Month: June 2011

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On Grasshoppers, Mormon crickets, C-Rations and Cannibals

I just read an essay about Africa in which the author mused about sitting in an airport waiting for a ride out of Nigeria. As he dealt with delays and uncertainty, he killed time watching the insects fly around as evening arrived and he noticed how the locals trapped them and cooked them in a can. I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten insects on purpose, although sometime in my life I might have dined on some kind of six-legged critter. I suppose if you are ravenous enough, a cricket, an ant, a cockroach might hit the spot. The thought of munching on one of these hard-backed, black beetles I’ve seen on the trails around Boise isn’t too palatable and I’m sure their armored parts would not be as tasty as braised asparagus spears or a rare t-bone steak. I have no intention of finding out if cockroach legs taste as sharp as they look.

I have eaten some pretty sorry grub in my life. Once, in Vietnam, we went out into the bush for a two or three hour patrol and ended up staying over a week. We took no chow (on the orders of the Platoon Sergeant) and for a number of days received none either. Those of us who, disobeying orders, thought to take a can of chicken noodle soup or pound cake found ourselves quite popular. Once, while we were out there looking around for someone to shoot, or something to eat, a six-by Marine Corps-green truck loaded with soda pop come down the road and sped around a curve just below our position. The lieutenant sent a few of us to check out the chaos and we found a whole palette of orange Fanta spilled out into the road. The NVA were out there too, so we set up a perimeter and helped load up the wayward soda. When we got down to the last few cases of pop, we got into an argument about our share. The sergeant in charge of the truck full of soda said his orders were to deliver all of it to Khe Sanh, so he was thankful we’d helped round up the errant cans, but he could not share. Since we were hungry enough to eat the skin off the rock apes that lived up on the ridge, we took offense and brandishing our locked and loaded M-16s, acted just like old-time highwaymen and held up the shipment. We stuffed our pockets full and then ordered the sergeant, at gunpoint, to vamoose and we formed a detail to haul the rest of our take of Fanta up the hill.

We were hungry, actually on the verge of starving, and after three or four cans of hot fizzy orange Fanta, we began to vomit. After that, we reserved our food procurement activities to sweeps alongside Route 9 to see if we could find some discarded cans of ham and lima beans or beefsteak and potatoes. We did not, but we did find thrown-away crackers, Hershey’s candy bars, Big Hunks, and Almond Joys, all which were mostly rotten, so we picked the bad parts off and were glad to get what we could get.

We might have eaten insects, or other such critters, but luckily for us a chopper full of fresh water and cases of C rations showed up. Yes, we might have eaten the insects—they were all around us—and some of their cousins like big black arachnids with red and yellow stripes and blazes. Spiders as big as my hand which could provide a substantial repast and less inviting, the ever-present leeches. They loved to climb onto us for a ride, or try and slither into our mouths while we slept, or into our noses. I think I was lucky and found the ones that were on my lips, looking for a way into my mouth and further down. I think I got them all, of course in the rain and wind and the humidity, who knows, I could have gained protein from a leech.

Pondering bugs, this came to mind. Years later, in southern Arizona, returning home from viewing a high school baseball game in early May I stopped in Chandler, Arizona, to buy a Coke or a Coors or maybe some pickled jalapeños. It was one of those hot spring-times of the year when the Sonoran Desert is castigated by Biblical hordes of grasshoppers. I got out of my pickup to go into the 7-11 and as I walked across the parking lot I could hear them crunching beneath the soles and heels of my lizard skin Justins. Crunch, crunch, crunch. I am not a stranger to death and mayhem, but I remember feeling just the slightest bit squeamish as I massacred all those grasshoppers, cutting short their oh-so-brief flings and I won’t even venture into what I was probably musing on…if grasshoppers feel pain, know they are dying, consider death as we do in a self-conscious way, or if they just live and die, driven only by the need to survive long enough to fertilize their eggs.

After I came out of the 7-11 with my bag of Lays or sixpack of Coors, I remember stopping to gawk at the gangs and gangs of grasshoppers flying around the street lights. It reminded me of rainfall in Khe Sanh, the way the big drops seemed to thunder down between me and the lights, but instead of thundering down they flew around and around, so many of them the light was clouded, but eerier, as the shapes and hordes moved and shifted, they caused the light to reflect, then refract, then reflect. I crunched on to my truck. I had the window down and could hear the decimation of the grasshoppers beneath my tires as I drove south.

Herds of grasshoppers like that can scour the crops and I suppose that was their goal. Similar to my grasshopper experience was when I drove my Toyota Tacoma north from Sebastopol, California, to Boise when Betty and I moved. As I approached McDermitt, Nevada, I was suddenly surrounded by hosts of critters that splatted on my windshield to the point I could not see. I turned on the windshield wipers and they got mucked up so badly I did not think the wipers would work.

I stopped at the Texaco gas station in McDermitt and the bugs were all over the asphalt and gravel parking lot. They crunched beneath my feet. Bigger than grasshoppers, almost succulent, I’d say, and as I tried to avoid that squishy sound of death beneath my boot heels I recalled I’d seen these critters before. Once my friend Wayne Wolski and I trudged up the flanks of high Mt. Jefferson in Central Nevada on a backpacking trip. After scaling to the top, our breaths wheezing, our heads like overripe muskmelons, we struggled back down and on the way, found similar critters lying in the trail. We looked them over and headed on to camp for a meal of freeze-dried spaghetti mixed with Top Ramen noodles.

Inside the McDermit Texaco, I got the skinny on “Mormon crickets,” as the lady called the succulent joint-legged denizens out there crawling, zooming, looming about. Talk about biblical or more than that, “Book of Mormonical.” I’d read about the hordes of these critters, which are actually katydids of sorts, but unlike the image of katydids of bucolic wonder that you might read about in stories like “Little House on the Prairie.” These katydids, these Mormon crickets , toted a sinister reputation that made my neck feel like a Rotweiler’s might when his hackles get up. I had read about them migrating, for one supposed reason, to keep from being eaten by other Mormon crickets.

Cannibalism. These critters eat each other. In our civilized time, cannibalism makes our skin crawl, or mine anyway. I think about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and the constant need to eat, and the constant fear of being eaten. By other humans. Our civilized neighbors. Primitive, like it must have been in the old days, when food didn’t exist at Winco, or Safeway, or Whole Foods, but had to be foraged and scoured from whatever source was available and whenever available.

I think back to those days on that little hill alongside Route Nine in Vietnam and if we’d have had to go much longer, we would have begun eating insects, snakes, lizards, and when those were gone, what? Imagine, eating one of your comrades, one who had died in battle, or worse, one who had died saving you, protecting you, and then becoming a source of a different type of salvation. And from there it’s not hard for me to imagine how starvation might drive you to kill and eat a person more as quarry, as game. And maybe enjoy eating them. Achh, and maybe developing ritual to make one feel better about dining on one’s own species.

Ah, but we aren’t like that…..we are civilized.

Yes, we are civilized and don’t do things like that. Wolves do that, and fish, and lions, and bear, and Mormon crickets. I wonder.

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The Winds of Diyarbikir

Guest blogger Sheila Robertson takes us into a snapshot of the past.

I stand on a windy hill, watching dust whirl over the dun-colored soil. Two women in black chadors work in a field, gathering purple-flowered herbs, and an old man sits in the shade fingering his evil-eye beads. Wildflowers and thistles wave between large faced blocks of stone tumbled and strewn in ruin across a rocky knoll. My map says I am at Suayb City.

I toe through the sand-colored rubble and peer into a network of underground rooms. The cool, dank air draws upward from a few larger chambers that contain livestock cribs. The whisper of ancient languages curls up from the dark and the dust under my feet while sunlight plays over layers of more recent civilizations piled on top. A tumbled church. A crumbling mosque. My guidebook has brought me here. It says cuneiform tablets have been found nearby; that the caves are the site of very early civilization.

Today, this place is a few mud-brick houses on a wind-tracked rise. Around them the ruins and goat paths are filled with the laughter of ten Kurdish children competing for attention and leading me from tumbled lintel to toppled column. They point to exotic inscriptions and carved designs, and then scramble on excited to show me more. Black hair, black eyes and bright laughter. I wonder what blood runs in their veins; what tribes their ancestors belonged to. Mongols, Turks, Hittites. What conquering armies swept over this hill and what civilized histories deposited them at this point. A fluid thing, this dust owned by Tamurlane, Alexander the Great, Darius III, and Nebuchadnezzar.

The children offer me yellow wildflowers and I twist them into the girls’ hair. The boys jostle each other and want their pictures taken. I don’t understand Kurd, but they have learned enough English to wheedle. They are hoping the Americans will leave behind a few kurus, or if they are fortunate today, a lira.

Han el Ba'rur Caravansary

I bend to scoop a handful of the tan earth. My childhood Sunday School lessons inform me that Abraham lived a few hills away, in Harran. The prophet, Jethro, settled here and taught in these caves after The Flood.

In the dust I imagine camel caravans trekking this way trading in silk and spices and new ideas. In the wind I hear the clashes between Byzantines and Turks. The battles among followers of Yahweh, Allah, God and Sin, the ancient moon god who ruled these hills before the rest. Today, Allah owns the hearts in this land and Turkey controls their lives. In the Arab Spring there are rumblings from Diyarbikir and the dream of free Kurdistan rides the wind.

But for the moment, the children are laughing and the dust swirls around us and the wildflowers nod.

(Diyarbikir is the unofficial capital of the Kurds)

Sheila Robertson grew up in the west where she lives and enjoys the out-of-doors. She is a writer and photographer who loves to explore the world. Read more of Sheila’s blogging at http://blogsheilarobertson.blogspot.com/ and check out her photography at www.sheilarobertsonphotography.com.

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On Sage Thrashers, Music and Autistic Architects

Betty and I recently spent time in south-east and south-central Oregon with friends, looking at the rippling water, the green-gray sage, the juniper, the snow-covered mountains. While driving between Pete French’s round barn and Diamond, we heard a particularly melodic bird song. I stopped the car and rolled down my window and the sweetest sound carried over the cold spring ground, the sagebrush, and flitted off towards the hills. I looked through a set of binoculars and saw that the bird was a male sage thrasher, a bird whose plumage so blends in with the hard land it was a surprise, nearly a shock, to hear such a beautiful tune come from its beak.

I don’t know what it is about me, always trying to equate beautiful sound, beautiful other things—art, music, pies and cakes, most anything with what I consider to be the 21st Century’s archetypal, human, physical beauty. I don’t know if it is just me or if all of us think that successful, creative people look like Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt. I am old enough to know better, and intellectually of course, I do, but I still find myself tying physical beauty to intelligence and talent.

The sage thrasher is the color of the land he lives in and should be judged beautiful in his or her own right, and not by some standard we have developed due to movies and photography. What’s that old saying? “Beauty is only skin deep” and I know this subject is probably a bit hackneyed, but then it is clichéd for a reason, I suspect. We do judge people by how they look. Don’t you see it everywhere: clothes make the man, you are how you dress, the squared-away Marine is a good Marine.

Montana Poet and songwriter, Paul Zarzyski, has written a poem that ponders the notion of what we expect from people based on how they look.

From Montana Second Hand

Down’s syndrome can’t hinder the Saint
Vincent de Paul thrift store
troubadour of the shoe department,
John Jasmann, singing his pedal steel guitar
love songs into his rhapsodical
job—sorting used footwear……

In his poem, Zarzyski immediately identifies the “type” of individual he is going to write about. I say “type” because we categorize, segregate, allocate people into groups so we can deal with them, think about them, define them, stereotype them. In this case, the poem’s subject is categorized with “Down’s syndrome,” a condition we had more crude words for when I was younger. Zarzyski goes on, in the middle of the poem, to describe the subject and setting and ends his poem with these words:

Listen—as each shopper.
gawking with awe toward Shoes,
pictures some rockabilly god,
some rhythm-‘n’-blues aficionado,
maybe Saint Vinny himself,
rolling a ruby-ringed finger
over the solid gold dial
tuned to Angelic Debut.
May grace taking shape
tangibly in a single line of singing
draw us all one lonesome day
toward the mysterious
display of white shoes
staggered with black boots
across wrought iron racks. There, may each shelf
holding the notes, sharps, flats,
show us how the maestro—excited
by the infinite, cued to the unique
movements we make
arranged together in perfect time—writes
out of all our used lives
one sweet music.

Through the use of shoes, music and references to the spiritual, Paul Zarzyski shows us how we can find beauty in spots we normally are ashamed to look for it, or spots where we mask our fears with pejorative comments and language.

Beauty, talent and ability come in all kinds of shapes, forms and packages. Back in the early 1970s I worked at a big cattle feeding outfit half-owned by John Wayne. There was a young woman who hung around in retro gabardine western suits like cowpoke babes (or want-to-be cowboy babes) wore back in the late forties and early fifties. You know the kind of clothes, with the bright poppy or lime colored piping at the tops of the pockets, and the embroidered yokes, with vivid images of bucking broncos and bull riders, sagebrush and western scenes. She was a reporter for one of the local agricultural magazines and was always looking for an interview. She stood around and looked at us a lot, just stared and little did we know, at the time, she was autistic. We laughed at her strange ways and guffawed at the way she came to the feedyard all decked out in the Hank Williams-era get-ups.

Little did we know that inside that mind was a person who understood as much about cattle and their feelings, yes, I said feelings, than the best waddy or buckaroo around. She just didn’t look the part, as we thought the part was supposed to look. To us she was strange and frightening—yes, I said frightening; her difference frightened us. And then, as the years went by, she created cattle handling systems that mitigated the jagged corners, the bang-clang blare and jangle of livestock pens. Out of her knowing she made architectural things of beauty, elegant art, practical, but yes, elegant, yes beautiful.

That’s something about life I have discovered, that beauty resides in almost every person and every thing as does beauty’s antithesis, whatever you want to call it—ugliness, hate, bilious behavior, fear. These are the things that battle beauty and sometimes the beauty cannot be seen because of our own ugliness, hatred or fear. We can’t see beauty, artistic panache in an autistic architect and expert on animal behavior, because all we can see is how that person is different from us, and we can’t see it in a Downs syndrome man because what that man has, what makes him different from us, scares us. And we don’t like to be scared. And when a bird sits on top of a sagebrush bush and warbles out the sweetest tune in the Steens Mountain watershed, we are surprised, because in the midst of that dry and drab land, a masterpiece wafts to our windows on the strands of the afternoon wind.
There is beauty there, in most everything, the music from a Down’s syndrome baritone, a desert dwelling bird, an autistic architect….in the good, yes, and in the “ugly.”

1 Paul Zarzyski, from “Montana Second Hand,” from 51, Bangtail Press, Montana, 2011, pp 183-184. By permission from the author.

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Science, Spirituality and Water Witches.

Last week I was yarning with a couple of buddies about water witches. I snatched images out of my memory from way back in my life, thirty years almost and longer. We were standing in a RV park in Lakeview , Oregon and I have no idea why I got started on the subject but ever since I told them this stuff, it has been right there, sitting on the front porch of my consciousness, not trying to kick the door of NOW in, but not going away either.

So, here goes. Back in the 1980s my good pal and business associate, Robert Moser and I were involved in a southern New Mexico mountain real estate development. We got government approvals, put in great roads, phone service, power lines but no matter what we did it seemed like it was never enough to satisfy most potential purchasers. They wanted water. I can’t really blame them, since in New Mexico, having ample and suitable water is always an issue when contemplating a purchase of real estate.

Just to show someone that water was on the various properties, we decided to drill a well. This particular lot was a fairly flat spot on top of a pine and fir studded mountain ridge that poked nine-thousand feet into the clouds. It was a pretty good lot and we convinced a well driller to drag his rotary rig up the mountain. We picked a spot after discussing the theory of water, the geology of fractured limestone mountains, and the reliability of water witches. The well driller was a big, gruff man who guffawed when we asked him if we should witch the lot for water. He barked, “You don’t believe in that crap, do you?” I don’t know about Robert, but just being semi-accused of believing in something like a dowser made me roll my shoulders over like I was guilty of some crime.

After a thousand feet of dry hole we quit that well and of course since there is no guarantee of the driller finding water, it cost us plenty. The well had been drilled in a dike that went all the way the way to the portals of hell. While up there cussing that dry hole our surveyor showed up and recommended we call his Uncle Lester about getting the lot witched. The well driller was there so of course we went to pawing the grass and scoffing around but then asked about Uncle Lester. The well driller glared at the surveyor who said, “He’ll give you a good deal. $25.00 a lot and he don’t charge unless you hit water.” What had we to lose other than our lack of faith in the unseeable? The threat of another dry hole was a hell of a lot more threatening than hiring a well dowser. Not that it’s always this way, but right then, greed and spirituality were on the same side.

Imagine my surprise when I drove up to Lester’s house and found out he was damned near blind. I recall sneaking a look around to see if anybody I knew noticed me in front of his house. And to boot, he was pushing eighty years of age and the surveyor and I had to help him get in my rig and he made us stop by Fresnal Creek and cut him some willows sticks, one long one and a forked one that we had to trim down just so. By then I was wishing I was at the bar even though I had quit drinking the year before.

Lester bragged all the way from the six thousand foot elevation where he lived up to the nine thousand foot lot we wanted him to witch. He boasted that when he was younger he never could sleep at night until he met an old Bruja over in Cuchillo, New Mexico just west of Truth or Consequences on the Rio Grande. She advised Lester the reason he couldn’t sleep was because he was a water witch and was sleeping over an underground river. He laughed after he told us that part as if it was the commonest thing, to go home and move your bunk into another room because you were a water witch and couldn’t sleep over an underground river. He said, “And I never slept better and that’s when I became a dowser for hire.” I could hardly keep from breaking out in uncontrollable laughter, so I lit up a Winston and just grinned.

Up on top, we led him to the lot and he put the two ends of the willow fork in his hands and the surveyor helped him negotiate Douglas fir roots, chunks of limestone, bushes and holes. I followed them and kept my eyes on his hands so that when he turned them down I could see for myself what a fraud Lester was.

Not ten feet from the dry hole the willow fork turned its snout down and he said, “Here. Now give me that other willow limb.” He sat on the ground and began to count. The end of the stick began to point and bob up and down where the willow fork had indicated water should be. Lester began to count as the end of the willow stick went up and down with each number he said, or maybe the numbers came out of his mouth as the end of the stick pointed at the ground. I tried to see how much of all this he was causing with his hand but I really couldn’t tell. When the point of the limb stopped bobbing up and down he said, “There. You got strong water at two-hundred ten feet. Better than ten gallons a minute.”

I scoffed but on the way down the hill we had him witch four more lots, just for fun and since it didn’t really cost anything, why not? Two weeks later the well driller hit 12 gallons a minute at 208 feet. I didn’t know what to say but we sent Lester his $25.00 check and when we hit another well, on another lot, right where he said, we sent him another check.

I am not a spiritual or a religious man, so I am not sure how to explain all of this although yesterday I read something interesting by the journalist Arianna Huffington. She was blogging on her experience of receiving an honorary doctorate at Brown University in Rhode Island and the professor who acted as her guide. He is a biologist who believes that Darwin and the theory of evolution can be reconciled with the notion of a supreme deity, a God. He says that given enough time, science will repeatedly show that the mysteries of life are the work of a supreme being, or at least that’s how I read her post. Maybe water dowsing is something that can be explained by science.

I am not sure I feel that science and a supreme deity are the same thing, although lately things in my life seems to act as if they were meant to happen and I think back to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time where he ruminates on the creation of the universe. What he says intimates to me that sometimes it seems we were put here to see it all happen, black holes, super-novas, galactic movement, water witching. Sometimes I feel that way, that I was put here to see what happens, and for what purpose, to report it? To just witness it? For what purpose, but then I think about all the random stuff that slams you and then it’s like, No, everything is random, within the sphere of the laws of physics and there is no intelligent design.

All of this doubt reminds me of a man I knew who was an accounting client of my mother’s. He was a trained aeronautical engineer who became a real estate developer. Although a Catholic, he was a person who believed in the rules of physics. Later in his life he got into buying farms so that he could control and later sell the farms’ water rights. He and I were talking farms, wells, water rights and water. I asked him if he ever drilled wells on those farms after he purchased them. He said he did. I asked him if he ever used a witch. He said “Yes. Everytime.”

I said, “Do they work?”

He nodded. I must have let my skepticism show because he shrugged and said, “I don’t believe in water witches but I never drill a well without one.”