lane. Car after car after car with only one occupant. If I had to hazard a thirty-mile drive five days a week into the mouth of that monster, I think I’d find someone who wanted to ride with me. Save money, save time. But we are curious creatures , us Yanks, with our desires…no, our demands…to keep our flimsy independence in tow. As if sitting single behind the wheel of the car is the best way to manifest our independence.

But then again, don’t get me wrong, I love to drive, and will do so even in the teeth of evidence that flight or rail makes more sense. Like my fellow road warriors, don’t tell me what to do.

And driving does have its joys. Discovery, discovery, discovery. Mossy oaks on a spiny ridge, redwoods creating a cathedral over the road, a glimpse of the Pacific behind a spray of mustard colored gorse. A wild, four-wheel-drive slide down the cold side, boring through snow banks. A herd of three hundred elk, thundering across a frost-covered sage brush flat. Spires of Saguaro cacti raised to the sun in supplication. Once, back in 1985, Betty and I were on our way from Sacramento to Salt Lake. At one of the big I-80 bends between Lovelock and Winnemucca, a herd of wild horses  frolicked in the cold eye of a February noon. Black clouds hovered to the north. The herd threw a high column of dust behind that got caught in a southeaster and trailed out behind. They were colored funky, white and brown and black and kicked up their fetlocks as they ran, ran, ran across the sagebrush plain. As I watched them something inside me got up and somersaulted and for just a moment I understood some things about horse, horse and man, and their long and strangled and joyous relationship. But now I cannot articulate what I understood then.

Now back on the road to anywhere from Sacramento at 4 P M, the light rain creates an added hazard and magnifies the eruptions of the brake lights. They remind me of howitzer reports hammering a monsoon afternoon. (Nothing escapes my memories of war, and so my metaphor veers like mourning dove on the first day of hunting season.) Blare, bash, kazoom, crash. Traffic.

Posted on

Weather

Last Sunday, hoarfrost painted the tips of the sagebrush on the Fort McDermitt Paiute and Shoshone Reservation for about one hundred yards on each side of Highway 95. Mist rose off the macadam in wispy breaths that wavered like ghosts from the Greek tragedies. The hoarfrost only lasted for a short space but was a chorus in the morning that sang of the sleet, scant snow and rain that smattered our windshields. Remnants of a late winter storm, wet enough to make the golden eagles on the telephone poles hunch their shoulders. The clouds obscured the Santa Rosa Mountains, whose jagged ridges usually hack up the bright blue sky of northern Nevada. Dry creeks ran muddy and the way the ripples in the water caught the wan light made the surfaces seem like scaly patterns on the sides of sunfishes.

Later in the day, the contrast between the high desert and the low coastal plain hung between Nevada and California, in my mind, like comedy and tragedy penned by Euripides  and Aristophanes. Not that I wept as if I’d just read Medea, or cackled after watching a production of Frogs. Nothing so distinct as sad versus happy, but emotions that were similarly divided and evoked by the harsh and violent beauty that surrounded us. What separates the high dry of Nevada from the low and verdant damp of California are the Sierra, which this year flaunted a mantle of deep snow, and though at this late date looked like soiled white togas, still spoke of the weather that crashed face-first into the coastal headlands and barreled across the Sacramento and San Joaquin river valleys and into the mountains. Outside Reno the snow strangling the sagebrush on the cold slopes owned mule deer and coyote trails stitched into the icy white.  The long cold Washoe valley wore a hopeful look that someday spring would march into view and sing its verdant tunes of crocus buds and passerine birds that love to sit in the tops of conifers and warble their mating messages.

Monday, a stiff breeze changed the weather in northern California, from wet to sunny and dry, back to wet. The yellow blossoms of acacia trees lit up the freeways and the colors of plum and cherry and peach tree blossoms stood out like lost Greek gods calling from a bleak wilderness. The long winter rains made the country green green green and the air clean.

And for some reason it made me laugh and yet it made me sad and I don’t know why but I swelled up inside. Maybe it was nostalgia for something lost, or an appreciation of all that verve, the yellow of mustard blossoms like a billion candles burning in the green after my cold winter of dry bitterbrush and winter fat. Maybe.

Posted on

Alone

It’s often just enough to be with someone. I don’t need to touch them. Not even talk. A feeling passes between you both. You’re not alone.
                                                                                                                                          Marilyn Monroe

Betty ventured off this week on a photography trip and left me behind to toil over movie scripts. I could have gone along if I wished, but this is her time to create art and besides, I figured it was better for me to remain here and discover what it means to create a documentary movie script, sitting for hours in a chair in front of both the computer screen and the TV screen…back and forth from one time-code burn of conversation to the next. Capture the optimum moment when the speaker pronounces just the right thing, about how someone died, the flick of the speaker’s head, the flare of the smile, the wide gulf between his sweeping arms.

But even as we loaded Betty’s bags and camera gear, in the front room, something loomed, like a gaggle of ghosts ganged up in the peak of the cathedral ceiling. Maybe I could turn on the ceiling fan and scatter them to wherever they sneaked in from. But I suspect those ghosts really haunt me from the chambers of my own innards.

I think you can tell by this writing, that I am not totally comfortable with being alone. I don’t know why. I consider myself a loner. I’ve been called a loner. I am a writer which means I work alone. Alone, alone, alone.

What is “alone?” What does it mean?

A few synonyms:

Single, solitary, unaccompanied, unattended, isolated, lone, lonely, desolated, longing for companionship.

Right now I am unattended, or unaccompanied.

Right this moment, there is:

no laundry thumping in the washing machine tub

no one trotting up and down the stairs

no querying calls on the intercom

no prodding about what is right and what is wrong, what’s not done

no one to nudge me out of bed to turn up the heat first thing in the morning

no warm body next to me beneath the blankets, no one to snuggle.

Somebody once tried to explain Existentialist philosophy to me and all I retained of the conversation is that you are born alone and die alone. Being born alone doesn’t seem too bothersome since, if you survive, you have your whole life to ponder and prepare for your end. And I’m not sure you know anything at age two days, anyway. And you’ve got your mom. But dying, I think, presents one of the most frightening things a person can ponder. Dying…alone.

When I say dying alone, what I think I mean is that no one can step through that portal for you. You must gut it up and march through, even though you don’t want to: like reporting to the principal in second grade because you almost bit Thel Gillespie’s right ear off in a fight on the playground at recess. The sudden silence except for the rampant thump of your heart beat. Hesitation below the doorway lintel. Forcing yourself to reach up and knock. But is dying alone what’s gnashing at me now, seeding this sense of isolation?

Maybe it’s always bothering me.

I have questions. Do we need something extraneous to ease our minds, our fear as we walk down that hall? Take our minds off of what’s on the other side?  Or not on the other side?

Alone. I think we hope for one or more of a passel of rewards on the other side of that door: resurrection, nirvana, peace, love, spirits spun out with Alpha Centauri in the ecstasy of string theory. But all we really know is that we die. Alone.

I have more questions than I have answers. I wonder if we don’t bury ourselves in ideas, activities, social interaction to occupy our minds, keep us from pondering the finality of that ultimate moment.

Does fear of being alone and its concomitant possibilities generate social strategies intent on helping us survive? We hear, “multiply and replenish the earth,” even though we can’t seem to get a handle on controlling our population growth. The more of us, the safer we are? Is that the primal drive? The more of us there are, the safer each of us will be? I wonder about that notion…..we seem to be kin to bison in that regard, and red ants and black ants and termites. The more of us there are, the better our chances of survival. Like wolf packs, pronghorn herds, flocks of starlings, Hereford cattle, Nubian goats, Navajo sheep.

I have queries. Does being left alone lead us to despair?

One day in 1968 in Vietnam, during a particularly savage artillery and rocket attack, I huddled against the cold, wet red-mud walls of my bunker with my eyes closed as every round seemed to get closer, closer. The whiz bang sizzle, roar-whine of death singing. My mind exited my body, trying to hide. In a vivid moment, a steep gabled roof, me on the top, like a Wallenda on a high wire, gazing left, then right, then left…to the left insanity and escape. To the right, reality and what? Death, death, maiming? What did I want least? Insanity? Or death? I heard a soft click, looked up at a thin photographer as he shot images of me in my moment of despair. The sight of him, his ragged dungarees and scraggly red beard (an anomaly, that red beard in a military setting) made my heart (is that word too trite?)…my heart hurdled with…was it joy? (Again, is that word too hackneyed?) Or was it relief? Salvation? All I know is that while he captured my portrait, I was not alone. Maybe all we need is another person.

Not alone. But still, we die. Alone.

I’m glad Betty’s coming back