September 11th - 15th

September 11, 2005

It’s unsettling to be boarding a jet plane this morning. Four years have passed since the attacks changed our lives, changed the world, but I’m still humbled and sobered by the date, which will ring blackly in my ears forever.

A happier thought, then: Gussie’s excitement upon our reunion later today, and my own glad comfort to have him sitting in the passenger seat of my car.

My brief return to the East has come to a close, and it was a fun and successful trip. Having landed the bungalow so soon, I had two whole days just to relax and visit family and friends. I spent most of my time in Manhattan, which helped to acclimate me to urban craziness and which will make my return to the wilderness all the more serene and sublime. I drove down yesterday morning and met my sister and her family on 43rd Street, where they were having a street sale. I also met Annie Hall, who’s been a big fan of the blog since I started it back in April. At the sale I found a handsome little photograph of blue doors and a set of stationery. Then I went downtown again to hang around with Peter for a while. There was a huge street fair on 8th Avenue, and we noshed on ethnic food from various stands. I bought a tee shirt and a new case for my iPod. Then I zipped back up to Jersey for a dinner with colleagues at Saigon Republic, a nice little Vietnamese restaurant in Englewood. We had a fine meal and then gathered on Roz’s new backyard patio for desserts from Balthazar’s and good conversation. A lovely way to end my visit.


My dad called last night to tell me he’s home from the hospital after his surgery and feeling tired. I suppose one would be after having had a major artery hollowed out. I know my mom’s glad to have him home, too.

Next post will be from Oregon.


September 12, 2005

After my long journey yesterday I was finally reunited with Gussie, who seemed very happy indeed to jump into my car and leave the kennel behind. He gave me many sweet kisses, but then gave me an accusatory look and sulked in the back seat. On the drive back to the cabin he finally forgave me and climbed into the front seat. Once home, he was excited to hop out of the car and run down into the meadow and then to sit out on the deck while the sun fell and the crickets started singing. I was pooped after six hours of flying and six hours of driving, but it felt good to be back at Dutch Henry breathing the sweet-scented air and having so much open space to myself. I was sad to see that my sunflower had withered up a bit despite a little rain, but everything else was as I left it. I put away my things, started the mesquite in the Weber, encrusted some lamb chops in garlic and rosemary, and strummed my Gibson till the coals were ready. I had a nice dinner followed by leftovers from Balthazar’s, compliments of Marge Boyle (who bought them) and Roz Maiden (who packed them up for me), and I was asleep before ten. Gussie, perhaps overly attuned to the quiet after six nights in a kennel, woke me up several times barking at the critters passing in the night, but I couldn’t be mad at him. I was just glad to have him with me again.

As it was back East, the weather here is great. Chilly nights, sunny and mild days.

Down in the garden my chamomile grew many more blossoms while I was away, and I picked the flowers and lay them in the solar dryer. When all is said and done, I should have a nice baggie full of dried chamomile to help me relax on winter nights at the new bungalow. More tomatoes were ripe for picking and drying.

A small poem:

Early Girls, Late Summer


So glad to be red and full in the sun
after a whole summer of unquenched thirst,
the tomatoes hang heavy on the vine
and can’t help but grin when their tight skins burst.


Gussie, deprived of running and swimming for a week, was eager to get out this morning and visit the pond. So I took him. Here’s Dutch Henry’s meadow and his old apple trees. Doesn’t it look inviting?


And here are some blackberries. They remind me of Galway Kinnell’s famous poem “Blackberry Eating” (a copy of which last year’s resident, Martha, left in the bathroom at the cabin, and which I read every time I brush my teeth). It’s a poem I know by heart. It begins:

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry making….


At the pond, Mr. Bullfrog greeted us…


…along with attendant newts:


When he picked me up at the airport yesterday, Bradley had an Altoids can full of newly tied flies along with some advice on how to use them. Thus, I’m heading down to the river later today to see if I can get one firmly affixed in the lip of a steelhead.

Back from fishing, and no luck (again). I tried both the fly rod and the spinning rig, to no avail. Will keep at it. Writing in the morning, fishing in the afternoon. Not a bad life.

My stomach’s growling like a cougar. I’ve got Barbara’s Famous Chicken in the oven, and it’s filling the whole cabin with a vinegary-chickeny smell. The recipe is my sister’s invention, and calls for a marinade of olive oil, vinegar, garlic, paprika, salt and pepper. I added a pinch of cayenne and a diced tomato to spice it up a bit. I like to use thighs and/or drumsticks for the crunchy skin and dark meat. With some brown rice and a salad, it’s going to be scrumptious. And I’ll have leftovers.

Still trying to decide on a title for my new manuscript of poems. I’m leaning toward Transit, which with its several meanings might work:

tran-sit n. 1. a. The act of passing over, across, or through; passage. b. The conveyance of persons or goods from one place to another, esp. on a local public transportation system. 2. A transition or change, esp. from one life to another at death. 3. Astron. a. The passage of a celestial body across the observer’s meridian. b. The passage of a smaller celestial body across the disk of a larger celestial body.

The American Heritage Dictionary
Second College Edition

I think this title works for quite a few poems and themes: the passage from being married to being single, the passage from East to West, the poem “Transit” about the terrorist bombings of trains and buses in London, several poems about death, and a poem from last year called “The Eclipse.” I’m not crazy about one-word titles for books, though.


September 13, 2005

Now that fall is nearly here and we’ve had some rain (while I was away), I’ve got mushrooms sprouting in my brain.

Rubaiyat for Chanterelles


I wait for them the way I might
a lover. Visited at night
by visions soft and golden—flesh
of cap and slit of gill—I fight

my sleep to step instead through trees.
No doubt like love it’s a disease
of mind and body—wide and deep,
its roots as mycelial as these

October fruits’—this need to find
and lose oneself at once in blind
pursuit. The hunt’s the thing that feeds:
the forest damp and cool with vines

as sweet as shampooed hair; the oaks
all smooth and posed in their baroque
undress; a kind of eagerness
in that autumnal air, like smoke

before a fire. I wander thus
the edge of sleep a man obsessed
with love—the fungus rarely found
and only sometimes poisonous.


September 14, 2005

This afternoon I edited a story I wrote earlier in the summer, and now I figure I’ll post it. I’d be curious to hear comments from anyone who reads it. The plot is based on an actual event that occurred here at Dutch Henry Homestead and another that’s a legend.

The Trap

The trap—made of 14-gauge steel, heavy duty green mesh, and a spring-loaded door—was, like Roger himself, getting old but still efficient. Mounted on a flatbed trailer for quick and easy transport, it was designed to lure a bear, confine it, and keep it safely contained until it was sedated, driven many miles away, tagged and released in a place more accepting of its disagreeable habits. To Roger’s way of thinking, the black bear, Ursus americanus, was far more accepting of the disagreeable habits of humans, habits like building cabins in places where people really shouldn’t live. Most bears went about their business, pawing around old logs, blackberry bushes, bee hives, rivers and streams, and they never bothered anybody. Sure, once in a while one might turn predatory, might chase somebody down. But it was rare. Most of the trappings Roger had done as a ranger with the Oregon Department of Forestry had been in small river communities in southern Oregon, places like Merlin and Galice and Glendale, where people were careless with their garbage or hung bird feeders where bears could reach them. But two days ago he’d gotten a call, packed his gear, hitched up the trap and trailer, said goodbye to Lydia, called Tina to tell her he’d be late in coming by, and driven some fifty miles along rutted gravel roads roughened by water dips and mud holes to get to this place, a fifty-acre inholding along the Wild and Scenic corridor of the Rogue River. The property’s structures consisted of two small cabins, one of which had had a wall torn down by the 300-pound sow Roger now studied through the mesh wall of the trap as she slumped into sleep, the thin white drool of chewed marshmallows oozing from her toothy maw. The sow’s body settled. Its right paw, tipped with long black claws, twitched a few times and then went still. Its tongue lolled out, as big and pink as a sandwich steak.

Roger laughed. Bears were funny creatures. Judging from the damage to the cabin and the prodigious piles of scat, this one had spent about three nights tearing and gnawing at the cabin’s cedar shake walls. It had snapped one wall stud in half and nearly chewed its way through the back board of an oak cupboard. Driven across who knows how many miles of dense conifer forest by the tempting smell of about one-eighth of an ounce of sardine juice, which had leaked from a rusty tin on the top shelf of Barbara Walker’s pantry cupboard, a scent not even the ants or mice had noticed, the sow had consigned all 300, maybe even 350, pounds of herself to three nights of hard labor and, now, to tranquilizer dreams and the confusion, when she awoke, of finding herself in completely foreign territory far away from the fishy-salty juice of her torment. Funny indeed. But also majestic. Roger had trapped over a dozen bears in the dozen years he’d worked for the ODF, and he’d never gotten tired of it. Climbing into the green, banged-up trap to tag the sedated bears with a quick ear-piercing, he liked to open their huge mouths and inspect their teeth, feeling for those five or ten minutes like a lion tamer. Using his nail clippers, he’d cut out burrs embedded in their thick fur. He’d check their ears for infection or for horsetails, their pads for thorns, their snouts for ticks. The musky smell of a black bear gave him a feeling of being closer than ever to nature. Sometimes he’d just sit with a sedated bear for a while, petting its huge head as if it were a sleeping dog.

He’d gotten the call from Dean Vaughn, his former supervisor, a nice old guy who’d retired a couple of years ago but who still stopped in from time to time to say hello. Dean had called because he knew the complainant personally. “Roger, I hate to ask you to drive all that way to remove a bear for scratching up a cabin, but Barbara’s an old friend and she’s almost ninety, and I’d hate to think of her getting in a tangle with a marauding black bear.” He went on to tell how Barbara had gone in with her youngest son for a weekend, maybe one of her last at the place, and found the cabin all torn up, the bear still lingering about. Roger had planned to spend the evening at Tina’s, as he did every Monday. Dinner at Pasta Piani, ice cream at Jake’s, put Tommy to bed, and then have a roll on Tina’s futon. He’d been thinking of her succulent lips, her warm tongue, even as he said to Dean, “Hey, what are friends for. Where is the place?”

Tina had pouted on the phone when he told her, gone silent, played that passive-aggressive game she liked to play when things didn’t go her way. At least with Lydia, Roger usually knew where he stood. Not with Tina. She clammed up and made him guess. He’d seen her do the same thing to other people on the phone. Her mother, her ex. She’d chew her Orbit gum, twirl her hair, roll her eyes, hold the phone as though it were a turd, and give one-word responses—“Whatever,” “Okay,” “Sure,”—or the repeated single word response: “Right, right.”

“Listen, babe, I’ll be back in a day, maybe two, maybe even tonight,” he’d said, and he could picture her twirling the little curl above her left ear.

“Sure. Whatever.”

He’d been inside his truck in his driveway talking on the ODF cell. About a month ago he’d seen Lydia looking through his Qwest mobile bill. Roger was pretty sure that Lydia knew he was having an affair, but she hadn’t yet asked and he wasn’t about to bring it up. Still, he found himself trying to hide his tracks. Postponing the inevitable. He’d been married to Lydia for sixteen years. In their second year together she’d had a miscarriage. They’d tried for the next five to have a child, Lydia turning as sour as old milk. And then she’d had the hysterectomy. Congenital defect, the doctors had said. It was probably just as well. Who could afford to send a kid to college these days? Sometimes when he played with Tommy, Tina’s four-year-old son, Roger felt something like regret or anger or sadness well up in him. Roger and Lydia had wanted a boy, had even settled on a name. Matthew. In a strange way Roger appreciated it when Tommy acted badly and Tina screamed at him; then, driving back home, to Lydia, things would seem not just bearable but right, destined. Through the picture window he could see Lydia now pushing a vacuum around the living room, her brown ponytail swinging between her shoulders. “Hey, I’ll come by as soon as I’m done with this and stay extra late,” he said.

“Okay,” Tina said.

“As soon as I get a signal I’ll call you.”

Now he looked around. Green, fir-topped ridges, blue sky, a red clay road, the madrone trees dropping their leaves like autumn, though it was only July, and beyond the cabin a high meadow full of daisies and grass starting already to seed. There was no cell signal out here, and he hoped there never would be.

The bear was asleep, its breathing slow and steady, its tongue still hanging out. Through one of the square gaps in the mesh, he reached in and nudged her. The fur was warm, coarse, a fiber that seemed manmade it was so strong. She didn’t budge. He went to his pickup to get the tag and the piercing gun, and removing the gun from his bag he was reminded of the time he went with Lydia to have her ears pierced. She was twenty years old and had never worn earrings because her mother, a manic-depressive and the daughter of a Baptist minister, thought it crude. They’d gotten drunk first on beer and then gone to a mall in Portland and at a kiosk a young girl had punched holes in both lobes with a metal gun. Lydia had cried on the ride home. Later, one of the holes turned swollen and red with infection. How long it had been since those holes closed up? Lydia hadn’t worn earrings in years, or any other jewelry for that matter, except for the gold crucifix which had belonged to her grandmother and which Lydia took off and kissed every night before getting into their canopied bed. Maybe she’d come to feel the same way her mother did about dangling ornaments from holes in her ears. Maybe she no longer saw a need to be attractive. Not like Tina. Tina wore hoops, big gold ones, and rings even on her thumbs, and a month or so ago she’d had her navel pierced with a thin gold stud. At first Roger had laughed. But now all it took was a glimpse of that stud and he’d be groping for her. He’d always told himself he didn’t like women piercing themselves all over—their noses, eyebrows, lips, nipples, who knows where else—but now he wasn’t so sure about that. Tina, ten years younger than Roger, had awakened him to the potential in his life of youthfulness, sex, and something else he’d all but forgotten was possible—joy. These eight months with Tina had been like a rebirth, an epiphany. They had showed him all too clearly how loveless his marriage was, how depressive Lydia could be. For sixteen years they’d been doing the same exact thing, week in and week out. The same breakfasts of yogurt and fruit, maybe on weekends some eggs or pancakes. The same flavorless and overcooked dinners eaten off of trays in front of the TV while they listened to the themed crescendo of the evening news, music which promised importance or disaster or some small triumph in an unrelenting world. On Fridays they’d eat out, but it was always the same three places and she’d dress in the same long-sleeved shirts and wear the same perfume and order the same dishes. “I know what I like,” she’d said to him once when he made fun of her. Twice a year, usually in May and September, they went away somewhere—San Francisco, Mendocino, Vancouver—and for a few years those week-long trips had been times to which they’d both looked forward, events that gave them something to talk about, before and after. But for too long now the trips had become obligatory, like weddings, like funerals. The scenery changed, but they didn’t. At a winery in Napa, it was still Lydia standing beside him rolling the sauvignon in her glass, cheerless Lydia, with the black bags beneath her green eyes and her wild brown hair and sagging breasts. Even with a few glasses of wine in her, she barely came alive, barely smiled, barely laughed. She’d never gotten over the miscarriage and the operation that confirmed once and for all that she’d never have children. She’d nearly gone over the edge. When they first met, kids were all she talked about. Whenever there was a baby around, she’d tell Roger he was a natural. “You have such good instincts,” she’d say. But Roger never felt that way. Babies made him nervous. They were so helpless and fragile, their necks weak and unable to hold up their oversized heads. “Three,” she said to him on their honeymoon in Mexico. “I want three kids. Three has always been my lucky number.” So she was three times sadder after the hysterectomy, though by then she would have settled for just one. They’d talked about adoption, but they both knew it wasn’t the same, and back then they couldn’t have afforded it anyway. Motherhood had been all that Lydia ever wanted, and to be denied it had all but drained the life out of her. When Roger thought about Lydia finding out about Tina, he wasn’t worried so much about her reaction to him having sex with another woman; no, it was Lydia hearing that Tina had a son.

He’d met Tina at the Riverside Cafe in Medford, a cheap place to get breakfast when he was in that town on business of some kind or another. She’d been his waitress, her first week on the job, and he liked her black ponytail, her white teeth, her tight blue tee-shirt. The flirtation was instant and reciprocal, and after she’d taken his order he realized that he’d stuck his left hand in his coat pocket. By the time she came back with his eggs he’d taken off the ring and rubbed at the red rut it left. Later, after they’d met at Dutch Brothers, a coffee place up the road, and were smiling incessantly and holding hands across the small round table beneath the too-loud music, she admitted that she’d seen the ring but didn’t care. No need for secrets with her. “I’ve dated married guys before,” she said. “Whatever. No biggie.”

The thought of Tina made him want to talk to her, to tell her he’d trapped the bear and sedated it, and now he just needed to tag it and then drive it deep into the Siskiyou National Forest along one of the Bureau of Land Management roads. By the time he got to the spot he had in mind, the bear would be awake. He’d release it and head straight to her place, an hour’s ride, maybe less. He knew it was useless to try the cell phone. Maybe he could get a bar or two up on the high pass after he tagged the bear and hitched up the trailer and trap. He glanced at the plastic tag, opened his log and wrote down the tag number and location.

Back at the cage he nudged the bear once more through one of the gaps in the mesh. She didn’t move. He unlocked the door and climbed inside, laid down the tag and piercing gun and looked the sow over. Judging from her size and the condition of her teeth, she was probably four or five years old. There was a wide scar in the short blonde hair of her snout. He lifted her eyelids and looked into the unseeing brown of her small eyes, lifted her ears and saw in one of them a dog tick bloated gray with blood. He plucked out the tick with his nail clippers. The sow’s paws, huge and heavy and tipped with black claws longer than his hands, were in fine condition. Then he saw her teats, pink and distended. She was lactating. But where was the cub? He’d gotten here around nine to find the whole valley shrouded in mist. He’d set the trap and unlocked the undamaged cabin with the key Dean had told him where to find. With his Thermos of coffee, he’d sat on the deck and watched the sun burn off the mist and set the spider webs gleaming. He’d found some old newspapers piled by the woodstove and taken a crossword from one of them and was almost finished with it when he heard a snort. And here she’d come, lumbering out of the shadowy tree line and through the bright meadow toward his pickup and the trap baited with a whole bag of Western Family Mini Marshmallows. He hadn’t seen a cub.

He glanced at his watch. Almost one o’clock. If there was a cub, he would have seen it by now. Maybe something had happened to it. Roger had heard of cougars killing young cubs. This one would be about six months old. Black bears bore exceptionally small offspring relative to their adult size. Yes, the cub would be small enough for a cougar to take down. Or some poachers might have shot it. But how would they have gotten through the locked gate? He looked around and listened. A tanager was singing in one of the old apple trees. Madrone leaves were falling in the road. The meadow made a seething sound. Everything else was still. The last thing he wanted to do was separate a cub from its mother. He thought of Tina, thought how the tranquilizer would be wearing off, thought how unless the cub walked in the cage in the next hour or so, there was no way he’d trap both of them unless he gave the sow another dose. He folded the nail clippers and slipped them in his pocket. Might as well tag her. He slid the piercing gun over her ear and pulled the trigger. The sow jerked her head and Roger sprang back and stood up. She groaned and he took another step back and banged his head, hard, and before he could stop it the door slid through its oiled grooves and clicked shut.

Locked.

He couldn’t find his breath, couldn’t see well, couldn’t think. He dropped the piercing gun and tag, jerked at the door, kicked it, jerked at it again. Coffee and stomach acid rose to his throat and he swallowed it back down. The bear’s small eyes were half-open. Uncomprehending, but half-open. He tried to remember everything he knew about the trap, the door, the lock. Was there some kind of manual release on the inside? He knew there wasn’t. When he’d opened the door to climb inside, he’d reset the mechanism. He could see the lock, but there was no way to reach it through the mesh. Crouched in the corner, he studied the bear. Her beady brown eyes. Her breaths came in short gasps. Her tongue, lathered white, slipped in and out of her mouth. The eyes closed again.

Suddenly alert and focused, though his pulse was racing, a sensation much like the one time in college during finals when he’d snorted methamphetamine to help him cram, Roger tried the door again. It didn’t move. He had a momentary vision of one of his ODF colleagues finding him out here, in the cage, half-eaten by the sow, its face gory with his blood. He saw Lydia dressed in black weeping by his casket, saw Tina in the crowd, Tommy standing beside her looking confused and sad to see his mother cry. He felt empty, felt again as though he might vomit, but it wasn’t panic. No, he wouldn’t panic. His response was almost automatic, a decision he was hardly conscious of making. He moved toward the bear and nudged it with his boot and when she didn’t move he did his best to roll her. Her shoulder was muscular and warm. He straddled her, pushing the huge head back, revealing the neck. The nail clippers had been a gift from Lydia, part of a men’s manicure set she’d given him for Christmas after he’d left his others behind at Tina’s. He’d told Lydia he’d lost them in the locker room at the YMCA. He snipped quickly at the coarse black fur until he saw skin, pale gray. He scratched with the edge of the two curled blades and drew blood. Folded inside the clippers was a short, dull blade, one side of it a file, the tip of it curved for cleaning out the black moons that formed beneath fingernails. His fingers slippery now with the sow’s blood, he gripped the file blade and pressed it hard into the small gash. The bear’s body moved beneath him, the shoulder contracting, one of the back legs scraping at the steel floor. He worked the blade violently, digging deep, tearing through the layers of muscle and fat. Inside there, he knew, was the carotid artery, coursing with blood rich with oxygen. He stabbed at the wound with one hand while the other yanked at the flap of flesh. Blood seeped from the wound, and he thought of Lydia, that morning when she’d come to him. He’d been out on the patio of their first home, the little ranch house in Grants Pass, reading the newspaper. A spring morning, damp with mist and fog. She’d said his name and he’d seen the blood dripping from both hands. The hysterectomy, he’d thought, the operation. But that had been two weeks ago. And then she’d held out each gashed wrist like a gift, like an offering.

When he pierced the vessel the blood rushed out, warm, like stepping on a garden hose left out in the sun. Roger sat back and watched it, his heartbeat sounding deep inside his ears. He heard a twig snap, saw through the green mesh of the trap the black form come into focus, its little blonde snout, the curve of its back. The cub lifted its nose, sniffing the air, and then it stood on its hind legs looking almost human.