Category: Musings

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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.”

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On Nikita Khrushchev, Boy Scouts, the Cold War, and Graduation

Yesterday, walking along the sidewalks that wind through the subdivision where we live, Betty and I admired the fulsome blossoms of ornamental trees that line the streets and walkways. Dogs barked . . . Dachshunds, Springer Spaniels, yellow Labrador Retrievers, German Shorthairs, black mutts with gray and wizened mugs.

The sound of a plane engine cut the afternoon air. Without thinking, I looked up. A single engine plane flew out of a cloudless northwest. I asked myself, why do I always look up, or want to look up, when a plane or helicopter flies over? And I immediately had an answer. I won’t say The Answer, but it was an answer.

I was raised in the 50s and 60s when the United States grappled with the Soviet Union in what we called the Cold War. Not that it was cold; it was plenty hot in Korea and Vietnam and Laos and Nicaragua and Angola. We just called it cold. The threat of annihilation via nuclear armaments hung across the planet like a giant shroud. We had bomb drills in school, watched Walter Cronkite broadcast Cold War info nightly from CBS News. It blared at us from the newspapers and Time Magazine and US News and World Report. We talked about it at school and at Boy Scouts. I was a rabid Boy Scout back then. The semi-militarism of it all draped on me like a French general’s tunic. It was heady, wearing war-tinted uniforms, talking about survival and battle. Dreaming of killing krauts like Audie Murphy in To Hell and Back.

One of my Boy Scout projects was to work with Civil Defense on some type of project designed to teach me the value of public service. One of my good friends, “P,” who was also my fiercest competitor on the march to be an Eagle Boy Scout, decided he would spend some time at the local airport watching for enemy aircraft. This was in the time when missile technology was new, so the standard method of nuclear armament delivery was the airplane. “P’s” father, “Mr. S,” was a Civil Defense volunteer and knew all the skinny on planes and weapons and the politics of Anglo-Russian enmity. If “P” was going to spend his weekends helping defend America, then in the spirit of competition, so was I.

We rode out to the airport on Saturday mornings in “Mr. S’s” green Chevy Suburban. Back then a Suburban was more utility van than sport vehicle. The airport was a sand-and-clay-particled mess that sat on a big flat stretch of desert surrounded by creosote and saguaro cacti. In the 1800s it had been part of the Santa Cruz Riverbed, but now it was just a flat spot where when the wind blew it created a dust storm that browned out the sun, the moon, the stars, the blacktop, the honky-tonk on the side of the airstrip, Little Mountain to the west and everything within an arms length of the viewer.

We climbed up the stairs to the observation tower and inside, sets of binoculars were strewn on plywood tables and posters of airplanes papered the sheet rock walls: side views, top views, bottom views, numerical enumerations, plane manufacturers, what ordnance they were capable of delivering, the names we knew them by, most prominently the Tupolev T-95, or “Bear,” as we called it. We stood most of those mornings with binocular straps cutting into the flesh around our necks as we watched the sky over Picacho Peak, and Newman Peak, and San Tan, and Silver Reef, Table Top, the Vai Vo Hills, and the Sierra Estrella. All we ever saw were buzzards and red tailed hawks, the pigeons that nested in the date palms that grew along the highway to Phoenix.

We were obsessed with the Soviets back then, or our parents were, as were our politicians. Nuclear attack was so imminent it was not a question of “if,” but “when.” But I must admit, other than a chance to get another merit badge on the road to my Eagle Scout goal, or a chance to play Army, I, and most of the kids I knew, paid very little attention to the Soviet threat.

Some of my parents’ friends created makeshift bomb shelters in their basements, stocked with fifty-gallon drums of flour and raw sugar and pasta and cans of beans and tuna fish. Lots of water. One of them, “Mr.B,” even had a lot of games for his kids to play. At night, we used to raid his air raid shelter and drink the soda pops he kept in the refrigerator as we played Chess, and Clue and Checkers, and if we could get some girls down there, strip poker. For us, girls were a whole lot more dangerous than Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan.

One of the physicians in our town actually had a real bomb shelter built to specifications with a special system for filtering the fallout from the air that targets would breathe in the aftermath of a hydrogen bomb attack. Anecdotally, we called that possibility Nuclear Winter.

In 1964, at the close of my junior in High School, I went with my neighbor to his high school graduation party. I got drunk, not once, but three times that night, spent some hours fandangoing around a big mesquite wood bonfire as Sputniks passed overhead every hour-and-a-half, watching us, or so I imagined, and sending signals back to Moscow about our whereabouts. Later, we unstuck someone from the caliché muck of an irrigated cotton field, and then we went to the physician’s house for a graduation breakfast. His eldest daughter was graduating, too. She slinked around in her white shorts and blue top, the most dangerous thing I’d been near all night.

The sun was barely up and the Sonoran Desert heat not yet steaming off the paved streets and the concrete sidewalks. We all wanted to go into the bomb shelter, but the doctor’s dangerous daughter kept telling us no. I wanted to see what an air filter for nuclear fallout looked like. I wanted to see if they had ice cold Cokes down there, and maybe some more Vodka so I wouldn’t lose the buzz I worked on. I wanted to get close to the dangerous daughter.

One of the graduating seniors, “L,” kept sneaking down the steps and then we’d have to go down, led by the dauntless daughter, and capture him. At first it was funny, all of us laughing, but then it turned surly. “L” was drunker than I was, than anyone was and he grew violent, his face purple, his glare like a drill instructor’s. He wore a new gray graduation suit and was walking around with a bottle of Gilbey’s Gin which he sucked on now and then as he bellowed about going off to San Diego to US Navy Boot Camp later that day. Soon, he clunked someone in the noggin with the gin bottle and we had to gang him down in the green Bermuda grass that stained his new gray suit. We thought nothing of going to battle with him. That’s what we did, we Americans, we did battle with whomever: Dominicans, Lebanese, Laotians, North Koreans, Chinese, Russians, our next-door neighbor. We did battle. We wrestled “L” into the bed of a new Ford pickup and eight of us sat on him as he bucked and scrabbled and screamed obscenities about our mothers. He lived outside of town down a dirt road. We pulled into the gate and turned the truck around and threw him out into the dust and gravel. He staggered up and chased us down the highway, stumbling and falling, lurching in his now ruined new gray graduation suit as he picked up large rocks and tossed them at us. We laughed and headed home for sleep.

And soon enough most of us were in the Army, the Navy, the Marines, fighting too, or preparing to fight, each in our little parts of the Cold War, Germany, Korea, and for me Vietnam where we often looked into the skies for signs of North Vietnamese MIGS and Russian Bears. And then, years later, of course the sound of those September wings of 2001. How they haunt our lives now. The memory caught up in the dreams we sleep, the way we exist. Wary now. Striking out at what frightens. Looking into the sky at the sound of planes. Keeping a close eye on our new neighbors. We live uneasy.

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On Beowulf, William Safire, Old English and the Constitution.

“Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don’t start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Last, but not least, avoid clichés like the plague.”
— William Safire

William Safire, the late columnist for the New York Times, a delightful mind and fearsome writer, described himself as a “libertarian conservative.” I have professed conservative credentials from time to time myself and have also been accused of being libertarian and rightly so. Neither label has caused me shame, nor has the moniker, “liberal.” I have held and still clutch close important beliefs from all three of those approaches to life and how it should be communally experienced.

I have often agreed with things Safire said about the world, but one of the places we have veered off mutually inclusive paths is with the subject of language. I began this blog with a semi-tongue-in-cheek quote from Safire about how one should write, and I suppose, as a continuance of his notion, how one should speak. I think Safire was interested in keeping language, especially written language, consistent within itself and within its history. And I would expect him to feel that way, given his conservative bent.

But I have a bone to pick with that notion.

Above, Safire says “Don’t and don’t and never and unqualified, and improper and avoid.” Although he semi-toys with us, Safire held an underlying belief in strict rules for English. All through school we had rules, and in the world of editing we have rules. So with all the rules we have one would think that English today might look like it did one hundred years ago, five hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, since no right-minded writer or speaker would break the rules. But that is not the case. Below I have quoted the first four lines of the epic poem, “Beowulf,” composed in Anglo-Saxon, which, in the year 800 AD was English. Below it I have given a rendition of those same four lines from an early twentieth century translation by Francis Grummere. Both are written in the English of their times. Note the difference between our ability to understand the words in terms of the English that we spoke and read twelve hundred years ago and the English we speak and read now.

THEN: Ða wæs on burgum Beowulf Scyldinga,
leof leodcyning, longe þrage
folcum gefræge (fæder ellor hwearf,
aldor of earde), oþþæt him eft onwoc

NOW: Beowulf bode in the burg of the Scyldings,
leader beloved, and long he ruled
in fame with all folk, since his father had gone
away from the world, till awoke an heir,

Beowulf is a Danish-Viking story but it has come to us in Old English, which was the Anglo-Saxon lingo of the late first millennium. About the time that Beowulf was being written in Old English, Danes and Vikings were raiding, plundering and then settling the British Isles. With them, they brought some words that we have added to our language. Words like: Mink, flounder, cog, lug, spry, nudge, wicker.

If we had obeyed all the rules for keeping Old English pure, then those words would not have been added to our panoply of utterance. English would not have changed. Our language would be poorer, in my estimation.
In 1066, William the Bastard led an invasion of England that changed the history of our language some more. French became the official language of England, and of course the number of words that came into our language was quite large. An example of some follow: Archer, bacon, embezzle, gutter, salary, venison, vicar.

A couple hundred years after William’s Norman troops pacified the Anglo-Saxons, the diplomat and poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote his famous narrative poem titled, “The Canterbury Tales.” I have included a four-line segment so you can see how much our language changed in a five hundred year period. Although Chaucer’s lines are hard to read, you can see that there are quite a number of recognizable words. Right below Chaucer I have included a translation that illuminates the full gist of his words.

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
There was a duc that highte Theseus,
Of Athenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour.

Once upon a time, as old tales tell to us,
There was a duke whose name was Theseus:
Of Athens he was lord and governor,
And in his time was such a conqueror,

You can guess where I am headed. If we listened to thinkers like William Safire, our language would still look like it did when that first monk in an English abbey wrote Beowulf in the native tongue of the land. About three hundred years after Chaucer wrote, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes composed the following words in his famous philosophical work, Leviathan.

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?

Again, you can see how our language changed over a three hundred year period and now, after another three-hundred-fifty years, our language has changed a lot more. Today, we have a large number of words that were not in the original Anglo-Saxon: Rodeo, raccoon, substitution, constitution. That word, “constitution,” comes from Latin, and also exists in French and very likely came to us with the Normans.

It is fascinating to me that although we have an old and famous language, one spoken world-wide, we still are subject to the necessities of time and change. What was said and written in the time of Beowulf is not how we write and speak today.

Before I quit, I want to go back to this word, “constitution.” Right now, our notion of that word as it regards our country’s “Constitution” is subject to a lot of argument regarding what it is and what it is not, what it means and does not mean, what was originally meant by its framers. I suppose I come down on this subject sort of like I do with language. Constitutions change. The meanings of words change. Times have changed. A lot of my good conservative friends believe that what the framers wrote, literally, is how the constitution should be interpreted today.

But I wonder about that. The Constitution, although it did not mention slavery, did say that Congress could not prohibit the importation of people held to service or labor. We had to fight a war to get rid of that “peculiar institution.” Yet, prior to our Civil War, no amount of argument, legislation, legal activity could get rid of slavery. So I wonder, is that the original Constitution my conservative friends want to go back to? (I think I just broke one of Safire’s grammar rules here.) Or the one that said you could not vote if you were a woman? Or the one that said you could not vote unless you were a property owner? Or the one that said that when counting population for purposes of districting congressional representation and distributing taxes that African-Americans only counted for three-fifths of a person? Are we to believe that the language we speak and write now is exactly the same language written by Franklin and Adams and Jefferson? Do the words and their intent mean the same thing now as they did then? And besides, the Constitution exists to regulate the behavior of men, and does not stand on its own above and beyond that purpose. No people…no need for a constitution. And people and their necessities change over time.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that the Constitution we had two-hundred-thirty years ago has changed, mostly for the better, and having said that, it seems evident that it is a changeable document that has modified over the years to meet the times and the trials of our country. So, to me, like language, the Constitution has evolved to match the age we live in, and is not some immovable object that cannot deal with the crises we face today, tomorrow and the next day.

1. “Beowulf, from the website http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~beowulf/main.html
2. Francis Grummere, , from the website: http://www.alcyone.com/max/lit/beowulf/
3. Geoffrey Chaucer, from the website: http://www.canterburytales.org/canterbury_tales.html
4. ibid
5.Thomas Hobbes, from Leviathan, http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1451508&pageno=7

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On Kobe B., Homophobia, Alan Simpson, and Round Ball

I recall sitting in a room in the early seventies at Arizona State University waiting for the Economics 101 professor to show up. A day-old State Press, the university newspaper, sat on one of the desks. I picked it up and thumbed through until I came to the editorial page. I liked to see what the students thought about the world’s events. But the most interesting thing on the page, in the paper for that day, was a letter to the editor. Someone, a gay student at the university, had been murdered in Phoenix and the letter writer was berating the city, the university, the population as a whole for a lack of earnest concern about the death, who had killed the victim, the state of society’s relationship with gay people in general. In the margin next to the letter to the editor, someone had scribbled, “The only good gay is a dead one.” I need to confess that when I read that I laughed out loud. And for years I have thought about that and asked, why? Some of it was a chuckle at the local mentality, about the nature of a seemingly intractable relationship between gays and straights in the 1970s in Arizona, but part of it was an attitude on my part.

I have to admit, my attitude towards the gay community has always been a complex one. My first overt activity with a gay was on the ball court at North School in Casa Grande, Arizona. Every afternoon, after my seventh grade classes were over, I gathered with a bunch of classmates and we shot baskets. One of the regular participants was a boy who had a reputation for being a “fag” or a “queer” as we called gay people in those days. One afternoon he and I ended up as the only ones left on the court. As the sun started to set, all I can call it was: he assaulted me. But before it went far, I got away and went home and never played basketball again unless I was with a gang of kids. I told my friends about my encounter and they all laughed, having had, they said, similar experiences with this young man. We huffed and puffed and talked among each other and made boasts about how we would handle it the next time, stuff like “If he does it again, I’ll get my dad’s twelve gauge and blow that fag’s ass away.” Unfortunately, that young man eventually assaulted someone and got hauled off to jail, and knowing the attitudes and laws in Arizona in the early 1960s, I am sure he went to the pen.

And I could say that experience developed my attitude about gays, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I had a gay aunt, maybe two, and I understood that on some level long before my experience on the ball court. Maybe not in a bright shining way, but I knew her as being different and that’s what this hatred and fear of gay people is, I think, about some people being different and the trepidation that creates in us. My father and his many brothers were two-fisted toughs, bare knuckle boxers who adored their sister, whom they even called “Butch”. Because “Butch” was one of the terms for a gay woman. So I knew it on some level. Besides that aunt, I had gay cousins, three that I know of and maybe more, and I have a nephew who has come out.

My first wife had at least three gay cousins, maybe more, one of whom I called on the telephone when I was stranded in a snowstorm in El Paso. He came to the Holiday Inn and picked me up and took me to his home and invited some of his gay (and straight) friends over and we laughed and ate and drank and had a great time, and I recall sitting in a chair and looking at them, thinking that these were a bunch of fags, some of whom I had known for years and whom I had known were gay, and we were having a great time just being folks, talking, laughing, no sex, no assaults.

Over the years I have come to accept gay people as friends, as working partners, as neighbors, as teachers. The ones I know are smart, capable, talented and mind their own business, so unlike the young man who assaulted me. Even though I didn’t know it then, I am sure that some of the men I served with in the hell hole of Khe Sanh, Vietnam, were gay. Brave men. Warriors. Men who did not dodge the draft.

So, as I sit here, I wonder why, when someone pulls out in front of me on the road, or does something else to frighten or irritate me, I say things under my breath like “F-ing Fag.” Why does that latent anger? fear? resentment? still remain? Why do I say it? Right now, some of my best friends are gay. But I am still capable of epithets that denigrate who they are in a base and crude way.

So when I read on the internet about Kobe Bryant, a man I don’t particularly admire, calling a referee in a basketball game an “F-ing Fag,” I got all uppity and denounced him until I caught myself doing the same thing out on the road yesterday morning. I thought, I’m not any different than he is, and then I thought, but I don’t hate people who are gay, and then I thought, he probably doesn’t either. But the grudge, the edge, the buffer still remains, doesn’t it?

Not to make excuses for Kobe or myself. Gays are killed in this country for being who they are…people. No less a stalwart of conservative Republican politics, The Honorable Alan Simpson, lately a Senator from the very conservative state of Wyoming, last week attacked some members of his own party, prominent members, for their homophobia. That surprised me, that someone as conservative as Senator Simpson, and a politician to boot, would have the guts to make a statement about such an incendiary issue. But I suspect one of the things his actions indicate is that there are a lot of homophobes in the Republican Party. And there are a lot of gay people in the world and somehow the twain must meet. And then it probably isn’t fair to just say Republicans are homophobic; a lot of Independents, Communists, Libertarians, Tea Partiers, Socialists, Know-Nothings and Democrats probably fit in that group too. Even me, given my outbreaks, could be described as homophobic.

As I sit and think about it, it seems to me that we have a lot of problems in this country…high unemployment, a lot of bitter economic-class-based rancor, two (or maybe three) wars, and a host of other issues. Given all this turmoil, do I need to worry about what a man and woman, or two men, or two women do in their beds at night? It is none of my business. Maybe, if I think about this enough, I might stop my little outbreaks. I hope so.

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Oh Outhouses, Four-Holers, and Burning the Heads

One of the Twitter headlines for The Washington Post.com on 4/5/2011 was, “Is it impolite to bring reading material to a public restroom?” I chuckled when I read that and not because of the inanity of the query, but because of memories that hove into my mind’s view.

In early April, 1968, I had just escaped from the siege of Khe Sanh and was killing time in the 1st Battalion, 26th Marine Regiment rear at Phu Bai south of the old Vietnamese imperial capital, Hue, waiting to go home. Luxurious being able to sleep in every morning on a cot, above ground, in a covered hooch, no mud, no incoming. Luxurious with hot showers, hot chow, movies, sodas, beer, no work parties. Luxurious, too—and this will sound basic, basic as hell—walking to the head with the latest edition of The Stars and Stripes military newspaper without doing the Khe Sanh Shuffle. Not worrying about being blown off the toilet seat while taking care of one of your most intimate acts.

The battalion head at Phu Bai was a four-holer housed inside a substantial building vis à vis the one-holers I was used to. I had some experience with heads…crappers. On several occasions, I had to burn the “shitters” as we called them in Vietnam. I had shitter-burning detail for a whole month in August-September 1967 on Hill 861. Alphabet (a Marine with a Polish last name too hard to say or spell), Spooner and I had given each other Mohawk haircuts, out of boredom, I suppose, and the Company Commander, after catching sight of one of us, ordered us to fix the damned things. So we did the only thing possible, we shaved our heads and of course, given military logic, that was worse than a Mohawk, so the three of us had to run all the way around the trenchline of Hill 861 as our fellow Marines pummeled and slapped and kicked us as we stumbled and huffed and puffed and elbowed each other to come in first which really was not part of the punishment, to come in first, but as you know, coming in first is important. As I hunched my shoulders and kept my face buried to avoid the hands and fists attacking me, I recollect I thought of Tyrone Power in The Black Rose when Orson Welles as the Mongol warrior Bayan forced Power’s character to run lengthwise on a log through a dangerous gamut of Mongol warriors slugging Power’s character with inflated pig bladders with the intent of knocking him off onto spearheads buried point-end-up on both sides of the log.

Our reward (Alphabet, Spooner and I), whether we finished the circuit of Hill 861 first or not, was burning the shitters and the trash dump. Which we did. Twice a day. Using gasoline, diesel, and wet matches. Ignominy was draped on our shoulders. We smelled like what we tried to burn. Everything was monsoon wet. We joked about it and laughed and exaggerated our every crapper-burning action, but no matter how hard we tried, we were shitbirds, as the term goes. Luckily for me, time and time-in-grade moved me past my shitbird moments, through the dank wet of monsoon floods, red mud, two trips out-of-country on R & R, and then as a grand finale, the siege.

Then on to Phu Bai, where the head in Phu Bai was not under constant attack, as had been the heads in Khe Sanh. Right now I can smile at the guttery notion of it all, running between incoming rockets, mortars and artillery to do your business, but men were killed and wounded while conducting their affairs in the head. So, being able to sit on the throne and read The Stars and Stripes without fear of flying shrapnel, even though there was little privacy between stalls, just a half wall, was still paradise. That’s one of the things you learn in war and privation, the elegance that can be had with the most basic of functions in the most basic of places.
In the head at Phu Bai, what was scratched on the walls was more interesting than reading in the paper about Lyndon Johnson deciding not to run for re-election, or who won NBA basketball games, or who got killed that week in-country. Some of the messages left dug into the unpainted walls were names, dates, home town, home states. One of the most interesting things I read:

We are the unwilling
Lead by the unqualified
To do the impossible
To help the ungrateful

I laughed when I read that little verse. It was cynical, yes, bitter, yes, but something about it drove home a little sharp stake near where I imagined my emotional heart, not necessarily the physical heart, lived. The unqualified out there tearing up a country, killing people, getting killed…and most of those we were trying to help, ungrateful. Not a comforting thought as you sat there, relaxing…not a comforting thing to think about. But like having to dodge shrapnel on the way to the crapper, not much about the Vietnam War was comforting.

To this day, while driving down country roads in Idaho, finding abandoned homesteads, often one can still find the outhouse. When I was a kid in Arizona, some of them were still functional. My grandfather had one on his old outfit. Tar paper, black widows, cold seat, hot seat, gossamer trailings into the dark corners. Flies. Seeing those old outhouses, with their doors flung open, hinges missing, throws memories at me, about incoming artillery rounds, my shitter-burning details, running the gamut, getting pummeled like Tyrone Power, and that message carved into the wall at Phu Bai.

I’ve never had an affinity for communal heads, and try to avoid them as much as possible. I’m not sure if that’s due to my bathroom days in a war zone, or the unwanted but often truthful messages carved into the paint on the walls. And whether someone carries Time or Good Housekeeping or Playboy into a stall is not my concern, nor is it my business.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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