Fronting the Essentials

October 20th - Final Post

2005-10-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

After spending last night in Pennsylvania, we pushed east again this morning and arrived at our bungalow in New York around noon today. The bungalow is located just north of the New Jersey border. We didn’t stay long, as the landlord was repairing a timer switch to an outside light and I didn’t want to be in the way. Next stop: the dog park. I’m glad to report that there’s a nice park with an off-leash section about ten minutes from here. Gus had fun meeting some new dogs and running around—much needed exercise after five and half days in a cramped car. After that I stopped at Lemongrass, my favorite Thai restaurant in New City, and ordered take-out of my favorite dish: pad kee mao with tofu. I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening unpacking and setting up our new place. Right now I’m drinking a cup of Dutch Henry tea, a special blend I made of chamomile and mint from my garden.

Thus ends the greatest adventure of my life. Oregon seems awfully far away in terms of highway miles, but it’s still close in my heart. I have a feeling I’ll go back some day. Unpacking my things, I was happy to find some river teeth that I picked up along the Rogue. What are river teeth? The writer David James Duncan describes the phenomenon eloquently and poetically in his book entitled River Teeth. In a nutshell, here’s what happens: a conifer falls into a river, and the river goes to work breaking it down. Maybe in ten years most of the tree has broken up and eroded. But the branch joints, those places where limbs met the trunk, places dense with pitch, last much longer: hundreds, maybe even thousands, of years. And when they finally do wash up on shore, they’re quite shrunken and soft, and very often they look like teeth. I’m glad I kept two of them. I’ll display one in my office at the bungalow. The other I’ll keep on my desk at school. I like to think, too, that the river worked on me during my six months of living along it, and that now there’s something durable, something thick with the pitch of my soul, laved by all the times I swam in the Rogue or dragged a fly through it or merely gazed at it and let its whorls tell its story in that language I couldn’t really translate though I tried. Those teeth of the Rogue, hard and yet soft and shaped by a beautiful and patient persistence, have sunk deep in me with their memories of the river’s endless conversation. I can hear it talking through those teeth even now.

The End.

October 19th

2005-10-19T04:58:00.000-07:00

October 19, 2005

I’d planned on an easier day yesterday. Sioux Falls to Chicago. According to an online distance-checker, it was 474 miles. Well, the site was wrong by about 100 miles. Then I made the mistake of going through Chicago at rush hour. Bumper to bumper for 40 minutes or more. I’d been driving since 8:00 am. By now it was after sundown, I was hungry, Gus was ready to get out of the car, and my nerves were fraying from the craziness of the city. At one point I realized I had a train to my left, a plane flying overhead, and a sea of cars in front of and behind me; the cabin flashed in my mind: the wood stove crackling, the crickets peeping, the moon rising over Rattlesnake Ridge. It’s strange not to see fir trees everywhere. And I miss the smell of the canyon: that dry scent of madrone, bay laurel, Douglas fir.

After four days of driving, I finally found my maps! I’d put them in one of the backpacks. Now, though, I pretty much know where I am and where the road goes. I’m getting on I-80 East this morning. I’ll probably make one more overnight stop: Pennsylvania somewhere. Then home, though it’s really not.

October 18th

2005-10-18T06:06:00.000-07:00

After driving over 700 miles yesterday, I’m now in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and getting ready to ship out again. I’m hoping to make it to Chicago today. According to a distance-calculating site my dad sent me, it’s 474 miles from here to Chicago. South Dakota was a drive of mostly rolling hills. Saw signs for many historic sites and landmarks—Battle of Little Bighorn, Deadwood, the Badlands, Devil’s Tower—but didn’t stop at any of them. Here are a few shots from the journey so far:

A salmon swimming through the fish ladder at Bonneville Dam, Oregon:

Larches (they look like conifers but are deciduous, dropping their needles) turning in southwestern Montana:

Four shots taken from the car window while driving through Montana, "Big Sky Country":

I’m in Central Time now. One hour earlier than Eastern Time. Getting closer.

October 17th

2005-10-17T05:27:00.000-07:00

October 17, 2005

Well, I’ve driven about 1,100 miles or so since leaving my grassy slope beneath the madrone outside the cabin door. I’m in Billings, Montana, and I’m about to hit the road for another day of driving. Two nice things about reintegration: The Weather Channel and HBO. I just watched the former, and it’s going to be a clear go for me today. There’s rain ahead of me and behind me, but I won’t see any of it. And the latter: last night I watched my first episode of Rome, and I’m already hooked.

I took a few pictures along the drive yesterday, but haven’t downloaded them from my camera yet.

Onward and upward (or…across).

October 14th & 15th

2005-10-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

October 14, 2005

Our last day at Dutch Henry Homestead and the gods were as unhappy about it as Gussie and I; it was a violent, blustery day, with the worst winds I’ve seen in the six months we’ve been here. At one point this morning I looked out the window and there was a blizzard of orange needles falling in the yard. I’d been loading gear and had the car doors and the Thule box open. Fir needles everywhere. Later, on our final walk to the pond, debris blew into both my eyes. There were limbs crashing in the woods around us, twigs and branches falling in the road. I had to get the bow saw and cut one fir tree that had fallen across the road above the lower gate. The surface of the pond was covered with needles and leaves, but it didn’t stop Gus from having his last few plunges fetching sticks. After the car was all but loaded, after printing out a note for Steve, a note for Bradley, a new story I wrote, and a cover for my printed version of the blog, we made our last hike down to the river to go fishing. Again big limbs were crashing all through the forest, the wind whipping. Our trail was littered with green fir branches freshly fallen. In the open, down at the river, where the canyon is like a wind tunnel, I felt the full force of the gales leading the low front coming in from the Pacific. I could see dark clouds moving in. But I wanted to catch a fish to bring to Bradley and so in spite of the crazy wind and impending rain, I fished from the creek to the back eddy and back again to our beach. And struck out. I had one fish rise and turn, but it didn’t bite down on the fly. The river was full of leaves and debris. A real mess. Bad action. About two hundred yards from the cabin on the walk back up, the rain started.

Since yesterday Gus has known that something’s up. He’s been watching me pack stuff up. He saw me break down his crate, and gave me an anxious look. This morning while I was loading the car, he jumped in the front seat and wouldn’t budge. I think he was afraid I was going to take off without him. He wouldn’t let me out of his sight all day. And later, down at the river, he looked sad, even amid all the excitement of the front moving in. Here he is saying goodbye to the river:

And here’s the two of us lying one last time on our beach:

The poison oak is a beautiful red right now:

I liked the colors in the composition of this mossy tree on the walk back up to the cabin:

This week I made a collage to take home with me, a reminder of this coniferous forest. Aptly, it’s made of torn paper (newspapers, file folders, covers of poetry journals). A touch of pastels and green marker, too.

On the drive to town yesterday the fog over the river compelled me to pull over on the Whiskey Creek Road and take this shot:

I had a final burst of writing in my last three days here: a new fishing story. I’m going to send it to Fly Rod & Reel in the hopes of winning the Robert Traver Fly-fishing Fiction Award again (I won it in 1997 when I knew almost nothing about fly-fishing). Recently they more than doubled the prize money. I have a few edits to make after I get online again and do some research. I’ll post it when it’s complete.

Gussie and I have indeed had a great go of it here. It’s been one of the deepest experiences of my forty years on this planet, and I’d do it again without thinking twice. Some day, maybe when I’m retired or if my life circumstances change, I’d like to do what Margery suggested—come here for a winter stay. It must be magical here in winter. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the Boydens (and Bradley in particular), to PEN Northwest (John Daniel in particular), and to the Tenafly Board of Education and administrators for making my stay here possible.

October 15, 2005

It was a sad and soggy departure from the cabin this morning in a light drizzle and before sunrise, followed by a long day of driving. I stopped by Bradley’s to give him the keys and say goodbye to him and his family, and then pushed on, stopping at Bonneville Dam to see the salmon climbing the fish ladder. It was pretty neat to see big salmon swimming by the glass. They actually pay someone to sit there and count and log species of every one of the fish that passes through. Amazing. I’m in Spokane, WA. We made over 600 miles today. I’m pooped; thus, the brief posting. More later.

October 8th - 13th

2005-10-13T11:06:00.000-07:00

October 8, 2005

More thick fog this morning, beautiful to watch sifting through the meadows and firs. After coffee and an hour’s work on a new poem, we went into town to get mail and do laundry and hit the farmer’s market, where I treated myself to a delicious cheeseburger and bought some croissants, a small walnut pie (just had a piece with vanilla ice cream!), a bone for Gus, and a housewarming gift for Sharen—a rounded-edge myrtlewood bread board with a gorgeous grain.

No bobcat sightings on today’s drive, sad to say. Just some deer, one of them a big antlered buck, and lots of grouse and quail. I was thankful the road was damp from the recent rains. No dust to undo yesterday’s cleaning job on my car’s interior.

I’d planned to leave next Saturday, but I spoke with Steve Edwards tonight, and now I’m wondering if I should stay through Saturday night and exchange stories about our experiences here. He seems like a great guy. He’s teaching at the University of Nebraska, where he said he sees Ted Kooser every day. I’m only reluctant to stay the extra night because I want to make it to New York by Friday the 21st so I can move my furniture on Saturday the 22nd. Stan Flood, a pal from the English Department at Tenafly, said he was available to help me that day. Sunday the 23rd is an option, too, but I have concert tickets for an afternoon Ellis Paul concert at The Mansion. Don’t want to miss that. So, the question is: can I make it from here to New York in five days (or six if I drive all day Sunday instead of staying at Bradley’s house in Portland)? Well, I have the week to think about it.

I received copies of Crab Orchard Review in the mail today. My friend Peter and I each had poems accepted for their “Ten Years After: Documenting a Decade 1995-2005” issue. What a nice journal. I’m honored to be included.

On the drive back I stopped at The Silver Sedge Fly Shoppe and bought myself a new leader. The one on my rod is too short and is curling in places. I may have better luck fishing with a new, lighter line. I plan to try tomorrow. If I do stay next Saturday night, it would be nice to cook Steve Edwards a steelhead dinner.

October 9, 2005

After several nights of troubled sleep, I finally slept well last night despite having school on my mind all day. Didn’t wake up once. Maybe I’m getting more used to the idea of returning to my life.

First Day of School

They file in with their bags and books,
as tentative as reluctant penitents,
their bodies sweet embarrassments,
their eyes on guard for funny looks.

They’ve remembered pens and pencils,
paper and erasers, calculators
and planners, granola bars
to sneak, but have forgotten the rules

of fitting in—how and when to smile
or laugh, what to do with hands and feet,
how not to ooze into plastic seats.
All they want is to be liked. Meanwhile

there’s the teacher with her bag and books
and a roster of strange and common names.
After a week of troubling dreams,
her eyes, on guard for funny looks,

wear dark moons that shine across the room.
She’s remembered pens and pencils,
her brown planner and gradebook, the rules
of attendance, bells timed to the clock that looms

and draws all eyes like a giant silver sun.
But she’s forgotten everything she planned—
opening joke, stern warnings, the hand-
out detailing her policies on grades and gum.

So she simply smiles and with deft
gestures hides shaking fingers and beating
heart. And soon enough she’s teaching,
when all she really wants is to be loved.

The day began with clouds, but by noon it was sunny and warming up. I looked along the logging spur for chanterelles again. Nothing. Bradley says it may take a few weeks for the mycelia to get going, so I fear I won’t get any.

Went fishing in the afternoon. Despite my new leader, it was bad action. I caught one small trout in a back eddy. Had a nice hit at the mouth of the creek and another upriver in a shallow gravel run. Lost the last two Boyden pattern flies—one of them on a submerged rock, another on a backcast (couldn’t find where it snapped off). I’m going to try my hand at tying some tonight. I think part of the reason I lost the two flies is that the leader was too thin. I got a 4.4-pound line. Should’ve gotten a bigger one. Finally, I just cut a foot off of it, and then it was fine. Hoping for better action tomorrow, if I can manage to make some decent flies.

Good wildlife down at the river, though. I saw two great blue herons, four otters, a huge red-tailed hawk, several water ouzels, and three deer. The otters were fun to watch diving and rising along the far bank, like dolphins. I also heard a pileated woodpecker and something big crashing through the woods on the walk back up. May have been Mr. Bear. Saw fresh bear scat up near the pond this morning. I think the dish du jour was acorns. Here’s one of the herons. It was a bit dark to get a good shot, so it’s kind of grainy:

October 10, 2005

I was up until after midnight tying flies! Of course, my first few came out badly. I even left out one ingredient—whitish strands of sparkly stuff. But the next couple I made looked about right. This morning, I went right back to the vise. It’s a meditative task. I could see myself really getting into it. I made about eight flies using the pattern Bradley taught me. I’m probably in violation of the secrecy code posting this (and I’ll take it down if Bradley balks), but here it is:

Not bad for an amateur, right?

I feel like a true outdoorsman. I caught a steelhead this afternoon on one of the flies I tied with my own two hands! It was a beautiful strike. I was up on a ledge just downriver from our beach and I moved the fly past a submerged rock. Up came the fish, slow and graceful, snapping the fly. I set the hook and he fought me for a bit. Then while I was reeling the slack he dove beneath the ledge I was standing on. The line wouldn’t budge, and I couldn’t pull him out. Determined not to lose this fish, I tried pulling from every angle, tried giving slack to see if he’d swim out, tried moving upstream and down. Finally, after five minutes, I pushed the rod out toward the river as far as I could and pulled, and out he came. The poor thing was exhausted from the pulling, all the fight gone out of him. Here he is:

I had a few more nice strikes, but no takers. Here we are fishing:

I just cleaned the steelie and put it in the freezer. If I stay Saturday night, I’ll need to catch one more so Steve Edwards and I can have a fish fry. If I don’t stay, I’ll leave him this fish and some butter. He’ll like that.

October 11, 2005

Talons and teeth abound in these woods, and most of the time you never see them. I’ve encountered a myriad of cougar scat gray with fur and bones. I’ve twice walked out my door in the morning to find smaller scat on my doorstep. Marten? Fox? Fisher? The other night I heard what I think was a screech owl with its eerie call. Sometimes, though, you get lucky: you do see them. I saw another bald eagle flying upriver today. But I’ve seen them before. No, today I saw a bird I’ve never seen and have always wanted to see. Walking up from the river around 5:30 this evening, I heard a bunch of chickadees sounding pretty alarmed, and there in a tan oak I saw what I thought at first to be an oversized Oregon junco. But I’ve seen lots of juncos in this forest, and they were all much smaller. I had a mosquito net over my head, something I’d discovered in the cupboard a long time ago and never used until today. It’s made of green netting and fits over a hat, with an elastic ring that goes around your neck. Lately tiny gnats or flies or whatever they are have been tormenting me on my walks, going straight for the eyes and ears and when I’m breathing hard from the steep hike, going down my windpipe. They don’t bite. Just annoy to hell and back. Thus, the mosquito netting, which made for a very pleasant walk. But back to the bird. I lifted the netting for a better view. The sun was beginning to go down, and I had to shade it with one hand. The bird was no junco. I saw the head turn to reveal “false eyes.” A Northern Pygmy Owl! I’d long ago given up on seeing one out here, even though they often come out in daylight. Now, in my last week, I’ve been rewarded for the wait. The Northern Pygmy is the smallest owl, about as tall as a sparrow but three times as heavy. A small, fat body with no neck. According to John Kemper in Southern Oregon’s Bird Life, “They often hunt in the daytime, and their principal prey is small birds…”; thus the squawking of the chickadees. Kemper goes on to say that they are “ferocious hunters, and frequently take prey twice as big as they are. One will hunt from a perch, holding perfectly still except for its head, which turns constantly this way and that, seeking prey. It can turn its head completely around, of course, and when it does, the false ‘eyes’ on the back of [its] head become visible.” This is exactly what I saw it do. It seemed unperturbed by my presence. I was only about fifteen feet away. Twice it turned its head showing the black feathers on the back of its head that look like eyes, an evolutionary wonder. After about five minutes, I returned to the trail. When I looked back, it was still on its perch, head turning from side to side looking for dinner. Or would it be breakfast?

Fishing was bad action. I turned a few nice fish, but they didn’t take. I caught one tiny one. The owl sighting made up for the lack of fish.

I rototilled two of the garden beds today. It was sad to churn up my pepper plants, even though they gave me very few peppers. I left the basil and parsley and chamomile. The former I hope to use for dinner with Steve. The latter two herbs should last through the winter. The chamomile has been most productive, giving me a half-quart baggie full of nice flowers for tea. I didn’t touch the bed with the tomatoes and cukes. They’re still bearing, and Steve can eat some, and then Lang and Bradley when they come out in a few weeks. I also didn’t till the bed with the sunflower and zucchini. The sunflower isn’t quite ready for eating. And the zucchini plant is still bearing. More food for those lucky enough to be coming out in the next few weeks.

There was a pretty moon rise tonight. The digital doesn’t do well with little light, but I tried my best:

And here’s a night shot of the cabin. That’s one of the propane lamps burning. The pole to the right is the antenna for the radio phone. There’s smoke coming out the chimney from my fire, but you can’t see it:

October 13, 2005

Two nights ago I woke up with an idea for a new fishing story. I’ve been wanting to win the Robert Traver Fly-fishing Fiction Award again (I won it in 1997) from Fly Rod & Reel Magazine, especially since they raised the prize money from $1,000 to $3,500. Good cash money! Inspired by Laurie Lynn Drummond’s stories, this one is about a cop dealing with guilt over a family tragedy and the help he receives from his compassionate partner. I worked on it all day yesterday, finishing eight pages, and I feel good about it. I need to check the FR&R web site and see about word limits. If I recall, the stories can’t be more than 3,500 words, and I’m close to 3,000. After my Rogue River steelhead experiences, the fishing details have been easier to write than in previous fishing stories I’ve done.

Yesterday morning I walked out on the deck and saw deer in the garden! Three of them. At first I thought they’d jumped the fence. Then I saw the gate was wide open. Apparently, after chugging the rototiller back up to its parking place beneath the cabin, I forgot to go down and close the gate. I didn’t want the deer eating the tomatoes and cukes and sunflower, so I took a walk down there. I thought it would be easy enough to herd them toward the gate. I was wrong. As soon as they saw me, they started trotting around. Then the youngest of them dashed right through a gap in the barbed wire. I winced, imagining its hide being scratched by the barbs. Another one ran into the fence two or three times. I was horrified. I started backing away. The last thing I wanted was for them to hurt themselves or damage the fence. This one was much bigger than the youngest, but miraculously it also leapt through a gap in the fence just east of the run-down chicken coop. I hightailed it back to the cabin, where I watched the third deer. She walked the perimeter, finally found the gate, and trotted through it and off into the meadow to rejoin her scratched-up family. I went back out and inspected the fence. No damage done. The gap through which the biggest deer leapt was a rectangle measured about 15 inches high by 20 inches across. I could see bits of fir on the barbs, but no blood. I thought for sure that the two deer going through the fence would have messed up the electric wire, but they didn’t. The wires were perfectly intact. Incredible!

No fishing yesterday. I was too engrossed in the new story. Anyway, it was hot. Felt like summer in the afternoon. Taking a break from writing, I printed out a condensed, hard copy version of the blog (minus pictures and audio and HTML codes, of course). To shorten the page count, I single-spaced, reduced the margins, changed the font to Garamond (a nice, small typeface), and changed the font size to 11 point. Anything smaller would be too hard to read, especially for any future residents as old as me. Thus shrunk, the blog ran 114 pages. To conserve paper, I printed on both sides, first doing the odd pages, then the evens. Half-way through the odds, the generator ran out of gas. When I added more gas and started her up again, the laser printer got all screwed up and I had to cancel the print job, reprint four or five pages, and then pick up from there. When all was said and done, it took me over an hour to print the darned thing. But it looks nice. I’m going to try to have it spiral bound at a copy place today.

This morning I woke up at 3:00 AM, a wee hour, and couldn’t fall back asleep. I tossed and turned for two hours, before I finally got up. I took Gus out for peepee/poopy in the dark, and the stars were thick, crisp, cool, Orion there large in his perpetual hunt. We’re making our final trip to Grants Pass today to mail four big boxes of stuff, close the P.O. box, wash the bedding, and run a few other errands.

October 2nd - 7th

2005-10-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

October 2, 2005

It rained on and off throughout the day. During a morning lull, we went out looking for mushrooms and didn’t see a single fungus. Maybe we need a day of warm temps following the rains to get the spores popping. I checked a place where Lang and Martha found chanterelles last year—along a now overgrown logging spur off the DHH road. In the afternoon we braved the drizzle to do some fishing, and I got skunked. I fished from the creek up to the back eddy pockets and then back to our beach. Had one hit, and it might just have been a squawfish. Where are all the steelies? It was nice to be down there, watching the mists and the occasional patches of blue sky. Even standing in the rain. Gus didn’t seem to mind much. He was wet from the river anyway. On the path out, sitting on a log to switch from my felt-soled wading shoes (good on slippery rocks) into my hiking shoes, I saw a bunch of mushrooms, but they weren’t chanterelles. Soon, I think.

I’ve had the wood stove going all day, keeping the cabin warm and dry. I’ll miss the coziness of having a wood stove, the chore of chopping and carrying wood. At the Fort Montgomery house, it was my nightly routine in the winter to make a nice fire. That stove, a Vermont Castings I bought in the Adirondacks and hauled home in the trunk of my Honda Civic (nearly breaking the springs), had a window. I loved watching the flames and hot coals. Many a night I fell asleep by those fires. There’s no wood stove or fireplace at the new bungalow. If I ever buy a house again, it’ll have to have a wood stove.

I did some more packing today, another big box, this one full of books and summer clothes. I don’t think I’ll be needing shorts or short sleeves much if this weather keeps up. I kept out one pair or shorts and several tee shirts just in case.

I worked on a new poem today. The title is a bit of a pun, which soon becomes evident. I got the idea when I saw a call for manuscripts in P&W for a literary magazine doing a theme issue on “simple virtues.” I assembled a few other poems and story to send in, too. The lines should have staggered indentation. Each section has a different point of view.

Cardinal Virtues

I. Justice

Eggs in nests, breakable,
in need of constant heat
and turning; squirrels

and hawks, and at night
the black gaze of owls
piercing, piercing.

Cats at feeders,
poised, slow as the sun
but quicker than light.

Plate glass windows,
clean, clear like the gaps
between trees. Hard, hard.

II. Prudence

Beware of clearings
and the yards of boys.
Beware freely offered

seeds. Forage most
in autumn when the leaves
and you are one. Beware

a background of snow.
Do not linger at dusk.
Take a circuitous route

back to the nest
you’ve built high
above the ground.

III. Fortitude

At the top of a pine
the fledgling, awakened
by the marrow of its thin

bones, peered out
of the woven bowl.
It liked its home—

the smell of grass
and moss, the down
from its mother’s breast.

Fear lit its eyes,
but something just as old
told it how to use its wings.

IV. Temperance

They eat when they’re
hungry, and they’re always
hungry but never gluttonous.

Water’s harder
to come by, and so at times
they love the rain too much.

Their very lives
are arranged, like feathers,
with form and moderation.

They are no more
red than a jay is blue.
Refraction: light, them, you.

Rich Norris, crossword editor at The L.A. Times e-mailed to say he wants to publish another puzzle of mine, but I have to make the grid easier, since it’ll be a Monday puzzle. I fixed it up today and will send it when I get on WiFi again.

October 3, 2005

Bradley and his friend Bradford (I know, that sounds funny) are due to arrive this afternoon bearing a new sliding door for the cabin. I have a feeling it’s going to turn into a very big job, a mandatory course here at the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology. Needs to be done, though.

I’m making a batch of Gary’s Famous Barbequed Ribs and I’ve had the Cubans properly humidified for a few days. Should make for some good action at the upper house tonight.

New poem, a loose sonnet. I can’t seem to escape the Adam and Eve story, which figures prominently in the new book. So here’s another. By the way an arbor vitae (pronounced vigh-tee), is an evergreen with a strong smell.

Arbor Vitae

She was seven and I was eight
and we were as old as need be
when we hid beneath that arbor
vitae in its sour pungency.
Needles, little serpents, bit
inside my collar. I could hear
hollering in the fenced darkness,
but couldn’t see to see, and there
were spider webs surrounding us,
sticky things to push through or fear
if fear was what we wanted. We
didn’t know. We held each other.
That was all. Where else could we go?
We didn’t know. We didn’t know.

October 4, 2005

The Two Brads arrived yesterday afternoon with the huge new door strapped to the top of the pickup. The plan is to begin work on installation today. While we were chatting on the deck, a nice rainbow formed right over the garden:

In the evening we had a good time at the upper house, eating a plate of the ribs I made and then some barbequed chicken. Bradley’s friend Bradford is a character. He grew up in Preston, Idaho, the same town where Napoleon Dynamite is set and was filmed. In fact, he said that in the movie you can see his parents’ yard. He now lives outside of Phoenix. He kept us laughing with stories about drag racing, grilling, and Evel Kneival. The funniest episode of the night was when he told us a riddle that a radio show up in Washington broadcast a few years ago. The prize to the first person who called in with the right answer was something like $5,000. Riddle: “What’s the first thing you know?”

I’ll give the answer next time I come to town.

As Bradford drank beer at the table with his eyes closed, Bradley and I played four games of cribbage. I beat him three to one.

October 5, 2005

Yesterday commenced intense vocational training at the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology, when The Two Brads came rolling down the road with their box of tools. Soon my deck was strewn with the dismembered, disassembled, disabled parts of the old sliding door and various and sundry windows, T-111 siding, propane gas pipes and moldings. While I stood around “holding the rope” and collecting wrenched-out nails, the professors did all the work and in a few hours had the old door out and the new one loosely fitted in. The door wasn’t sitting quite plumb or square, and the afternoon had lapsed well into fishing time, so Bradley put some temporary tacks to hold the door in place, said, “We’ll finish her tomorrow,” and the three of us and Gus went fishing. We got skunked at the river. Bradley and I had strikes, but no takers. Very bad action, but our dinner and continuing banter made up for the lousy fishing. Steak, mashed taters, Walla Walla onions, string beans—all of it, of course, cooked in butter, the fat of the gods. It was a clear, cool night and the stars were thick. Bradley brought the cribbage count from 3-1 to 4-3, but I’m still leading. Around 11:00 I called it quits, thinking I’d come back and read another one of Laurie Lynn Drummond’s great cop stories, but when I went to light the propane lamp above my bed, I remembered we’d had to shut off the gas when we disconnected a lamp near the sliding door. So I made a fire in the wood stove and went to sleep. This morning, without gas, I boiled water for my coffee on top of the wood stove. Roughing it.

The other day Bradford asked me to write a poem for his wife, an apology for him having come out here and left her with all the chores. Here’s what I came up with:

Postcard Too Small for My Apology

—for Kathy

For the cool prelude of my side of the bed;
for the paper not yet read still waiting
at the end of the drive with its creases
and bad news; for the bee hive humming
in the eaves and the too-heavy ladder;
for the dog’s empty water bowl,
his whining by the locked door, the tug
of his leash, the brown steaming piles;
for the rubbish and recyclables—blue bins
loaded with the waste of our consumption,
the dark and sour smile of black beans
at the bottom of one tin can; for no whiskers
like hyphens punctuating the bathroom sink,
no uric ellipses on the toilet seat, no moist
sock like a sad brassard on the arm
of your favorite chair; for no black hairs
stuck to the bar of soap, no farts, no dopey
jokes, no charred-army body count
in the glass ashtray; for no one with whom
to drink or commiserate or die those little
deaths; for your speechless disbelief when I say,
“I’m going fishing for five days, can you
watch the kids?”; for Eve made from Adam’s
rib, and the long, long history of grief;
for what happened in the Garden—for all
of this and more, I humbly beg your pardon.

I’m expecting the professors to come rolling down any minute now to begin my practical examination—the final steps in the installation of the new sliding door. Then, to my best guess, we’ll be doing more fishing.

Evening post: The door’s in and sliding like butter. My deck’s back to its original state of semi-disarray. I got skunked again fishing, but The Two Brads just came up at first dark and said they caught two. They’d gone down through the corral and upriver fishing downriver. I’d gone to my beach and fished upriver. I’ve been feeling pretty lousy (upset stomach) all day, so I didn’t wait for them and just headed back. More action at the upper house tonight.

October 6, 2005

Last night I spent more good time with The Two Brads in the coziness of the upper house beneath a blanket of stars. Sitting out on the deck, I saw two shooters, one of them an orange blaze with almost no tail to it. Bradley whipped up a batch of his famous boneless pork ribs, this time with a spicy chipotle marinade. His pan-friend potato cakes were sublime, as was the honeydew drizzled with lime juice we had for dessert. Despite all this kindness, after a 4-4 tie in the cribbage tournament, I beat him in the last game. I’m ahead 5-4.

Here we are:

I got a call yesterday from Loretta, Judy Montgomery’s friend in Bend, who had been so kind to me when I was there, baking me treats to bring back to the cabin and bringing rawhides for Gus. She called for my address because she wants to send me something, and while we were chatting she asked how Gus was doing and then told me her own dog died suddenly the other day. I can only imagine how sad it must be. Anyway, I wrote this poem for her and her husband Pete.

Elegy

—for Loretta and Pete

Come, sit, stay awhile
before the end, old friends.
I’ll miss your smiles,
your bountiful hands,

the commands I never
listened to. Now I would
hang on your every
word, sit, stay, be good.

Life was a leash I loved,
and I knew it well.
It was heaven enough
as far as I could tell.

They say there are no
fences where I’m going,
and I’m afraid I won’t
know what I’m doing

there. Hard to comprehend
—all that space to run.
I promise, old friends,
if you call, I’ll come.

The whole canyon was full of thick fog this morning, the first time I’ve seen that. It was beautiful. Now, at eleven, it’s burned off to a sunny day. We’re going to move some wood into the woodshed and rototill some of the garden beds, and then go fishing. We need a third fish for our fish fry tonight.

October 7, 2005

I caught us the third fish we needed, a nice 14-inch steelhead! He fought like mad and after I got him onto shore he broke the hook in half. A feisty fish indeed. I landed him right at my beach on a rock I’ve dubbed “Gary’s Rock,” because I usually have success there. Here I am with it:

Just before I caught the fish I saw two otters in the river, my first glimpse of them out here! They looked right at me, snorted, shook water from their big whiskers as if to say hello, and then dunked down and were gone. Very cool!

Later, just before we quit, Bradley caught one, too. That one he’s bringing home to Margery. What a good son.

We had a great dinner of the steelhead, some sautéed veggies, and some fried taters, and then we made the huge mistake of playing Trivial Pursuit so as to let Bradford get involved in the evening gaming (he’s not a cribbage player). Well, the game went on past midnight and then I finally won it. Afterward Bradley vowed never to play Trivial Pursuit at Dutch Henry again. “Throw it in the fire!” he spat. I think I concur. Cribbage is the house game, and all you really need.

It was a beautiful morning today, cool and sunny. I woke late after a lousy night’s sleep, my stomach bothering me again. I think it’s anxiety about leaving next week. After breakfast we loaded Bradley’s truck with firewood for him to take home to Portland, then stacked the rest in the woodshed. Between them packing up to go, we got in one more game of cribbage, and I won, bringing the series to 5-3. It’s official: I’m the undefeated champion of DHH for 2005. Man, I’ll really miss playing cribbage with Bradley. Here we are:

Here’s Bradford out on the deck taking in a last look at the amazing view:

By the time they were heading out, some weather was moving in. May rain tonight:

And here’s Gus looking a little sad to see the guys go:

Around 1:15 I said goodbye to The Two Brads, feeling sad to see them go. I had a great time with them. Then Gus and I were back to our quiet canyon. In anticipation of leaving next week, I cleaned the inside of my car, washing out all the dust and dirt I could and then wiping her down with Armorall and cleaning the windows. With a damp road, I should have a nice ride into town tomorrow for my penultimate trip to Grants Pass.

I may have one last visitor, if I decide to leave on Sunday instead of Saturday. Bradley says Steve Edwards, a DHIT alum, is planning to come in on Saturday. I feel torn. On the one hand, I’d like to be alone when I say farewell to this place; on the other, it would be fun to spend a night with Steve and compare notes on our Dutch Henry experiences. I’ll see how I feel when the time comes. Now that I think of it, if I want to move my stuff from storage on the 22nd, I should leave Saturday to give myself 7 days to drive across the country.

I’ve got baked ziti (homegrown tomato sauce) in the oven, and it smells good.

September 28 - October 1

2005-10-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

September 28, 2005

I’m getting very anxious about the prospect of my reintegration into civilization and my life back East. I have less than three weeks remaining here, and I’m afraid to leave the safety of the wilderness; pretty ironic given that I was terrified for a whole year at the thought of coming to live here. I’ve gotten used to the buffer of countless miles and boundless quiet, a wall which makes for a lightness of being one cannot know in cities and towns, a lightness born of obliviousness and small wonders. Only when I’ve turned on the radio out here or gone into town and read newspapers has that wall been breached. Tonight, listening to NPR while cooking dinner, I heard reports of people starving in Africa, people in our own country displaced by Hurricane Katrina, the ever-rising death toll in Iraq, and I suddenly had a headache, and then had a hard time enjoying my sesame-encrusted pork loin. And I feel embarrassed to even write that. In my old life, how did I ever eat all my dinners in front of the six o’clock TV news? I don’t think I’ll do that anymore once I’m back on the grid. There is so much suffering in the world; how do you live so that it doesn’t rot you on the inside? Do what you can to alleviate it? Make donations? March in protest? But do these lift the weight, stop the rot? Listening to the report about these people in Africa, whose crops have failed and who don’t have enough to eat despite international help, I thought of all the food I’ve consumed out here. I spend an average of about $75 a week at Market of Choice. I treat myself to expensive cheeses, meats, olives, snacks, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Choice stuff. I’ve stocked dry goods I’ll never eat: brown rice, flour, sugar, oat meal. Listening to the news, I found myself wishing I could send my whole pantry to these malnourished people. I know that sounds cliché, but it’s true. An hour before all this, I was down at the river catching steelhead on flies, watching water ouzels and a great blue heron, my head as clean as the river, the air. Oblivious. Light. I was happy. Yes, I think there’s something to be said for obliviousness. Maybe that’s a cop-out. It doesn’t stop suffering except in the one oblivious. It’s a shirking of responsibility, even. But maybe that’s the guilty trade-off for peace of mind.

I’m not sure how I’ll handle the reintegration. I had a fleeting fear recently that I’ll have a complete emotional meltdown. But of course I won’t. I’ll be grumpy for a time. I’ll grind my teeth in my troubled sleep. I’ll have headaches more often. I’ll ride the high of the intense stress that comes with being a high school teacher. But I expect I’ll do what I’ve done here to find peace of mind—revel in the small wonders. I’ll look for them or stumble upon them as I always have. Fall foliage going from red and orange to brown. Snowfall in the glow of a streetlight. Ellis Paul singing “Maria’s Beautiful Mess” live at The Mansion in Middletown, me sitting close enough that I can touch his guitar. The sound of ice shifting on a frozen lake. Gussie’s sweet, attentive eyes; his big black paws; his taut little body. Coming to know and love a new batch of students. Seeing the first crocus of spring. These and a thousand other things will iron out the wrinkles made by my wincing at the hard, hard world and my new life, forty and divorced.

I’m tired tonight. This morning, feeling guilty about the condition of the corral trail, I lugged the Stihl chainsaw about a mile down the trail and cleared all the fallen trees. Cutting the biggest tree, I got the blade stuck, despite my silent assurance that I wouldn’t let it. I didn’t want to bend the bar or damage the chain trying to yank it out, so I hiked all the way back to get the bow saw to finish the cut. It did the trick, but now I’d walked twice as far as I’d planned. As if all that steep hiking wasn’t enough, in the afternoon we walked to the river for more fishing. I fished for about twenty minutes and had several tugs, but caught nothing. Then I noticed that the hook on the fly was broken, its point and barb completely gone. That explained why I wasn’t catching fish. Duh. It must have broken against a rock during a back cast. I tied on a new fly and tried my trusty pockets, but nothing doing. Then I made my way back to our beach, where I encountered a nice family on a raft. The Cramers. They’d parked right at our beach and were setting up camp to spend the night there. I got to talking with them, and they gave me homemade chocolate chip cookies and showed me a Rogue River book I hadn’t seen. There was a section in it on Dutch Henry. Annoyed that I hadn’t caught a fish, I decided to try the mouth of the creek before I left. And there I caught one, a nice steelhead, about 14 inches. I offered the fish to the Cramers, but they politely declined. While we were chatting, the older of the two brothers, casting from my rock, hooked into a steelie with a spinner. Here’s the picture of them unhooking the fish and giving Gus a sniff of it:

September 29, 2005

Having coffee this morning, I discovered an issue of The Alaska Sportsman magazine dated June, 1945. I got a kick out of flipping through it and seeing all the old ads for polar bear rugs, shotguns, Tlingit baskets, references to the war. But the back cover ad for Schenley whiskey had me laughing out loud. It reminded me of Gus chasing around old Dutch Hen:

Today I lacked all pep, and my right shoulder was aching. Maybe it was all the walking and lugging of the chainsaw yesterday. It was all I could do to go to the pond and back, put away some gardening tools and hoses, chop some kindling. I napped twice in the afternoon. Once didn’t do it. Had no juice to go fishing at the river. So, a day of rest. In Genesis even God needed one of those.

I cooked up the fish I caught yesterday, and it came out just right. With some shad roe Bradley left me, some brown rice, a corn salad, and a romaine salad, I had a nice dinner.

I’m starting to think about packing up. My car and storage box were full coming out here, and I had to mail myself several boxes of things. I guess I’ll do the same when I leave. It occurs to me that I won’t have a bed to sleep in when I arrive at my bungalow. My bed’s buried in storage. I’ll be roughing it until I can find someone to help me move the big things. I’m tired just thinking about setting up the new place.

September 30, 2005

Feeling much more energized today after a good night’s sleep (even though I stayed up late watching Patton), I started packing stuff this morning. I filled up two big boxes to mail to myself, one box full of spices, teas and stuff I’ve dried and canned, another box full of books. I need to get myself more boxes and packing tape on my next trip to town, which might be tomorrow. With Bradley coming in on Monday with a friend, I’m thinking I should go to the farmer’s market in Grants Pass and get some goodies.

After lunch Gus and I went fishing. The river was like a circus. As soon as I got off the main trail to head down to our beach I encountered a hiker. He’d walked about 14 miles and was looking for a place to camp. I directed him to a nice spot with a flat area and close to an outhouse. Then there were two boats at the beach, some people stopped for lunch. After they left, three more boats pulled up, guides saying they had twenty hikers coming to camp there. It’s just as well. The river was high and cloudy and the wind was blowing like crazy. I think a dam must have been opened upriver, because the river’s been so clear and low. Anyway, the fishing was no good. We fished as far as the back eddy pockets, and then headed back.

Looking at some maps this afternoon, I decided to head back by going north into Washington where I’ll get on I-90 and take that all the way, through the Badlands. It was the way I wanted to come on the ride out, but didn’t. I think I’d rather see Montana than Nebraska again. Man, it’s a big country. I don’t relish the thought of driving it again. I’ll have to download more books from iTunes.

October 1, 2005

Well, October made a splash here. Literally. A whole night of rain. All day yesterday I could feel it coming, could sense it in the bluster, see it in the swirling clouds, and by evening I felt the first tiny droplets falling. Several times I woke in the night to hear it dancing on the skylight. When I got up this morning the mists were snaking along the ridge. I’m grateful for the rain. It’ll make my drive into town so much more pleasant. No dust!

With the change of month, I had the calendar on my mind this morning; or the lack of one. I haven’t had one out here, except for the tiny calendar in my checkbook I’ve consulted from time to time, or the date on my watch. But no tacked-up calendar with big boxes to X out. And so, this draft of a new poem. Of course, as with most of my poems, it’s about more than that (or at least I hope it is):

Numbered Days

In this ambivalent wilderness
I’ve lived long without a calendar
to mark the things I’ve done
or haven’t—no exes through
my cabin days like the eyes
of the dead in comics, or on maps
for tourists the places that say

You Are Here; no appointments
scribbled or scratched out;
neither birthdays nor holidays
to mind like pots of rice.
To know the phase of the moon,
I’ve waited for the glow along
this eastern ridge. To know

the day, I’ve gazed through
the square pane of a bay window.
And when one month ended
and another began, I turned
no page but the one on which
I wrote in longhand the vain
stanzas of my numbered days.

On the drive into town I had a really great look at a bobcat. It was on the side of the road eating a dead deer. I slowed and watched it and it ran across the road. Then I stopped and turned around. Out it came for more. Again I drove up and got a great look. Then it dashed off again. I waited for more, but cars started coming by and it didn't come out for ten minutes, so I gave up. Pretty neat.

September 22 - 26

2005-09-27T13:55:00.000-07:00

September 22, 2005

Autumn now. Another summer gone like a bloom. Mine one to remember. We’re back from the trip to Eugene, which was great. The city is like Bend, but bigger—clean, artsy, progressive and laid out in a grid along the Willamette River. It took me five minutes to find a WiFi café. Ten to find a dog park. Eugene has four or five of them. We visited two and both were bigger than a New York City block. One of them was a short walk from the house I stayed in. My host, Cecilia, was kind and engaging. She’s a writer and teacher and former editor of The Northwest Review. I enjoyed spending time with her and her husband, Craig, an artist and retired art professor, who does excellent landscape drawings in graphite. The reading was great. Big turn-out, attentive audience. In the library there was a huge poster advertising the reading, with bios and photos of me and the other reader, Laurie Lynn Drummond. I was tempted to snag the poster, but it was under glass. Laurie was quite good. She read a short story from her collection, What You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You, stories about women police officers in Baton Rouge. Yes, she was a cop there before becoming a creative writing professor at the University of Oregon. I read first, and did sixteen poems, a few from my book, the rest pieces written out here. Lots of people spoke with me at intermission and after the reading, and I signed a good number of books. One woman asked for my poem “Sheep’s Skull,” which she wants to send to a friend. I was surprised to find that one girl in the audience was, like me, a former Pearl Hogrefe Fellow at Iowa State. She and I chatted about the professors there. After the reading, Cecilia, Craig, Laurie and I went to a restaurant called Zenon (same name as a science teacher at my school, though pronounced differently) for drinks and dessert. In the morning Cecilia and Craig came by and brewed up some good coffee. We had breakfast goodies, chatted some more, and then walked up to the dog park. They recommended some places to check out before I left, and we said goodbye. I got my watch battery replaced at a watch repair shop, bought a cheddar brioche and some oatmeal cookies at a bakery, and then drove across the river to buy a four-track cribbage board for Bradley, a gift I’ve been searching for since I went to New Jersey. Then we left Eugene and drove to Grants Pass to get my mail, do laundry, and shop at Market of Choice. In the mail was a rejection from Barrow Street, but with a nice handwritten note saying that my poem “A Mouse in the House” came very close and that I should try there again with some other poems. Barrow Street is a prestigious, lovely journal. I will indeed send more. The long day of driving combined with lack of sleep had me wiped out by the time we made it back to the cabin late in the afternoon. Gus was glad to get out of the car and run free again. When it got dark I heard the strangest noise, kind of like raccoons fighting but louder. I shone a flashlight from the deck and saw two sets of green eyes glowing up the road a bit. The beam was too week to see clearly but the shape of one of them was a small bear. Don’t know what the other was. I was in bed before nine o’clock. Read some more pages in Bob Dylan’s terrible book and conked out.

Today I stacked more of the madrone in the upper wood shed, finishing the bigger of the two piles Bradley and I made. The stack is well over my head now. There’s something satisfying about stacking wood. Doing it, I understand in some small way what it must be like to be a mason making a brick wall. Later I worked on the oil painting some more. It’s looking better. I want to let it dry before I put on the finishing touches. I’ll take a photo of it when it’s done. It’s a forest scene, kind of impressionistic.

It’s 3:20, sunny and cool. Bees hover at the eaves. A squirrel is chirping. Gus is lying beside the La-Z-Boy. Seltzer whispers in the can.

September 23, 2005

A little rain came through last night, so Bradley and Margery should have a nice drive in, very little dust.

Last evening I discovered that the fence battery was in the red. I walked the perimeter of the garden twice and the wires weren’t touching metal or anything else. I can only imagine that some critter got a big zap the night before and drained down the battery. I turned it off to see if it would recharge, and it didn’t. I’m going to let the sun hit the small solar panel all day today and see if that charges it up. If not, I’ll have Bradley take a look when he gets here later today.

While in Eugene I chatted with Cecilia Hagen about The Christian Science Monitor and the essays I’ve written for it. Then I had an e-mail from Casey McIntyre, a former student and now in college in Atlanta, and she said she’s using one of my Monitor essays in a nonfiction class she’s taking. I considered this a sign that I needed to write a new short essay and send it in. I’d all but given up on the Monitor after never receiving replies from the last two essays I sent. But I wrote a new one, and will send it. This one’s about the lone hummingbird I saw this morning. It makes reference to the episode this past summer when I caught a hummer. The piece is short and sweet, and may be perfect for the paper. Here it is:

Birds of a Feather

Today I saw what may be the last hummingbird of the year, a female Rufous, mostly green. These tiny flying gems are always in a hurry, but this one looked almost anxious, as if she’d bided time too long, greedy for my sweetened water, when she should have already flown south.

Last night a rain came through. In my sleep I was vaguely aware of it thrashing the roof, pattering on the skylight. In her little nest this hummingbird must have been cold, much colder than I beneath my down and wool. Maybe her mate was there to share body heat, their two pea-sized hearts beating together in time, a song for warmth inaudible to all except them in their woven bowl.

Now the sun has cleared the ridge, and she and I will soon fool ourselves again. We’ll pretend summer didn’t end. I’ll slip on some shoes and go out to the garden to pick the two dwarf cucumbers, but I won’t actually do it. I’ve been hoping for a growth spurt, though every day they appear to be the same size, the same distorted shapes. They’d make good baby dills, but there’s just the two of them. A salad then, when I finally do pick them. Under the sun, with the chill burned off, it’ll be easy to forget it’s autumn. My hummingbird, drinking sweet rainwater out of the morning glory trumpets, must be just as reluctant to let summer go.

It wasn’t long ago that I stood beneath the red feeder while she and six of her friends or family zipped around me. I’d been astonished to feel the wind of their wings on my face. I’d been a little envious of their play, too. I’m forty, but there’s a boy in me who refuses to move out of the house of my mind, and it was him who thought to catch one of them. It’s easier than one might think. I stood statue-still, my index finger and thumb poised beneath the feeder. The seven hummers hovered and zoomed and peeped. Then one, a coffee-brown male, stopped just above my waiting trap and I had him by his feet, which were black and thin as pencil lead. I was gentle and didn’t hold him long, just long enough to have felt as though I’d joined their game of chase, just long enough to have gotten a close look at his iridescent orange bow tie.

Now my green friend is dipping into the purple petunias in the basket hanging above my deck. Of course, I can’t be sure that she was among the seven that day I caught the brown male, but I’m good at pretending. So I know why she’s still hanging around. She’s middle-aged and there’s a girl inside her who won’t fly away. She’s not anxious at all. No, she’s asking me to come out and play, out there in the sunshine where it’s always summer.

September 24, 2005

Remember everything I said about fly fishing? Well, I gulp my words. Bradley came hurrying down the road yesterday afternoon with his fly rod in hand. “Let’s go fishin’,” he said. I hadn’t even heard them arrive, hadn’t yet met his mother, Margery. We were at the river about five minutes before he hooked into one, a beautiful silver steelhead. A steelhead is a sea-run rainbow trout. They’re born in freshwater rivers, then go out to the ocean to feed, and then return to their home rivers. Because they feed on shrimp and ocean life, their flesh is pink rather than white like a freshwater trout. The fish he caught was a good size, so he bonked its head on a rock and bagged it. A minute later, another. He let this one go. Now I was itching to catch one. We went downriver a ways. Bradley had a tug, but no taker. Then we made our way upriver. He took his time and showed me all the back eddies and pockets. At one of them he told me to toss the fly right in this foam. And I had one! The first fish I’d ever caught on a fly, and I fumbled a bit with the slack line at my feet, but then I had the fish in hand, pulled the fly out of his downturned lips, bonked and bagged him. We fished for another two hours or so, Bradley giving me good lessons in casting. He’s a master at it, can lay a line all the way across the river, and he knows how to work the fly so it looks just like a fish in the water. I hooked into another in a back eddy, but it jumped off. Once stung, it wasn’t coming back for more. Up in a nice gravel run, Bradley landed another fish, a hatchery one, and had several other strikes. I fished very little here, because it was a hard place to cast. He knew what he was doing, so I let him work the water. On the way back down, at the same place where I lost a fish, he caught two more, one of them a nice 14- or 15-incher. I caught another fish, but it was small, only about six or seven inches. Bradley said it was a rainbow trout rather than a steelhead. With five fish in the bag, and with dark coming on, we headed back up the trail.

I met Margery, and she’s a fantastic lady! Ninety-three and quick as a bullwhip. And very sweet. She was so happy that I’d made her an apple pie and that I’d caught my first steelhead. Bradley told me he learned all his fishing skills from her. While the chicken was cooking on the barbeque, Bradley taught me how to clean the fish we’d caught. Now I’m all set to catch more, clean them, and eat them. I hope to eat a lot of fish in the next three weeks. All I needed was an attitude adjustment, a willingness to accept the many facets of fly fishing. Here are the five we caught:

And here’s Margery:

We’re heading back down to the Rogue around noontime today for more fishing. Can’t wait.

After cleaning bat guano from the windows of the upper house (much to Margery’s appreciation) and then chopping some firewood, Bradley and I made a trek to the river up above Horseshoe Bend. We left Gus at the cabin. He gets in the way and jumps in the water. As we made our way upriver I hooked but lost three fish. I think I’m still getting used to setting a fly once a fish takes it. That, and keeping tension on the line. I’ll work at it. Bradley caught one in this stretch and let it go, because it was small and wild. Pretty fish, though. Here it is:

My teacher:

He lost a couple of fish, too. Finally, after walking three miles and fishing a nice stretch of the river, he caught two beauties, bonked and bagged them. It was starting to get dark and we had a three-mile walk back up. In all, we walked six rugged miles. “You gotta have the love,” Bradley said.

Later, at the upper house, he prepared a gourmet meal of the steelhead we’d caught the day before. He stuffed them with onions and apples and fried them in butter. He also made a stir-fry of red peppers, zucchini and onions. I contributed a salad of tomatoes from my garden with red onion, basil, balsamic vinegar and olive oil. For dessert: more of my apple pie topped with Ben & Jerry’s vanilla.

As pooped as we were, we got in one game of cribbage on the new four-track board I gave Bradley as a present for schlepping me to the airport and back. He won.

September 25, 2005

This morning we played cribbage again before Bradley and Margery left, and I won, despite his screaming lead with a sixteen-point hand. So we were even this time, which means I’m still undefeated as the individual cribbage champ of DHH.

I had a great time with Bradley and Margery, and I was sad to see them go. Margery is full of stories and is fun to be around. She began a nice watercolor painting of the view from the upper house deck. I gave her a copy of my book, and she kept saying she enjoyed my poems. I plan to send her some of the new stuff, especially the ones about this place. I know she’ll appreciate those.

After they’d driven off, I had lunch and then a nap and then headed down to the river, determined to catch a fish on my own, and did! And in the same spot as yesterday. Here it is:

A little further up I hooked another, even bigger. He put up a great fight. I had him almost to the shore and he dove down under a rock. I worked him out and was lifting him in to grab and he flopped off the hook and was gone. This was in the same spot where I lost one yesterday and where Bradley caught two. It’s a tried and true pocket, and I’ll revisit it next time. I fished for another half-hour and had no more strikes, so called it a night. I had a nice fish in my bag. Dinner. Here he it on the cutting board before I cleaned it:

I prepared him the same way I watched Bradley do it last night, minus the dill, which I don’t have. Coated with flour, stuffed with apples and onions, fried in butter. With some leftover rice and leftover tomato salad, it was just great.

Not bad for my first caught, cleaned and cooked steelhead. I cooked it just long enough, too, so that the spine and all the bones came out in one perfect piece. If you cook them too long the bones stay in the flesh.

Another adventure-filled weekend at the Dutch Henry Homestead. God, I’m going to miss this place.

September 26, 2005

Samara

Winged seeds of maples, as thin as paper,
as green as katydids, scapular
fruit dangling

in the shade of late summer and one day
splitting their seams and spiraling off
in a breeze.

We called them helicopters, made a game
of chasing them, our outstretched hands
landing pads.

And when we caught one we’d pry it open
exposing seed and sticky milk,
and glue them

to our noses—Cyrano, Pinocchio. Now when
I see one I’m carried back
to the lie

of childhood, its long, slow convolution toward
the touching down, the welcoming,
the cold ground.

Well, the solar-powered battery that charges up the fence around the garden has gone kaput. Bradley and I fiddled with it while he was here, and the box was full of nesting bees, but I don’t think they had anything to do with it. I think the battery just died out. It doesn’t much matter now. There’s no fruit on the fruit trees, and the only morsels that might invite bears are the concord grapes, the wine grapes, and the last of my tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers. This morning I harvested a nice load of yerba buena and put it in the dryer. I want to bring home as much as I can.

Went fishing again this afternoon and had more good action. I didn’t see a single rafter, and my only company was a bald eagle, a kingfisher, three mergansers, and Gus. On my second cast I hooked into a nice steelhead, fought him, and then was hoisting him up on my rock when he made a final thrash and bit the line just above the fly’s knot. Now there’s a steelhead out there with an orange fly in his lip. Maybe I’ll catch him some other time. He was about as big as the one I caught and ate yesterday. I tried the same pockets that have been successful, but today they weren’t. All I pulled out of them was a squawfish. Heading back toward my beach, though, I stopped at a spot I hadn’t fished and made a long cast, worked the fly over a submerged rock, and hooked a steelhead. This one I was determined not to lose. I muscled him onto the shore, unhooked, bonked and bagged him. I’ll have him for dinner tomorrow. Here he is, a thirteen-incher:

It was getting late and I’d caught a fish, so started back. I figured I’d take a few last casts at my rock just below my beach. Again, I sent the line out far for a long drift and arc. Bam! A big fish! I could see his silver flanks as he fought. This was the biggest one yet. I quickly reeled in the slack. The drag screamed out line. I held line to rod, fought, pulled him in a good twenty feet. Then he made a violent thrash, dislodged the hook, and was gone. Apparently it wasn’t yet his time. But it was some good action before the walk back up.

Tonight I carb-loaded: rigatoni with sausage, tomato, onion, green pepper, basil, and porcini mushrooms, topped with grated asiago cheese. Sun-dried tomato flatbread to go with it.

All these trips to the river are getting me in shape, but I’m pooped at night. The price one pays to fish for steelhead on a wild river, no one else in sight.

September 15th - 19th

2005-09-20T14:28:00.000-07:00

September 15, 2005

I plan to leave in exactly one month—October 15—to make my stay an even six months and to give me time to drive back East and set up my bungalow. It’s strange to think back on my arrival here five months ago, on April 15, when there was a foot of snow on the road and rain was falling. Back then I wore fleece and a rain jacket. The meadow shone bright green. The river flowed about five feet higher. Though I still wear shorts in the afternoon, it’s feeling more and more like autumn every day, and it’s nice to have left the heat of summer behind. It won’t be long before I break out the rain jacket again.

My garden is dealing its last hands—some stunted peppers (jalapenos, red bells, poblanos, Thai peppers), the last of the tomatoes, some hard yellow squash, a few midget cukes, celery. Yesterday I picked a big squash growing out of the compost bin, the result of some seed last year’s residents, Martha and Lang, must have tossed on the heap. I don’t know the variety, but it was football-shaped, yellowish-green, and striped white. It was delicious sautéed with garlic, tomatoes, and red onions. Made a nice side to my rib-eye steak. The jackpot of my late summer garden, and I didn’t even plant it.

I got up early today, before light, and Gussie and I drove into town. I needed to make plans for next week’s reading in Eugene, and I e-mailed and then spoke on the phone with Cecilia Hagen, the organizer of the Windfall Series. Cecilia said she and her husband each have a house, and she’s going to put us up in one of them as long as Gussie gets along with her cat. I may stay an extra night either there or in a hotel so I can explore Eugene a little. The reading is Tuesday the 20th at 7:00 pm. It’ll be nice to meet some new people and see a new town.

There’s a slim chance I may have another visitor before my residency ends. Neil Curry sent me a letter and said he’d like to come again. And my friend Peter in New York is talking about trying to come out for a long weekend. Either or both would be most welcome.

Today I had my head buzzed down short to match the beard I’m growing. Yes, I’m going for the G.I. Joe look again. I’m tired of trying to fool myself into thinking I’m not bald.

September 16, 2005

I heard some scary snarling and growling going on down in the canyon this morning. Gus and I were in the garden picking some celery for a corn chowder I made for lunch (delicious!), and I heard what sounded like two animals fighting. I immediately thought it was a cougar and a bear fighting over a carcass, but who knows? Maybe it was two bears. Or two cougars. Whatever it was, I worried that Gus might run down to investigate and become the next carcass for the critters to fight over, so I distracted him and got him inside.

Later, walking back from the pond, I came across this big wood-ear type fungus, which may bode well for chanterelles popping up soon:

Here’s a shot of the upper cabin that shows some of the madrone Bradley and I chopped last month. I’m stacking it in the woodshed a little at a time:

This afternoon I saw the first bit of rain in over two months! From the time the sun came up there were clouds about, big and dark, but with patches of blue sky between them. After lunch we went to the river where I tried my hand at fishing again. This time I didn’t even bother with the fly rod, using the spinning rig instead. I had several hits but no takers. While we were down there a few fat raindrops fell. But just now, back in the cabin and waiting for my chicken to cook, I glanced out the window and it was drizzling! It lasted about three minutes, but it’s something.

Once again the aroma of Barbara’s Famous Chicken is filling the cabin. With brown rice and a salad, it’s going to be sublime.

Friday, and it’s movie night! I bought a copy of Million Dollar Baby while in town yesterday. People raved about this movie and it won four Oscars, so I figured I’d give it a try. I’m a boxing fan, and most boxing movies I’ve seen, aside from Raging Bull, have been cheesy. I’m also usually dubious of any movie with Morgan Freeman in it. I know, he’s a good actor, but the movies he’s in are always so…well, feel-good and Hollywood. I do like Hilary Swank, though. Not only is she gorgeous, she’s one of the great contemporary actresses.

A post-dinner, pre-movie puff on the meerschaum:

September 17, 2005

The mists returned this morning! All through the spring I was enchanted by them—white, diaphanous shapes snaking through the canyon. I missed them all summer. Before they burned off, we went out for a walk. Here’s what they looked like:

It rained a bit during the night. I woke up once to the sound of it pattering on the skylight. While out looking at the mists, I poked around some for mushrooms, but I think it’s still too early and not wet enough.

It was kind of a lazy Saturday. I chopped a little wood, put more mint in the solar dryer, and tried to make an oil painting. My heart wasn’t into any of it. I thought about going fishing, and then thought of the steep hike back. So instead I finished the Ted Kooser book, solved a few crosswords, played hearts on my laptop, changed the strings on my guitar, sat out in the garden enjoying the breeze, napped, and finished this poem I’ve been tinkering with for a few days. The form is a rimas dissolutus.

Water, Father, an Unsteady Boat

He and I cut an awkward, crisscrossed wedge,
a wake of whorls gurgling back to black glass,
and in the rear I could hardly see him
for the fog. His paddle knocked at the prow,

its blade dripping, our silence like a pledge
of truce to our ancient war of redress.
I owed him as much, as far as we’d come—
through the portage of years and our somehow

still burdensome need to push from the edge
into the deeper mystery of us.
Perhaps this was why he taught me to swim,
for the passage he couldn’t help but allow:

water, father, an unsteady boat, the ledge
toward which we rush, buoyant and yet hapless,
where lakes become rivers, rivers become
seas in the confluence of then and now.

I just got up to get a drink, and saw a great moonrise over the ridge. I set up the tripod and took this shot:

Tried watching The Importance of Being Earnest tonight, and just couldn’t get into it.

September 18, 2005

Another day of perfect weather here, but again I’m feeling distracted, as though I’m just waiting around for the trip to Eugene. In the morning I worked on a new poem and then stacked more wood in the upper wood shed. I figure I better get it under a roof before the rains return in force. Couldn’t muster the motivation to hike down to the river to fish, and so spent the day milling about the cabin. Making lunch, I heard a huge horsefly buzzing at the window screen. It was almost the size of a cicada. I trapped it in a glass and let it go:

I’m about halfway through Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, which despite all the rave reviews and my love of Dylan’s music and mystique I’m finding to be a bit too pretentious and slow-moving. For twenty pages he’s looking out a window in a friend’s apartment. For another twenty he rants about all the books he half-read. I’m a third of the way through the book, and I still feel as though I know very little about his upbringing, his coming of age, his feelings about things. As with his music, he seems to hide himself behind the words, always in shadow or distorted. Who’s the real Bob Dylan? Maybe his persona has become so huge that not even he knows.

Here’s the new poem. The impetus for this one was a recollection of seeing migrant farm workers up in Pine Island, New York, the “Black Dirt Region,” which produces a huge percentage of the country’s onions. The three pickers reminded me of Francois Millet’s famous painting “The Gleaners.”

The Pickers

Bent against a sunlit field, like Millet’s
gleaners, they could be either women
or men, and like them they toil for little.

They have traveled far to gather onions
the combines missed, crossed a border at night
and no doubt left something sacred behind.

Trucks loaded high grind by, and the pickers
straighten their backs, make some unheard remarks.
Along the heaped rows seagulls flap and screech.

They have traveled far to gather the worms
the combines unearthed. They know no borders.
The pickers reach. The sacks and bellies fill.

Elsewhere in fields rich with corn or beans
the birds may be turkeys—toms or hens—
and the bending people women or men.

I set up the tripod again tonight, this time waiting for the moon to rise. The small picture hardly does it justice, but it looked pretty neat rising behind some giant Douglas fir trees in the distance. The trees looked like they were on fire:

September 19, 2005

The lines in the following poem should have a staggered indentation. For some strange reason HTML can’t do indentation properly. So imagine that in each stanza the second line has one tab, the third two.

Jays Raving at Dawn

Once again I’m ratcheted
out of darkness and into dim vision:
the cabin cold and damp as a grave.

The jays, the jays, the jays.
Same web between glass and screen.
Like me it has changed little

these many days. It trembles,
vacant silk, like the scarf of a baby’s
ghost, and despite this being

the first thing I see when I wake,
I like this time the most. Stretching
my toes into the cool space

a wife once occupied in that life
that seems sometimes like a dream.
The jays. The clicking of claws

on the floor when my dog
and I rise together. Water filling
the empty heart of the kettle.

Blue flames. The tiny brown
mountain of coffee dressing
the pantry with its smell. And the jays,

the jays. I can see them now
through the kitchen window,
a family of them, blue and proud.

The jays, the jays, the jays.

I tried the river again this afternoon and saw some big fish surface, but none of them went after my lures. Bradley said I should try the fly rod again. He’s coming in this weekend with his mother Margery. I look forward to meeting her. The residency award is in her name, and she’s the matriarch of the clan. Bradley said he’ll take me down to the river and show me how the fly fishing is done.

Pa called tonight and said my mother’s operation went well. I thought tomorrow was the day she was going in. Must have confused it with my reading. I’m not good at dates, especially out here where I lose track of what day it is. I often have to check the tiny calendar in my checkbook just to remind myself the day of the week. It’s a relief the lump is out. Next come the treatments to make sure it doesn’t return.

Tonight I’m going to print the new manuscript and choose which poems to read tomorrow night. I plan to read a few from Velocity and the rest will be stuff I’ve written here.

September 11th - 15th

2005-09-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

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.

September 8th - 10th

2005-09-10T06:49:00.000-07:00

September 8, 2005

I’m in New Jersey! I flew from Portland yesterday (Wednesday) afternoon and had a long but painless journey. Brother Bradley and family were kind enough to put me up on Tuesday night, and we had a fun evening. I won at three-way cribbage and then we spent the rest of the evening solving some difficult riddles the kids had gotten at school. Fun stuff. Bradley dropped me at the airport bright and early, and by 7:45 I was climbing to 30,000 feet. I made it half-way through Cormac McCarthy’s new novel, No Country for Old Men, five hours had passed, and then we were descending into Newark. Fifteen minutes later, I was in a rental car and driving up the New Jersey Turnpike and contrasting the filthy salt marshes with the pristine Rogue River. And there was Manhattan staring from across the river like a gang of thugs, but a sort of welcome gang of thugs, one you might want to join someday. Then I was pulling up to the house of a friend and former colleague, who has put me up in the posh third-floor suite of her house. Most cozy quarters and fine company.

Today I found a new abode! As hoped for, I landed the bungalow up in New York just north of the Jersey border. It’s a cute little place, about the size of the Oregon cabin, and will be perfect for the Gary/Gus duo until I find myself a real house. There’s a den, an office, a breakfast nook, a bedroom, and another room where I’ll keep clothes, etc. And it’s in a nice location. Feels woodsy, but close to shops, malls, highways, a dog park. I also got to see Sharen. She was getting her Mini fixed and I picked her up at the Mini dealer and together we poured on the charm with the 90-year-old landlady at the bungalow and persuaded her to let me have the dog. Here’s the place:

Much relieved at having gotten the place I wanted, and so quickly, too, I suggested Thai food at our old favorite place. (My bungalow is ten minutes from there!). It was the best meal I’ve had in six months! Sharen and I caught up a lot and had some laughs, then I dropped her back at the Mini dealer. I’ll see her tomorrow in Manhattan, where I’m also planning to meet my friend Peter and my sister and her kids. The plan is to visit the Cezanne/Pissarro exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. I’m also going to a gallery opening tonight: Martin Mull’s paintings. Should be fun. Martin Mull, by the way, is the actor who starred in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” on TV and in many movies.

The Martin Mull opening was hopping! Twentieth Street, nay, all of Chelsea, was swarming with people, a bit scary but exciting for this longtime hermit. Apparently it’s the week when all the galleries start having openings; thus the crowds. Walking to the gallery, I passed David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame). I always see celebs in New York! Some kid walking by confirmed the sighting, when he looked at me, nodded, and said, “Yeah, that was David Byrne. Pretty cool.” Roz and I went in the gallery, got some drinks, and started checking out Mull’s large, lovely paintings. Almost all of it depicts scenes from the 1950s era, but unlikely scenes full of wonder and deep emotion. Many draw upon Mull’s own upbringing. Around almost all of them he painted frames imitating ‘50s style wallpaper, as though you’re gazing through a house window into the scene. Very nice touch. We checked out about five paintings and then Roz ran into her high school friend, whose son owns the gallery. Like a docent, Lynne took us around and told us lots of great details about each painting, most of it based on stuff Mull had told her or her son. For instance, for the following painting Mull painted the view from Steve Martin’s back deck at his home in Hollywood. The boy holding the cat is Mull, and the sheep a memory of farm life. Steve Martin bought the painting.

This next one is one that Lynne and her husband bought. I think it was my favorite out of all of them. I like the quintessential Midwestern feel of that house and the sheer desperation on the face of the swimmer, the feeling that he’s fighting for his life to escape this scene, this flood, this dreary life.

Here are two more. I felt weird about photographing the paintings, so I quit after these.

But I did get a shot of Martin Mull:

The photos make the gallery look empty, but it wasn’t. It was packed. I took the pictures later, as the crowd started to thin out and there was an open view of the paintings. They’re all done in oils, and appear almost photographic, as though he merged multiple photos together. But they’re all brushed by hand. He’s a technically skilled painter, to say the least. Worth seeing.

Here’s a shot of the gallery next door as we were heading back to the car. Darkness teeming with New York’s bountiful beautiful people:

Stopped at Ben & Jerry’s in Englewood on the way back, and was glad to see a former student there managing the place. Even as a sophomore, Brad had a full beard. He’s a genius with his own theater company. I don’t expect he’ll be managing Ben & Jerry’s long. He gave us a discount, of course. Good man.

September 10, 2005

I spent all of yesterday in Manhattan. First stop: the Cohen residence, 43rd Street. When I got there only Ezra and his friend Dale were home. Barbara and the girls were at Food Emporium. So the boys and I decided to trick the girls and have me hide. I sat cross-legged on a bench among all the girls’ dolls in the corner of the big living room and posed completely still. Barbara and the girls came home and Lucy looked right at me and didn’t see me. Barbara glanced my way and nearly had a heart attack. We boys, of course, had a good laugh.

An hour later I drove downtown to Greenwich Village to see Peter Marcus, a poet friend I met two years ago at Bard College. He lives in a great neighborhood, and so we walked around looking at more of New York’s bountiful beautiful people. Fashion models were teeming in the streets, all there for the big fall fashion shows. Peter and I had delicious Mexican food for lunch, and then coffee and chai tea at a café.

Around 3:30 I took a subway up to midtown to meet the Cohens at MOMA. The new MOMA (which typically charges $20 to get in but is free on Friday afternoons) was fabulous. And the Cezanne and Pissarro paintings blew me away. The two painters were friends and collaborators for many years, often painting the same scenes side by side. The curator did a fine job of grouping the similar paintings, or the paintings that spoke to one another. The museum was packed, of course, since it was free. But after two days in NYC—overstuffed subway cars, gallery crowds, elevators—I’d gotten a bit more used to the proximity and abundance of my fellow man.

Then it was back down to Peter’s place on Horatio Street, where he was working on a new long poem, an elegy to his uncle, who committed suicide this past summer by jumping off the roof of his apartment building in New York. It was a moving draft, and I had him read it alouod. An hour later Sharen arrived and the three of us took a cab to Peter’s favorite sushi place. We had a feast. It was the best sushi I’ve ever had. And lots of it. Then we walked around the East Village, making our way to Rice Dreams, a great rice pudding joint. By that time we were all pooped and we took a cab back to Peter’s neighborhood. I gave Sharen a ride to her car on 33rd, and zoomed back to New Jersey feeling glad to have had a nice bite out of the Big Apple.

I may head back to Manhattan this morning to meet the Cohens at their street sale. The whole block of 43rd Street will be having a huge outdoor sale today. Tonight it’s dinner with several colleagues at a Vietnamese restaurant in Englewood. I’m sure getting a good dose of tasty food and good company while I’m here in civilization.

As fun as it’s been, I can’t wait to fetch Gussie from the kennel on Sunday evening (I find myself looking for him beside me) and get back to the redolent peace of the Dutch Henry Homestead and my daily writing routine.

September 2nd - September 6th

2005-09-06T10:09:00.000-07:00

September 2, 2005

One thing I won’t miss about my life here is the long, dusty, rocky drive out to Grants Pass. Once out of the shade of Dutch Henry’s woods, the road is strewn with fist-sized rocks and layered in about an inch of gray dust from days of baking in the sun and the churning tires of my car and those of the men caretaking out at the castle. Even rolling along at 20 mph, I can’t help but rouse a huge wake of Steinbeckian dust. A look in the rear-view mirror, and I get a sense of what the Okies saw when they parted the curtains and glanced through their filthy kitchen windows. And like the Okies’ kitchens, the inside of my car and everything piled on floor and seats is covered with a gray, pollen-like coat, and to touch anything leaves a fingerprint. Then to touch my nose leaves a brown mark of dirt. Forty, and I look like a kid when I see my face in that quadrangle stuck above the dash. Half-way there, going in either direction, I can feel the dust infiltrating my nostrils, eyes, ears, mouth. I wonder how many ounces—nay, pounds—of Josephine county dust I’ve consumed this summer. Forty years old, and eating dirt. At least as a kid I did so of my own volition.

And the bumps. Driving the Whiskey Creek road feels a bit like playing a video game, a test of hand-eye coordination: how to find the smoothest track, how to avoid the biggest and sharpest stones and limbs, the worst washboard ruts. Whole CDs play through and begin again, the tracks skipping over the bigger bumps, and I’ve been oblivious to the music so intent am I on dodging holes, washouts, ruts. Teeth rattling in my mandible, eyes shaken sore, neck stiff from clenching, I drive unblinking even as the flecks of dust jab at my sclera. My shocks groan. My struts squeak and bounce. Ruts like a giant’s washboard, logging debris, razor-edged stones darting the road edge like teeth, and an hour or so later, when dirt and rubble finally give way to a kind of half-asphalt, I’m exhausted not so much from the hour behind the wheel but from the intensity of my road gaze, my gamer’s concentration. The one consolation in all of this is that the road gets progressively better the closer I get to Grants Pass. Finally, a half-hour or so from Merlin, the roadway blazes with the familiar comfort of yellow stripes and solid pavement, and I accelerate a good 40 mph. Through Galice, not really a town but a handful of outfitter stores, rafting companies, and riverside homes. Through Merlin and its strip of convenience and antique shops, feed store, post office. Onto 1-5 South for three miles. And then I flick my right turn signal and I’m there: Grants Pass. No apostrophe.

Today I drove my car through an automatic car wash while in town. I wasn’t so stupid as to think my car wouldn’t get just as filthy after my drive back in the afternoon; I paid the $5 just so I wouldn’t look like Pigpen every time I opened a door or brushed against the car’s invisible paint while I ran my errands; $5 just so I wouldn’t leave fingerprints around the door handles.
During my stay in said town-sans-apostrophe, even as I did laundry, visited the dark-haired beauty at the coffee shop, got on WiFi, bought groceries, and drank Dutch Brothers iced chai, the trip back loomed like a dust storm, like human plight itself, so that when the time finally came to head home, I almost got on I-5 south, toward California, to go pick peaches like the Joads in shady groves and drive the smooth, paved roads of the growers. I had a cooler full of food on ice, a bag full of clean laundry. I could have done it. I could have. But I didn’t. No, I clutched the wheel like twin joysticks and turned north to begin the game again. Heading back, of course, the bumps, ruts, and dust get progressively worse.

Thus, I sit here in the La-Z-Boy with a headache and the taste of dust on my palate, despite having showered and eaten honey-slathered grilled pork chops, garden-grown tomatoes with basil and vinegar, and warmed leftover homemade apple pie with Ben & Jerry’s vanilla. My breath smells of the Whiskey Creek road, and everything I see is tinged with gray. But I have a fridge full of seltzer, a dresser full of clean underwear, an empty trash container. I received a nice hug from the dark-haired beauty upon my departure from the Tee Time Diner; an acceptance of a poem by Alimentum, a journal devoted to food literature; a fresh supply of Chemex coffee filters, compliments of my father, who made a special trip to The Coffee Exchange in Providence to get them; more classified ads from my pal Stan Flood; and many kind blog comments and welcome e-mails from family, friends, colleagues and students.

What’s a little driving?

Did I ever mention that the fire’s out? It has been for a week now. Often I’ll catch a whiff of burned forest, but it’s just the wind. There’s no more smoke. Here’s a view of Rattlesnake Ridge sans smoke. Note clouds. I’m liking the clouds:

September 3, 2005

It’s 1:58 AM and I’m sitting in bed with a bowl of cereal (amaranth flakes in soy milk) feeling the warmth of the propane lamp on the back of my neck and listening to the night’s one long, twittering whistle, which every now and then pauses like a coach catching his breath. The bird clock ticks. The lamp hisses. The spoon taps the bowl. I am awake because Gus the Dog saw fit to spring from the bed at 12:20, woof through his nose, climb atop the large maroon chest in the other room, and bark through the window above it at whatever scented creature (most likely mammalian) happened to be passing the cabin. My usual routine is to get up and close the windows to seal out the scent, rebuke him for waking me, click off the flashlight, and go back to bed where within minutes I feel the familiar, welcome bounce of him at my feet curling into a quiet breathing heap. Tonight, though, I left the bedroom window open for the crickety whistle, the cool seeping. Unable to sleep, I got a bowl of cereal. And Gus the Dog, rather than rejoin me, has taken up a sentry post on the living room couch. Even now he snorts at some other or the same presumed threat to our late night peace. These nights I don’t fall back asleep all that easily. Tonight I tossed side to side playing scenarios of future days, envisioning scenes that won’t come to pass. They never do as we work so hard to imagine they will. So, some pages in a book to tire my eyes, distract my projecting thoughts, my worries dark and shriveled like the raisins in my cereal only not as sweet. No, not sweet at all. When I get up to put the bowl in the sink and brush my teeth, I’ll close the windows, quieting the whistle and letting the nocturnal creatures pass in peace while we sleep.

I woke at 7:45 to an overcast sky. Yes, the weather pattern is changing slowly but surely. I think it will rain within the next week or two. That will settle the problem with the dust on the road.

A near tragedy this morning! I usually prop my glass Chemex coffee beaker on a tripod-like stand atop the wood stove so that my second cup is every bit as warm as the first, maybe even warmer. Well, walking past it I must have nudged it with the sleeve of my robe (I didn’t feel anything) and there went the pot, tumbling onto the iron stove and then the brick footing, spilling coffee into the wide lip below the stove door and onto two of the big square bricks. I thought I heard glass crack and shatter, and my heart stopped. I rely upon my Chemex like a pacemaker, and I left my reserve pot in storage back in New York. Miraculously the pot was unbroken. Not even a chip, not even a hairline fracture! This after a three-foot tumble onto iron and brick. I’ve broken two or three of these pots merely tapping them against the faucet in kitchen sinks. Perhaps the ghost of Dutch Henry himself cushioned its fall. Tomorrow I’ll pour a bit of black coffee over the deck railing as a libation. Thanks, you old murderer!

Gussie, wanting to come out on the deck:

I finished an ambitious poem today, one I’ve been working on since hearing about Hurricane Katrina. It took shape as a double sonnet, which is its present title.

Double Sonnet

The equivocal eye has come and gone,
gale and rain minced the faith we each depend
upon. Another storm has met its end,
blind to wreckage, utterly overthrown
by its own gyrations. Cities lie prone
as lakes. The sun, as if nothing happened,
strews from its azimuth countless diamonds
on the signed canals, plays like God’s trombone
a warm and silent jazz, a sine qua non.
Onto half-submerged mansions gulls descend
to vie with anhinga for dividends:
flotsam in the deluge like stepping stones.
And in their tiny, eager eyes is shown
in miniature a scene to apprehend:
what the dove might have had the world been manned
so long and been so ruthlessly outgrown.

Where I tune in, two thousand miles away
in the undestroyed Pacific Northwest,
my hand-crank radio seems strangely apt.
On NPR familiar voices say
what they can to keep listeners abreast,
the general theme being: people adapt.
My own storms seem like showers, a spring day.
I put a fool’s trust in the old beau geste
of time and place. Tomorrow can’t be mapped,
unless by miracle or righteous way
we’re warned, like Noah, who at God’s behest
measured cubits while the thunder clapped.

September 4, 2005

I’ve decided that fly fishing is a myth. Have you ever seen anyone catch a fish on a fly? I haven’t, except in A River Runs Through It, and we all know Hollywood can perpetrate any lie. A few years ago I fly fished in Yellowstone (Wyoming and Montana) and saw huge trout in the water eating stoneflies, and no matter how many times I cast the exact sized fly their way, they wouldn’t budge. I’ve fly fished in western New Jersey and the Catskills of New York, two prime trout areas, and have never caught a trout on a fly. Today it was cloudy and cool, so after lunch I packed a bag and went to the Rogue toting fly rod and box. Brother Bradley, the Fishing Guru of this place, claims that the “half-pounders” should be in the river by now. A passing rafter confirmed this, saying the river guides have been catching four- and five-pounders. (Why they’re called “half-pounders” if they’re four- or five-pounders is beyond me; it’s an Oregon thing, like the way Oregonians say “good on ya!” to mean “nice going!” or “right on!” as a response to just about anything. The latter is repeated for emphasis: “Right on! Right on!”). So I fished a few of the places Bradley told me to, starting at my beach and working my way upriver. An hour of that, and then Gus and I walked about a mile down to a riffle called Doolog. Forty casts there and I renamed the place Poolog, and called it quits. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m the world’s worst fly fisherman. If you don’t know anything about fly fishing (you may want to remain that way), you cast a weighted line rather than a weighted lure. The lure, the fly, weighs nothing. Some lines float, some sink. Some flies float, some sink. Unlike a spinning reel and rod, which I can cast about a hundred feet with one hand and standing on one leg while patting the top of my head with my free hand and whistling “Dixie”, with a fly rod I’m lucky if I get the fly out 25 or 30 feet using all my concentration. It’s a little like golf: it’s not how hard you swing the rod, it’s all in the technique. One of my college housemates, Slim, lived up to his nickname. He was as short as I and skinnier, and he could drive a golf ball farther than anyone. He’s a pro now at the country club my brother superintends. I bet if you gave Slim a fly rod, he’d cast that hook twirled with feathers and thread all the way across the river and catch a lunker steelhead on the first cast. Not me. So, knowing I’m not really going to catch anything, I’ve used my recent outings to the river to practice casting. Today I only hooked one willow tree while backcasting. That’s pretty good. And I made a few casts that felt and looked just right, the line shooting straight out and uncurling, a sweet little ripping noise as it shot through the guides, line and fly landing on the water with grace. When this happens, I’m always sure I’ll catch a fish. But then I don’t really know what to do. The fly zooms in the current and when the line goes taut the fly arcs across the middle and toward the shore. I give little pulls. I try to copy Bradley and curl line in my left hand. Sometimes the fly looks like a little fish darting across the current. But it invariably floats 30 or 40 feet downriver and back to my shore without a nibble, and then I’m stuck with having to get it back out there. I pull line, yank, whip, flick, release line. It’s so much damned work, I’m exhausted after five casts. I know the Fly Fishing Guru is reading this and shaking his head and wishing he could come out here and show me that fly fishing isn’t a myth, and I suppose this is one of my motives for writing this entry. In the meantime I’ll try not to get discouraged. I’ve communicated my worry that I’ll be the first resident in 13 years who didn’t catch a steelhead, and the Fishing Guru assures me I won’t be. In the meantime, I maintain that fly fishing is a myth begun to make spinner fishermen look lazy. Good on ya.

I’m going to miss the hundred-year-old apple trees out in front of the cabin. I’ve looked at them so many times since I’ve been here that I’ve forgotten how impressive they are. One former resident, Steve Edwards, told me in an email that he fantasized about chopping them down when he was here, he was so sick of looking at them. I may have been close to that sentiment in August, but not now. I love the way this one grows sideways out of the ground:

September 5, 2005

Labor Day today, right?

I had ants in my pants all day in anticipation of tomorrow’s parting with Gus and the beginning my journey east. I couldn’t focus for long on any one activity, and so engaged in many. Among other things I: arranged a new manuscript of poems for the New Criterion book contest, wrote an epigraphical poem to open the collection, decorated a walking stick (using blackberry juice) I carved yesterday,

tried to make a painting on a square sheet of Masonite-like material I found in the mudroom, reordered the poems in the manuscript, took Gus to the pond, packed, napped, gathered stuff from the solar dryer and garden, cooked dinner. And after dinner while we were out playing in the yard, I saved this very fat praying mantis from Gussie’s snapping teeth:

I was just saying to Frank Boyden two weekends ago that I hadn’t seen any praying mantises out here.

Here’s Gus wondering where his plaything went:

It’ll sure be strange to walk the streets of Manhattan on Friday night.

August 27- September 2

2005-09-02T13:18:00.000-07:00

August 27th, 2005

I got a lot done on my trip to town yesterday. While Gussie was getting his shave-down, I collected my mail, paid bills, did laundry, photocopied the Bend article, made some calls on my cell phone (with my friend Peter, who just returned from a summer in Asia; with Sharen, who was driving a NY state car on I-90; with my sister in Manhattan; with my folks in Rhode Island), got on the WiFi at Dutch Brothers and checked email and uploaded to the blog, shopped for groceries at Market of Choice, and bought a King James Bible. When he was here last weekend, Frank Boyden and I got to talking about Genesis and Revelations, and he said there should be a Bible in the writer’s cabin library. I agreed. He went inside and returned with two crisp twenty dollar bills. “Buy a nice one,” he said. So I did. It’s bound in genuine leather and has large print. It only cost $19.95 (no tax in Oregon), and so I slipped the other twenty into an envelope, wrote “Emergency Fund for Indigent Writers” and tucked it into Psalm 34, where verse 6 reads: “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles.” I love the thought of some future writer finding that. Of course, if Emma reads this, it’ll be hers! Among my mail was a package from Stan Flood, one of my English Department pals, full of real estate classifieds from Jersey papers. I made my first round of calls and set up two places to check out, if they’re not already rented by September 8th. As expected, most places don’t allow dogs. One promising rental was a cottage on the Bergen county/Rockland county line (I think in Nanuet). The landlord said she and her husband were reluctant to allow dogs, but I did my best to convince her that Gussie was a great dog and that I was an ideal tenant with excellent references. So I’m planning to have a look at the place. It’s on a property with three other cottages on an acre or so of land. It sounds like an old vacation place, so I don’t know how winterized the place will be, but it’s worth checking out.

All the running round in town and the stress of thinking about the move back East, combined with the long and dusty drive back to the cabin, completely wore me out. After unloading my stuff, I took a two-hour nap. But I was still tired. I spent the evening making a small collage tribute to the newts up in the pond. Then I went to bed early and slept for ten hours! Here’s the collage. It’s made of paper, pastel and pencil. I hung it on a thin strip of wall in the cabin.

Today I wrote a poem to go along with the newt collage. In case you wonder what Sapphics are, they’re metrical stanzas using a complicated pattern of trochees and dactyls. I’ll gladly explain it to anyone who’s interested. One other note for anyone who missed the earlier blog postings about the newts: the rough-skinned newt is one of the most poisonous creatures on the continent. It can exude through its skin a deadly neurotoxin; thus, you wouldn’t want to eat one!

Sapphics on the Rough-Skinned Newt

Toxic swimmers, thousands of them in my pond,
wiggling black-sperm questions for me as I stand
bent and ready, armed with a net and answers
I wouldn’t give them.

Sins of mine—amphibious, star-toed, whip-tailed,
mute transgressions gone unforgiven too long.
Water-borne and treacherous, sedge and dragon-
flies like reminders.

So the net—a Catholic expiation
made of wire and mesh and the need to expose
all my darkest slitherings like penumbras
during eclipses.

Newt on newt. The murky and amoebic water
slick with sex: the jettisoned seed, the poison-
skin’s release, and my uninhibited gaze,
too, like a voyeur’s.

Even netted, even in open air they
cling and shine, and something in me would fling them
far but for the deeper desire I have to
swallow each pair whole.

I found a tiny, shriveled pear on one of the pear trees in the garden and really liked its cracked skin and shape and so tried to get artsy with a couple of photographs:

August 28, 2005

We spent the afternoon down at the river yesterday and again our beach was occupied upon our arrival. Not Boy Scouts this time, but a friendly fortysomething couple from the Bay area. I apologized for crashing the beach and offered to move upriver, but they assured me it was okay, so I planted my chair and umbrella in the usual spot. They’d been floating for four days, taking their sweet time in the Wild and Scenic portion of the river, and were planning for three more days of it. Paul is a wheelchair mechanic. Joyce a musician. I could tell they were good folks and so told them what I was doing out here. I watched their raft for them while they hiked up the trail a ways.

Then they moved upriver to a more level stretch of ground. I couldn’t help feeling like I was ruining their wilderness experience (and I can come to the river any old day), so I read a chapter in a new novel (Falling Angels) and said goodbye, leaving them to the peace of the Rogue. Before leaving I took this shot of the back of Gussie’s head. Ain’t his haircut cute?

Afraid my two huge bowls of tomatoes would go bad, I made another batch of sauce last night. I plan to use half of it tonight tossed with rigatoni and some of the salmon Emma Brown gave me.

When it got dark I watched half of a PBS DVD Jim sent me called “American Photography: A Century of Images.” Great stuff. I’m thinking I can work some of it into my Art & Literature class when I get back to teaching.

Mama bear was in the yard early this morning. Gus told me so. Loudly. When I went out to the car to get his leash, there she was, ten feet away, standing in the blackberries. When she saw me she gave a huge snort, turned and ran. Lucky, too. The car was locked!

With the help of caffeine, I worked out another poem this morning. Many of the new poems, as you may have noticed, pay close attention to form. In the past I sometimes tried to deny my formalist bent, forcing myself to write in looser, free-form lines; those poems are among my worst, I think. Lately I’m embracing my need for order, symmetry, rhyme. If it works…. Here’s the poem, in envelope quatrains.

Pawtucket, Rhode Island: An Interment

Once upon a time it must have been quaint—
old Slater’s place the only industry,
the rest rolling pasture and willow-tree
banks along the Blackstone. No chipped-paint

tenements, no I-95. The bricks
of mills still red clay waiting to be fired—
like the millions who would live and die here.
I see the waterwheels turn like clocks.

I hear the huge looms rattle, the spindles
spin thread down to dowels, the stone-on-stone
knock of building. And dirt flung where the bones
of my ancestors lie. We light candles

in the chapel for our final goodbyes.
Outside a wet snow falls into rows
of graves. The past begins and ends right now,
here where grief powers the machines of my eyes.

Bradley and family, making a trip to California, are coming tonight and staying till Tuesday. I’m going out to pick them a bowl of tomatoes.

A couple of yelps from You Know Who…

…announced the Boydens’ arrival. Outside the upper house we were greeted by Marie, Bradley’s wife, who immediately fell in love with Gus. They used to have wire-haired fox terriers, so when she saw that Gus was a terrier, she cried out with joy. She even considered taking him in while I fly back East instead of me putting him in a kennel, but Bradley nixed that idea. I had a nice chat with the family, and then they were sitting down to dinner, so we left them to eat in peace.

Back at the cabin I finished the recording of what I think is my best song yet. I need to get my brother-in-law Ian or one of my students to lay down a better lead guitar track, maybe throughout the whole song. I think a fiddle or mandolin would sound great, too. With this one, I recorded voice and rhythm guitar together for the first time, hoping for a more authentic sound and experience, and it made for an old-time feel, which I like a lot. I did that track yesterday. The lead stuff in the middle and at the end I did tonight. The song is about an Oregon gold miner.
The Shine in the Sand

It’s a chilly night and the crickets are chirping. Tonight’s the night when Mars is supposed to look big. I heard the whole thing was an urban legend, but I went to check the sky just the same. Figures: clouds, not a single star visible. This after two months of nothing but clear sky.

August 29, 2005

The coolest night and morning since last spring! It was 51 degrees when I got up today, and had to be in the 40s last night. Making a fire in the woodstove, I was grinning like a kid. It’s amazing how much the weather affects my moods.

New poem (strange the places a head full of caffeine will take me):

Black Boy at the White Girl’s Funeral

Lifted up by the rope of the huge bell,
he braces for the deep voice of its dong
and gazes through a window at the town.
A woman on a three-wheeled bicycle

with two poodles in a basket behind
her, a man sawing at a diseased elm,
another ruling with a hoe the small realm
of his backyard garden. Now the long line

of cars with their lights on in the August
sun, and leading the procession the hearse
black as his jacket. It has to be worse
that he knew the girl, but he knows he must

not be sad; the color of his skin is his
and theirs is theirs. And even if the rope
should wear away his palms, there’s little hope
for the rest. Death reminds him who he is.

He rises, he falls. The bell swings and swings.
In his blood the vibrations of it ring.

Never one to pass up a chance at fishing, Bradley suggested last night that we all take a walk to a creek downriver and try for a Chinook salmon. We packed lunches and set off down the Lang Cook Trail, now with a lot less poison oak after my spraying job but still perilous in places because of loose stones and steep drops. Marie slipped and fell once and scraped up her thigh. Aside from that and the annoying flies hovering around our eyes, we had a nice walk. Here’s a neat madrone on the trail with a huge peeling burl:

We couldn’t see any salmon in the mouth of the creek, but Bradley tied on a fly and tried just the same. Meanwhile Marie said she’d like a Christmas card photo of the kids, Hollynd and Wilder, so I tried for one up on the rocks above the creek:

Then we all went down to a wading spot in the creek, where we entertained Gus with tossed sticks. Hollynd and Wilder are remarkable kids. Funny, smart, adorable. I most enjoyed their company.

Here’s Hollynd trying unsuccessfully to wrest a stick from Gussie:

Here’s Gussie peeking out from behind some leaves:

After the creek adventure, we took the river trail down to my beach. The weather was just perfect. In the high 70s. Maybe low 80s. Intermittent clouds. It was one of the best days in a long time. Here’s the Boyden family posing on the trail above the river:

The kids found a katydid floating at the swimming hole and saved it from a watery demise:

We’d planned for a big dinner at the upper house and I’d promised to make an apple pie. With the day getting late, Gus and I left ahead of the Boydens so I could make the crust and pick some apples and get the pie in the oven. The trees in the garden were almost bare, but Bradley had four or five Granny Smiths in his knapsack. Not the best pie apples, but better than nothing. Hollynd and Wilder were excited to use the Apple Machine apple corer/peeler, a gift Lang, Martha and Riley left here last year. It’s a scary-looking contraption, but it works like a charm, coring and peeling the apples and slicing them in neat spirals. Here they are with the Apple Machine out on my deck:

Very good action!

Our dinner was great. Barbequed chicken a la Bradley, corn on the cob, zucchini from my garden, and a nice avocado salad Marie made. The pie came out great, though it seemed juicier than a pie should be. Not sure if it’s because of the Granny Smiths. The mixture was dry when I put it between the crusts, so the apples must have had a lot of water in them. We split the leftovers, so I have a huge slab of it in the fridge for tonight. Giddy up!

While dinner was cooking, the bats entertained us again, thousands of them dropping out of the cedar shakes. This time I had the camera at the ready. Here’s a bat dropping out:

And here’s about a half-dozen of them about to come out through the gap. You can see their ears and eyes:

After dinner we played a four-way partners cribbage game. Hollynd and Wilder both wanted me for a partner. I can only assume that they could sense their dad’s inferior cribbage skills. Wilder won the flip and he and I won the first game. Hollynd and her dad took the second. By then we were all tuckered out from the big day, and so Gussie and I said goodnight.

The stars were thick and it was downright chilly as we drove back down to the dark cabin. Dreaming weather. And I slept. And I dreamed.

With the Boyden family hoping for a mid-morning start toward the redwoods, we had to get in our tie-breaking cribbage game, so Gussie and I walked up after breakfast. Despite many superstitious knockings of cards and Wilder’s inspired sound effects, he and I lost. I attribute their win to Hollynd’s astute strategizing and clever pegging. Okay, her dad had a 14-point hand, too. It was a sad defeat, but I left assured in the knowledge that I still reign as the singles champ of the Dutch Henry Homestead. (Maybe this will entice Bradley out for another visit before I leave in October!)

I had a grand time with the Boydens, each of whom contributed to the goodness of the action. I’ll see them again one week from today, when they graciously allow me to spend the night at their house in Portland before my early morning flight to New Jersey. Should time allow and Hollynd and Wilder not have homework after the first day of school, perhaps the cribbage board will make an appearance for a partners rematch.

Out in the garden there’s a lone sunflower, thanks to a seed left behind by Lang, Martha and Riley last fall. It’s about six feet tall now and stunningly beautiful. Thanks, guys!:

August 31, 2005

Sharen called yesterday to see if I’d heard the news about New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf. I hadn’t. The last I’d heard on NPR the hurricane was still a couple hundred miles from landfall. What a disaster. I’ve been tuning in and catching some of the news and interviews on NPR. I feel so bad for all those displaced people, not to mention the families of the dead. Terrible, terrible news. I feel very lucky to be in this place, with a roof over my head and good food to eat and clean water to drink.

I heard the price of oil skyrocketed because of the devastation, too, with all the Gulf refineries virtually inoperable. I’ll be curious to see what the prices are at the pumps in Grants Pass when I go in tomorrow or the next day. I fear the oil situation is only going to get worse, despite the President’s plan to open the reserves. Maybe I should trade in my car for a hybrid, especially if I’m going to be commuting, as much as I like the on-demand 4-wheel drive in the snow. Something to consider.

While the world has been coming apart a bit more, I’ve spent two pretty lazy days here since the Boydens left. I did do a bit of work today, mowing the grass in the garden and swabbing out the upper house fridges, but for the most part I’ve been taking it easy. Yesterday I finished Tracy Chevalier’s Falling Angels, which one of my students gave me to bring out here. It’s the story of two families in England at the turn of the 20th century and the changing roles of women. One of the wives becomes a suffragette. The point of view shifts between each of the dozen or so main characters. My favorite was a gravedigger boy named Simon. I also printed out my essay “A Heaven We Knew Once” and packaged it up to send to an essay contest in New York. And last night I wrote a new song. Today I started to organize and assemble into a new manuscript the best of the poems I’ve written here and a few older ones that didn’t appear in my book. It’s always a challenge to try to make a cohesive whole out of miscellaneously written poems, and to put them all under one title. There’s a book contest sponsored by The New Criterion for a manuscript of poems paying close attention to form. I was a finalist a few years ago. The new stuff is tighter, better, so I think I’ll try again. Wish me luck.

Tonight I recorded the new song. I like the chord progression in this one. Again, it would sound better if I had some accompaniment, especially percussion. It’s pretty bare bones with just me and the Gibson and my inept guitar playing. But it’s fun! And it’s the songwriting piece I like most.
Home Today

I’ve been fretting about next week’s trip, waking up in the middle of the night and tweaking for hours. I hate to part with Gus, especially after spending five months as constant companions. And I hate traveling on planes. So I need to keep reminding myself that I could be in Mississippi or Louisiana, a refugee in some shelter, my home under water. That’ll help put things in perspective.

One game of Spider Solitaire, then off to read. This time a Ted Kooser nonfiction book about life in Nebraska. My friend Neil sent it to me.

First day of September tomorrow!

September 1, 2005

I began my sabbatical exactly five months ago. Doing this thing has given me a taste of what retirement must be like, and I have to say I think I’m going to love it! Of course, I have many years before I’ll be able to call it quits.

Feeling guilty about the condition of the Corral Trail, I went down this morning with bow saw, loppers and rake and cleared the trail. At one point I dropped the saw and it slid down into a deep ravine. I thought I was going to break my neck going to retrieve it. I scrambled half-way down holding onto roots and then realized I could snag the saw with a long stick. It worked first try. I was completely bushed and soaked with sweat by the time I finished around noon. And with the temperature warmer today (high 90s), the hike back nearly did me in.

Gussie hurt his paw this afternoon. Not sure how. I was sitting on the steps of the cabin breaking down some dried mint and suddenly he was limping and whining in the grass. I took him in and put him up on the grooming table and had a look with a flashlight. His paw was all red in between his pads. I thought maybe he’d stepped on a thorn, but I didn’t see one. I put some Animax cream on the spot. An hour later he was walking fine. Now I think maybe he got stung by a bee or a wasp. He is always chasing and eating them.

In the pantry today slicing up some tomatoes for the solar dryer, I caught this psychedelic-green bug:

New poem:

Sheep’s Skull

I know it is waiting in that storage
garage, wrapped in newspapers in a box,
horned and hollow and bleached by Ireland’s
treasured sun. Gaudy bones. An end for books.

She never liked it. The day I carried
it through the cottage door and held it up—
“Alas, poor Yorick!”—she shook her head, said,
“You know you can’t take it home, right?” I slipped

it in my suitcase rolled in a sweater.
For four years it gazed through the barrister
bookcase glass in our house, a reminder
of Achill’s wasted landscape, our time there,

the hardness beneath our soft flesh. One day
soon I’ll retrieve it and my other things.
At times I’ve thought to give them all away,
start from nothing and see what luck might bring.

But I like those horns, those deep eye sockets,
the passages that once were filled with breath.
I take comfort knowing that I’ve packed it
again. A keepsake of marriage, life, death.

August 15th - 25th

2005-08-25T09:57:00.000-07:00

August 15, 2005

I’m back from my trip to Bend, which was just what the doctor ordered: a healthy dose of friendly, intelligent, artsy, kind, relaxed people; shared meals of excellent food; a hike along the Deschutes River through volcanic terrain and ponderosa pines; a reading; a hot tub; my very late discovery (in Audubon magazine) that the Ivory-billed Woodpecker is not extinct!; and nicer temperatures (the mornings were actually pretty cold). Following are some pictures of our walk along the Deschutes:

This is at the start of the trail by the river. It’s hard to see, but in the background is a ledge of volcanic rock, a massive tumble from an old active butte. It looks almost like huge rows of dried-up chocolate cake. The water here is wide and slow.

Some treacherous rapids downriver.

And more white water.

Phil took this shot of Judy and me. I should’ve had him use the flash on my camera, but I didn’t realize we were so backlit.

The following poem was inspired by our walk through Lava Lands:

Lava Butte

Brown butte, clumped
lifeless ledges
rising out of the forest

between piles like slag, rows
of scars, charred
spot where Vulcan

could have forged weapons
or kenneled
the dogs of war.

But here, beside the Deschutes’
white froth and its
never-ending aria,

hip-deep in the shining
green manzanita
and sniffing vanilla

in the bark of a ponderosa
pine, I’d rather
view that wasted butte

through the osprey’s eyes and see
a mole on the face
of a lady reclining

in a desert land and not yet mythic,
not yet exploited
by a lame god or man.

Judy and Phil, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, were lovely, gracious hosts. Indeed, I received the royal treatment, down to the thick white terrycloth robe to wear on my walk back and forth from the hot tub. They’re both great cooks and they have a beautiful home on a couple of acres about ten minutes from downtown Bend. Judy and I got to yak about poetry and trade some poems, and she showed me some nice journals to try out. Gus was a good boy, for the most part. He has bad manners around food, always reaching up to the counter for a sniff. At mealtimes, I banished him to the back deck. Here he is looking rather sad in his exile:

The reading was a smashing success. They all said it was the largest crowd to date in this “Second Sunday” reading series. The turn-out might have been the result of the big write-up on me (almost a full page) in the Bend paper, done by journalist David Jasper. Since I can’t send a copy to everybody, here are some pics to give you a sense of it:

This is the front page, where I got mention in the upper right.

This is the article itself, with headshot and excerpt of poem, etc.

I think a lot of people read the article. I had a random comment on my blog from a woman who read it, but couldn’t make the reading. And today I received a call on the radio phone from a different woman in Bend, who did go to the reading but had to leave because her daughter was antsy. She’d listened to my audio post on the blog inviting all callers, and so called to see how I was doing out here with the wildfire so close and to say she liked my poems. I have a fan! I can’t recall if I mentioned in yesterday’s post that I also ran into one of my college professors at the reading. Don Kunz was one of my profs my first year of college at the University of Rhode Island. I always remembered his name, and my first poetry publication, in a journal called Literati, was side-by-side with a poem of his, which I thought wonderfully ironic given my less than stellar academic performance at that particular institution. Anyway, he and I got to catch up. He retired from teaching and moved out to Bend. After visiting there, I can see why. I’ve had my own fantasies already about living there someday. I was also given a copy of a fabulous new literary and arts magazine called High Desert Journal and invited by the editor, Elizabeth Quinn, to send in my poem “One Day in July,” which I’ll happily do. The inaugural issue featured David Duncan, Gary Snyder, John Daniel and Judy, among others. A bunch of people bought copies of my book, and I signed them. Then we went back to Judy and Phil’s house and a few of their friends came by for a barbeque. Loretta and Peter were so kind, bringing Gus some rawhides and me some cupcake-like cookies to take back to the cabin. They also made a sinfully rich and delicious dessert of cherries in a chocolate cake topped with chocolate fudge. I have a huge slab of it here in my fridge, along with delicious orange/chocolate chip bars that Judy made. Just had one of those, in fact. Judy and Phil made me a big breakfast this morning, and then Gus and I hit the road around 8:00 am. We took a different route back, going by Crater Lake and then down to Grants Pass, where I got my mail and had some lunch at an outdoor café. I was excited to have received the new issue of Paste, and surprised to see a letter of mine printed in it! I’d written two weeks into my residency to say how much I was enjoying the DVD and lamenting the fact that I hadn’t brought out the other Paste DVDs to watch. Not only did the editor print my letter, but he sent me replacement DVDs so I could watch the previous ones out here. All you subscribers, check out my letter. All you nonsubscribers, subscribe! It’s hands-down the best music magazine in the world. My mail also included a Holly Palmer CD from Sharen (our friend Jamie Saft played piano/keyboards on it). She found it in a used CD store for a buck.

I also found out via e-mail that one of my puzzles was accepted by Games magazine. Very cool. It’s an unconventional puzzle, with four squares outside the grid, and so would’ve been hard to fit in a newspaper, which is always short on space. Not sure yet when it’ll appear.

I ran into a couple of guys on the road close to the DH turn-off, and stopped to see who they were. I thought at first they might be firefighters, because they were filthy, but they said they were caretaking over at the castle. Apparently, the new owner is planning to build his own trail down to the river. We chatted for a bit. It turns out it was the driver’s nephew I chased out of here a few weeks back. I apologized and explained that I’d been sort of harassed earlier in the day by the guys from down at the river, that his nephew happened to cut through at a bad time. I don’t know that he cared all that much, as he and his buddy appeared to be pretty drunk. They were swilling beer as we talked. I told them I had ice cream melting in my cooler, and went on.

My garden dried up a bit in the three days I was gone, so I’m leaving the sprinklers on all night for a good soaking. I’ve got tomatoes coming out my ears. I wish I could send some to Judy and Phil without them going bad in the mail. I brought them a bagful and they were ecstatic. Apparently, Bend has a very short growing season and so they can’t grow tomatoes there. I only wish I’d had more ripe ones to bring last week! I’m making sundried tomatoes with the Romas, and have a baggie full of them already.

The weekend left me feeling energized and excited for my Eugene reading in September. I’m thinking about spending a couple of nights there before the day of the reading. It’s the second-largest city in the state, and a college town, and school will probably have started already, so it’ll be hopping.

August 16, 2005

It’s a cool night and the crickets are chirping and the mosquitoes are biting. Today I mowed around the pond and in the garden. The heat has stopped the growth of most of the grass, but it was high in places. I also harvested a bunch of tomatoes and canned two jars’ worth. I can’t possibly eat them all myself before they go bad, so this way I can preserve some for sauces and other dishes. It’s been about ten years since I canned stuff. With tomatoes, what you do is boil them for about two minutes until the skins crack and then you soak them in cold water, peel them, stuff them in clean jars, and fill the jars with water leaving a half-inch of space. Then you submerge the sealed jars in boiling water for 40 minutes.

I ripped up my tomatillo plant, the one that grew better than anything else all spring and into summer. Despite all the flowers and the formation of the papery sacs, no fruit grew! I think the plant wasn’t cross-pollinated or fertilized or whatever. Maybe I should have planted two of them? I saw plenty of bees on the flowers, but not a single tomatillo formed.

Next time I go into town, I’m going to try to buy more seeds or starters (if there are any left) and do a second planting of lettuce and maybe cilantro. I’ll see what else might grow in late summer/early fall. I don’t like that I have to buy lettuce again at the market!

I harvested all my garlic—six bulbs—and it’s potent and delicious. I’ve got a few hanging in the mudroom to dry, along with some lavender. The dryer in the garden is full of thin-sliced Roma tomatoes, mint and chamomile. I can’t wait to fill it with chanterelles!

A lone bear (possibly Mama bear) was in the yard this morning. At one point I looked out and it was in the apple tree closest to the house. I tried getting a photo of it up there, but by the time the shutter clicked, it was running off:

August 17, 2005

The cooler temps continue. I even lit a fire in the wood stove this morning, making for a cozy few hours of writing time. While I was working on the orange/brown couch, I noticed some new birds in the yard and took down my binoculars and had a look. a MacGillivray’s Warbler and a Black-Throated Gray Warbler. Apparently warblers are migrating through, heading south, I guess.

My experience of canning tomatoes resulted in the following poem, which is a bit sexy, but should be read with tongue in cheek. It’s meant to be lighthearted.

Canning Tomatoes

I love the way they slip their skins
and settle into jars,

pink flesh pressed against hot glass
so that I cannot help

but think of sex and the last time
I had it. And their names

vaguely erotic—Early Girl
and Better Boy, Beefsteak

and Sweet. Steam rising from the pot.
Gold bands on the counter

like bangles slid from a thin wrist.
And the round lids’ red lips.

Fruit packed in its own murky juice,
and a kind of pact made

at the rim not to leak a word
of it to anyone.

Long after everything has cooled,
some night when I’m eating in,

and thinking of this time I canned them,
the precautions taken

to preserve these bright globes I grew
out of earth, I’ll unscrew

counterclockwise and watch them spill
from the jar like a birth.

This afternoon I made some fabulous chicken croquettes from scratch. The first step was to make a homemade cream sauce from butter, flour, half-n-half, salt and pepper. Then I cooked some chicken breast on the grill and finely diced it. Meanwhile I chopped some celery from the garden, leaves and all, and some onion. I mixed all those ingredients together (saving some of the cream sauce as a topping) and chilled it for a half-hour. Then I formed balls and dipped them in beaten egg and rolled them in breadcrumbs. Then deep-fried them in vegetable oil. With a side of tomatoes, red onion, and basil in vinegar, it was one of my tastiest meals out here!

August 18, 2005

For the third day in a row the weather is pleasant: plenty of sunshine (after morning clouds—the first I’ve seen in two months!), nice breezes sweeping through the canyon, temps in the low 90s. Much nicer than 105 or 106! In preparation for company arriving tomorrow (the Brothers, John Daniel, and Emma Brown), I baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies and cleaned up around both houses. Yesterday I fired up the fridge in the upper house and filled the ice trays; swept the deck; took out the grill; hung the hammock. I’m also planning to make some tarts (blackberry, apple, and cherry) for tomorrow night’s dessert. The berries and cherries are ones I picked here and froze. The apples will come right off one of the trees in the garden.

Mama bear and cub are hanging around and Gus is giving me a headache with all his barking. He really hates our ursine visitors. Here are a couple of shots of Mama bear:

August 20, 2005

My company arrived late yesterday afternoon! Walking back from the pond with Gus, iPod blasting in my ears, I was startled by Frank’s maroon truck inching up behind me, John Daniel and Frank waving out the windows. Right off, Gus gave Frank a hard time, humping his leg and jumping all over him. I was embarrassed. Gus always goes right for the Alpha male. With John, he was gentle as can be. At one point Gus was being such a pest on the upper house deck that I put him inside the house and he turned around and ran right through the screen door, knocking it off its runners (I was glad Bradley wasn’t there to see it; of course, he’ll read this and know about it). Gus was very hyped up, to say the least. Finally, he calmed down. It was great to see Frank and John again. They started in with the stories, which went nonstop until late into the night. While I was back at my cabin preparing some hors d’oeuvres and my shepherd’s salad and wrapping up the homemade tarts I’d made, Bradley and Emma arrived. Emma, as I imagined, is great. She seemed to ease right into the Boyden banter. I’m sure she’ll do just fine here next year. As evening came on, we watched about a thousand bats (not an exaggeration) drop out of the cedar shake siding of the upper house. Bradley cooked up some delicious steak on the Weber, and with sautéed Walla Walla sweet onions, mashed potatoes, zucchini and the shepherd’s salad I’d made, we had a great feast. Emma got to hear all the Dutch Henry legends. My tarts were a big hit, especially with Frank. I felt bad I was only able to make eight of them (ran out of butter). The canyon was a bit smoky last night, and it made for a beautiful rise of the full moon. Emma’s orientation continues today. We’ll probably take a walk down to the river. And Frank said he’ll hang the new screen door at my cabin. Good action so far. It’s fun to have company.

Bradley said that the grandson of Bill Graiff (the hermit who lived here after Dutch Henry) is coming out here on Sunday to see the place. The grandson is now in his 70s, and the last time he was here was in the mid-1960s.

August 21, 2005

Yesterday morning, while Frank and John hung the new screen door, Bradley, Emma, Gus and I hiked down to Horseshoe Bend via The Corral, a huge area of meadows. This is a hike I haven’t done in my time here. In the spring, I was afraid of the ticks and in the summer the burrs. And yesterday my fears were justified, big time. In the Corral area Gus picked up so many small, tacky burrs that he turned a brownish-green color. His legs, belly, chest and face were literally covered with them. I felt like crying when I saw him, for I knew they’d just be impossible to remove from his soft coat. And they were. I tried combing him out later in the afternoon, and all I got done was his face and the lower parts of his legs. I tried him both dry and wet. No go. Every swipe with the comb pulled out clumps of his hair. I called the groomer, and Gus is going in on Thursday to be shaved down. It’s the only solution. Despite the major thrash of burrs, blackberry brambles, poison oak, and swamp near the river, we had a nice walk and rested atop the rocky hill at Horseshoe Bend, where we saw a gray fox scampering around. Then we hiked downriver to the swimming hole. Here are some pictures from our walk:

The Corral (aka The Land of Ubiquitous Burrs). That’s Gussie to the right of the trees.

Bradley and Emma in The Corral.

Gus getting covered with burrs.

Chicory (love the color of this stuff!).

Horseshoe Bend. Note the smoky haze from the wildfire.

The Rogue from atop the rock at Horseshoe Bend.

Bradley and Emma at Horseshoe Bend.

Some of the river rocks have huge holes bored in them from spinning eddies of water wearing them down for centuries.

Here’s a beautiful riffle between Horseshoe Bend and Meadow Creek.

Bradley and Emma on the trail along the river. Where I shot this picture, there was a fallen tree in the trail. Bradley cleared it with the bow saw.

Once again the bats entertained us in the evening, hundreds of them dropping out of the siding. Emma and I tried to get photos of them, but the bats are too quick and the digital cameras too slow. Bradley cooked up another fine meal, this time barbequed chicken, corn on the cob, and wild rice. For dessert: watermelon and cookies. Frank regaled us with many good stories. Here’s a shot of him and John on the deck (Frank’s on the left; John’s on the right):

Emma came down alone this morning, bearing some smoked salmon for me (thanks Emma!), and I got to give her the scoop on the radio phone and the garden and the various and sundry items in the cabin. Then we all gathered again at the upper house for lunch. When Graiff’s grandson didn’t show around noon, Frank and John took off. Then Bradley and Emma were leaving, too, when they encountered Graiff’s grandson on the road, so they turned around and brought him and his wife down and showed them the place. The grandson had with him a huge binder full of Graiff’s documents and photographs. He promised to make Bradley a copy of it, which will add much to the history of this place. Everyone hung around here at the cabin for twenty minutes or so, and then they headed out.

Gus and I are back to our peace and quiet in the smoky canyon. This evening tiny ashes were falling on me like snow as I swayed in the hammock.

August 22, 2005

Before drifting off to sleep last night I started a new essay on solitude and death. I worked on it for a few hours this morning and another hour or so this afternoon, and I’m six pages into it. Happy with it so far. We didn’t do much else today: a walk to the upper house to swab the fridges and read what the visitors wrote in the journal (a tradition here), a walk to the pond so Gussie could swim. Looking for ways to use up some of my many tomatoes, I cooked up a delicious batch of homemade tomato sauce (diced cherry and beefsteak tomatoes right off the vine, onion, oregano, thyme, fresh parsley and basil, wine, sugar, salt and pepper). Had the last of my croquettes for lunch. Just as good a couple of days old!

As feared and despite my generous applications of Tecnu after our Horseshoe Bend walk, I’m developing poison oak rashes on my arms and legs. Got a nasty bit of it bubbling in the soft flesh of my elbow joint. I probably got it from touching Gus after applying the Tecnu. Now I’m walking around like a leper, covered with pink spots from calamine lotion.

The canyon cleared out over night. And the prevailing wind blew to the west, keeping the smoke away all day.

I keep wondering about what’s in my P.O. box and e-mail inboxes, but I won’t go to town until Thursday, when Gussie has his grooming appointment. It’ll be nice to be able to run errands while he’s at the groomer. No worries about the hot car.

August 23, 2005

My mother called last night with the terrible news that she has a cancerous lump in her breast. Needless to say, I’m in a funk about it. It seems especially unfair given that she just got the “all clear” on the bladder cancer she was diagnosed with a couple of years ago. She seems hopeful about the treatment, though. And her mother survived breast cancer for many years, so maybe that bodes well, too. My mother seemed more worried about my father, who’s going in for carotid artery surgery (his second) soon. The artery is almost totally blocked. The first operation went well, though he was in intensive care for about four days. These developments make it harder to be out here.

Last night I worked for about two hours recording a new song. I laid down three tracks (chords, vocals, and lead guitar fill) and was in the middle of tweaking things on the computer when the program crashed and I lost it all. Bummer. I think there’s a way to piece it all back together, but it’s tedious work. I think I’ll just try recording again when I feel up to it. Last night I needed the diversion.

I worked some more on the essay today. I’m up to ten pages. If it turns out any good, maybe I’ll send it to Literal Latte’s essay contest, if I haven’t missed the deadline.

A team of researchers with the Department of Forestry came today and parked down at the turn-around. They’d called Bradley and okayed it, and I opened the lower gate for them so they didn’t have to make such a long walk. Apparently there are research plots all over the state where they track growth of trees and compile other data. They were off in the woods all day, and just came back up looking sweaty and tired. I went out to chat with them and the mosquitoes were horrific. The researchers didn’t stick around long.

I heard from Bradley and from these researchers that the wildfire is about 90% contained and they think it’ll be completely contained by Friday. This is good news. Once again there was no smoke in the canyon today, and the weather was cool.

August 24, 2005

I re-record the new song last night. It’s called “Just Drive,” and it has a mythical allusion to Charon, the ferryman to the Underworld.
Just Drive
Note: if using iTunes, you may need to convert the file from mp3. It sounds lousy on iTunes, but okay on MusicMatch Juke Box on my computer.

I’m all but done with the new essay (a few things I need to check on or add to), and I think it’s the truest piece of writing I’ve done here, so I’m posting it as is. Writing it, I’ve come to appreciate this place a whole lot more, though I’m not sure if I’m any closer to making sense of my life. It’s a bit long and I forgive you if you don’t read all of it.

A Heaven We Knew Once

For over four months now, I have lived almost totally alone in a remote cabin in southwestern Oregon. Yes, it’s true that I’ve had visitors—a friend came and stayed a week, the owners of the property spent two weekends, and a biologist came on two separate afternoons to look for peregrine falcons. It’s true I’ve had unasked for human contact, too—rafters passing on the Rogue River, hikers on the trail, stray walkers on my road. And I’ve made journeys into town every week or ten days to retrieve mail from my overstuffed post office box, to check my e-mail and upload my daily journal at WiFi hotspots, to pay bills, to stock up on provisions. I’ve spent a few weekends in towns like Grants Pass, Ashland and Bend, sometimes delighting in civilization (foreign films, Greek and Italian and Japanese food, cafés, ice cream, poetry readings, CD stores) and sometimes not (less than cozy hotel rooms, ambulance sirens, Walmarts, car horns, litter, $3.50 iced chais, the signed gaudiness of capitalism). I’ve even had a couple of unspectacular dates with a darkly beautiful waitress, who continues to haunt my thoughts. Still, I have spent well over a hundred days with no company except my wheaten terrier, Gus. A lone human in a vast wilderness. And now it will be easier to die.

Not that I want to.

Like Thoreau, I think I came here in part to take stock of my life, to see if (or what) I haven’t yet lived. But however much I’ve pondered life, I’ve discovered that solitude is a kind of preparatory course in the ultimate aloneness of the abyss that awaits all of us, a curriculum in which the lone self is both student and teacher. I used to dread death. Many a night, unable to sleep, I’d open my eyes to the dark and try to imagine the absence of consciousness, the existential void, nihil humani, and I’d fill with terror and anger and sorrow. At those times it would seem to me that life was a scam, a con game, the creator I’d been raised on the Grifter of all grifters. Buy this life, but…sorry, it’s not really yours, it’s not really for keeps. Like a cheaply made thing, it’ll wear out all too soon.

I don’t remember exactly when I became aware of my own mortality. I’m sure I watched cowboys die on Gunsmoke without really considering the implications of their pained expressions, their clutchings at gut or chest, their crumplings into dusty streets. Half-asleep and wedged between my mother and one of my siblings on a couch in our finished basement, I may have felt bad for the dead cowboys, but it’s more likely I just followed the marshal through the swinging saloon door and deeper into the narrative. I think my first real experience of death was the passing of my paternal grandfather, Gilbert Whitehead, a man I loved for his white hair and tanned arms and the catamaran he kept at his Falmouth beach house on Cape Cod. I remember hearing his voice through the metal vent in the floor of that house, as my brothers and I, lying on fold-out cots, drifted off to sleep, our heads filled with blue crabs and waves, sand and shells. And I remember sitting on his knee and patting his salty merchant marine arms and begging him to stop smoking cigarettes. But by then it was too late. I was in first grade when he died. I didn’t go to the funeral, but I was told that Grampa Whitehead was gone, that I’d never see him again, and that now he lived in heaven. I imagined him in a round gold house like the one at church where the priest kept the white wafers people lined up at the altar to eat. And I knew then what sadness was. My father’s red eyes. My brothers’ awkward avoidance of the topic of Grampa. The beach house. The catamaran. Mrs. Duncan, my teacher, told me she was sorry and she hugged me, and this gesture made me even sadder than I was. Other deaths followed. My maternal grandfather, my Voo Voo, Antonio Fernandes, was next. I was two years older when he died, and I had Grampa Whitehead’s passing as a reference. I knew how to wear my sadness. Now I was a boy without grandfathers, and a piece of me had been left behind like a suitcase full of familiar clothes redolent with cigarette smoke and whiskey and sweat. But I buttoned into the new glum reality, the conventions of loss. For years I watched my Voa Voa, like the night, wear nothing but black dresses.

I suppose I wondered where my grandfathers had gone, where they’d “passed” to. Attending Catholic school, I’m sure I had some vague conception of the Christian idea of afterlife. As far as I was concerned, my grandfathers had both been good men, and so I probably accepted the idea that they were up in heaven with God and Jesus and Mary and all the saints. But Grampa, like my father, was a Protestant. What he protested against, I didn’t know. Going to church, maybe. My father didn’t attend church. It was my mother who dressed us up and dragged us there, despite how much we protested. “I want to be a Protestant, too,” I said to her more than once. And she would glare and hiss, “You go and get dressed before I count to three. One, two….” I liked that my father didn’t go to church. It was rebellious and brave. Church was so dull, the pews so hard and uncomfortable, the goings-on up on the altar so hypnotic and vague. I hadn’t had my First Communion, and so I couldn’t join all the other churchgoers at that high point in the Mass when the organ music set the grim tone and everyone lined up to open their mouths. However much my stomach was rumbling, I couldn’t eat the unleavened bread, the flesh of Jesus Christ. I remember looking around at the other kids my age or younger, many of them my classmates, all of us left behind in the long wooden rows looking altogether unworthy and childish. Or I’d look up at the stained glass windows and think of my grandfathers standing still in such holy and colorful light, near God, their heads haloed, their bodies shining all prismatic and beautiful. But weren’t their bodies buried in graveyards? I couldn’t quite figure out that conundrum. But faith, the nuns told me, was the belief in things you couldn’t see or understand. And maybe Grampa was in a different heaven than Voo Voo; maybe Grampa was in a Protestant heaven where the light wasn’t so colorful. In any case, they were both dead and I was struggling to understand just what that meant.

One summer day when I was a little older, I went off in the woods with a friend’s Daisy BB gun, the kind you could fill with the tiny copper balls and pump a dozen times for every shot. By now I liked to read Outdoor Life magazine, the hunting stories especially, and sometimes I’d feel as if a wild streak, a primal desire for stalking, was locked in the chains of my DNA, those double helixes I’d recently learned about in school. Stepping silently through the steamy oak leaves and brown needles of pines, gun in hand, I felt completely unleashed and primitive. And when a rabbit dashed out from the brush and paused in a clearing, my heart leapt and I held my breath, sighted, fired. Down it went. Suddenly I was large, ancient, capable. I understood in those first few seconds the romantic vision of Outdoor Life and the pride in the eyes of camouflaged men holding up antlered heads. Then I stood above the brown-furred body, saw my own face reflected in its drying amber eye. Its body was limp and warm in my hand. Those were bones in there. And organs and blood vessels. Its long back feet had made their last leap because of me. The rabbit was dead, no longer conscious, and now I had no intention of skinning it or eating it. I considered bringing it to my Voa Voa, who liked rabbit and would probably know how to dress it, but I knew that to carry it from this clearing meant to hold up my shame to every gaze beyond this private and terrible place, eyes in which I might see myself the way I’d seen myself in the rabbit’s unseeing amber orb. Arranging its limp body in a grave of leaves, I wondered where the rabbit had gone in its death. This Christian afterlife I’d been persuaded awaited me—was this for humans only? Would this rabbit be there to confront or receive me? And all those elk, moose and deer I’d studied in the pages of Outdoor Life, would they be there? And the Japanese beetles, a whole mayonnaise jarful, my brother Michael and I snatched last week from our mother’s roses and drowned in gasoline? Christian doctrine had no room for the billion other life forms. Heaven was a place for humans only. Fifteen years later I came upon James Dickey’s poem “The Heaven of Animals” and discovered I wasn’t the only one to have wondered about this. But in his vision of animal heaven there are no humans, just animals engaged in the never-ending hunt of one another, ecstatic in the kill necessary to the food chain. In school, learning about St. Francis of Assisi, who like Dr. Doolittle on TV surrounded himself with animals, I wondered how he reconciled himself to a heaven without all his beloved creatures.

By the time I reached high school, I couldn’t bear the thought that one day I’d be torn from my mother, father, sister, brothers; that I’d get to know them so long, love them so much, and then be orphaned to eternity, never to come home again to find my parents sipping coffee from their forty-year-old flesh-colored mugs, the ones they’d been drinking out of since the day after their wedding. Ten years later, as a married man, I felt a similar fear of separation, and to walk through graveyards and see the headstones of couples, side by side, gave no consolation; for while their bones, arranged in their best suits and dresses, lay mere feet apart under the earth, in death they neither reclined in plots nor rotted between ruffled satin and each in his or her own nonexistence was, I knew, quite quite alone. I made it clear to my wife early in our marriage that I wanted to be cremated. I didn’t relish the thought of being bled, pumped full of embalming fluid, made up like an actor with rouge and powder for my final silent performance at wake and funeral, hands folded around a crucifix in which I never really believed. Having moved around a lot in my twenties and thirties and feeling rather rootless, I told her to scatter my ashes in Eagle Lake in the Adirondacks, a place where I’d experienced peace and happiness at an artist’s colony over two separate summers. She had a similar wish: donate her organs, then cremate. Last fall, six months before I came out to this remote cabin, she told me she was unhappy and had been for a long time. Having accepted a promotion, she’d been living three hours from our home for over a year and visiting most weekends. After almost twelve years our marriage was over. She wanted out. We signed a separation agreement, and it was official. All last winter, I drove the swerving, slippery roads of the newly divorced, sliding into resentment, anger, fear, shame, regret, and the deepest sorrow of my 39 years. Meanwhile I was preparing for my six-month writing residency in the backwoods of Oregon. I found a buyer for our house and signed documents with my attorney. I moved all my things into storage and cleaned out the house. On the last night of March, a week after my 40th birthday and the night before driving West toward Oregon, my final hours in our house, I ate takeout sitting cross-legged on the bare bedroom floor and traversed the past that had led me to this moment. Forcing down my fried chicken wrap, I closed my eyes and ran the gauntlet of my conflicted feelings. Then I collapsed on the sleeping bag, my sobs echoing through the empty rooms. Later, lying in the darkness (all the lamps were in storage), it occurred to me I was indeed alone in the world and so perhaps ready to live in the wilderness in almost total solitude. I also realized I had no one now to carry out my wishes should I die, no one to take my ashes up to Eagle Lake. And the wilderness would be a dangerous place, full of bears, cougars, rattlesnakes, a wild river, steep and precarious trails, impenetrable darkness. I’d be a good fifty miles from a hospital. More than a few times I envisioned my dead body flown back East in the cargo hold of a plane or laid out in a suit in a shiny box surrounded by flowers. What would become of Gus? Would my sister take him in? Her Manhattan apartment was already a veritable zoo. Rolling down the driveway in my overloaded Honda, I was homeless and, but for the formality of paperwork, divorced. Having lost my soul-mate, my own soul felt adrift, a piece of space dust hurtling through the void and ready to blaze upon entry into the atmosphere of a perilous new world.

When I first arrived at the cabin a week later, I thought very little about death, for the place was so full of life: fruit trees bright with blossoms and dripping with spring rain, meadows a rich green, wildflowers everywhere like tiny works of art, the irrigation pond teeming with rough-skinned newts. I saw garter snakes and bull snakes, alligator lizards and blue-tailed skinks. From daybreak to nightfall the forest and meadow hosted a chorus of birds: tanagers and chickadees, sapsuckers and woodpeckers, juncos and robins, grosbeaks and finches, wrens and jays. Nighttime brought the arias of spotted and barred owls, congregations of mule deer grazing the rich shoots of grasses, a gray fox in my compost, a thousand bats dropping out of the cedar shakes to erase in moonlight the white moths marring the dark. Planting my garden—lettuce, broccoli, celery, squash, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, garlic, herbs—I felt no existential angst. This was life, these were living things, and as alone as I was I felt surrounded by creatures. Genesis doesn’t say who died first, but if Adam survived Eve, then I felt the way he might have as a widower: a man who had known love and lost it and found succor in the tendriled, leafed, winged and legged things of the world. That barren place the winter of our separation had made in me was filling in now the way the trails were with saplings of fir and madrone and huckleberry. Self-loathing and regret, sorrow and shame—these I turned over like my garden beds. And over the course of weeks contentment sprouted, took hold, survived the spring rains.

But death came knocking, as death will do. Quite literally, in fact. One morning, reclined on the orange sofa, sipping coffee and writing a short story, I watched a pair of sapsuckers flitting around the yard. Their play was either a courtship or a happy marriage, I couldn’t be sure. Whatever the case, I felt almost jealous of their companionship, but getting lost in my story, I forgot about them. Then came the crash against the glass, and I nearly dropped my laptop. Looking down, I could see the black and white tangle in the grass, the female of the pair. I went out and picked her up and stroked her still-warm breast. She’d broken her neck in the crash and was dead. I buried her behind the tool shed, this time feeling not guilt and shame the way I had with the rabbit all those years ago but a sense of injustice and, as much as I didn’t want to admit it, a tiny stab of vindication too. That’s what love’ll get you. Afterward, I couldn’t bear to watch her mate cruising the yard, calling. I shut down the laptop and took Gus down to the river.

Death has visited in other ways, too. Not long after my separation my friend Jim called. I was still a bit sore with him for having poo-pooed our protests at the Republican Convention in New York and for having voted for George W. Bush, but I forgave him these trespasses and decided it best that we not discuss politics. I’ve known Jim some fifteen years. In college we formed a poetry group with a few others and have been close ever since. Jim had always idolized my marriage, had always told me how much he admired the easy way my wife and I had with each other, and he was shocked to hear the news of our separation. On the phone that night I poured out all my anger, all my lamentations, and when I felt spent and was getting ready to say goodbye, he told me he was dying. I can’t remember exactly how he phrased it, but it was couched in a joke. I’ve always admired Jim’s wry humor, but this time it floored me. He’d been diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas and liver, and he didn’t have long to live. This was last November. He’s still hanging on. Before driving cross-country, I visited him in Rhode Island. Now whenever I talk with him on the cabin’s radio phone, I savor his deep voice, knowing it may be the last time I hear it.

Cancer is Death’s favorite dish; He serves it liberally and often. Just last night I got a call from my mother, who told me she has breast cancer. This after getting the “all clear” two weeks ago on the bladder cancer she was diagnosed with a few years ago. Unlike with Jim’s cancer, with my mother’s new tumor there’s hope. Given the advancements in breast cancer treatment, a lumpectomy and radiation might cure her. I wish the same could be said of Jim. Some nights, after shutting off the propane lamp above my bed and after my eyes adjust to the dark, I gaze at the stars through the three-foot square skylight. Emerson said that if a man wants to feel alone, let him look at the stars. At these times I do indeed feel alone, feel that all of humanity is insignificant, each of us no different from that woodpecker who crashed into my window. Life, then, seems a series of accidents waiting to happen, one following the next without purpose, and the stars themselves the result of some mishap and one day to die out, too, making for a whole new map of the night sky. Creationists would have us think of a grand design, but I don’t believe it. Grand designs are the things of men, otherwise God’s a killer.

As an adult I’ve been wont to kill things, the result perhaps of guilt I’ve felt for the hosts of creatures I slew in my youth. An amateur naturalist and birder, I’ve preferred to observe rather than shoot or slap or swat. When a bee was trapped in the house I’d catch it in a glass and release it outside. When I saw a spider in the shower I ignored it. At our house in the Hudson highlands of New York, my wife and I bought catch-and-release mouse traps, even after looks askance from the feed store clerk. “You know they carry diseases, right?” she said. Good karma, we replied. Mice deserve to live just as much as we do. One day I released a mouse in the road without even stepping out of my car. Just opened the door and shook it out of the trap. The poor thing was shivering, filthy with its own excrement, shocked mad like an inmate in solitary. In my rearview mirror as I pulled away, I could see it hadn’t moved. And on my return trip from buying half-and-half at the corner convenience store, there it was, squashed by some other passing car. Chance accident or grand design? If the latter, to what end? I know my mother would say, “Ours is not to wonder why,” but I do. I wonder why. After my wife took her promotion and moved to Utica, I started buying the old-fashioned mouse traps and baiting them with peanut butter. She was no longer around to frown, and anyway she’d never released any of the live mice we’d trapped. She hadn’t seen the mouse I freed get altogether flattened on Canterbury Road. Some nights I’d be in bed reading when I’d hear the neck-breaking snap down in the garage. In the year or so I used them I must have killed at least two dozen mice.

Coming out here, where I’ve been surrounded by creatures large and small and usually not human, I’ve tried to resume the Buddhist way of not killing. But I’ve had my lapses. One night, sitting in the La-Z-Boy playing solitaire on my computer, I saw something black scurry across the dim-lit kitchen floor. A scorpion! The first I’d ever seen, stinger poised high on its tail like a question mark. I snapped its picture and then, afraid it might sting me or my dog, I squashed it beneath my Birkenstock. For the first month or so of living in the cabin, I did catch-and-release of bees and wasps. Then I got stung twice. Now when there’s one buzzing around the house, I open the sliding door and try to shoo it out. If that fails, I reach for the fly swatter. With ticks and mosquitoes I have never had and never will have mercy: I squash those fuckers on sight. Flies, too. And pantry moths, those powdery, ash-colored microlepidoptera who find their way into my pancake mix and flour. Anyway, nature seems just as ruthless. The bees I don’t swat tire at window screens, bake and die and pile in the sills. In a cupboard in the pantry of this cabin is a jar of such bees some previous resident collected and labeled “Squeeky’s Bugs.”

If spring swept through this place like the hand of God in that week of his creations, summer came like a plague in Revelations. For a time everything was green and alive. I watched dragonflies change from nymphs to adults and take to the sky. I heard the chicks of gilded flickers peeping from a hollow tree. I had to mow the lush meadows every other day. Then those relentless rains and mists riding in from the Pacific died out like the Indians. The last clouds plumed like smoke signals and were gone. Blue sky. Naked sun. On the rocket-shaped thermometer outside my kitchen window, I watched the mercury rise and rise and rise. One-hundred and five, one-hundred and ten. The meadows, so long green with well-fed grasses, white with daisies, purple with elegant brodiaea, withered and dried a pale brown. Mud puddles turned to dust and where once mosquitoes hatched, now ant lions made their sandy craters and waited for the least trembling. With no electricity in the cabin, and so no fan, I suffered the long, hot afternoons. Cool baths. Pond plunges. River swims. The firs and pines, alders and madrones, their tap roots deep, stayed green. My garden, too, thanks to two sprinklers and an endless supply of water pressurized by gravity. But all else seemed dead. And when darkness fell I found myself more often than before swinging in the netlike cradle of my hammock and gazing through vast distances at the ancient light of stars. Some of those stars, I knew, had already died out, nothing left but the speed of their bright leaving.

It is late August now. Last night I reached in the dark for the eider down and, half asleep, smiled when Gus jumped on the bed and spun himself into a ball between my legs. I’ve gotten used to sleeping alone, but I miss the sensation of a warm body beside me, the smell of Sharen’s hair, the rise and fall of her respiration, the eyelid flutters of her dreams. In a small way my dog reminds me of this. A warm weight alongside. Something dear on a cool morning. We each lie in the bed we make, and—for better or worse—I have either chosen this one or been consigned it. Who can say which? But should I die and my wish for cremation go unfulfilled, the coffin won’t seem so strange. I have slept alone and woken alone and spent over a hundred days alone at this cabin. I have felt small beneath the stars, large standing over a long line of black ants marching across a dusty road. With no one to talk to I’ve conversed with a spotted owl, calling it closer and closer to the cabin until it made a full circle around me in the dark. I’ve talked often to my dog and to my self, if only to know that I still had a voice. I’ve spoken to friends and family on the radio phone and in my dreams. I have listened to a wild river, watched it drop a good five feet from its spring high to its summer low. I have seen things birthed and seen things die, and through all of it I have, like the river, moved closer to the wide mouth of my ending, when I will join the confluence of every other thing that on this third planet from the sun has lived and died. Yes, I think I fear that ending a little less than I used to. When the time comes and if I’m conscious, perhaps that won’t be true at all. Maybe all the old dread will spill right back and carry me off in eddies.

Twelve years of Catholic school gave me a good education, and I’ll always be grateful that my parents provided me that, but however much the nuns, brothers, priests, and monsignors tried, I resisted the indoctrination. Like Thomas, I doubted and still doubt, and one root of my misgiving is the Christian notion of the afterlife. Believe in Jesus and you’ll have everlasting life. To me that sounds too much like a sales pitch, as indeed it is. The easiest way for a business to stay in business is to corner the market. Hence missionaries. Hence the Crusades. Hence the logo swinging at the ends of beads. Church as a social institution makes sense: neighbors gathering in good cheer to share a ritual; in essence, to share a meal, albeit one made of much hocus pocus. It’s the spiel I can’t swallow. Maybe in ten or twenty years—if I’m still walking this earth, still struggling to make sense of this and the million other mysteries—I’ll feel differently. Maybe in time I’ll come to find comfort in the repeated words, the statuary, the stained glass, the golden tabernacle the priest opens with his secret key. After all, resistance is a kind of attachment, isn’t it? Otherwise, there’s just a letting go. I cling to the teachings even as I slough them off. Still, I know I’ll never believe what the nuns and brothers and deacons and priests would have had me believe. I couldn’t stand a minute in an eternity without birds.

I’ve always admired the Transcendentalist notion of the Oversoul, a vast energy into which and out of which all living things take and give up shape. If matter can neither be created nor destroyed, it exists somehow and somewhere and sometime, and no matter is excluded. I like the thought of my matter mixing with the maggot’s and the blue whale’s, with the mendicant’s and the king’s. Most religions are, like country clubs, exclusive. And this is precisely why I don’t want to join one. Cormac McCarthy, in his violent novel Blood Meridian, writes that “every man is tabernacled in every other, and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.” Were this the universal scripture there might be hope of ending the cycles of war. And were we to change the word “man” to “living thing,” it might be a truer mission statement to try to live by. One problem is that it’s so easy to swat the fly, and somewhere in that endless complexity there’s the urge that would make a boy sight a rabbit at the end of a rifle. Or another man. Maybe I’m no closer to understanding any of this, these mysteries of solitude and loneliness, death and love.

This morning, for the first time, I caught a whiff of autumn. Woodsmoke seeping from my stove. Curled bark of madrone. Pine cones. Stacked logs. Apples. My time here will end in the season of endings, in the last colorful splash before the snows. In two weeks I’ll be making a brief trip back East, to northern New Jersey, to find an apartment close to the high school where I teach. Then I’ll return here and stay through mid-October. My sabbatical ends November 1st. I fear this next step. Forty and divorced and living in the suburbs. A lone human on the fringes of a vast metropolis. I fear I may be more lonely there, though I’ll have my students to keep me company and raise my spirits as they always do. I fear the noise, which alone might be enough to drive me mad. I fear the cars and pollution, the strip malls and $6.00 bridge tolls. Out here I have gotten used to not carrying a wallet or wearing a watch. I fear alarm clocks and schedules, landlords and bills. I have lived there before, in the mid-‘90s. I didn’t like it then. In the glow of New York City there are no stars. There are no hummingbirds, no pileated woodpeckers, no bears. I fear it will be an adjustment for Gus, too. So long unleashed, he will feel quite tethered to his new life, romping through huge meadows only in his leg-twitching dreams. These 95 acres surrounded by countless miles of federally protected wilderness will seem to both of us, then, like a heaven we knew once, a place to which, with any luck, we might one day return intrepid and together.

Maybe it was because I had the essay at the forefront of my mind this week that I had so much trouble with the following poem. Or maybe it’s the form: another terza rima. Whatever the case, I’ve been struggling with this one for about a week now. But I’ve put it to bed, and I’m happy with it:

Tilled Acres

When I see them—three boys crossing turned earth—
I fall in step as the brother I was
before the seasons squandered all their worth

through thirty calendars or more. Because
they would never let me, I slow their pace
to know, if I might, how time undoes

the smooth construction of a young boy’s face
or dims the burning at the rims of eyes.
And as the sun sinks low and barn swallows trace

figures in the air, something in me dies
to see the furrows of tilled acres fill
with shadows and a lone vulture’s clockwise

spiral count the seconds as they spill.
When I look again the field’s empty. Still.

Looking over this blog posting, I realize it’s been a busy and productive ten days out here. My trip to Bend energized me.

Leave me comments. Let me know what you think of all this.

And in case you’re wondering if I look like Grizzly Adams…

August 7 - 13th

2005-08-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

August 7, 2005

The bad headache that plagued me all day yesterday—the result, I think, of two nearly sleepless nights in a hotel and lots of driving—has finally gone away. I think I just needed a good night’s rest. Thankfully, the bears stayed away and so Gus didn’t wake me up with any barking. I think I’m so used to the quiet out here that when I stay in a hotel the sound of the air conditioner (a necessity) keeps me up. I never get a good night’s sleep in town.

It was dreadfully hot again (105) when I got back, but I survived. Cindy Thompsen called in the afternoon. I’d hoped to meet up with her and her siblings as they were passing through the area, but we didn’t plan well, and having already driven all the way back here and feeling lousy, I wasn’t up for making the drive out again. They didn’t seem keen on driving the rental car over the bad roads to visit me out here, and I don’t blame them. It’s just as well; I would have been a bad host as debilitated as I was by the whopping headache.

With a clearer head and cool morning breezes, I finished up this poem, a terza rima:

Pit Viper

It comes to me in the night through the grass
of dreams, a living ribbon curled to strike,
guarding some next strange and shifting trespass—

a thing I’ve done or haven’t but would like.
No rattle I recall, no sound at all,
no hissing invitation to its bite.

But a foot will fall where a foot will fall
and might will come what might. Thus the two-pronged
knife, the mind-gall, the choice, the wherewithal

sleep affords the sleeper when all along
he’s walked so blindly through his life. A prick
before I see it, like stepping on thorns,

and then the blooming at my feet, the quick,
the chill as if from an open window
in a familiar room, the steady tick

of seconds counted. And they do not slow.
I’m poisoned simply knowing what I know.

It’s going to be hot again, so we’re heading to the river for the afternoon, where I’ll spend some more time with Woody Guthrie in Joe Klein’s book.

The river was lovely, as usual. Cool, clean, green water and our nice sandy beach. Quite a few rafters floated by, and I tried to find out more about the fire downriver. Last night, listening in on the party line, I was able to gather that the fire exploded over the last couple of days. The folks at Marial Lodge sounded worried. There was talk of back-burning, evacuation plans, and closing down the river to rafters. Some of today’s folks said they heard the river might be closed to rafting as early as tomorrow. I tried to check the Forestry Department web page about the fire while in town yesterday, but the page hadn’t been updated since July 29th. The fire’s been burning now for about 15 days. I’m going to keep trying to listen in and gather whatever info I can, and I’ll call the fire dispatcher tomorrow to get the scoop from there. I wish I could just call down to Marial Lodge, but the way this radio phone works you can’t call anyone else on the party line. I don’t know what will happen if I have to evacuate. Will I just head home? I can’t afford to stay in a hotel for any extended length of time. But I doubt it’ll come to that.

I called Sharen tonight to hear how the Newport Folk Festival was, and she was sitting on Newport Beach with the Subins. They’d just eaten at Flo’s Clamshack. I was most envious.

August 8, 2005

Last night I was all set to get in bed and read, and then I took Gus out for a pee and saw the stars! There was no moon, and they were thick, the Milky Way all nebulous and beautiful, so I decided to brave the mosquitoes and lie in the hammock for a while and watch for meteors. No sooner had I settled in than a huge one shot across the sky. Then another. Then another. In the half-hour or so that I lay there I saw five, all of them leaving long, fleeting trails. It was magical. And I don’t think I got a single mosquito bite. This may become a nightly routine. I got this poem out of it:

Meteors in a Remote Place

Here night is night; there is no man-made light
but for satellites which like runaway
stars could pass for planes in the Milky Way’s
otherwise unchanged arrangement. Tonight,
wrapped in the hammock on the open deck,
I brave mosquitoes for the meteors’
white-blue-orange trails that flash across
the northeastern sky and just as quickly
extinguish. Hard to think they’re just debris—
space dust, pebbles, peas—down here where crickets
sing, a mule deer chomps at the apple tree,
and my dog romps in his sleep beneath me.
As small as we all are, I, too, should shut
my eyes and let the black close over me.

Well, I called the fire dispatcher, who took down my information and said someone would be calling me. I also contacted Bradley to see if he had any news on the fire from the Internet. He said the fire is 20% contained and has burned about 2,100 acres, and that the ODF has been doing all it can to get a handle on it. He asked if I’d seen any smoke in the canyon, and I said no, and it turns out I spoke too soon. Late this afternoon the wind shifted and now the whole place is thick with smoke. I can hardly see Rattlesnake Ridge. The smoke’s irritating my eyes and my lungs, but my hope is that, like the last time it got smoky, the wind will shift again and clear it out. I just got a call back from the person the fire dispatcher contacted. He took down my coordinates and said he’d have someone on the firefighting team call me tonight. It’s good that I’m letting people know I’m out here just in case.

August 9, 2005

When I got up around 7:00 the smoke had dispersed quite a bit. There’s still a smoky haze in front of Rattlesnake Ridge and down over the river, but the air is a bit more breathable. The guy from the firefighting team called me last night, and gave me the scoop. He said the fire’s three miles from me, and that if it started to head my way he’d call. He sounded confident that it won’t, and said the smoke I was seeing was likely from the back-burning they did yesterday.

This morning I wrote and recorded a song for my good friend Jim Dowling. Jim’s got a fatal cancer, and doesn’t have long to live, a dreadful and sad fact we talk about pretty candidly. He and I have been friends for about fifteen years and have had many good times together. The song is a carpe diem (seize the day) sort of song as well as a tribute to our friendship. Hang in there, pal!
Gone for Good

The wind kicked up again in the afternoon, and the smoke came pouring back into the canyon, irritating my eyes and my throat. I tried closing the windows of the cabin, but the place got too hot. It’s hard to capture it in a photograph, so below I have an older shot of Rattlesnake Ridge on a clear day and then a shot from yesterday afternoon to try to give a sense of how smoky it is:

I’m looking forward to getting out of here for the weekend and going to a place where I can breathe!

August 10, 2005

Well, with the smoke working its way into the cabin, my clothes, my hair, my eyes, it seemed only apt that it work its way into a poem, too:

The Dry Season

A fire, sparked by lightning, has invaded
this green wilderness, clouded all vision.
My eyes sting for a thing I haven’t done.
Although I cannot see the charred acres

from here, I imagine the refugees—
mammals and birds and reptiles and insects,
a menagerie not unlike the ark’s.
But what of those creatures too slow to flee—

the beetles and snails, for example?
They’ll be the casualties of God’s wild whim,
like the ones last time round who couldn’t swim.
Mere miles away trees burn like temples

and orange teeth march in a crooked line.
Through tiny eyes gaze down on either scene’s
aftermath—a ship upon a mountain,
a bear clinging to the top of a pine.

August 12, 2005

I got a call on Wednesday from a reporter for the Bend newspaper, who’s doing a story about me for Saturday’s edition in advance of my reading there on Sunday. I’m guessing this is Judy’s doing. It was a pleasant surprise, and I’ll be curious to see what he writes. He’d seen the blog already, and so had a pretty good idea of what I’m doing with my residency. At one point he asked if it’s helped having my dog here. Apparently he noticed my huge attachment to Guster. Anyway, I hope the article drums up a good audience for the reading.

I also got a call from Bradley last night, and he said the fire blew up a bit on Thursday. Starting tomorrow the river will be closed to rafters and the river trail closed to hikers. The fire’s now burned about 3,700 acres (I think that was the figure he gave me), but he said it would have to cross creeks and a road to get here, and that the firefighters will have set up significant lines along the road going to Marial. So it’s unlikely I’ll have to evacuate.

We spent yesterday afternoon down at the river, where at one point I looked up and saw a bear on the other side. This is probably one I haven’t seen previously. I watched him for a while and Gus didn’t catch a whiff of him and so was oblivious. But then it looked as if the bear might climb into the river upstream of me, and I was afraid he’d cross right to us, so I gave a shout. That set Gus off. He went bolting upstream and yelping wildly. Then I was afraid he’d try to cross the river to get at the bear, but he didn’t. The bear finally ambled off and Gus returned to the beach and curled up in the shade of the umbrella.

There was a nice crescent moon rising last night, and the sky above the forest looked kind of purplish-blue. Not sure the photo does it justice, but here it is:

I finished the Woody Guthrie book last night, and had a hard time reading through the tears it brought on at the end. Poor Woody never had a chance against the Huntington’s chorea passed down by his mother, and he suffered a lot at the end. Joe Klein did a great job of bringing Woody to life, and he looms large in my mind now as an important American, like Walt Whitman. It was touching to read about Bob Dylan seeking out Woody at the hospital and playing for him. Woody called him “the kid.”

Now I’m reading Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which Neil left here for me. I’m liking it so far. Holly Golightly reminds me so much of Lori Brum, Sharen’s friend and neighbor when she was growing up.

Finished a couple more new poems. I’m not sure where this first one came from; maybe I’m feeling regrets about the way my life has turned out; maybe reading about Woody’s slew of kids dredged this one up.

Childless in a World of Children

Here comes the moon moving like a lantern
through the trees, and on the canyon’s far side
a pulled shade. Out of all the taciturn
evenings there are these somehow dignified

silent times through which the unborn voices
climb like half-remembered songs I would sing
in small rooms. I am doomed by the choices
I have made. My knees swing lighter lacking

riders, my shoulders slouch beneath the weight
of what they have not carried. My story’s
devoid of characters, and it’s too late
to revise. The moon’s my repertory

now. I watch it, however much dismayed,
playing the same scene it has always played—
a hermit walking home through a dark glade.
I am doomed by the choices I have made.

This next one was inspired by the sorry-looking apples I picked yesterday. Though they look unsightly, they’re actually pretty delicious. I tried to play around in this poem with a strange predominant meter: trochaic tetrameter catalectic. In layman’s terms trochaic means that there’s a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Tetrameter means that there are four feet. Catalectic means that the final foot is incomplete (just the stressed syllable; the unstressed is left out). This structure works (for the most part) through each of the three longer lines that start each stanza. The short concluding line of each stanza uses a three-syllable line, usually an unstressed followed by two stressed syllables. Why this structure? Well, trochaic rhythms, unlike iambic rhythms, are a bit unsettling, and so they seemed to match the imagery and tone of the poem. Maybe it’s all too technical for the poem’s own good, but I think it works. I say “for the most part” above, because at times I vary the pattern a bit. For example, in the first line the word “Cancerous” should be pronounced as a two-syllable word—“Can-srus” rather than “Can-ser-us”—to achieve the desired effect. Of course, you can read it as a three-syllable word, too, and it’s simply a slight variation of the meter. If you were to scan line 7 you might find the meter a bit mucky in the second foot. Same with the first few feet of line 10. But it doesn’t really matter. My feeling about meter is that a little variation is to be desired. Now that I’ve said all this, I’ve probably spoiled the poem for you, as you’ll be counting as you go. Forget everything I said, and just read it.

Summer Apples

Cancerous danglers, homes for worms.
Some of them afflicted down
their embarrassed longitudes
with gray scars.

Others fallen, already
softened, sweet and crawling all
over with so many bees
and black flies.

But the ones I keep in bowls—
conspicuously flawed, these
sad and spotted bodies—call
to mind now

relatives of mine long dead:
faces powered, rouged and veined;
houses left empty and fruit
still set out.

“Where do they go?” I asked once
of my sister. We were slicing up
granpa’s apples, crosswise, for
their brown stars.

And before they dried where we’d lined
them on windowsills, I knew.
Some of them held seeds and that’s
how trees grew.

A bear was in the blackberries again this morning. I didn’t see the cub, but it looked a lot like mama bear. Maybe the cub was off apace also munching away. I don’t know how the bears can stand to walk through the thorns of those bushes. I slice up my fingers just picking a few berries.

The reporter from the Bend paper called again this afternoon to ask if he could use an excerpt from my poem “One Day in July” in his article. Of course I said yes. I’m glad he chose that poem. It’s one of my favorites of all the poems I’ve written out here. He said he’s including a photo of me, too, the black-and-white one that’s on the web. It’s ten years old, but whatever! It’s fun to get some press.

August 13th, 2005

The drive up to Bend was beautifully scenic, snaking along the Umpqua River and up into the Oregon High Desert. Judy and Phil have a lovely home, and they're the nicest people! Bend is a funky little town. I could live here! I saw the article on me in The Bulletin (including a huge photo of me and an excerpt from "One Day in July"), but I haven't read the article yet. Judy and Phil dropped me in town here for WiFi and a taste of the place while they doggy sit Guster.

I'm glad to be here.

Had a nice dinner with Judy and Phil, spicy porkchops, potato salad, and some of the tomatoes from my garden I'd brought as a little present, the latter done up with basil and balsamic vinegar. Good coffee and a tasty orangey dessert, too. It was nice not to eat alone, especially joined by easygoing, smart, engaging people. Good action!

It's late, and I had a long day. Signing off.

2005-08-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

August 4th

2005-08-05T15:22:00.000-07:00

NOTE: The domain name of the site I use to host my pictures expired, and so that's why the photos weren't loading. I renewed today (Aug 5) and they said it takes 24-48 hours to get things working again. Thanks for being patient. Pictures should be back by Monday.

Gus and I took a drive out to the coast today along Rt. 199 from Grants Pass to Crescent City, California, a scenic ride especially near the end where we passed through gorgeous redwood forests. It was foggy and cool on the coast, a welcome change from Grants Pass, which is sunny and close to 100 degrees. We wound up at a neat lighthouse, but it was closed because the tide was coming in, blocking the path to get to it. But Guster got to have his first swim in the ocean. He wasn't sure what to make of salt water. He took one drink and sort of looked at me as if to say, "What the heck is this?" Then he went romping in the waves and seaweed.

Here's the lighthouse:

Here's Gus swimming

He's me standing beside one of the gargantuan redwoods:

July 29 - August 4

2005-08-04T12:16:00.000-07:00

July 29, 2005

I happened to turn on NPR this evening, and on “All Things Considered” they featured Stanley Kunitz, who turned 100 today, reading one of his poems. I was quite moved hearing his ancient voice read his poem “The Long Boat.” It was one of those magical moments of serendipity, and I sat there afterward wondering what made me switch on the radio when I care so little lately about the news of the world. Maybe I wanted to catch the weather report or hear some update on the wildfires, but I like to think there’s something more to it. Hearing Kunitz read, I remembered the time a few years back when I attended a reading of his at a tiny church during The Dodge Poetry Festival. I was late in arriving and the only seat left was directly in front of him. I could have reached out and touched his green wool sport coat, which I found myself imagining would fit me. Then I had the fantasy that he was my grandfather and that when he died I’d inherit that coat. He was in his mid-90s then, and still traveling around doing readings. Now he’s 100, and today he was to spend the day at his house in Provincetown with family and friends celebrating. Here’s a poem I wrote for him:

The Salt Marsh

—for Stanley Kunitz,
on his 100th birthday, July 29th, 2005

Beyond his garden
and down the long path
above which herring gulls
toss like angels
and through the tall
spartina and beach
plums, he sees what
for a hundred years
he’s come to see:
evening setting the water
aflame; a hermit crab
waving its one good arm;
a cormorant diving
and surfacing and diving
again; a rowboat waiting
as if for its ferryman;
and the moon, like a coin,
on the horizon.

July 30, 2005

A giant salmon was swimming around in my thoughts this morning, so while it was still cool we packed a bag and took a walk down Lang Cook Trail to the creek. The trail was much improved after my Roundup treatment on the poison oak, though there’s still that big fir tree across the trail. But we weren’t to be deterred. I lifted Gus onto the huge trunk of the fallen tree and he jumped down onto the other side. On the cliffs above the creek mouth, I peered down and, sure enough, there was Mr. Chinook, all 20 or 25 pounds of him swaying around. But I was foiled by the damned rafters. As I was tying on a big, gaudy, orange fly, rafters floated by. Then before I could make my first cast I saw a fishing line fly. And there was the dumb rafter standing two feet above the pool and chucking a huge spinner around. I don’t know if he saw me up above him, but I know his cohorts on the other raft did. I felt like trying to hook him with my fly, but I didn’t. I let him finish scaring away the fish, then I went into a shady overhang of rock and ate my lunch, shad salad in a wrap and a plum, and waited for the salmon to think the coast was clear. When I went back to fish, I couldn’t see him at first. I surprised myself with some nice casting, working the fly along the shady water. Then I could see him swishing around. I threw the fly down about sixty times, letting it drift, jigging it. No luck. But I’ll try again some other time.

I thought all the wildflowers had been obliterated by the hot summer days, but on the river trail making our way to the beach, and I encountered this beauty. Again, my wildflower guide fails me. Looks like an orchid to me:

Having been out here a while, I sometimes forget the majestic beauty of the canyon. Today the view was crisp and clear, and I shot this Rogue vista:

Mama bear and cub have been regular visitors to the homestead driving Gus (and hence me) a bit crazy. As soon as Gus gets a whiff of them or hears them on the property, he runs around the cabin barking incessantly, getting himself just as worked up as he used to do with the chicken. When we’re outside and he catches wind of them, he runs right to them and tries to scare them off. And when he finally comes back, he’s covered with burrs and I have to spend the next half-hour combing them out, a painful process for both of us.

Here’s a shot of Mama bear from last night:

Even as I type this, she and the cub are out feasting in the blackberry patch behind the woodshed. Gus is presently doing a time-out in his crate. I’ve also added a drop of Rescue Remedy to his water to help calm him down. As much as I hate to do it, I’ve instituted a part-time leash rule. If while in the cabin Gus gives any indication of bear-agitation, I keep him inside and take him out on the leash to do his business. I’ve never seen him bark so much as he has in the last few weeks here. When I first got him, he almost never barked. Apparently he doesn’t like black bears, which is too bad, because I kind of like having them around.

July 31, 2005

Last day of July, and I’m glad the month’s over! I hope August brings with it rain and clouds and happier days. I never thought I’d get sick of sunny weather, but enough’s enough. I need a change of pace. It was another day around 105. Right now, though, at 10:43 pm, there’s a nice cool breeze coming through, and I think it’ll drop into the low 50s overnight. Maybe this is the beginning of a cooling trend.

I’m sick of being alone, and I’m looking forward to my reading in Bend in two weeks. It’ll be nice to be among the literati there.

I wrote this poem this morning.

The Lion’s Share

He wakes with dusky colors in his eyes,
tuned to shadows, warm in a bed of ferns.
A yawn erupts from where his hunger burns
without fuel. Soon he and the moon will rise

together to the task predictable
as sex or weather. Meanwhile the meadow
closes slowly around a grazing doe,
a spotted fawn. It’s just as possible

they’ll be gone by the time he’s near enough
to sense them; chance, as ever, left to chance.
In a house nearby a similar dance:
wild eyes of the weak; hands, teeth of the rough;

a human drama with its human laws.
I bring you back to the meadow to feel
the savage beast’s savage strength and the squeal
of something warm struggling in its claws.

Tonight I tallied up my output since I’ve been here:

I’ve written 29 poems so far. None of those has been accepted yet, but not many submissions have come back. The poetry world moves at a slow pace. I’m confident that a good number of those poems will be published in magazines and journals, and I hope that most of them will fit into a new collection, which I haven’t even started to think about organizing. I did receive an acceptance last Thursday, from Crab Orchard Review. A poem entitled “These Last Ten Years.” I’m excited about that. Crab Orchard’s a nice journal, and my friend Peter had some poems accepted for the same issue.

I’ve made 30 new crossword puzzles here, and only one of them has been accepted so far. That’s a bad average, considering that the responses come back quickly from newspapers (except for The New York Times). But I’m learning a lot about the business. It’s all about a good theme!

I’ve written two short stories, one of which has come back rejected from The Atlantic Monthly and North American Review. The other story I haven’t sent out yet. A third story stalled at about 20 pages. And a fourth story, which I’d hoped would shape up as a novel, stalled at 42 pages. I seem to have lost all confidence as a fiction writer. :-(

I probably should have produced a lot more in three and a half months, but at least I’ve written something. And, as my faithful followers know, I’ve written many, many words in this blog. I’m hoping to find a way to print the blog when it’s all done, and leave a copy here at the cabin. It’s a tradition here that the resident writer keep a journal. I’ve spent quite a few hours reading through the hand-written entries of former residents. I don’t want to submit future residents to the torture of trying to decipher my handwriting, and there’s no way I’d rewrite everything just so it’s in the “official journal.” So, I’ll find some way to print the blog, maybe bind it even, and leave a copy here.

Mama Bear and cub were back again this evening, getting Gus all riled up. They’re making the rounds of the blackberries. I went out and picked a large yogurt tub full before they eat them all. My plan is to make a cobbler or some kind of pastry with them.

My garden’s giving me tomatoes now. I’ve eaten several and today I sliced up a few Romas and put them in the dryer. Yes, I’m making my own sun-dried tomatoes. If they dry nicely, I’ll pack them in olive oil in canning jars and take some home with me. It would be cool to preserve some of the bounty of this place and over the long winter back in New Jersey remember my time here. I’ve got a good supply of bay leaves, mint tea, and chamomile tea already. I’ll can other stuff when it’s cooler.

August 2, 2005

The heat wave finally broke! Yesterday and today the weather was just right; it never got hotter than 85 degrees and there was a nice breeze. The cooler temps raised my spirits, but I’m still feeling a bit bored and lonely. Cabin fever. Solitude blues. I’ve been thinking that maybe we should take a drive to the coast. I’m so close to it that it seems silly not to go see the Pacific, even if it’s too cold to swim in it. Maybe we’ll go to Brookings on Thursday and spend the night and then return via Grants Pass to get mail and groceries.

I finished the novel Midwives today, and boy was it a page-turner. It has such a cinematic structure that I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into a movie yet. I’m sending it to my sister, who, if she wasn’t busy raising three kids, would probably be a midwife. I know she’ll like it.

Last night I watched some of the new Paste DVD, and there was a great short movie entitled “The Great Cheesesteak Debate,” a documentary set in Philly that consisted of countless people making claims about which cheesesteak place is the best in the city. Some of these places operate right across the street from one another, and they all do a booming business. Even at two o’clock in the morning, the line goes down the street. The movie was a riot, but by the time it was over I was dying for a cheesesteak! So today I defrosted a sirloin I had in the freezer, and for dinner I sliced it thin, cooked it in a frying pan, melted some American cheese on it and slid the greasy pile into a nice seeded baguette slathered with mayonnaise (healthy heart be damned). Man, was it good!

August 3, 2005

Last night, for the second night in a row, I had a hard time falling asleep and, gazing up through the skylight at the stars, saw a long, bright, orange-white meteor flash past. The strange thing about these two sightings is that I’ve been wanting to go out and watch for shooting stars, but the mosquitoes and bears have made me reluctant to go lie out in the field, where I’d have the best view. I could watch from my deck, but it faces east. I think the best place to see shooters is in the north. I wonder if these shooters I’ve seen through the skylight are bits from the Perseids. I need to check the date on that occurrence, for which I’ll most definitely don the long sleeves, long pants, and mosquito repellant and take to the field with my pal Gus.

It’s taken me a few days to work this one out, but I think it’s done now:

Transit

Around the world on trains and buses
fuses

real or imagined wait to spark this
darkness

to a brief flash at the speed of an idea.
I hear

what comes before as much as after:
laughter,

cameras clicking, a girl snapping gum,
some

young men discussing football scores,
doors

sighing open or closed, a cell phone’s
tones

playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.”
Not a

single seat unoccupied. And maybe
a baby

has started crying and the soothing word
heard

is Arabic or French. Now some other
mother

offers a piece of advice. Streets outside
slide

by like a movie. Even in the bright
light

of day, for every rider the vast, black
back-

of-the-mind reminder that nothing’s hum-
drum

now. But still, O God, we climb aboard,
we climb aboard.

Steve Edwards, a DHIT alum, emailed a request to take a photo of the bench up at the pond, which he built during his stay here. Apparently his mom didn’t believe he was capable of such handiwork. I warned him that now, four years later, the bench is in a state of disrepair, but I assured him it’s still sturdy enough to sit on, which I do every time I go up there. Here it is:

On the walk back from photographing the bench, I found this dead cicada. I had a really great ending to a poem about cicadas in my head, but by the time I’d walked back to the cabin, I’d plumb forgotten it.

While I was eating lunch today a hummer landed on the chair out on the deck. Scarce as they’re becoming as the summer plods on, I couldn’t resist:

Once again, Mama Bear and cub were back for their evening plunder of the blackberries. This time I got a nice look at the cub, who scrambled about thirty feet up into a tree. The cub’s not much bigger than Gus, and is probably only seven or eight months old (I read somewhere that black bears usually give birth around January).

We spent the afternoon at our beach, where I started reading Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie lent to me by my brother Michael. I’m loving it.

The heat has returned. High 90s when we got back from the river. Tomorrow we might take a drive to the Pacific.

August 4, 2005

Here's a shot of the wildfire burning downriver from me. I took it on the road this morning:

July 23 -28

2005-07-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

July 23, 2005

After a night in town cooling off in a hotel with AC and a pool, I’m back at the cabin, where it’s warm and the mosquitoes are feasting on my legs and feet. On the drive back from Grants Pass, about two miles from the Dutch Henry road, I saw a fire burning and got a bit worried. It seemed awfully close to the homestead. While unloading my groceries I saw a helicopter fly down the river canyon, a big balloon hung below it. I called the fire dispatcher in Grants Pass and she said that there was a fire burning but that they had it under control. Just in case, I gave her my latitude/longitude coordinates and the radio phone number. Then I called Dave Reed, a retired BLM officer and long-time friend of the Brothers and Margery. He said he hadn’t heard about the fire but that he’d look into it. He called back later to say the fire was down near Marial Lodge, on both sides of the river. Marial Lodge is about five miles west of here. The firefighters have been dumping water on the fire since yesterday. All afternoon and evening (I can hear one right now) planes have been flying over, too. I plan to leave the phone on all night just in case the fire spreads and I need to be evacuated. Pretty scary, especially with the forest as dry as it is.

While in town on the WiFi, I started researching my relocation back East, scanning Craig’s List for apartments and looking into a flight in September, and the whole thing threw me into a deep funk. The prospect of apartment life feels a bit like awaiting sentencing at Sing-Sing. It occurred to me I probably won’t even be able to grill! At my house in Fo’Mo’, I grilled year-round, even in two feet of snow. And neighbors. I’ll have neighbors. Probably right on the other side of my bedroom wall. So, of course, I started second-guessing this decision to live close to school. Maybe another house up in Orange county is the answer. I don’t know. In any case, I can’t buy a house in three days, so I’ll be living in an apartment to start. Maybe I’ll spend the winter in an apartment and start house hunting in the spring. The thought of that life makes me appreciate this place a bit more.

My puzzle came out in yesterday’s USA Today! That was fun. I gave a copy to Angela at the coffee shop, and one to a guy named Rick I chat with sometimes at Dutch Brothers. I’m mailing one off to Neil Curry, too. Sharen, visiting her folks at the Ohio lake house, was text messaging me for help on it. She said she saw a woman at the airport reading the paper, and there was my puzzle staring her in the face. It’s neat to think that people all over the world were doing my crossword—a far bigger audience (and better pay) than any poem of mine will ever receive.

Judy Montgomery, whose chapbook I published in 1999, called me yesterday to work out details for my mid-August reading in Bend. Gus and I will be staying with Judy and her husband Phil for two nights. She’s got a fenced yard, where Gus can run around. I’m excited to finally meet her. She’s one of the nicest people I know in the poetry world. Bend is supposed to be a fun town, too. I’m looking forward to reading some poems from my book and some of the new stuff I’ve written out here. It’ll be the first time anyone’s heard the latter.

I’ve been running the sprinklers all day out in the garden, trying to keep everything green and growing. Despite the ever-encroaching weeds, the garden is looking great. Nice-sized squash and zucchini are ready to pick. I’ve got a few small eggplants. I harvested my first tomato today. My various salad greens are all thriving. And the strawberry patch is still producing berries. I’m going to pick my first bulb of garlic tomorrow.

I received e-mail replies from John Daniel and Emma Brown (next year’s resident). John says he’s going to come out when Emma visits the weekend of August 19th. That should be a fun time, what with the Brothers being there, too. Lots of personalities. Emma wrote asking about the solitude and loneliness. Reading my blog, it occurred to her that she, too, will be out here for six months essentially all alone. I’m going to give her all the tips I can on everything from gardening to making fires to coping with the loneliness. She recommended I read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and there’s a copy at the cabin. It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read and just haven’t gotten around to. Anyway, I hope it’s as good as she says. I look forward to meeting Emma later in August.

July 24, 2005

I finished Blood Meridian and highly recommend it to anyone who can stand the violence. It’s a superb read, McCarthy at his best. I’m just about finished reading Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, a copy of which Lang left here twelve years ago. It has indeed helped bring me out of my funk, especially with regard to my writing out here, my solitude, my desire for companionship, my future. Rilke was so full of wisdom, especially for a man of 27. I think this is one I’ll keep coming back to during my remaining months here.

Aside from reading, the only productive thing I did here today was to create two more crosswords. I’m completely hooked. Lately I’ve been beefing up my database of clues and words, which makes the construction of puzzles a whole lot easier. I’ve come closer to figuring out the full potential of Crossword Compiler, the handy program I purchased to assist me in making puzzles.

The weather is much improved. In the 50’s this morning when I got up at 6:00. I made a small fire in the woodstove even. The highest I saw the mercury today was 92. By dinner it was 76. Much more to my liking.

The ticks seem to have disappeared. Haven’t seen one on Gus or on me for a few weeks now. The bane now is the burrs, which are worse than ever with the grasses having all dried up. Every time Gus goes outside, he picks up a new assortment of them. His “soft-coated” hair doesn’t stand a chance! And he so dislikes me brushing them out. Sorry, pal.

The daisies are gone, along with all the other wildflowers, except for a few Brodiaea in shady spots. The hot days have turned everything brown. One upside to this is that I won’t need to mow nearly as often. But I’d rather look at flowers. They were so abundant and varied in the spring.

I’m looking forward to chanterelle mushrooms in the fall!

July 27, 2005
I haven’t written in the blog for a couple of days because the heat’s been so bad I hate to turn on the laptop. It only adds more heat to my lap! The helicopters have continued to battle the fire downriver and today, while hanging out at my beach, I smelled smoke and looked up to see the whole river canyon filled with smoke. I got a bit worried, packed up my stuff, and made the steep and hot walk back up to the cabin, only to find that the smoke was up there, too. I put a call in to Bradley, who’d said he’d try to monitor the fire on the Internet, but he said he hadn’t found much. He assured me it was probably just a wind-shift and that if there was trouble the fire dispatcher, with whom I left my number, would call. I’m not so sure about all that. In any case, I’m going into town tomorrow to get Gus some shots at the vet and to buy plane tickets for my trip back East in September. I need to arrange to board Gus, too. I’m looking forward to the hotel pool and the air conditioner, too. After the couple days of pleasant weather, it’s turned hellish again. The mercury in the big thermometer outside my kitchen window read 108 today!

I’ve been reading a lot—the only activity I can sustain for any length of time. I read Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love in about two days. It was a real page-turner. I’m sending it to my mom. Now I’m reading Midwives.

Can’t wait for the fall and the cooler weather. I know, I’m sounding like a broken record. But what else is there to talk about?

July 28, 2005

I just listened to the news and picked up some info on the fire. It’s about 200 acres in size and not yet contained. There’s very little smoke in the canyon this morning, because the wind has died down. While I’m in town today I hope to make some calls and get an evacuation plan in place, just in case.

July 16 - 22

2005-07-22T12:24:00.000-07:00

July 16, 2005

Bradley arrived late yesterday afternoon looking tan and healthy, but tired from the traffic on I-5. He said it was a nightmare getting out of Portland. His stress seemed to fade quickly, though, as he took in the sights and sounds of old Dutch Henry Homestead, a place he’s known his whole life. I showed him around the garden, where he was surprised that the apple trees were bearing very little fruit compared to previous years. Maybe the dry winter?

We had a nice dinner at the upper house—chicken kabobs I’d been marinating all day, along with a shepherd’s salad I made with fresh cucumber from the garden and corn and tomatoes and red onion. Bradley brought with him a bunch of shad he caught and had canned. Mixed up like tuna salad, it makes a great appetizer dip. We ate lots of that, too. Then it was cribbage and Cubanos. When Gus and I left around midnight, Bradley was up 2 to 1 and gloating a bit.

He put me to work this morning, the two of us splitting a big pile of logs by the upper house, with more in store for tomorrow. I like chopping wood, working wedge and axe and maul. It’s meditative and satisfying. But I was feeling it in my back and shoulders. Recently I tweaked that little muscle between the shoulder blades. Did it wheeling a too-heavy wheelbarrow. And every now and then it sings, off-key.

Bradley dug up a hammock for me and set it up on my deck, so I can recline and swing out there in the breeze and survive these hot days of summer. Here he is trying it out:

After a break for lunch, we packed up some knapsacks and Bradley grabbed his fly rod, and we made a bushwhack along a trail Lang cleared last year down to one of the creeks. Bradley was hoping some Chinook salmon might be milling about in the mouth of the creek where it dumps into the Rogue. Most of the trail was a good, easy walk along a gentle slope. But the poison oak was very bad. Gus got covered with it, and I fear that we did, too. We were almost to the creek when we encountered a huge fallen fir blocking the trail. Every other fallen tree had been cleared last year by Bradley’s friend and his giant chainsaw. This was a new fall. We couldn’t figure out how to get Gus over it. There was no going down and around the tree, because it was a steep slope there. And to go up and around meant a bushwhack through lots more poison oak. Finally, I just heaved Gus over the giant trunk of the fir. It was either that or turn back. He landed on all four feet and was fine. Then we were at the creek. Sure enough, we could see a big salmon in the shadows near the rocks at the mouth. Bradley let loose with the fly rod, making some expert casts (against a strong wind). I was most impressed.

The orange fly zipped through the mouth again and again, but the salmon didn’t go for it, and we didn’t see it again. Meanwhile, I took Gus down to the creek and got him to swim a bit in the hope of washing off some of the poison oak oils. I rinsed my own hands, too.

It was about 100 degrees by the time we set off up the river trail toward the swimming hole. There we set up my stashed umbrella and chair and went for a dip. Bradley didn’t bring trunks, so he swam bare-ass, scaring all the rafters, who must have thought he was some wild man raised by the bears. And in a way he is.

For dinner it was more of the shad and one of Bradley’s regular dishes: delicious marinated pork ribs done up on the grill, along with spuds and onions and cheese. And this time he made cabbage with bacon. Dessert was some Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia which I’d driven back from Grants Pass on ice. Very good action indeed. Back at the cribbage, I gave him a drubbing, winning four games straight and bringing this series to 5 games to 2. “I know you’re going to brag about this on the blog,” he said. Now I have.

July 17, 2005

More chopping this morning. When all was said and done, we’d split about a cord and half, maybe two, some of the rounds tough with knots. Good, hard work. Then it started to get real hot. Bradley said he wanted to shove off around 1:00 or 1:30, so I invited him to have lunch before he left. I made shad melts (like a tuna melt, but with a can of Bradley’s shad). I bought five cans for my own consumption. By the time he left, the temperature was 106! Here’s a picture to prove it:

Needless to say, I’ve had several cold showers and even swam in the pond, where out in the middle it was nice and cool. Gus enjoyed that, too. I’m hoping it cools down tonight. This afternoon I woke from a nap with a sheen of sweat on my forehead. Can’t stand that. If it’s too hot tonight, I may even sleep at the upper house, where it seems to have better cross-ventilation. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m not at all looking forward to these 100+-degree days. There’s very little humidity, but hot is hot no matter how you slice it. And it doesn’t agree with me, Portuguese blood and all.

Bradley and I were discussing my prospects for the fall—how to get the full extent of my stay here (when the fishing will be at its best) and find an apartment in New Jersey. His feeling is that I should take a Jet Blue flight to New York in early or mid-September, leaving Gus in a kennel for a few days in Grants Pass. I could find an apartment, then come back and stay till around October 20th. Then take a week to drive back and have a few days to move my stuff in the apartment. I could prepare for school while I’m still here, putting lessons together for the first few weeks of my return. I think it sounds like a good plan, though I hate the thought of leaving Gus in a kennel. But I’m sure he’d be fine. Hell, he might even like being around all the dogs and people. The place where I got him groomed is also a kennel, and the folks there seem nice. If I don’t do this plan, I’m looking at leaving here much earlier and then having to stay in hotels with my car loaded up with stuff and with Gus while I search for an apartment. I think if I line an apartment up in advance, I’ll have greater peace of mind when I leave here. More on this later.

Man, it’s hot.

July 18, 2005

As feared, it was a hot night. When I checked the mercury at about ten o’clock it was still in the high eighties, and warmer inside the cabin. The bedroom was a little cooler, but too hot for my comfort. At midnight, by kerosene lamplight, I had my sixth cool shower of the day. With my skin still chilled from the shower, I finally drifted off with just a sheet over me. I just got up, 7:00 AM, and it’s already 65. I fear it’s going to be another day like yesterday, maybe worse. I plan to take Gus down to the river, despite the hot hike we’ll have to make back up. Our beach seems the only solution to the heat.

The poison oak showed up on my right wrist, a bubbly line of it—snuck under my sleeve, I guess.

This afternoon we spent five hours down at the river. I planted my chair and umbrella right by the shore so I could dip my feet. I read a bunch of chapters in Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy’s gory but great novel. I almost dropped from heatstroke on the walk back up. The mercury, when I finally made it back, read 105. And it was probably hotter than that in the cabin. I spent the evening out in the hammock hoping for a breeze, and I just watched a DVD, Novocaine, a Steve Martin movie Jim sent me. But my laptop feels as if it’s overheating, like me. I don’t know how much more of this heat I can take. It’s making me a bit crazy and grumpy.

July 19, 2005

Hell in paradise: another hot day. I remember back in April and May cursing the cold and rain and wishing for hot summer. Now I’d sell my soul for one of those rainy, misty, cool days. We humans are chronic malcontents. The morning was bearable, and I hung around till about noon starting work on a new poem, watering the garden, and creating a new crossword. By lunchtime it was almost 100 again, and so we packed up and went back down to our beach. More chapters in Blood Meridian, more swimming in the cool, green river. After a couple of hours there Gus suddenly went bounding up the path barking up a storm. I could hear him beyond the river trail, up on the slope yammering away. I knew right away he’d gone chasing after Mr. Bear. So I slipped on my old sandals and shirt and hiked on up to investigate. There he was, about ten feet from a huge bear, barking as if he was a match for 300 pounds of muscle and fat and 6-inch claws. Mr. Bear seemed entirely unperturbed, swinging his monstrous head back to whatever it was he was grubbing for. I called and called and then made as if I was hiking back home, and then Gussie came. But all our stuff was still at the beach, so I turned around and headed back down the beach trail. Of course, Gus went back to the bear. I walked back to my umbrella, calling him the whole time. And before I had my shirt off here came my boy, covered with a whole new assortment of burrs, splashing into the river. I can say one thing: he’s a fearless terrier. We cooled off once more and then packed up and sweated up the steep hill homeward. Back at the cabin, I was hungry, but it was too hot to get motivated to fire up the grill for my marinating chicken breasts. So I had a salad instead, along with some of the leftovers from the meal Bradley made. Then I got Gussie up on the grooming table for some serious de-burring. He wasn’t a happy camper. The heat has me going to bed earlier and earlier. There seems to be no point in staying up. There are too many mosquitoes to sit out on the deck and look at stars, and it’s too hot to sit in the den. So here I am, in bed, where I’ll read till I drift off into dreams of air conditioning and rain, snow and ice and clouds.

July 20, 2005

I was having my coffee this morning when I heard a big whump against the window in the den. Another crashed bird. Sadly, this one didn’t fare as well as the tanager. This time it was a woodpecker. One of its eyes was open, and I thought it might still be alive. I brought it up to the deck in the hope that it would come around, but it wasn’t to be. The crooked flight of destiny is held aloft by feathers none of us can know and few of us reckon fair or necessary. And the hour of the woodpecker had come round darkly in the brightness of this July day.

I gave the bird back to the woods from whence it came.

You’d think my day couldn’t have gotten worse, but it did as soon as I decided to make Bradley happy and spray Roundup on all the poison oak on Lang’s creek trail. A three-gallon sprayer, full, gets heavy after about a minute. The trail is nearly two miles long, some of it along narrow and rocky paths. My arms were aching after a quarter mile, but I persisted, spraying ever shiny leaf of poison oak within reach. I’d dressed for the occasion: long pants, long-sleeved shirt, bandana around the face, sunglasses, hat. And the terrible mistake of Bean boots, perhaps the worst shoe I’ve ever owned. Some dumb designer up in Maine fashioned those boots so that a seem rubs against your Achilles tendon. The soles are flimsy, the toes offering no protection. My feet were aching. Walking thus clad through the veritable jungle of that nasty stuff, plants which serve no purpose but to make us bubble and itch, I knew I’d be carrying some of it home with me. I made it all the way to the turn-off to the creek, and used up every last drop in the tank. On the walk back, about a quarter-mile from the cabin, I took a wrong turn and found myself scrabbling up and down the steep, mossy slope and cursing aloud. I was all dogged out by the time I got back and washed out the sprayer and turned my tainted clothes inside out. That one was worth a Master of Arts degree from the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology. Maybe Bradley will read this, feel grateful for my having endeavored to accept such a mission, and bring me a nice piece of fish next time he comes in. The good thing to come of this mission: in about three days that trail will be free of poison oak, making for a much nicer walk to the creek to look in on those Chinook.

Hot again: 104. After the spraying job, I didn’t have the juice in me to make the walk down to the river, so Gussie and I went for a swim in the pond, where I don’t quite like to stick my head under. Too many newts and protozoa. It felt good, though. Afterward, I had cold bath, then a hot shower and a shave.

When will it rain?

Jim called around 9:00 PM sounding much better. His hiccups were under control, thanks to a new medication. He sounded upbeat, but said he’s very weak. I think of him often out here. He’s been such a good friend over the years. It hurts to think of him so ravaged by cancer. Jim said he has the Grants Pass weather on his computer desktop, and he gave me a promising forecast. Rain, believe it or not, is supposed to fall in GP in the next day or so. I’m 50 miles from there, and the weather here is often different from there, but I can hope. He said it’s supposed to cool down over the weekend.

July 21, 2005

I’m sitting in the brown recliner watching the madrone leaves tumble down out of the big tree leaning over my car. The yellow leaves have carpeted the woods and road. I woke this morning to a few of clouds through the skylight, and I thought Jim’s forecast had come through for me. But the sky above Rattlesnake Ridge was as clear as it’s been for weeks. It’s cooler today, though, even comfortable. If only the day would stay in the mid-70s. I’m headed out to trim the tall grass in the road, a fire hazard, while it’s nice out.

For the second time in as many days Gussie ran down a black bear. This time we were at the pond, where we stopped after mowing the high grass along the whole length of the Dutch Henry road. Gus was in the water and I was getting ready to throw him a stick when I heard a loud snort. I peered into the woods behind me and then heard it again, and it was coming from above me. There, about twenty feet up in a fir tree was a young bear, maybe 200 pounds, and none too happy about our being there. I hoped that Gus wouldn’t notice, and I tried to get him to come to the car, but he heard the snorfling and went to investigate. Now the bear started climbing down and Gus spotted him and began his yelping. Again I tried to get him to come to the car. Nope. Gus was trying to ascend the tree as the bear was trying to descend it and in mere seconds they would meet. I got a bit frantic, started the car and drove a few feet, tooted the horn, called. Then the bear leapt to the ground. I thought Gus was done for, but the bear turned tail and ran, Gus in close pursuit. The last I saw the bear rounded the curve and Gus was running through the woods as if to head him off! I turned the car around and followed. I tooted and called. And then I saw a wheaten blur growing larger on the road and taking shape as my pal, burr-covered and panting. I opened the passenger door and he jumped in looking victorious, proud, and not a bit as terrified as I must have looked to him. “Good boy,” I said, because he’d come. “Good boy.”

Despite some clouds and a tiny sprinkling of rain, it’s been another uncomfortably hot day. I spent the afternoon napping, having a cool bath, and swinging in the hammock, where I wrote this poem:

One Day in July

All that I am
wrapped in a hammock’s sway

and time sounded
in the small turnings of sprinklers

and fat flies.
Green gone brown. Road dust

asleep for the least
wind or any cloud’s offering.

As easily as I lie here
I could die here for all that moves me,

grow fat as an apple
and fall in some patch of shade,

forgotten by all
I’ve forgotten and sweet as the legs of bees.

Out of this moment,
if ever I recall it, will rock the soft

pendulum of the human
I was, as naked and doomed and malcontent

as Adam still ribbed,
and mythic only to me. Who else

will remember
the bear I saw a few hours before—

standing in a fir
like a logger, its breath like an engine—

or know another seven days
of silence and a single droning plane?

And if the same
could be said for every man alone

seeing the strange
and ordinary and storing them like seeds

for the tender shoots
of memory, passing time with little else

to grieve,
then it’s no wonder God created Eve.

As if the episode at the pond wasn’t enough, after dinner tonight Gus chased down another bear. This one I didn’t see, though I heard it crashing through the forest. I tried my usual methods to get Gus to come back, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I even drove my car down to the turn-around and tooted the horn. When he got tired of barking, he came back to the cabin. I just hope one doesn’t take a swipe at him.

July 9th -14th

2005-07-14T11:45:00.000-07:00

July 9, 2005

It’s my niece Lucy’s birthday today! Happy seventh, Lulu! I made another trip into town today with a list of things I needed to do and get. Then I went to the diner and saw Angela, and asked her to meet me at a cafe later in the afternoon—the first time I’ve asked out a girl in about thirteen years. We had a nice chat over iced chai at Dutch Brothers (Blue Stone, which has better snacks, closes early). I hope we go out again. It’s nice to have a friend in Grants Pass, especially one so attractive. Of course, I was so distracted I forgot to get half the things on my list, including a phone card. Doh!

July 10, 2005

After a morning of trimming around the upper house and my garden fence, I spent most of today lounging about with a new novel I’m reading, American Owned Love, by Robert Boswell. I read one of his novels back in the mid-‘90s and really liked it, and then I saw this book in a used book shop in Salt Lake City, and bought it. Later in the afternoon I wrote the ending to the short story I’ve been plugging away at. I think I need to beef up the middle with more characterization, but in the meantime, if I can find a way to post it as a PDF, I’ll do it. I hate the way prose paragraphs and dialogue appear on a blog. It’s impossible to format properly with indentations, etc.

July 11, 2005

It was a beautiful, breezy day here, and we spent a good chunk of it down at our beach. No fishing this time. I entertained myself with a crossword, some more chapters in the Boswell novel, and a few songs on the iPod. It’s strange to be sitting out in such a wild place, with the river’s song a mere ten feet away, and to listen to music through headphones. I could only take so much of that before I settled back in the sounds of birds and water (and the voices of the occasional rafters going past).

The phone rang tonight, and I was hoping it was my new friend, but alas, it wasn’t. It was Bradley calling to say he’d be coming out on Friday and staying the weekend. He said I sounded a little lonely in my last blog posting. I told him he didn’t need to come rescue me, but he said he needed to get out for his own sake, too. We’re going to chop some stove wood up by the upper house. He’ll cook for me one night, I’ll cook for him the other. Of course, we’ll be pegging on the cribbage board, too, I’m sure. It’ll be good to hang out with him. I’m curious to see what he thinks of all I’ve done here.

July 12, 2005

I was awakened this morning by Gus growling at the bedroom window. I looked out and saw the blackberry bushes rustling around, and heard twigs snapping. Mr. Bear! Or, as I later learned, Mrs. Bear. To silence Gus, I put him in his crate, then I got my camera. Sure enough, here came Mrs. Bear gobbling up the berries. How she stomps through those thorny blackberry bushes, I don’t know. Must have thick skin on her paws. Here are some photos I took. I also shot a short movie from the deck, but erased it by mistake when I was scanning through the camera. Doh!

While I was out on the deck taking pictures, I glanced up the hill behind the cabin and saw a tiny cub walk through a clearing! This is why I think the bigger bear is a Mrs. I didn’t get a shot of the cub, sorry to say. Maybe next time. They’ll be back.

My nephew Ezra’s birthday today! Twelve years old. Hard to believe. I remember when he was an infant, one of the most adorable I’ve ever seen. And he’s turned out to be the sweetest of boys and, from what I hear, a damned good baseball player, too. Happy birthday, boy!

Late in the day Gus went like a shot through the meadow behind the barn and into the woods barking like crazy. I thought I heard some snorts and rustling amid all the barking. My guess is that the bears were back. I used my foolproof trick to get Gus to come back toward the cabin: I opened the car door, started the engine and tooted the horn. He can’t stand the thought of me driving off without him. Sure enough, he came running up to the car. He’s quite the watchdog, but it’s scary to think he’s running down a 300-pound bear.

July 13, 2005

Another morning coffee without half-n-half. Soy milk just doesn’t cut it. The coloring isn’t right and there’s a kind of oily taste that just doesn’t agree with me. I love soy milk in cereal and chai tea. But it’s not meant for coffee, despite what my ex-wife says. As much as I’ve tried, I can’t get into black coffee either. No, I need the creamy goodness of half-n-half. So it’s on the top of my shopping list. I’m planning to head into town tomorrow, since Bradley’s coming on Friday. Lots to do!

I spent the morning doing chores, trimming the grass in the garden enclosure and clearing twigs and branches from the whole length of the DH road.

Lazy afternoon. Same old same old. I wrote and recorded a new song, but I’ll spare you. In fact, I think I’m going to delete many of the old ones from the blog. They take up too much space and they're not very good anyway. I also deleted the movie I made. It used up all the space on my server, and I couldn’t post anything last time. Pictures will have to suffice.

Me, today, around 7:20 pm. Don’t laugh at the hat. At least it’s not the Stetson. Speaking of which, anybody want that thing?

July 14, 2005

A hundred degrees in southern Oregon today, and I'm glad I decided to spend the night in town. Thanks to air conditioning, to the wonders of electricty, the hotel room is quite chilly, thank you very much. And the hotel pool was nice, too. I'd hoped for a dinner partner, but alas I'll be eating sushi solo. Better than cooking for myself in the hot cabin, though.

Gus is sprawled out beneath the air conditioner.

Now I know why I haven't missed the news. I just flipped on CNN and the first thing I heard was that China has made nuclear threats against the United States. Of course, the media is probably blowing this way out of proportion and contributing in its own way to humanity's ultimate demise. What madness.

July 3 - July 9th

2005-07-09T14:25:00.000-07:00

July 3, 2005

Today I encountered far too many of the worst kind of creature you can find out here. Not bears. Not coyotes. Not cougars or foxes or snakes. No, these were bipeds with opposable thumbs. And they ruined what was shaping up to be a nice day. Gussie and I made an early start down to the river in the hope of claiming our beach. Sure enough, there were three rafts shored up, and about eight or nine people lounging around our beach and noshing on cherries. This was a friendly group. I asked if they were camping there, and they said no, they’d be leaving in a minute. Just stopping for a snack. I chatted with them while one woman entertained Gus with sticks thrown into the river. They gave me cherries and offered me trail mix, we chatted a bit, and then they were off. I bivouacked. This time I brought a folding nylon chair and the umbrella, with the plan of stashing both close to river so that I wouldn’t have to haul them back and forth. We went for a dip and then I settled down to a New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle. An hour or so later, I was three answers away from being done with it, when I heard voices and Gus started barking. Out in the river there were three guys drifting in the water, no boat, right toward our beach. They started telling Gus to calm down, and so did I. “You guys lose your boat?” I said. Right off they seemed a little cagey and suspicious. Three guys drifting down the Rogue in nothing but life jackets? One guy had a big knife strapped to his shorts. They said they were river guides, and then the biggest of them said, “You living at that cabin up there?” I knew the jig was up. I couldn’t bullshit them. I had nothing but an LL Bean day pack, a bottle of Calistoga sparking water, a chair, an umbrella, and a crossword. “Yeah,” I said. They mentioned the name of someone who runs one of the lodges downriver, said he’d told them about the place. He went on to say that they were waiting for a party to arrive and that they’d be camping for the night upriver at one of the stops on the trail. “We’ve got some time to kill, so we thought we’d go check out the cabin. Is it far?” I was going to say that the place was private property, no trespassing, but I feared it might start a fight, and there were three of them, so instead I lied. “It’s a good three miles,” I said. “Oh, is it that far?” Then they were off walking up toward the trail. I cheated on the last three answers of my puzzle, cursed under my breath with all my best swears, and packed up. I didn’t bother changing out of my swim trunks. I just put on my hiking shoes. The three guys had been dressed in nothing but shorts and Tiva sandals, and I knew I could catch them if they did indeed find the trail to the cabin. I knew, too, that they weren’t planning an extended walk in the woods dressed like that. At the start of my trail, I found their life jackets in a pile. More curses. Double-time now. Uphill and steep and 80+ degrees. Half-way up, I could hear their voices. And finally, about to pass out from the effort, I intercepted them at a split in the trail. “Hey!” they called. “That was quick. You must be in good shape. How many times have you walked that trail?” I gave them my best scowl. “Quite a few,” I said. Now what? Do I politely ask them to bugger off? “Where does this trail go?” the biggest one asked. “To a creek,” I said. “Are you heading that way?” he said. “No, I’m going home,” I said, very unfriendly-like, and turned and left them there looking after me. Now I just wanted to make it back to the cabin and to my car before they did. I snatched the keys where I’d left them in the ignition (won’t do that again), unlocked the cabin door, and locked it up again behind me. Here’s where you’re going to think I’m turning into Ted Koczinski: then I loaded the .22 and sat on the couch listening through the screen. I had all kinds of wild visions: the three of them splitting up and coming at me from all sides; the three of them watching me from the dark edges of the woods, waiting for nightfall and then assaulting the cabin; the three of them letting the air out of my tires because I’d been so unfriendly. I suspect they caught the hint and just went back down to the river. But I’m still listening to every twig that snaps and wondering if it’s them. Dressed the way they were, they’d get tired of the mosquitoes real soon. So they’re probably back at their camp. But the thing is, they knew the way up here. How? That, I don’t like.

Anyway, here’s what our beach looked like just minutes before the amphibious weasels arrived:
Add code for movie file

And here’s a Western Sandpiper that came by for a visit:

And a pair of Common Mergansers

When my anxiety finally eased, I took a shower and lay down for a nap, and was awakened a half-hour later by Gus barking. I sprang out of bed, threw on some shorts, went to the sliding door, and saw heads walking down the road. Different, younger heads. They looked scared. Gus has an intimidating bark, and when you can’t see how big he is, he probably sounds pretty scary. I said through the screen, where they couldn’t see me well, “Hey, what are you doing?” They had fishing poles in hand, and clearly had just hiked up from the river. “Didn’t you see the signs?” I said. “No trespassing. This is private property.” The kid closest to me said, “Sorry. Can we ask you a huge favor? We’re dying from the hike up. Could you drive us up the road?” Anywhere else, on any other day, I would have gladly given them a ride, and a cold drink, too. But my nerves were already frayed from the cagey trio I’d encountered earlier. “Where are you going?” I said. “Oh, to the camp nearby,” he said. I asked what camp he was talking about. “Not a camp, really. The ranch. The castle house. We’re staying there.” A felt a bit of relief. He went on to say that the other kid with him was related to the new owners. “Well, like I said, this place is private property, and we don’t want any trespassers,” I said. The kid apologized, said the new owner at the castle said it would be all right. “Well, it’s really not,” I said, “and I’d appreciate it if you just moved on.” Then they were gone.

Maybe it’s because it’s a holiday weekend. But whatever the case, my peace has been disturbed and I don’t like it. It’s given me a headache. What I should so is start firing the 30.06 randomly into the forest, so all lurkers will think I’m crazy and go back to their rafts and trails and cars. But that thing scares me more than they do.

Homo sapiens keep out!

For about 37 out of my 40 years on this planet, I’ve spent the night of the 3rd of July at my grandmother’s house in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, across from the minor league baseball stadium, where the city shoots off a damned good display of fireworks. It was always a fun time, a chance to see all my cousins and all the old Portuguese folks, a time to light off our own supply of bottle rockets and firecrackers and, if we were lucky, M-80s. The streets were always packed with people, the stadium mobbed. It took an hour to get out of the neighborhood after the big finale. A few years after my grandmother got sick and frail and went to live with my parents, they sold her house and the tradition went with it. And then she passed on. Tonight a new family is gathered on the square lawn, sitting in their folding chairs or on the grass or on the cement wall facing the stadium. And somewhere my grandmother, my Voa Voa, has become part of a bigger lightshow firing beautifully in some unknowable plane.

Tomorrow’s the Fourth, Independence Day, and I’m feeling homesick.

July 4, 2005

A hot holiday, well into the 90s. I was leery of going down to the river with all the folks about, so we stayed put, and my big activity of the day was weeding the strawberry patch. Can’t say as I’ve ever done that on the Fourth of July. But it needed to be done and it was the only chore I could muster the motivation to do, and only because I had my iPod plugged into my ears and I was rocking out to Luna. I treated myself to three of their CDs when I was in Ashland recently, and I’m enjoying the songs. My friend Peter and I saw Luna’s last show in New York City back in the winter. They were a great band, but alas, they’re no more. Every day’s a holiday out here, so I guess it really doesn’t matter that I spent the day doing little more than working in the garden. I was thinking a lot about Rhode Island, though, and wishing I was at Flo’s clamshack eating clamcakes and chowder, standing around in my still-wet swim trunks, my skin covered with Atlantic salt, sand between my toes.

For the first time in my residency, I’m starting to feel bored often, and I think it’s the heat. When it gets too warm, I lose the motivation to write, to read, to noodle around on the guitar, to walk or hike. The river’s the place to be. Maybe tomorrow, after the holiday revelers have all gone back to their lives. In the meantime, thank goodness for crosswords. I find myself most energized and happy early in the morning, when the air is cool enough for fleece and the mosquitoes all seem to have gotten bored and left. This morning sitting out on the deck, the spider webs gleaming as the sun came up, was the happiest part of my day. Maybe I should wake up earlier and write until it gets hot. Then I can allay my grumpiness with an afternoon trip to the river, or a long nap in the bedroom, which seems to be the coolest room in the cabin. Even poor Gus, usually a bundle of energy, has been listless all day. I’ll take him up to the pond after dinner.

On our walk up to the pond, I discovered a bunch of Leopard Lilies growing near Bill Graiff’s old stream. Quite lovely:

Here’s a look at the shortcut I mowed through the meadow. It goes from the pond to the woods and then the path goes to just above the upper house. The grass around the swath is taller than me!

On the shortcut path I discovered that Mr. Bear didn’t clean up after his dinner. He tore this old tree to shreds dining on grubs, and then had the bad manners to leave it right in my path:

Here’s a nice shot at dusk. I like how it’s dark in the foreground, still bright in the background:

And here’s Rattlesnake Ridge soaking up the last of the sun:

I found this Old Man’s Beard, a cool kind of lichen, on the road back:

I picked my first zucchini. Sauteed with garlic, it was sweet and succulent. Went well with my grilled marinated chicken kabobs:

Tonight this big flying bug came and landed on my shoulder. It looks almost albino. He got in through the gap in the screen door. I really need to plead with the Brothers to fix that sliding door, which is the source of all invading flying insects. The mosquitoes have been supping on me nightly.

July 5, 2005

I followed my own advice and got up around 7:00, when it was cool enough to make a fire, and wrote a draft of a new poem. Then I cleared out the water dips and culverts along the road. I did this earlier in the spring, but the heavy rains in May filled them again with silt and debris. I also cut a fallen madrone that was sticking out too far into the road above the lower gate. A good few hours’ worth of work. Then I came back and put some finishing touches on the poem. Here it is:

My Flawed Utopia

If I could cook for her—
roasted lamb with a demi-glaze,
say, or coq au vin

(anything with wine),
potatoes baked in their dirty skins—
while her wet clothes

dripped on the line
and Allen’s hummingbirds
sipped the sugared water

hung above the deck; and if the light
was just right, and the breeze
easy, carrying a dry trace

of bay and the madrones’
yellow leaves; if she liked
fresh-ground pepper,

the sound of it cracking
in a mill, and sea salt, too,
and coffee sentenced

to the antique oubliette of a hand-
cranked grinder; our laughter lost
for a time in the teapot’s whistle,

then—what? Who would I be
for her or for me but the man
who in the undreamt world

tires too soon of talk
and can’t stand a cluttered table.
In the middle of some story

told more to fill the empty space
between our plates than to reveal
anything meaningful,

I’d find myself dreaming
of the green river, of the way
it hugs my legs when I wade in it,

or of the lizard I saw
doing push-ups on my steps.
But I’d be looking in her eyes,

wet and brown, and thinking
at the same time
that this is what love is—

the sweet burnt crust
of crème brûlée and the dark hair
falling across her pretty face.

July 6, 2005

My hands finally wear the smell of fish—seven of them! Seven laughably small but feisty little swimmers. Against my better judgment as a dignified person and wannabe fly-fisherman, I followed my brother Richard’s advice (it’s his birthday today) and dug up a dozen or so worms from one of my garden beds and found some small hooks on which to impale them. I made a lunch, filled my hydration system with ice cubes and water, loaded up towel and trunks, and twenty minutes later, on my second cast, I felt that unique sensation of a fish jigging at the end of my line. I landed seven within about twenty minutes, all of them four to six inches in length (as I said, laughably small). I think they were trout. One appeared to have the rainbow coloring, but I’m not really sure what they were. Maybe Bradley or Frank or Lang can set me straight. See photos:

I kept thinking of the mother in The River Why, who irks her husband, a fly-fishing snob and expert, by fishing with worms and hooks. I guess if a worm works, throw it out there!

ADDENDUM: Lang says the fish are squaw fish, not very well-liked by salmon fishermen, since they eat small salmon.

It was breezy down at the river. Took the edge off the heat. And this morning there was a most welcome mist and fog up at the cabin. I found myself wishing for rain! I kind of miss the sound of it pattering on the roof. A little rain would make the road less dusty, too.

I saw this deer in the deep meadow last night, almost invisible in the tall grass:

Not sure what this flower is, though it looks almost like a rudbeckia or coneflower. I think its petals haven’t yet grown:

A ladybug. I haven’t seen too many out here. Back in New York, they used to swarm my house, thousands of them crawling all over the window screens.

July 7, 2005

Very cozy and cool last night. I closed up the windows and took the wool blanket off the shelf again. Even made a fire this morning. I took advantage of the cool and cloudy morning and moved five more wheelbarrow’s worth of logs into the woodshed and raked out the debris. I did some work a the pond, too, pulling up sedges and grass and skimming off algae.

I also completed another crossword, this one with a golf-related theme. I think it’s worthy of one paper or another. It’s tough writing clues without reference resources, but I’ll tweak it when I’m on WiFi again, and then send it out. I’m also close to finishing a Sunday puzzle, bigger than a daily, measuring 21x21, and paying three times as much. Not sure if the theme is great, but I’ll give it a whirl.

July 8, 2005

A new poem:

Autumn in July

All the great shakers are at it again,
or as ever, making news for the world.
Papers have yellowed, their edges have curled,
and those deserts have grown weary of rain.

The end may be near, but here it is just
beginning, again, as ever, with birds
doing what birds do, clouds moving like herds,
and the river announcing what it must.

The leaves have yellowed, their edges have curled,
and, oddly, it is summer still. And ants,
doing what ants do, march through my pantry
carrying spoils back to their little world.

I consigned myself to a few hours of hard work this morning along the Corral trail. I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t even gone to the Corral yet. The ticks kept me away back in the spring, and lately the hot days and the prospect of Gus getting covered with burrs have kept me away. It’s supposed to be a great place for seeing wildlife, but I know Gus would just go chasing after whatever was moving around those meadows. And I can’t bear to leave him in the cabin while I go out. He goes everywhere with me. So we’ve only gone as far as the creek. Today I raked almost the whole trail. It was covered with madrone leaves, which make for a slippery walk. I also graded a detour where a tree fell over the winter. And I pulled up all the saplings growing along the edges of the trail. I was pooped by the time I got back to the cabin around noon.

I’m losing track of time again, and my watch, when I consulted it this morning, was no hope. It told me it was the 9th, my niece Lucy’s birthday, so I called her in Manhattan to wish her a happy day. She seemed a bit confused and passed the phone to her mother, who told me it was only the 8th. The calendar on my watch has 31 days. For every month with only 30 days, you have to manually make the adjustment one day forward, something I should have done a week ago but didn’t. You’d think a Swiss watch would know to make the adjustment itself.

The days this week have varied between easy contentment and acute loneliness, sometimes within the same span of an hour. Most days I’ve woken up feeling glad to be here and eager to see what the day had in store, but by the afternoon I’ve felt pangs of isolation and boredom. Catching fish the other day was entertaining. I like the little walks we take, despite the mosquitoes. Most of the time I like the work—writing and chores. But other times I’ve found myself feeling sick of being in my own company, sick of cooking for myself and eating alone, sick of all the ways I occupy my time. The funny thing is, the longest I’ve been in solitude out here is about ten days. I can’t imagine being out here in the winter, when you can’t leave. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had people visiting or if I had a writing project going that I felt confident about. The writing comes in little spurts and I have trouble sustaining them for long. Still, I’ve written some good poems and might have a second book’s worth by October. And I’m midway through a new story. Soon I may have some visitors, too. Cindy Thompsen and her brother and sister, who live in Eugene, might be coming out in early August. Then I’ve got a reading in Bend in mid-August, and then the Brothers are bringing next year’s resident in for an orientation the week after. So next month will be full of activity. A visit from anyone would ease the loneliness. And I have my trips into town. Those help.

June 26th - June 30th

2005-07-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

June 26, 2005

I had a bit of a scare late yesterday afternoon, upon my return from a resupply mission to Grants Pass. I’d put away my groceries and was heading out to take Gus for a walk up to the pond to cool off, and I smelled smoke. I hadn’t made a fire in the stove since early morning, and it was long dead. I looked south, in the direction of the river, and the whole river valley appeared smoky. I sniffed the air again, but now I couldn’t really smell smoke. Or could I? It was hard to tell. It’s nothing, it’s haze, I told myself, and I started up the road with my bamboo walking stick and Gus, who was glad that the bumpy, dusty ride had ended and that the pond awaited him. I got about a hundred feet before I turned back to look toward the river. It sure looked like smoke. I was suddenly quite worried. What if it was a forest fire started by some careless rafter or camper down on the Rogue trail? What if the fire was even now gorging itself on the vast mass of deadwood and headed my way? I reversed course, called Gus to follow, opened my trusty Dutch Henry Homestead Manual, composed painstakingly by Bradley, and located the number for the Oregon State Police, Grants Pass. The dispatcher answered and I told her I thought I smelled smoke and then the whole river valley looked kind of smoky. Had she heard anything about a fire, and should I be worried. She said they don’t really handle fires, and put me through to someone else. Again, I explained my fear and asked if they’d heard anything. Nope. No reports of fires along that or any other particular stretch of the Rogue. “Call 911 if you smell smoke,” she said. Somewhat relieved, we resumed our trip up to the pond. Near the upper house I had a better view, and it still looked smoky. Or hazy. Up at Rattlesnake Ridge it didn’t look like that. By the time we were walking back toward the cabin, Gus sufficiently cooled off, the haze was gone. Apparently, that’s all it was. Haze. The smoke smell? I don’t know. A weird trick of the olfactory, that old factory, I guess. John Daniel writes in new book about the Muzak he heard throughout his four month winter stay here. I’ve heard music, too, but only when the solar inverter is humming. Sometimes, in that hum, I hear bits of music and talking. Maybe the smoke smell was one of these strange sensory quirks, or the ghost of Dutch Henry pulling my leg. I can imagine him over in his meadow, hip-deep in daisies, having a good laugh. Scared that Yankee, didn’t I? But fire is something to fear out here, especially now that the dry season has started. This forest hasn’t had a good fire in many years, and so the brush and dead trees have accumulated to dangerous levels. If there is a fire, and there will be one someday, it’s going to be devastating. So I’ll keep sniffing the air and watching for smoke and trying to distinguish it from haze on hot days. And that slash pile in the yard, all those apple boughs Neil and I pruned? I’ll torch that on a wet day in the fall.

Well, I got my wish regarding the snake. Today Gus and I went to the garden to water, and there just inside the gate was my narrow fellow in the grass. Gus didn’t see it and ran right over it. A good three- or four-footer, it looked very much like the snake Gus was barking at the other day. But maybe it’s a different one. Anyway, I was able to distract Gus out of the garden and into the house, where I snagged the camera. Then I headed back out alone, much to Gussie’s chagrin. I tried matching the photos to the pictures of snakes in my North American Wildlife book, and its pattern looks most like a rattlesnake, but I saw no rattle, and the head didn’t look like a pit viper’s head. Maybe someone else out there, with better references, can tell me for certain what kind of snake this is. Whatever its name, it’s a beautiful specimen:

Tonight I made my worst dinner yet, and the only disappointing meal, come to think of it, that I’ve had here. It sounded good in theory: fried oysters and cubed steak, with salad. The oysters weren’t fresh-shucked from the shell, but jarred ones I saw in the fish section at Market of Choice and figured I’d try. They looked nice enough when I rinsed them and breaded them. But frying in oil, they turned to runny mush, and they tasted a lot like runny mush fried in oil, too, with a tinge of the sea in there, like the memory of a clam eaten yesterday. The cubed steak, pounded with flour and crushed black pepper and a little salt, sautéed in butter, wasn’t terrible. But it also wasn’t a marinated steak fresh off a mesquite grill, either. And it’s cubed steak, a rough cut the butcher feeds into a machine with teeth to make it tender. Filet mignon, it’s not. I’m not even sure why I bought it. Some vague recollection of my mother having cooked such steaks for me when I was a kid. I guess I liked them then. And the salad? I was midway into frying the oysters before I thought of the salad, and then I couldn’t go out to the garden to gather some mesclun and red romaine and celery and a cuke, so it was plain old green leaf lettuce, with a few slices of yellow onion. Even Gus wouldn’t touch the oysters, so they went into the woodstove. But he did help me eat the steak. But it was a sad meal, to say the least. So, now I’m assuaging my gastric grief with a fine Cuban cigar, a Cohiba Esplendido. And later, just as I’m starting to watch Empire Falls on DVD, compliments of Jim, I’ll cool my disappointment with a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Heath Bar Crunch. Life in the wilderness is hard sometimes.

I picked up some Teramycin for Dutch Hen, who doesn’t appear to be getting any worse or any better. Every time I look in on her, she’s sitting in her nest looking exactly the same. I bought a package of the antibiotic for the Wilson sisters, too, and stopped by yesterday to deliver it. Ann is such a sweet old lady, and a lover of chickens and talk. It’s hard to get away once you’re there. She wanted to pay me for the Teramycin, and I said she could pay me in eggs instead. God knows I need them now that Dutch Hen has stopped laying. So I took out my first installment of a dozen. Ann offered to take Dutch Hen and try to nurse her along with her birds. I told her I’d see if the antibiotic helped, but I may wind up taking her up on the offer. Maybe she’ll trade me for a laying bird—one of her Rhode Island Reds. Here’s poor Dutch Hen:

I finished John Daniel’s book this afternoon (I know, I’m a slow reader), and I recommend it to all—not just for Dutch Henry lore but for its well-crafted, lyrical, frank and intelligent writing. Near the end, I was almost in tears. It’s a beautiful and remarkable memoir.

Here’s a new song I wrote, one of my best yet, I think:

Ive Got You

June 28, 2005

I spent yesterday making the final tweaks to the new puzzle I mentioned in my last upload. It’s an unconventional puzzle with four boxes outside the grid, and has a nice, clean layout. I’m sending it off to Will Shortz in the hope that it’s New York Times-worthy. I no sooner finished clueing that puzzle when an idea for another came to me, and I hacked away most of the afternoon trying to lay it out. I wasn’t pleased with some of the obscure words, so I need to keep at it.

I mowed up around the pond yesterday morning, once again making a wide swath to the shortcut path through the woods. My other chore was to weed one of the garden beds. Now that summer’s in full effect, the weeds are becoming unruly. My tomato plants don’t seem to mind them, but everything will be more productive if I stay on top of them.

Wrote this new poem this morning:

The Lesser Good

Out beyond my garden fence a black bear
fells another rotten tree with a crack,
and I’m clawed from the false world of a book
to go to the glass for a look, and there,
beady-eyed and unbathed, my ursine face,
the one only mirrors know, gazes back
wearing a lonely and a hungry look.
I have been too long pawing in one place,
grubbing through paper and words—and for what?
Where these trees end, my whole insomniac
race waits with plots to fill a trillion books:
betrayal and greed, violence and lust.
There are wars to read about, and famine,
and on the radio the hits play back-
to-back for a man a woman forsook
and for the boy hiding inside that man.
But here I go again, as I knew I would,
tearing through old wood for the lesser good.

My chore this morning was to consolidate in the woodshed and clear a spot for the nice round wood pile down by the barn. I like looking at that pile, but if I don’t get it under a roof, it’s just going to rot out there. It’s well-seasoned and ready to stack in the shed. On my way with the wheelbarrow, I almost ran over a different, bigger snake of the same variety as yesterday’s. This one was easily four-feet long. Since I was in the middle of working, and since Gus was romping next to me, I didn’t go in for the camera. Again, I looked for a rattle, and didn’t see one. And according to the Brothers and John Daniel, no one’s ever seen a rattlesnake on the homestead property. John claims that the rattlesnakes made a pact with Dutch Henry long ago to keep away from the place. I made four trips with the wheelbarrow before I broke a heavy sweat and convinced myself that I need not finish this job today. More tomorrow, in the chill of early morning.

By noontime, it was sunny and getting hot, a perfect day to spend the afternoon down at our beach. This time, determined to do it up right despite the heavy load, I filled up my large North Face pack with: quilt, umbrella, fishing pole and lures, towel, shorts, camera, binoculars, crossword book, journal and pencil, and hydration system. No food, since we’d just had lunch. The pack weighed maybe thirty pounds, just enough to make my legs feel it. We headed out, passing this lizard outside the cabin door:

They seem to be fattening up as the summer gets into gear, and they’re everywhere. Hanging my wash out to dry this morning, two of them were chasing each other around my feet. And the first thing Gus does every day when he bounds out the door is run to the rotting railroad ties to jam his snout in the holes and sniff for lizards.

On our walk down I tried to capture for you one of the monstrous Douglas fir trees along the trail, but the photo doesn’t do the tree justice. You see only a tiny portion of this massive giant. I think two people would have a hard time wrapping their hands around its trunk at the base. Even with Gus in the picture for perspective, it doesn’t look as big as when you’re standing next to it looking up to its tip well over a hundred feet up:

The trailside is dotted with Elegant Brodiaea, but I’ve taken pictures of those already. Here’s what looks to me like Queen Anne’s Lace, though it might be something else. I don’t have the energy to thumb through the stupid Audubon book:

By the time we neared the creek bridge, I was dreaming about diving in at the swimming hole. It was hot and dry, and I was sweating from hauling the pack. I’d already seen rafters float by, but I didn’t care. I’d make sure none were turning the bend and I’d strip down and get in my swim trunks and I’d dive into that cool green water, Gussie splashing after me. But when I got to the bridge—

— I saw a yellow dry bag strapped to the railing. “F___!” Campers. Whatever, it’s cool. They usually camp in the flat spot in the meadow, and I’ve never seen them at our swimming hole. So we headed down the path, dodging the poison oak, and there, sitting like sad reminders that I’m not the only one enjoying this river, were two red backpacks. And then there was a boy with a net. He spotted us and made an about-face, and then a guy in his late 20s met us at our beach. I saw a big blue raft, a cooler, tent poles, nylon. “You guys stopping for lunch?” I asked, but I could see they weren’t. “No, we’re camping here for the night. This is a scout troop. Did you pass a bunch of boys on the trail?” I couldn’t tell him that I walk only about an eighth of a mile of the river trail, that the rest of my descent is quite concealed up the hill. “No, we didn’t see anybody.” The guy shrugged. “They must be right behind you.” Gus looked as irritated as me. What were these freaking Scouts doing at our beach? “Well, we don’t want to crash your party. We’ll head upstream for our swim,” I said. I knew that there was no beach as good as this one, but I found a half-way decent place where there was some sand and where the current wasn’t so strong that Gus would be swept away. I set up the umbrella, laid out the blanket, got into my swim trunks. But it wasn’t the same. Now there were boys crawling all over the rocks with butterfly nets. For a second I considered packing everything back up and heading home, but I’d carried the heavy pack all that way. I might as well try to enjoy the river for a bit. But a bit was all I could stand. We stayed maybe an hour. I took a few casts, got wet, threw sticks for Gus, chatted very briefly with one butterfly-chaser, and then we packed it in. As if their invasion of our spot wasn’t bad enough, as I was traipsing through their camp on my way back to the trail, one of the leaders caught a fish, right in the spot where I’ve fished a dozen times and caught nothing. I went to investigate, and it was a trout. Definitely not a salmon fry or a half-pounder steelhead (which Bradley says aren’t in the river yet). No, though my eyes are inexperienced, it looked like a trout. That was all I could stand, and we skedaddled. Here’s the invaders enjoying our waterfront property:

By the time we got back, Gus was riddled with burrs. I can’t tell you how tired I am of combing burrs out of his hair. I’m sure he’s just as annoyed about it, but it doesn’t seem to deter him from sticking his soft-coated wheaten face right into a thicket of them. Every time he comes back inside, I have to clean him off. If I don’t, they’ll just get more stuck and eventually cause mats (especially in his beard and fall, which is really the only long hair on him right now). Even the short-trimmed parts of him collect these little buggers, and he doesn’t relish my removing them. But what is the bane of Gussie’s existence is my savior: the fine-toothed comb—
—which I ply with great skill.

June 29, 2005

Today’s update is an audio-visual one, a film montage of our morning walk from the cabin to the pond (via the garden). I shot the clips with my digital camera. I’m embarrassed to say that I still haven’t figured out the camcorder Jim was so kind to give me. It's a big file, 50 megs, so it might take a while to open unless you're fortunate enought to have DSL. Turn up the volume on your computer.

Montage of a Walk

June 30, 2005

Well, thank the ghosts of the Rogue: no Boyscouts at our beach today! It’s another warm, sunny day, and some topless rafters just floated past. “Where’s your boat?” one of them asked. “Oh, we hiked in,” I lied. “I like your dog,” said one of the bare-chested ladies. Yesterday was a hot, still day, and even by midnight, when I went to bed, it hadn’t dropped below the mid-60s. This morning I could tell it was going to be another hot one, so here we are by the cool river, sitting beneath our umbrella and hoping that if any more rafters drift by, they’ll also be topless. :-)

I saw a fox! A gray one. Yesterday, in the evening, going out to the garden to pick greens for my salad, I heard a thrash, and there he was leaping out of the compost heap with his long, bushy tail waving goodbye. I’ve been piling vegetable scraps in a makeshift bin next to my batch composter while the current batch cooks. The fox must have smelled eggshells and old broccoli. Gussie chased him into the woods beyond the meadow, but he’ll be back. I won’t have to worry about him getting Dutch Hen. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to put her in a nursing home: Ann Wilson’s chicken shack. I think she’ll be happier there, either to recover or spend her last days.

I was just interrupted by a BLM raft and the two rangers piloting it. At first I thought they were going to ask me for my fishing license, which of course is sitting on the kitchen table back at the cabin. But they didn’t. They asked if I was hiking, and I told them where I was staying. No need to lie to BLM. They guy doing the talking, Dave, said he knew Matt and Kate, the residents from 2003, who went on the following year to caretake one of the lodges along the river. Gus was barking at their big blue raft, wondering what this behemoth was invading his beach, and so they said goodbye, and pushed off with a wave.

It was a hot hike back up to the hot cabin, and it’s still hot. When we got back, the indoor thermometer read 87.9. Yikes. After the sweat stopped flowing, I took a cool shower and had a short nap. When I got up, the temperature had dropped one degree. I had no motivation to do anything but sit out on the deck feeling the breeze, mosquitoes or no mosquitoes. But I could see Gus was getting hungry, and then I felt hungry, too. Lamb chops for the two of us.

With this heat, I’ve been pining for ice cream, which I ran out of three nights ago. I’ll have to remember to buy two pints when I go into town again. Tonight I’ll have to settle for yogurt with sliced pear.

June 18 - 25

2005-06-25T12:50:00.000-07:00

June 18, 2005

My little lamb-chop looks so different! Tired of the constant battle against the burrs and horsetails, I had Gussie shaved down real short today—about a quarter-inch all over except his face. I love it. He’s so warm and soft and smooth and clean. The grooming place was great, and Guster was a big hit with everyone there. The cashier told me that the groomer made special mention of how well behaved and gentlemanlike my boy had been. She even came out before we left to tell me in person. She said that of all the Wheatens she’s ever groomed he’s been the best. I felt like calling up the first two groomers I took him to when he was just a four-month old pup. The first place did nothing more than trim around his eyes before calling me up and to say he was terrible and had snapped at one of the girls. The second place gave him half a cut, a veritable hack-job, and practically threw us out of the place, with a similar report. There I was, a new dog owner thinking that my pup was an intractable and vicious nightmare. Turns out he just needed the kind of groomer who would show him who was boss but love him, too: Dapper Dog in Cornwall, New York groomed him for two years and never had a problem. Now, the aptly named Home Away from Home ($30 cheaper than Dapper Dog) has reconfirmed that Gussie’s a good boy. While we were there I asked about his recent problem of bad breath. We checked out his teeth and gums and they looked just fine, and his breath smelled fine, too. The groomer said the smell was probably his beard. I’d never considered that. I figured that with his daily swim his beard would be pretty clean, but apparently it wasn’t. Bathed and barbered, his bad breath is gone. I’ll have to remember to wash his beard more often.

As much as I’ve tried not to think about returning to the East, I’ve been tossing around the idea of renting an apartment close to my job in northern Jersey and buying a small house or cottage in the Adirondacks. Oddly enough, Marge Boyle made the same suggestion when I spoke with her the other day. I had only just thought of it a couple days before. Anyway, I think this would be ideal. After living out here, I’m convinced I need to continue to live in a rural place, at least part of the time. I need the peace and quiet, the trees and fresh air, the vegetable garden, the open space for Gussie to run around. I can’t have that and still work at Tenafly, unless I commute an hour each way. So with this new plan, I could go to the cottage on weekends, during the many vacations I get during the year, and in the summer. And in having this country cottage I could tolerate living in the congested greater metro area of New York City for the rest of the year. The Adirondacks is not a far drive. I could leave work on a Friday afternoon and be there in time for a late dinner. I’ve asked Sharen to keep her eyes peeled for anything affordable that looks nice. And she’s sent me a couple of real estate newspapers. Of course, friends, family and colleagues will be most welcome to use the place when I’m not.

The high point of my day: back from our trip to town, I made a cup of tea and opened a package from Jim Dowling, the contents of which included some 30 DVDs in sleeves in a sleek black binder-type case! What a guy! Some of the titles: the last three episodes of this season’s Deadwood, the recent HBO production of Empire Falls, Cannery Row, The Importance of Being Ernest, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Trainspotting, and a few episodes of The Sopranos. It looks like there are some Nova or Nature Channel shows, too, one of them about birds. In short, enough nighttime entertainment to last me through the summer, starting tonight with Deadwood. Jim, what can I do to thank you for all these wonderful gifts?

June 19, 2005

Happy Father’s Day, Pa!

I woke up this morning with a couplet in my head, and oddly enough it was about a father—Priam, from Homer’s Iliad. I don’t usually write endings of poems first, but this one worked out that way. So, a Father’s Day sonnet:

A Father’s Eyes

My battles ended before they began,
and for that I’m grateful; those neon lips
had too soon kissed the boy from the man,
and hope of truce seemed as absurd as ships
in bottles. But fate sails an unlikely sea.
And gulls flap within the glass. I was saved.
So why do my father’s eyes still haunt me
decades later? How to see what they gazed
on the time I crashed in at 4:00 AM?
He didn’t speak a word; just stirred the storm
in his cup. But his eyes had grief in them,
and love and recognition. They were warm,
as Priam’s might have been to see his boy
dragged by Achilles through the dust of Troy.

Sunshine! Another perfect day in paradise. My first task (after writing the sonnet, that is) was to pick sour cherries from the trees in the garden. I’ve been most generous with the birds. All last week I watched the Steller’s Jays and robins gorge on the cherries, and I did little to shoo them away. I figured there was enough to go around. Today the fruit was finally ripe enough for me. Sour cherries are too tart to eat the way you eat sweet cherries, so you have to cook them with sugar. They’re best in pies. Here’s what they look like while still on the tree:

I picked enough for a pie just grabbing ones in reach, and then I got greedy and climbed on a step ladder. It’s not very level in the garden, and the ladder toppled and I fell. One story in the rich history of this place is the death of old Bill Graiff, the former caretaker of the homestead. He had an arrangement with a bush pilot friend, Deak Miller: if he ever got in trouble, he’d lay a sheet out in the meadow to let the Deak know something was wrong. One fall day, Bill was picking apples and fell out of one of the trees and broke his hip. He was an old man by then, and the accident incapacitated him. Somehow, in all that pain, he was able to get a sheet and spread it out in the meadow. But he was too weak to crawl inside the cabin. It was a couple of days before Deak Miller spotted the sheet and sent for help. A day or two later Graiff died in a hospital. So, brushing myself off after the fall, and relieved there were no broken bones, I decided I had enough cherries for one day. I’ll try to avoid climbing on ladders. I’ve got no bush pilot friend looking out for me. Here’s my bowl of cherries before I pitted them.

My experience with pie-making is that the crust takes some finessing. I have vivid memories of my mother making pie crusts on a roll-out plastic Betty Crocker pie-making mat, looking flustered and helpless as she pawed at the flaky mass that wouldn’t quite form a ball or roll out. So, I consulted my trusty Fannie Farmer cookbook, which suggested not fussing with the dough too much. Do a rough folding-in of the shortening (I use salted butter; none of that white vegetable goop for me) and add no more than a few tablespoons of water, one at a time, and then stir with a fork before making the ball and rolling the dough. The clumps of butter in the dough are what make the nice bubbles in the crust when it’s cooked. My dough came out quite nicely, thanks to Fannie’s tips. Here’s the pie before baking. Not the most elegant lattice, but not too bad for my first try.

And here it is after cooling in the pie safe:

It made a fine, fine dessert to top of my salmon dinner.

It was delicious plain, but I’m decadent; I added a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s, too.

I brought the camera along on our walk this evening. First stop: the garden. I’ve talked about my cucumbers like a proud father. Here’s what they look like:

I’ll pick the biggest one soon.

Garlic is in the foreground, eggplant in the middle, tomatoes in the back. It looks more crowded than it really is. The grass and clover has grown in around the edges:

Poopy fetching a stick in the mowed meadow:

(Where I haven’t mowed at all, like up near Graif’s old house, the grass is taller than I am!)

And Poopy chewing a different stick in the road on our way to the pond. That’s the upper house in the background. You can sort of see his haircut:

Here’s a view from the road of the daisies growing near the garden:

A banana slug, finger added for perspective. This is a small one!:

I love this madrone growing just south of the where the red-bellied sapsuckers are nesting. Its leaves are turning yellow and falling already—autumn in June:

Elegant Brodiaea are popping up all over. They bloom in summer after the fields dry out. Such a sweet little flower. I picked one and tried pressing it, along with some Mexican Golden Poppy and a few other beauties:

This green insect was clinging to one of the blades of grass taller than me. It looks like a katydid, but I don’t think katydids are found out here. I need an insect guide:

June 20, 2005

A bittersweet day today—what would have been my 12th anniversary. All morning I’ve been thinking about Sharen and all the great times we had together. But rather than being sad that we’re no longer husband and wife, I was simply feeling glad for the good run we had. The memory of one of those good times worked itself out in this poem:

Recollection on What Would Have Been Our Anniversary

Her father had given us instruction—
tie back the awning if a hurricane
blew in—and she and I couldn’t contain
our grins. Destruction,

though, is every father’s fear when he leaves
his girl alone. We offered our farewell
and wishes for godspeed to Portugal.
By next day the eaves

poured like tipped urns, and from her twin girlhood
bed I could see herring gulls tossed in gales
and leaves pulling like skeet from the maples.
How in the world could

he have known? An almanac? A forecast?
But young love heeds neither warning nor proof.
We swirled tongues like clouds even as the roof’s
nails complained against

the pull. We rode our own salt swells. It took
the awning lashing the house to rouse us.
In less than a year we would be spouses.
I climbed and unhooked

ropes from their moorings. I held on for life,
or tried to, as we tied the fabric fast.
For a time it held, like those years now past
when I called her wife.

June 21, 2005

The poems continue to come. It’s strange what I find myself thinking about during my morning coffee on the couch by the warm stove. This morning’s subject: genocide, and more specifically, the guys who bury people in mass shallow graves. Just following orders. Not a wholesome thought before breakfast, but there it was.

I’ve given myself back to writing with form and rhyme, finding particular comfort in the envelope quatrain. Here’s the result of this morning’s musings:

Memento Mori

He digs because it’s the job he’s given,
and he does it in the dark reckoning
all the ways it’s just. Soon the sickening
will be dressed and the blisters forgiven

by his hands. The spade’s blade will dry, the field
heal without a scar. Now there is no why,
just the work itself: the moon like an eye
watching, the tool helping the earth to yield,

a mosquito insisting at his ear.
He disregards the contents of the cart,
but it wants attention: blue twisted parts,
like a basket of crabs, staining the air.

He digs only as deep as he needs to,
tips the cart, kicks the spilled limbs. But the hole
is never deep enough. Though the small knoll
will settle, it’ll rise up like a coup.

Today’s chore: clear the road from the lower gate to the upper gate. Limbs came down with the recent windy days. I also need to smooth the deeper ruts in a few places. It’ll be cool in the shade of the monstrous Doug firs.

9:07 PM – Well, I didn’t quite clear the road all the way to the upper gate. I got more particular than I’d planned, and focused instead on several long stretches where many limbs had come down. I raked hard for two hours, and then hunger got the best of me. We came back for lunch, and then got distracted by weeding the garden. But I left the tools in my car and plan to resume tomorrow, if it’s not raining.

It just occurred to me that today is the longest day of the year, which explains why, at 9:07—oops, 9:08 PM—it’s still light out, bright enough that I can see three deer in the thick daisies behind my garden. One of them, maybe a trick of the strange light, appeared to be inside the garden fence, but a closer look with the binoculars showed the barbed wire between her and my tasty beds. I’m sitting on the deck in fleece and a winter hat. It’s about 58 degrees, but there’s a slight breeze, enough to bring on a chill. Gus is lying in his bed beside me, his eyes peeled on the meadow and the forest’s edge, a sentry. I don’t spend enough time out here at night. It’s usually too chilly for my comfort, or the mosquitoes annoy me, and if I’m writing I have to run the laptop off its battery. But tonight I’m out here, with a cup of my homegrown mint tea, and the breeze feels encouraging and there are no mosquitoes so far. Above Rattlesnake Ridge there’s a band of white and above that dark clouds gathering. Rain tonight? I don’t care. I like the sound of it on the skylight as I’m drifting off to sleep. If I listen hard when the breeze slows, I can hear the river down below, pushing its way toward the Pacific. It must be something to be down there at night. Once, before I leave, I plan to take the tent and sleeping bag and camp out there. I’d probably be too worried about bears and cougars to sleep, but I can’t leave here without having done it. And I’ll have my sentry there, too.

I’m waiting for the moon. Last night it topped the ridge looking huge, full, yellow. It’s a trick of perspective that makes it look big, of course. The moon, after all, is always the same size. Seen with trees in front of it, it looks huge. Seen high in the sky, it looks small. So here I am hoping to see it behind the silhouettes of the firs. Maybe it’s too cloudy.

June 22, 2005

Aptly, summer has started with warm days. Today we packed up a lunch and umbrella and went down to the river for the day. This time I remembered to bring something to read. I brought along an issue of Granta. In it I read a beautifully written essay by John McGahern, an Irish writer. This issue focused on mothers, and the piece, which will be included in his forthcoming memoir, details his upbringing in Leitrim. The writing was fine enough to make me want to buy the book when it comes out. I’m a sucker for all things Irish, too, and so the story was all the more appealing. Why is it that the Irish write so well? Is it the rain?

I struck out again with the fishing, reeling in nothing but greetings from passing floaters. One guy said the Chinooks are in the river, but I didn’t see any. I used an assortment of rooster tails and other delectable-looking lures, and I saw a couple of little half-pounders following, but no strikes. I’ve hung up the fly rod for the time being. It’s too much bloody work. I have a feeling I won’t catch anything until the fall when the steelheads come back home. But it doesn’t matter. Just lying out beneath the umbrella, back propped against the smooth rock I’ve claimed, Gussie curled beside me in the sand, and listening to the river’s unstoppable voice, was enough. I kept catching a scent in the air that I could’ve sworn was rosemary. And high up in a leaning cedar, the ospreys kept asking us to leave. Finally, we did.

The hike back up was dry and hot. I love to breathe that kind of air, but I had to stop at The Love Grove to drink the last of my water, and I was parched again by the time I made it to the cabin. The Love Grove, by the way, is a flat, shady grove of tall firs so named when a previous resident, Jenny, fell in love with Ian, Frank Boyden’s son, and the two had a tryst there. They later got married and are living happily ever after. In the middle of The Love Grove is a crude bench fashioned out of two logs and a rough-hewn plank. Atop the bench is a black stone in the shape of a heart. How’s that for romance?

After dinner I was all set to get back into the story I’ve been working on, when a puzzle idea came to me. It’s the first time I’ve tried this: a puzzle in which there are boxes outside the grid (of course, part of a theme idea). Sometime after midnight I finished filling the grid with words. Now I have to write the clues, which is hard to do here, where the only reference book is a dictionary.

June 23, 2005

I’ve been feeling jittery and out-of-sorts since yesterday, and I’m not sure why. My head feels as though I haven’t slept: not really a headache but an uncomfortable, frayed feeling. Besides a new poem I wrote this morning, I’ve had no motivation to do anything. In the late morning Gus looked hot, so I took him up to the pond for a swim. Other than that I just futzed around the garden, worked on the new crossword, napped, and wrote a couple of letters. It feels like anxiety, but what is there to be anxious about? My stomach has felt a little queasy, too. Maybe it was something I ate?

In his new book John Daniel writes about the digger squirrels eating his beets and how, despite his love of nature, he poisons them with Just One Bite. I found this story pretty humorous, and though the digger squirrels have left holes all over the garden, they’ve steered clear of my vegetables, so I’ve seen no need to mess with them. But recently I noticed that the three broccoli plants closest to the chicken coop have been nibbled, and more recently they’re looking downright chowed upon. I hate to use poison, especially since Poopy always follows me out to the garden and sticks his nose in every hole. I couldn’t live with myself if he were to eat Just One Bite and it turned out to be his last. But yesterday morning, having my coffee out on the deck, I spotted one of the varmints beneath the grapevines. I tip-toed into the house, took the .22 from the closet, and loaded it with a few rounds. The .22 is a sweet little shooter, a Winchester repeating, model 62-A. With it’s pump-action, the spent shells flipping out of the chamber, I feel big and bad and a little kinder toward the NRA every time I shoot it. Through the binoculars I could see the Varmint Cong chewing something. I took aim and fired. And missed. And he scampered through the fence and under the old chicken coop. I wondered, then, if that’s what Gus is always sniffing over at the ramshackle coop. This morning, enjoying my coffee and crossword, I looked up and there the VC stood, in the exact same spot beneath the grapevine. I’d left the .22 on the kitchen table (“You know you’re a redneck when…”) for quick retrieval, and now I leveled it once again on the deck railing. When Neil was here I hit a bull’s eye from almost the exact same distance, about 50 yards. Again I missed. And the critter scampered to the safety of his home. Then I remembered: the gun shoots a tad to the right, and the way I hit the bull’s eye was to aim to the left. If he’s there tomorrow, I’ll make just such an adjustment. “Say your prayers, varmint.”

Tonight, for the second time in as many days, Gus found a dead bird. His nose, as keen as a bear’s or a vulture’s, never fails to sniff out exactly the kinds of things I don’t want him finding. Why he can’t catch a mouse in the house or a digger squirrel in the garden, I don’t know, but he has a knack for finding dead birds. Yesterday’s little corpse appeared to be a robin. I wrested it from Poopy’s mouth and threw it atop the slash pile, now its pyre. Tonight’s prize appeared to be an Oregon junco. Both bird were fledglings. They were either tossed out of the nest or they didn’t survive their first flight. It’s sad to think that they never got to know the wonder of taking to the air.

June 24, 2005

I woke up feeling much better. Maybe I just needed more sleep. Some nights I do stay up past midnight, and then my internal alarm clock wakes me at 7:00. Today it buzzed a bit early, 6:30, which was just fine with me. I took advantage of the coolness of the morning to trim the grass around the cabin, the garden perimeter, the turn-around, and the start of the trail down to the river. And again, the Muse visited me:

A Used Book

When I open its pages my dog stirs
from his repose on the couch beside me
to sniff at the spine and trim. His gray ears
lift to listen, and I hear what he hears:
traffic horns, a teapot’s whistle, the purrs
of the reader’s cats on her old settee.

What was she doing reading such heady
stuff so early on a Saturday—sun
not yet risen, her lover still asleep?
The book, I guess, her company to keep,
and the cats, while the light kept its steady
course across her floor. Paris or London,

I imagine, though it was probably
San Francisco, a streetcar passing by
and fog rinsing the morning air. A gray
day then, much like any other. It may
be that she, too, drawn irresistibly
to its place on a shelf in a nearby

shop, blew the dust and bought it second-hand.
And perhaps her cats roused when she opened
its cover, catching the vague scent of dog,
and she got no further than the prologue
before she was off to some distant land
where a man held a page against the wind.

In preparation for tomorrow’s trip into town, I assembled a few submissions and wrote a few more letters. In order to use my laser printer, I need to start up the generator for some juice. So, I get everything ready ahead of time—stories or poems I’m sending out and cover letters—and then I print everything all at once. I can’t stand the sound of the engine running or the stink of the exhaust, so the briefer it runs, the better.

Today was the last day, a professional day, for my colleagues at Tenafly High. I’ve been thinking about all of you. Enjoy the summer!

It’s been about two and a half months that I’ve been out here, and I’m better prepared now to comment on what it’s like to live in solitude. Most of the time, I don’t really even think about it. When I’m engaged in any of my various activities—writing, reading, gardening, playing guitar, maintaining the homestead, walking around with Gus, fishing, swimming, doing crosswords, cooking or cleaning or washing clothes—it doesn’t often occur to me that I’m all alone, no one around for fifty miles except for the occasional passing rafters down at the river. Doing these activities, I am for the most part content and happy, and sometimes I’m deeply gratified. Some days I wake up feeling whelmed with glee to be in such a place and to have another whole day ahead of me here. Other times I’ll see things—the purple Brodiaea growing everywhere, a garter snake, a hawk contracting its wings in midair, a walking stick insect, a blood-red dragonfly, a giant madrone, a single yellow leaf waving like a hand in its descent, the bobcat scat I found on my doorstep this morning—and feel that I’m not alone at all, that there are living things all around me. But there are those times when I crave the company of people: laughter, a shared meal, music, even meaningless small-talk. Living with Sharen, I laughed a lot. The time we spent together usually consisted of a running banter of funny stuff, little things that no one else in the world would get. At work, too, I laughed a lot, in the office and in class with my students. Out here I almost never laugh. Maybe when Gus does something funny. Or when I’m talking with someone on the radio phone (though that’s always a little awkward since the person on the other end can’t hear me laughing). Meals can be lonely affairs, especially dinner. I love to cook, but it’s so much more satisfying to cook for someone else. When Neil was here, I took great pride in the meals I whipped up, and they tasted better than the meals I’d been eating alone. Usually, I dine with a crossword handy, or a magazine or book, and then I don’t find myself looking out the window and thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” But then I go into town and observe the people sitting around me in the coffee houses and diners, almost none of them alone, and listen to their chatter, and I realize that being in the company of others can also be taxing. During my dinners with Neil, as lovely as they were, I found myself worrying that I wasn’t talking enough, that he was feeling obligated to maintain the chatter. One of the penalties one pays for being in the company of others is the uncomfortable silence and the work of conversing. This is a feeling I have often around other people, especially people I don’t know well, and it’s extremely tiring. It’s a game we don’t acknowledge but know is there. The friends I love being around the most—I think of someone like Janine Sisak—are the ones with whom you don’t feel this pressure to fill the gaps. With them, it’s okay to shut the hell up and just hang. One thing solitude reminds me of is that I don’t have a lot to say. I think this is why I like writing. When I write, I have things to say, or at least I feel as though I do; I feel intellectual. When I’m around people I find myself struggling to maintain interest in conversations and steering away from anything deep. I’m not sure why this is: fear of sounding stupid or of not measuring up, boredom? Maybe it’s just one manifestation of my generalized anxiety, but around people, I prefer my conversations to be short and of little import, and I think this is why I’ve loved game-playing so much when hanging around with people. Playing games—cards, trivia, whatever—there are the machinations of the game to keep the talk and energy going. It’s so much more work to just sit there and actually talk. So, am I a misanthrope? No, I don’t think so. If anything, I think I’ve discovered that I’m insecure, and in solitude I feel pretty secure. I’ve also discovered, though maybe I knew this already, that there’s nothing wrong with silence or with enjoying being alone. More on this topic later.

2005-06-23T10:42:00.000-07:00

June 14th - 17th

2005-06-18T11:09:00.000-07:00

June 14, 2005

I stopped in to see Ann and Mary Wilson yesterday on my way back from town (where I’d gone to get some new tires for my CR-V following the flat incident) to ask them about doctoring Dutch Hen. As it turns out, whatever’s afflicting her has also arisen in quite a few of Ann’s birds, mostly golden comets. Ann said she first saw the problem last year when several of her hens exhibited the same symptoms—sluggishness, lack of appetite and productivity, and heaviness and balding in the gut. She said her birds died after a week or two, but that some of them this year have survived for several weeks. She sent one bird to Portland for analysis. The hatchery claimed it was egg-binding, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Ann said her family’s been raising chickens since before she was born and that they’d never had this problem. She’s convinced it’s from hybridizing the breeds, that it’s a genetic defect. She may be right. She said another woman in town has the same problem, and that her birds responded well to Teramycin, an antibiotic. I told Ann I’d pick some up for the both of us when I went into town on Saturday to get Gussie his haircut. In the meantime, Dutch Hen still sits in her nest doing nothing.

I saw a bear cub cross the road on the drive back. It was dark black and maybe 150 pounds.

Another perfect day here. High 70s and sunny, with a cool breeze. I worked most of the afternoon in the garden, tying up my cucumbers (some are four inches long now) to their tripod and my garlic to some sticks. Everything appears to be thriving except the squash, which continues to be decimated by cutworms, and the one row of broccoli which, it turns out, is shaded in the late afternoon. A new batch of mesclun greens has germinated, as well as some arugula and mustard. I’ve been eating many hearty salads. Not that I’m going vegetarian or anything. Tonight’s dinner was particularly good. Porcini mushroom reduction with sirloin tips (cooked over real mesquite coals) and a side of mashed potatoes.

This evening I confirmed that a pair of red-breasted sapsuckers are nesting in one of the dead alders just up the road from the cabin. At first I thought it was a pair of gilded flickers, one or both of which I spooked a number of times taking our evening walk up to the pond. But then I started seeing the sapsuckers. And twice I saw one fly to the tree and disappear. This evening I brought along the binoculars. Sure enough, here came one of the sapsuckers, its beak pinching some tasty morsel. She landed on the tree and poked her head in a hole, a green beard of lichen spilling out. A nest! I thought I heard some little squeaks, but it was hard to tell. There’s a big patch of blackberries below these alders and then high meadow beyond that, a veritable bird sanctuary. I could hear Oregon juncos and robins in there, and so couldn’t confirm the sapsucker chicks. But I’d be willing to put money on it. On the walk back, I saw both the male and the female sapsucker. And then a gilded flicker, too! Now I’m wondering if the flickers are nesting in one of the other dead alders (there are three). Wouldn’t that be civilized? Neighbors.

June 15, 2005

Gus is a disgrace to his breed. A terrier, a mouser, right? Pshaw. For the past couple of nights I’ve been awaked around 2:00 am by a scratching sound, a sound which, in the deep dark and quiet of night, sounded as though it issued inches from my head. I’d click on the flashlight and the sound would stop. I was convinced it was a mouse trying to get in from beneath the floor, nibbling at the carpet in the corner. Or one out in the mud room, investigating the shelves. Two days ago I put out some D-Con on one of the shelves. Last night I was awakened by the noise once again. This time I was determined to find the cause. I lay on the very edge of the bed, flashlight in hand. But the creature was coy. It would wait until I’d fallen asleep and then it would start up its maddening scratching. The flashlight beam revealed nothing. And then, by chance, I panned it across the window, and there he was! A mouse, caught like a wasp between the window and the screen. The scratching sound? His little feet trying to dig through the screen. Gus, meanwhile, was out sleeping on the couch, his big paws in the air twitching at the dream of a lizard or a digger squirrel. I saw him like that when I went out to the living room area to get my calfskin gloves and to ponder this late night dilemma: how to extract mouse from window screen without it leaping into the bedroom and haunting my cabin for the rest of the summer. But here was my answer, my wheat-colored, burr-covered, bearded, brown-eyed pal. Gus. Gussie. Poopy himself. “Gus, come get the mouse!” I said. He yawned and blinked at the flashlight’s beam. But he’d heard the tone. One that promised play, adventure, distraction. And he followed. The mouse, legs splayed, eyes wide and blinded by the flashlight beam, was right where I’d left him. I played the beam on him, pointed for Gus to see. He gave a tentative sniff, oblivious. Maybe it was the reflection on the glass. He couldn’t see the damned rodent. I slid open the window a bit. Now the mouse shifted, Gus heard him, and was suddenly interested. Only he still couldn’t see the thing. Granted, Gussie’s hair has grown long; his fall covers half his line of sight. But isn’t this what he was bred for? I was wearing the gloves and now I knew I’d be putting them to use. It was hopeless to think Gus would jump up and catch the mouse between his big white teeth. No, I was going to have to grab the mouse myself and escort him out of my cabin. This was the new plan: grab the mouse, and if he happened to jump into the bedroom, there would be Gus waiting. Surely, with a mouse leaping past, scurrying at his feet, Gus would spring into terrier mode and live up to his sole purpose for existing. Right? I blinded the mouse as best I could with the flashlight, slid open the window, snatched, and had him! Had him in my right hand, safely subdued within worn calfskin. Then, like Houdini, the thing squeezed through my tight grip, landed at Gussie’s feet, and darted beneath the dresser. Gussie looked at me. Did I miss something? his look said. “It’s behind your crate, dummy! Get it.” And then he seemed to understand. He slithered beneath the dresser, sniffing. And now the mouse was ours. I’d move the crate and the mouse would run right into Gus’s waiting maw. Only it didn’t. It zipped like a trick of the eye through the doorway and off into some remote nook of the cabin. I gave Gus a disappointed shake of the head, called him a disgrace, put out two more packages of D-Con, and went back to bed. At least I would be hearing the scratching noise anymore. When I go into town again, I’ll buy some mouse traps. God knows they’ll work better than a wheaten terrier.

If Gus is lousy at finding mice, he’s good at finding snakes. Today I was watering the garden and heard him barking in the grass along the road. I went to investigate, and he was terrorizing a large snake, about four or five feet long and maybe two or three inches in diameter at its widest. At first I panicked, thinking it was a rattler, but it didn’t have a pit viper’s head or a rattle. I picked up my pal and carried him away just the same. I looked up the snake, and the closest thing I could find was a king snake. I hope I see it again when I have a camera, and when Gus is sniffing around elsewhere.

June 17, 2005

Marge Boyle told me the other night that it was so hot and humid in the East that schools closed early and people were warned to stay indoors. Man, one thing I don’t miss about home is the humidity. My experience with the East is that winter lasts a really long time, you have two weeks of spring—tulips, lilacs, flowering trees—and then the heat and humidity and thunderstorms roll in, and it’s summer. Marge said the temperature there was close to 100 and the humidity just ridiculous. I looked at my L.L. Bean digital thermometer and it read 63. And there’s no humidity out here. When it’s hot, it’s dry, the air crispy and nice to breathe. I remembered that from my visits to California, too. Unfortunately, it’s not warm at all here right now. For the last couple of days it has felt like autumn. Blustery winds, drizzle, cold. It’s almost nine o’clock and it’s 54 degrees out there. I’ve got a raging fire going in the stove. It cleared up briefly late in the afternoon yesterday, and I seized the opportunity to wash the mud and dust off my car and to wash the cabin’s windows. I brought a nice window-washing tool out here with me, one with a telescoping pole and a removable cloth and squeegee. The tall pointed windows above the sliding door were pretty dirty. Now they’re clean. I left one or two streaks, but I can live with that.

I made another collage last night. This one’s a little different: an abstract piece, a kind of experimentation with color and composition and tension. I used paper and pastels. It fit nicely in a frame I found here, and it’s now hanging where a poster of Van Gogh’s boats at Sainte Marie had been tacked up. Sorry Van Gogh. I’m not a big fan of posters, especially ones curling up at the corners. I’ll hang the boats back up when I leave.

June 7 - 13th

2005-06-13T13:20:00.000-07:00

June 7, 2005

Today I was looking forward to having an easy afternoon back at the cabin. You know, put away my groceries, make some lunch, check on Dutch Hen and my garden, maybe finish the novel I’ve been gobbling up. I’d gone to John Daniel’s reading and thoroughly enjoyed it, and met Dave and Stephanie Reed, long-time friends of the Boydens. I’d had a nice Italian dinner in Ashland. I’d taken Gus to the dog park. I’d gotten a haircut. But after a night in a hotel and two days spent in town, I was ready to get back to the hummingbirds and my view of Rattlesnake Ridge. No cars, no stoplights, no Wal-Marts, no people. Just tall firs, easy breezes, serpentine mists, and daisies. Lots of daisies. Oh, and rain. Lots of that, too, though I was hoping for a sunny afternoon. The ride was all but uneventful—the usual washboard ruts and zillion curves and here and there a shoulder that drops off into some treacherous abyss. And then, on the road about a mile from the upper gate, I saw a bear. Huge, light-brown, moving faster than my car, he ran in front of me for maybe twenty feet, and then dashed left into the woods. It was the high point of my day. Better than the chai tea with soy milk I’d had at Dutch Brothers. Better than the song I was listening to on my new CD from Paste. Now I was even more excited to get back to life at the cabin, feeling restful with the thought that even among black bears and all the other wildlife out here, I have the comfort of my domestic economy. I’d put away my stuff, have a tuna sandwich, chop some kindling, and make a fire. That’s what I’d do. Then I got out to unlock the first gate and heard it. A hiss like a mosquito in my ear, like a balloon not tied tight enough, like a rubber raft that’s passed over a sharp stick. But my tires all looked inflated. Water hissing on the engine block, I told myself, and then locked the gate behind me and drove on. At the next gate my front driver’s side tire looked a little lower. I could still hear the hiss. I shut off my engine. “Ruh-roh, Raggy!” I said to Gus in my best Scooby Doo, but in my head I was swearing like a sailor. My tire was wheezing out its last breath like some expiring relic of a Good Year commercial. I’d gotten a flat. I’d gotten a damned flat. Yes, a flat, the misfortunate event I had worried about for nearly a year. Late night visions of a flat tire and a dark, dark road in the middle of a vast and desolate forest. I still had plenty of pressure, though, and so I hurried on until I pulled to a stop on the most level piece of road I could find, right smack in front of the cabin. By the time I put my meats away, the tire had sagged like the jowls of a bloodhound. Dead, flat, depleted of air. So much for my easy afternoon.

I had sense enough to eat the tuna sandwich before undertaking the tire-change. “Relax,” I told myself. “It’s only a flat tire, and you’re lucky it happened so close to the cabin. Had it happened half-way home you might really have been screwed.” I’ve changed a dozen flats in my life. No big deal. And I’d specifically bought the CR-V because it had a full-size spare. At least I wouldn’t have to drive all the way out next time on some chocolate donut. No, I’d pop that full-size spare on there in a jiffy and go settle down to finish the novel. But I hadn’t really familiarized myself with the jack mechanism of the CR-V, had I? So I took out the manual and like the rational and self-reliant type I pretend I am I read the instructions: How to Change a Flat Tire. The first step was to locate the jack and the lug-nut tool, which, the manual illustrated for me, would be secured in a small compartment in back of the car. Turn knob counter-clockwise. There, the jack. Okay. But where’s the freaking lug-nut tool? There was no tool. There was no tool! And now I was cursing the tool at Tenafly Honda who’d sold me the car. How was I supposed to remove lug-nuts without the lug-nut wrench tool? I flung down the jack and searched every possible hidden compartment I could find. No lug-nut wrench tool. Yes, I was damned lucky the tire went flat at the cabin and not out along the desolate stretch BLM road 19-77-162.3, or whatever the government calls it, bleak road of my nightmares and populated with hungry cougars and marauding bears.

Luckily, the Boyden hermitage has the dubious sobriquet of DHIT, the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology. There are tools all over the place. Sure, they might be half-broken yard sale wrenches, ancient pipe cutters, dull hacksaws. But they’re tools, right? The tool box yielded nothing resembling a lug-nut wrench. But I did find a socket wrench set out in the mudroom. The handle on the ratchet was about five inches long, offering at best about five pounds of torque. The typical car lug-nut is tightened with eighty pounds of torque, and anyone who’s ever changed a flat knows that when mechanics put a tire on a car they use an air-powered Uzi-looking gizmo that affixes a nut to a screw so tightly it might as well be welded on. But the five-inch ratchet was better than my bare hands. On my way back out, I cast a glance at the green tool shed. Smelling of motor oil and kerosene and moldering pesticide dust, this tool shed houses various hand-tools: axes, wedges, picks, rakes, saws and loppers, most of them broken and repaired by some previous graduate of DHIT. I almost never find what I’m hoping to in that cool, dark, bituminous shed. But I opened the door and there on the shelf the first thing I saw was a lug-nut wrench tool, the same exact color and texture of the cheap-ass jack I’d found stowed in the CR-V. Had I taken the lug-nut wrench tool out of my car when I first arrived and placed it in this gloomy shed? It’s possible, I guess. Whether this was standard Honda manufacturer part or not, it was just as flimsy as it should’ve been, handle welded to socket and designed to break at the least amount of torque, the way all car manufacturer lug-nut wrench tools are fashioned. So now I was armed with two useless tools and feeling all too much like a useless tool myself.

Following what the manual said, I took off the spare and positioned the jack in the proper jacking notch, handily identified on the Honda CR-V by a small arrow. Next step. Loosen lug-nuts on the flattened tire. The instructions might just as well have ordered me to pull my molars out with a pair of tweezers. I pushed, I pulled, I cursed, I hammered. I sprayed WD-40. Pushed and pulled and hammered again. I cursed and cursed and cursed. Nyet, nada, nein. Those weren’t lug-nuts. They were steel extensions of the axle, and they weren’t budging. Hercules couldn’t budge them. The Incredible Freaking Hulk would be hard-put to get even a squeak out of one of them. What I needed was a bigger hammer, something with some weight to it. In the wood shed, I knew, I’d left a huge maul. That would do. But it wouldn’t. It didn’t. Another ten minutes and all the maul had done was bend the handle on the fortuitously found lug-nut wrench tool. I sat there a long time. I had enough food in the cabin to last me a few weeks. If I couldn’t change the damned flat, I’d call someone—John Daniel, Bradley, Dave Reed. They weren’t exactly local, but surely someone could bring me out a decent wrench. Maybe a new tire, too, because now I was thinking about the scenario of getting a second flat. What would I do then? I wracked my brain for options and then I chose the one that any good son would: I called my dad. My dad’s never been the most handy of guys. Sure, as a younger man he tried to do home repairs, changing a door knob or a light bulb. I learned to curse from him, his head buried beneath a sink or behind a washing machine. But I’ve seen him use a screwdriver. Bob Vila, he isn’t. Perhaps recognizing this shortcoming, he befriended guys who were Bob Vila. His friend John Tobin once changed the timing belt on my ’69 Cutlass, using his own tools and no instructions in his own garage on the coldest day of the year. Another of my dad’s friends, Stanley Lachut, could take apart the space shuttle and put it back together again. So I left a message with my dad asking him to find out from one of these self-taught mechanic geniuses how to loosen stuck lug-nuts.

Torque. The word of the day. a force that produces a wrenching effect. Force being the key word. Pounds of pressure. That’s what I needed. And how many pounds do I weigh? For the last six years or so I’ve hovered around 150, give or take five pounds. Add to that weight the force of gravity and the thick Vibram sole of a hiking boot, and you’ve got your homemade torque wrench. This I conjectured, and this I would try. I found a long, open-end, ¾-inch wrench in the DHIT toolbox. Position on lug-nut, climb atop wrench, hold on to hood, and…. First there came a squeak, a shriek, a metallic cry that made my teeth ache. Then I was being lowered to the ground on the little elevator of the wrench and the loosened lug-nut. And before my dad could call me back, I’d put on the spare, affixed the flat tire to the back door of the Honda, put away the tools, and changed out of my muddy clothes. It was later than I would have liked it to be, but I made a fire in the stove, put water on for tea, and retrieved the almost-finished novel from the nightstand.

The registrar may dispute it, but I think this one earns me three credits toward my degree at the Dutch Henry Institute of Technology.

June 9, 2005

I took my first plunge in the pond today. The morning was warm and sunny and I was sweaty from two hours of mowing the meadow. Newts and all, I dove in, and it felt great. I didn’t stay in long, because Gussie came scratching at me with his big bear claws. What I need is an inflatable raft, one he can’t pop. The dragonflies were a sight. Bright red ones, neon blue ones, and the usual black and white ones. I also saw a three-foot garter snake and a frog bigger than my fist.

Late in the afternoon I was sitting on the deck icing a bee sting on my big toe (what I get for gardening in sandals) and there were seven hummingbirds dancing around one of the feeders. See poem below for story.

Seven Hummingbirds

at the feeder, peeping for the sweet
water and making wind on my face
as I stand among them feeling envious

of their games. They seem so happy
to be dipping, reversing, trading spaces,
clapping one another’s wings in mid-air.

They hover inches from my face.
Two brush my hand and I understand
I’m there to catch one and hold it,

because I need to, because I know I can.
And it’s easier than I would have thought.
Fingers spread beneath the feeder,

just a matter of pressing index to thumb,
and I’ve got one, a rufous male, feathers
the color of coffee with cream, a clean

splash of orange at the neck, black legs
as thin as a pencil’s lead, and the wings
fluttering, stymied, like a bee at a screen.

Cupped in my palm, his eyes look a little
wild, his feathers ruffled. His tiny heart
labors like loneliness. So I let it go.

(Note: I actually caught two hummingbirds. The first was the male rufous, who I didn’t photograph. With him, I held his foot and he fluttered and then just sat on my finger. Then I let him go. He’s a very aggressive bird, knocking all the others away from the feeder. He’s a character. The second was a female, and that’s the one you see in the photograph in my hand. I was very gentle with her, and held her long enough to snap the photo and then let her go. She was back at the feeder in about thirty seconds. Good action. The poem works better if it’s the male I hold. I think the reason’s obvious.)

June 10, 2005

It turns out that Dutch Hen doesn’t have coccidiosis but a case of egg-binding, which can be just as fatal. I’m quite sad about this. Apparently it’s fairly common, especially in fat birds, and she’s a bit overweight for her age. The egg has been stuck inside her for five or six days. I’ve tried twice to help her out by oiling her vent, a kind of gynecological task I’d rather not describe, but it hasn’t helped. I’ve also tried getting her to move around the yard, figuring that a bit of adrenaline might help her push it through. But the egg is just too big for her to lay. A clerk at The Grange Co-op, a great nursery/feed/pet store in Grants Pass, set me straight on her problem. He said the telltale sign of coccidiosis is blood in the stool, which I haven’t seen. She looks healthy except for the fact that she almost never leaves the nest now, and that she’s dragging her back end low to the ground. The clerk said it sounds like a classic case of egg binding, and I think he’s right. He printed out a web site explaining the condition, and gave me the pages, and that’s where I learned about oiling the vent. The site also said that sometimes the bird can be saved if the egg is visible and if you poke a hole in it and let the yolk and whites leak out, like making Easter eggs. The hen can then pass the shell by crushing it. But I don’t see the egg. It’s deeper inside. I feel a bit more helpless as each day passes. I’d take her to a vet, but vets generally don’t deal with chickens, and even if they did, I don’t think the bill would be worth it. I keep going to the coop a few times a day hoping to see her moving about and a big egg in the nest, but each time she’s just lying there looking like she’s trying to lay an egg. I’m not too hopeful.

I engaged in another DHIT project today: fixing the utility sink faucet. The hot knob hasn’t been closing properly. Sometimes water continues to come out, and you have to close the knob two or three times to get it to stop completely. Well, this is annoying, and it was time to fix it. But I should have known before I began, that with any plumbing job you usually start by making matters worse. I shut off the valve beneath the sink and took the knob off. I inspected the washer, and it looked fine. The screw holding the knob in appeared to be a wood screw, not the right kind at all. So I went up to the upper house tool shed to see if I could find proper screws and a new washer. I struck out with the latter. There are a hundred washers up there, but none of them the right size. I found an old bathroom faucet and took the two screws out of the handles. Then Gussie and I skedaddled back to the project. Of course, the screws were too big. So I reassembled the knob and screwed it back in with the same old wood screw, which will have to do until I get to the hardware store. Apparently, just moving the washer helped. The water turned off just fine. Then I heard the drips. Uh-oh, leaky! Upon close scrutiny, it appeared that the hoses going from the valves to the knobs beneath the sink were both dripping. How this happened, I don’t know. I barely moved anything back there, and the sink is screwed to the floor. But this is Murphy’s Law of Plumbing, and ours is not to wonder why. I shut the water off again and tried repairing the cold water hose first by using a little plumbing tape around the white plastic thread into which the hose screws just below the knob assembly. It leaked even more. I took the tape out and tightened without tape. No leaky. Pat on back. The hot water hose was leaking at the screw clamp where the hose connects to the valve. The only thing stopping me from fixing it was that there was no room to fit a screwdriver behind the sink to loosen the clamp. So I unscrewed the sink from the floor and pulled it out a few inches. Now I could reach the other clamp, the one on the hot water hose. I loosened it, cut a half inch off the hose, and refitted the clamp. No leaky. Screwed legs back in floor and, voila, sink like new. I even inserted a custom-cut brass screen in the spout for a nicer flow. One-half credit toward my DHIT degree.

I harvested my first head of lettuce today. For a few weeks now I’ve been enjoying the mesclun mix (mostly mustard greens) and a leaf or two each night from one of the heads of red romaine or the green leaf lettuce, but this was my first full head.

You plant a tiny starter, water it for weeks, mulch it, weed around it, let it soak up sun, and this is what you get.

It filled up a gallon-size Ziploc and will give me salads for a few days at the very least.

I’m looking forward to picking the red romaine, too. Here’s what they look like:

My cukes and squash are about three inches long, though the cutworms have done a number on the latter. Here’s one they haven’t gotten to:

I’ve been doing some decent writing. This week I put aside a sixteen-page short story I’ve been laboring over, a story close to its end but which the more I think about the less I like. So this week I started something new. I’m twenty-two pages into it, and I’m hoping it’ll take off into something good. I don’t want to say more for the fear I’ll jinx it.

My back aches from too much sitting on the orange couch. The recliner offers more back support, but during the day when the sun’s coming through the window it throws too much glare on the laptop screen and it drives me nuts. The best place for writing is on the orange couch out of the glare. I can keep the computer plugged in to the solar inverter from there, too. But, oy, my aching back. I fear I’m getting curvature of the spine.

June 12, 2005

Sharen’s birthday today. Thirty-five years old. I called to wish her a happy birthday, and she was hanging by the Subins’ pool—one of her favorite places, one of her favorite people. I’m happy for her. I sent her a bottle of scotch, Johnny Walker Blue. In her old age she’s become a bit of a connoisseur. What she really needs is a jet-pack; she’s always on the go. One days she’s in Batavia, the next in Brooklyn, the next up in Maine for a wedding, the next down in Rhode Island visiting her folks. She’s put about 60,000 miles on the Mini already. Slow down, I want to say. But she seems happy.

I saw cougar scat on the road near the pond this afternoon. A big pile full of bones and blood and fur and other nasty, undigested gunk. I’d walked up the road to clear the screen at the stream dam and to remove fallen branches from the road. But after seeing the scat, I kept looking over my shoulder and panicking every time Gussie went bounding off into the woods. It’s creepy to know there’s a huge cat out there, one who’s well aware of the presence of this human and this tasty-looking dog. Then I remembered the smell of carrion that Neil and I had sniffed one evening walking up to the pond. I think the cougar killed a deer somewhere near the pond and has been feeding on it. The smell is gone now, so the cat either finished the kill or carried it off to some other location. As scary as it is, I’d really like to see this huge feline.

June 13, 2005

Gussie and I spent a perfect day down at the river yesterday, a good five hours of lying about, swimming, fishing and fetching sticks (well, Gus fetched the sticks). I had one tentative strike from a half-pounder, but it looked pretty small. I think the fly was too big for it. We saw about a dozen rafts go floating by. One guy said, “Shouldn’t you have a boat or something?” I smiled and gave the enigmatic reply, “Or something.” It felt like a real summer day. No squalls. No cool breezes. Just warm and sunny. I’d brought along a beach umbrella, so we had some shade. Here’s what our shady nest looked like:

The only thing I was lacking (my own forgetfulness) was a book to read. But the river is so clean and sparkling and beautiful, I was content to follow its story.

After dinner last night Gussie leapt off the floor barking, and I looked out and saw a black lab in the road. At first I thought some hikers had wandered up here from the river and that I’d have to go out and politely as them to leave. Then I stepped out on the deck and saw a family—mom, dad, sis and junior—carrying Pulaski tools and heaving with sweat. There was a second black lab, too. I knew right away who it was: the Cummins family, the folks who bought the crazy castle up the road so they could raise and ride horses there. I went out to greet them, and we chatted for a while. They knew about the writing residency, and I think they’d spoken to Bradley. They were curious to see the river (oddly, there’s no trail from their place) and hadn’t known what to expect, so had brought along the Pulaski tools. I told them they wouldn’t need them, that the trail was clear all the way to the river. I’m sure Bradley’s told them that the homestead is private property, that we don’t want horse traffic coming through here, and that no horses are allowed on the Rogue River Trail. I told them I enjoy my solitude and like it quiet. We exchanged phone numbers. It’s good to have another contact out here, though they’ll probably only be coming in on weekends. Then one of their labs took Gussie’s bone and a scrap ensued, Gussie doing quite well for himself and winding up atop the lab in alpha dog position, teeth snarling. We broke it up, gave Gussie back his bone, and off the Cummins went to check out the river. An hour later, nearly dark, Gussie announced their return. I waved from the deck, and they walked on up the road. They seem like nice folks.

June 3rd - June 6th

2005-06-06T12:44:00.000-07:00

June 3, 2005

Back to solitude today, and it feels nice, as much as I loved having a visitor. I got right back into writing this morning, and was almost finished with a new poem when I heard a loud thump against the window. I knew exactly what it was. All during my coffee and while I was working out the first few stanzas of the poem, I’d been watching two western tanagers chasing each other around the yard, a male and a female, and I’d been thinking that they were courting and had a nest nearby. I’ve been seeing them for days. Then came the thump. I went outside and there in the grass beneath the window lay the male. Given the noise of the crash, I thought he would be dead, but he wasn’t. I picked him up. His heart was racing and he seemed to be in shock. I figured that he’d also broken a wing. I sat on the steps with him for a while, stroking his head, sad to see such a beautiful bird, one which only minutes ago had been flying around so sprightly, now so pained and frightened. It was thrilling to hold him in my hand, especially since the western tanager is such a beautiful bird. I saw my first one in Yellowstone park several years ago, and I was excited to find them so abundant here at the homestead. Now here was one pretty banged up and shivering in my hand. I couldn’t just leave him outside like that, so I took him in and fashioned a cage inside a Havahart trap. I was afraid that if I left him on one of the tables on the deck, he would try to fly and simply fall and hurt himself even more. After the chicken debacle, I knew enough to keep him well out of Gussie’s reach, too. So I set him up in the cage. Later I looked out the window and saw the female, his mate, on the clothesline with a bunch of lichen in her beak. She was looking for him, but I’m not sure if she could see him there in the cage. Yes, they were in the middle of building a nest. For the next hour or so I could hear her calling in the yard. After lunch while I was hoeing in the garden I picked up some grubs and worms for him. When I went on the deck to give him the worms, he looked much more alert and was standing up straight. I put the worms in the cage, and then watched him from inside the house. He paid no attention to the worms. Instead, he tried to squeeze through the bars. I decided to let him out, placing him on the glass table. He hopped around a bit, and after several minutes flew to the deck railing! I went inside so as not to frighten him. Then he dropped down to solar panel bar. Then to the grass. I went out to make sure he was okay, shot a photo of him, and off he flew in a wide arc—ten, twenty, thirty feet up and into a tree! A story with a happy ending. Apparently, he wing wasn’t broken. I think he only suffered a concussion in the crash. I’m confident he’ll find his way back to the nest and to his mate, which is more than I can say for myself.

Here he is after the crash:

And here he is five hours later, after recovery, and before his flight to freedom:

Isn’t he a gorgeous bird?

The crashed flight of the tanager added poignancy to the poem I’d been writing, a piece based on a collage I finished last night. Both the collage and the poem share the same title—“Bellevue, Paris, New York, Wherever”—and both allude to the myth of Icarus. In the collage a boy is falling through the air in front of an apartment building in a city. Some people see him falling; others don’t. While assembling the collage, I kept thinking of W.H. Auden’s poem “Musee de Beaux Arts,” in which he describes the scene in Pieter Breughel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” So my collage and my poem owe some debt to Auden, to Breughel and to the injured tanager.

Here’s the collage:

If you’re wondering about the title, it’s what appears just above the chicken and the girl. I clipped it out of a Seattle newspaper I found in one of the pantry cupboards.

Here’s the poem:

Bellevue, Paris, New York, Wherever

A boy falls from a window or a roof,
no feathers, no wax, the sun hardly out,
the peace of dinner broken by a shout.
Flies and neighbors gather demanding proof.

The cat in 14-B blinks from its sill.
But where is the boy’s mother? His father—
don’t you know?—was killed last year in the war;
she took a second job to pay the bills.

A siren navigates the labyrinth
of streets until its red lights dance across
the body covered now with sheets. The loss
deepens in the hush. When the ambulance

rolls away (no rush now), people shake heads
and cough, spent but reluctant to unfold
their arms and ascend the stairs to their cold
plates, their evening news, their familiar beds.

But there is the mother to consider—
how, later, she saw the blood-stained pavement,
and by the open window comprehended
the weight of that falling as it hit her.

June 5, 2005

I landed my first reading! Thanks to Judy Montgomery, whose lovely chapbook I published in 1999, I’ll be reading in Eugene on September 20th. Judy recommended me to the woman who runs the Windfall reading series. Details to follow. All I know so far is the date and city and that there’s a nice honorarium included. I spoke with the organizer woman yesterday. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll have plenty of new pieces from which to choose.

On a less happy note, I think Dutch Hen is sick. She’s been sitting on the nest for three or four days now, her head pulled back into her shoulders. She doesn’t appear to be eating or laying eggs. At first I thought she was sitting on an egg, but she wasn’t. I took her out of the nest the other day and she ate a little bit. When I went out this morning, she was in the nest again. I looked in my poultry book and, based on the symptoms I’m observing, I think she has coccidiosis, a disease caused by a protozoan parasite, coccidium. When I go into town tomorrow I’ll try to pick up some coccidiostats at the feed store and see if they’ll help. It’s too bad. She’d been so healthy and productive.

June 6, 2005

Back to winter today! When I woke this morning it was a rainy, chilly 45 degrees out, and when I got up in the higher elevations on the way to town, there was snow for a good ten miles. Don’t they know it’s June?

It's hard to believe it was in the 90s just last week.

I’m going to hear John Daniel, former Dutch Henry resident and now overseer of the program, read tonight in Ashland. I think he’s going to be reading from his new memoir, part of which is about spending a winter at the Dutch Henry Homestead in 2000. My dad read the book and loved it, and my brother Michael is reading it now. It’ll be great to meet John and hear him read.

May 27 - June 2

2005-06-02T09:02:00.000-07:00

May 27, 2005

Holy summertime temperatures! In two days it’s gone from being in the mid-40s to being very close to 100 degrees. I drove into Grants Pass on Wednesday to pick up Neil, and the heat was blistering. I couldn’t safely leave Gus in the car, so we spent most of our day at Bluestone Bakery at the outdoor tables, where I used the WiFi and Gus relaxed under the umbrella munching on a bran muffin. I did find a shady spot in the parking lot of Market of Choice and stocked up on lots of food for the week. Neil’s bus arrived late, around 6:30, and we made it back to the cabin by 8:15, well before dark. The cabin, which I’d closed up when I left in the morning (thinking it was going to be a cool day), was hotter than Hades. We had a late dinner—chicken wraps and chips—and then relaxed on the deck, looking at the stars. I don’t think the nighttime temp dropped below 65 degrees.

Thursday, yesterday, was another hot, sunny day, the temp climbing close to 100 degrees. I showed Neil around the garden and the upper cabin and the pond, and then we spent most of the day on the deck. We had a little target practice with the .22 rifle, much to Neil’s delight. He hadn’t shot a rifle since his service days in the late 50s. We hung a target about 100 yards away, and we each made two out of four shots. Good fun.

Here are Gus and Neil out at the barn:

Last night we played cribbage, and Neil won two out of three games. Before arriving, he’d made as though he didn’t really know the game that well, and I wonder if he’s hustling me. But I’m determined to redeem myself tonight when the tournament continues. Having beat Bradley, who counts faster than anyone I’ve ever played, I’m determined to beat Neil.

Here we are looking quite serious (and warm):

Before starting our cribbage games we heard a noise in a paper shopping bag someone had left out on the deck. I’d forgotten it was there beneath the clothespins. I looked inside and there was a mouse who had happily eaten a whole bunch of sunflower seeds. Here it is:

Today was cooler than the previous two days. It got up around 90, but there was a breeze. We had a lazy day hanging around the cabin, reading, doing crossword puzzles (we tackled three together), and chatting. At one point we ventured out without Gus to see if we could get a glimpse of Mr. Bear, who was once again knocking over trees in the woods behind the garden.

Every night we’ve taken a walk up to the pond to let Gus swim and fetch sticks.
Here he is in the grass, before the swim:

Here he is retrieving a stick in the pond:

Good action.

May 28, 2005

In the middle of our cribbage tournament last night clouds rolled in, wind blew the trees around, thunder boomed, and lightning lit up the night. A thunderstorm. It was far enough away that we weren’t all that concerned, and we welcomed the cooler temperatures and the breezes. Then it stopped. Around midnight, not long after we’d turned in, thunderclaps exploded again, this time just above the roof of the cabin, deafening booms that shook me awake. Heavy rain followed. The thunder, lightning and rain continued all through the night, and I couldn’t sleep. Around 3:00, I got up with a flashlight and went out to find my earplugs in the mud room.

In the morning Neil said he’d never encountered a storm so dramatic. Apparently he, too, was nearly knocked out of his bed up in the loft. Over coffee and tea we resumed our cribbage games, and the rain started again. I’d lit a fire in the stove, and I could hear drops hissing. Where the stovepipe leaves the roof, there was a small leak. As soon as the roof is dry again, I’ll get up there and patch it with some of the roofing cement. A similar leak happened at my own house in New York last year, and I think I can handle it. I’ll do it while Neil is here, just in case I fall.

I’m now losing the cribbage tournament, four games to five. Not happy about that.

May 31, 2005

Neil caught a fish! Saturday began cool and sort of cloudy, good hiking weather, so we packed a lunch and went down to the river. I brought along the spinning reel and rod just for the heck of it. Neil had never fished in his whole life. It’s a running joke among his pub quiz team members. So, Neil was hoping to catch one or to at least have me take a picture of him casting. On his very first cast, which he sort of flubbed, not knowing how to flip the bail, he was reeling the Rooster Tail dangerously close to some submerged shrubs, and suddenly a small fish broke the surface. “You’ve got one!” I shouted. Neil wasn’t quite sure what to do. He worked the reel as though the handle was stuck, the rod tip bouncing up and down. But then he was lifting up the fish, which was about four or five inches long and resembling a trout. I tried to take a picture of Neil holding the rod with the fish dangling off the end, but by the time I clicked the shutter, the fish had dropped off. Now the poor thing was flopping in the shallows and Gus was dancing around it. I really didn’t want to kill such a small and lovely fish, so I picked it up gently and revived it a bit in the water. I can’t be certain, but I wonder if it was one of the “half-pounders” Bradley had told me about, an immature steelhead. It had the mouth and face and body shape of a trout, but it was sort of silver-colored. I was afraid the fish was going to die, so I let it go before I thought to take a picture of it. But, for those pub quiz team members, here’s a photo of Neil just after the fish fell off the lure, and I can vouch for the fact that he actually caught a fish:

And here’s my bloke taking a cast:

Like the tiny fish, Neil was hooked. He must have made a thousand more casts, all from the same spot. I also made about half that many casts. Nothing. Still, it’s amazing that a guy who’d never fished in his whole life should, on his very first cast upon the Rogue River, land a “half-pounder.”

Like me, Neil’s fallen in love with the homestead. “It’s paradise,” he told his daughter Natasha when he called her on the radio phone for the Liverpool football scores. And yesterday he said rather sadly, “I have to leave in two days.” Here he is looking off the south side of the deck (the pulley behind him is for my clothesline):

Neil took this photo of Gussie and me on the famous orange couch:

I think I fixed the leak around the stove pipe. There was some roofing cement in the upper house tool shed, and so I climbed up and filled in all the possible places where the rain may have been coming through. “No leaky!”

Yesterday our major chore was the badly needed pruning of the apple trees closest to the cabin. These trees, which aren’t behind a fence and so are really just food for Mr. Bear, hadn’t been properly pruned in years and had many vertical branches. I climbed up in one of them with loppers and the bow saw while Neil used the long-handled loppers and saw on the other tree. I left some growth at the base of the vertical branches and saved all the horizontal branches. The tree will be much happier for our labor. There won’t be as many apples for Mr. Bear this fall, but in future years the tree will bear well.

Late yesterday afternoon we went up to the pond to check out the dragonflies. On a trip there the other day I noticed many dragonflies emerging from nymphs as adults, a process that looks like something out of Alien—head being birthed out of head, half-formed wings unfolding. The nymphs hatch from eggs in the pond and then crawl up the banks into the grass. Dragonflies don’t have a pupal stage. Everywhere in the grass were the dried brown shells of the nymphs and beside them the newly formed adults. In one or two of the nymph shells the dragonflies were still in the process of emerging. Here are some photos of the ones we found yesterday:

The dried shell of the nymph is just to the right under the lower right wing.

We helped this one take its first flight.

This one hadn’t yet unfolded its wings completely and couldn’t fly.

I wrote this poem after seeing the dragonflies emerging from nymphs:

Emergence

All around the pond I find
them clinging to the shells

of their nymph-selves,
their eyes puzzles of facets,

like pear-cut diamonds,
and their double sets of wings

filigrees of the thinnest glass.
It’s hard to believe

they could have climbed
out of these hard little bodies,

which delivered them
from water to air, but here

is one now, head pushing
out of head, like a lily opening,

and here am I, alive to see it,
eighteen years sober to the day.

On the walk back, we discovered this wildflower, called Pretty Face:

And here’s a nice collection of daisies growing just west of the garden:

June 1, 2005

June began with a daring rescue! Neil, Gus and I hiked down to the river this morning in the hope of landing another one of the little “half-pounders.” Neil was off on his rock casting a rooster tail while I was upriver a bit casting a fly. Gus, as usual, had been fetching sticks. Whether he was going after a stick or my fly, I don’t know, but suddenly he was out in the swift-moving current, and he was paddling to get to a rock. Only he was making no progress. He was caught in an eddy. As hard as he paddled forward, the current pulled him back, and he was tiring. “Come on, boy!” I yelled. “Come on!” To no avail. Then I thought to run toward Neil, figuring that if he swam behind one of the rocks there would be no current, and he’d be safe. I called him from there. But he just kept trying for that one gap between the rocks. Now I was getting scared. I had visions of him tiring out completely, going under, and being swept away. No more Gus. I threw down the rod, pulled off my shoes, stripped down to my underwear, and dove in. The river was cold, but I love my pooch. I swam out and grabbed hold of him and pushed him up on one of the rocks. Neil concluded that if dogs are anything like cats, then Gus has eight more lives. We caught no fish, but added two new birds to the bird list: American Pipit and a Great Blue Heron. Then the weather turned cloudy, cold and drizzly, so we folded up the blanket and decided to have our lunch back at the cabin, where we’d be warm and dry and Gus would be safe.

Today is Neil’s last day at the homestead, and we’re both sad about that. We get along well together, and have enjoyed many fine meals, stories, crosswords, games of cribbage, walks, bird sightings, shooting competitions, stars, breezes and the peace of the homestead. It’ll be strange to return to the cabin tomorrow without him, after I drop him off in Grants Pass.

He wrote me this poem yesterday:

No News

On the lunchtime news bulletin
Bush made a statement about judges,
And two rival Palestinian groups
had fallen out about something or other;

While here at Dutch Henry’s place
In Josephine county, Oregon,
We’ve walked the dog, pruned
An old apple tree, caught a neat

Little half-pounder in the Rogue River,
Played two hands of cribbage,
Had cold chicken salad with a little wine,
And are thinking of taking a nap.

Here are a few photos from today:

An alligator lizard spotted along the Dutch Henry trail.

Closer.

Neil’s cocoon up in the loft. He was afraid of mosquitoes, so brought along mosquito netting.

Looks like a British poet to me.

June 2, 2005

Early day today. We woke at 4:30 to make Neil's bus in Grants Pass. Had a nice ride out, with mists lifting over the mountains.

The final tally on the cribbage tournament: 19 to 12, Gary winning. It's official: I'm the Dutch Henry Homestead Cribbage Champion of 2005.

Week of May 17-24

2005-05-25T12:36:00.000-07:00

May 17, 2005

The cold weather continues. It dipped into the forties last night. As nice as it is that the chill is keeping the mosquitoes at bay, it’s also keeping me indoors. It’s about 3:00 PM, and I’ve only gone out a couple of times today—once to photograph a snake Gussie rustled up (see below) and another time to plant my new cantaloupe (which I encased in a cut section of plastic bottle to protect its stem from the killer grubs).

I was finishing my coffee this morning, when Gus began barking. I went out to investigate, and discovered that he’d found himself a big garter snake, a Western species with red dots, more colorful than the Eastern ones I’m used to. I picked it up and placed it atop my chopping block so Gussie wouldn’t hurt it, and while it was there I got some good photos.

I read in my North American Wildlife book that nocturnal snakes have vertical irises. Diurnal snakes have round ones, like this snake. I saw a different species of snake the other day while I was adding a fenced run to the chicken coop. It was a beautiful little snake, one I didn’t know, and it kept poking its head out from the cedar shakes. I didn’t have the camera with me. I’ll keep looking for it.

Here are some recent photos I shot when I did have the camera with me:

Black-legged tick, found walking on Gussie’s back.

Gussie keeping vigil over the bane of his existence. Reminds me of the cartoon with the sheepdog and the wolf.
“Mornin’, Ralph.”
“Morning’, Fred.”

My bathroom at night, kerosene lamp burning.

The daisies have opened, and all the meadows and roadsides are littered with them. They fill a vase nicely.

A bearded iris, planted by a former resident. He or she would be glad to know I’ve been enjoying it. Note the raindrops.

From above.

Wild rose.

While I was in Ashland, I stopped in Bloomsbury Books and bought the Audubon’s Field Guide to Wildflowers, Western Region, and it’s been a total flop. Hasn’t helped me identify a single wildflower except Elegant Cat’s Ear. I should have known better; their bird guide stinks, too. Here are five flowers the book either didn’t include, or which it does include but the photos look nothing like the actual flowers.

Here’s a link to Lang’s wildflower site. It probably includes them, with Latin names. I just haven’t had time to download all the pages.

I started T.C. Boyle’s newest novel, Drop City, and it’s a riot. It’s set at a California commune and later in Alaska (after the commune moves there) in 1970. Time to gobble up a couple more chapters.

May 18, 2005

Can you say, “Rain?”

Today was a miserable mizzling drizzling day. There were patches of blue—little teases. Rays of sun—false hope. It would rain for ten minutes, stop. Rain for twenty minutes, stop. Rain for five minutes, stop. Now randomize and repeat. As with yesterday I ventured out about twice. Once to replenish my kindling supply, a task which I had to finish on the deck because it started to rain. Another time to take Gus for our evening walk. Yes, it rained then, too. I bet if I were to step outside right now it would be, yes, you guessed it, raining. I thought that May was supposed to be a beautiful month here. So far it’s been wet and cold. I’d say that in the last fifteen days it’s rained about twelve of them. I’m hoping things change by the weekend.

I couldn’t get motivated to write anything today, so I read a bunch of chapters in Drop City and started making a collage. Last time I was in town, I picked up some Mod Podge glue and some heavy sheets of card stock. My other collage glue must have been in the package that got lost in the mail. It was fun to get back into collage-making, and so far, so good. I’m still ripping off Bearden, but it’s what I like. If it comes out as a keeper, maybe I’ll frame it and hang it in here as another donation of mine to DHH.

Speaking of which, I bought a composter, too, when I was in town. I’ve been trying to compost, but the bin in the garden was in a bad state of disrepair, and I didn’t like the looks of it or fancy the prospect of trying to nail it all back together. It looked like the kind of setup that makes compost about once every two years. So, I went to The Grange Co-op at the south end of Grants Pass and bought a nice round-barrel rotating type composter. This way I’ll have usable compost in 4-8 weeks, depending on the heat and moisture. It’s a sturdy rig, and will come in handy for future residents here as a batch composter.

I’m pleased to say that the garden looks happy after all the recent rain. My cukes and squash have survived the killer grubs. One plant has a 2-inch yellow squash on it! And the cukes are sending out tendrils. As soon as it’s sunny again, I’m going to erect some poles for them to climb. I can’t wait to start harvesting veggies. My red and green Romaine are looking good, and I think I’ll be able to start picking those in three weeks or so. I plan to harvest some of the mesclun greens tomorrow. After our walk up to the pond, where Gus took a long swim, I harvested a second batch of strawberries—a half-dozen nice-sized ones. I’ll have them with cereal tomorrow.

The local deer family is getting braver. Apparently, they’ve realized that Gussie’s bark isn’t ever accompanied by teeth, so they’re grazing close to the cabin and in broad daylight. I shot these two photos late yesterday after dinner.

Okay, time to climb on the bus with the Drop City characters. The commune is moving up to Alaska, after “the man” chased them out of California. This is such a fun novel. Add it to your summer reading. You won’t be disappointed.

May 20, 2005

Today’s highlight was doing telephone conference calls with three of my classes at old THS. I had to wake up bright and early—5:15—for my first class, and that was rough. It’s by far the earliest I’ve woken up since my last day of work on March 30. It was even more difficult because I couldn’t sleep last night. Perhaps it was a case of nerves at having to use an alarm clock. I was up reading at 2:00 and slept only a few hours, fitfully. But it was a delight to talk to all my students again. The creative writing classes read me poems of theirs, and I read some of mine. I answered questions they had about my experiences out here. Some of my colleagues stopped in and got on the phone, too, and it was fun to chat with them as well. For my seniors I read my usual summer send-off poem, “First-Year Teacher to His Students.” The only annoying thing about chatting with the classes was this radio phone. I only get to talk for ten minutes, and then I get disconnected, and I also have to click the mic every ten seconds or so, or the thing thinks the call has ended and it’ll hang up. So, while kids were reading me their pieces, I had to keep clicking the darned mic. And with each class I had to call three times. I guess the radio phone is better than no phone at all, or the satellite phone last year’s residents used. You had to stand in a field to get a signal on that one. As much as I’m liking being here, I do miss my students. It’s sad that I won’t see the seniors finish up the year. Maybe I could go into town on graduation day and watch it on streaming video on the Internet.

Another day of rain. I’m beginning to get a bit nutty with all the rain. I’d like a few days of sun, please. At least long enough for everything to dry out. The road is a muddy mess. And it’s been too cold to sit out on the deck for more than a few minutes. And I haven’t gone down to the river in three weeks. It’s weird that a month ago, my second week here, I was lying out in shorts and a tee shirt. I’d gladly take one or two of the hot days everyone promised. I’ve had the stove going all week. I don’t think the temperature has ever climbed out of the fifties.

Neil Curry called in the afternoon. He’s arriving at the Grants Pass bus depot on Wednesday evening. I’m looking forward to having company.

Well, it’s another Friday night at DHH, and I have to say that Friday and Saturday nights are the hardest. Back in my old life, I always found something to do on a Friday night, and in the last several months before I left I would typically go to the Peekskill Coffee House to listen to live music or to the Paramount Theater to see foreign movies. Those are the two things I miss the most out here. A movie on DVD would be nice, but I’ve watched all the DVDs I have here. I need to buy some. I looked some over at a store in GP last time I was in town, but they were all bad adventure movies or sappy romances. I like independent and foreign flicks. If anyone out there has any of those you wouldn’t mind parting with, send ‘em along!

P.O. Box 1212
Grants Pass, OR 97528

Tonight I’ll have to settle for a bowl of popcorn and the last few chapters of Drop City.

May 21, 2005

Finally, a day without rain! To cure our cabin fever, I took Gussie down to the river. I packed us a lunch, dressed in light clothes to spot ticks, and took the spinning reel and rod along just for the hell of it. As expected, the river was really high and cloudy after all the rain. In fact, our little beach beneath the osprey nest was completely under water. I threw about thirty casts with a rooster tail, but nothing. Gussie swam and was his usual crazy self. At one point he ran past the fishing rod and got the lure caught in his hair. Then he wouldn’t come to me so I could take it out. Finally, I enticed him with a biscuit and disaster was averted. The hook was nowhere near his skin. We had lunch on a rock, waved to some rafters, watched the osprey.

I saw another interesting bird, charcoal gray with a short tail. At first I thought it was a blackbird of some kind, but then I thought it might be a black rail. According to my bird guide they’re rare. I didn’t see the telltale red eye, though. So I won’t add it to my residency bird list.

After lunch we hiked upriver toward a scenic bend in the river, but then I lost Gus for about fifteen minutes. Apparently, I somehow got ahead of him, and when I finally turned around and saw him again, he was biting at his paw. I looked, but didn’t see what was bothering him. Then back down the trail a ways, I saw rusty barbed wire from the old telegraph line posts, and some of Gussie’s hair on one barb. I think he snagged himself on it. We were both tired after the steep hike back, but his paw seemed fine. And after dinner tonight—homemade sausage pizza with fresh mozzarella—he was chasing sticks like the crazy canine that he is.

Okay, time to dig into another T.C. Boyle novel. This one’s called East Is East.

May 22, 2005

Mr. Bear!

Yes, I finally got a good look at a black bear. A fat, tan-nosed ursine snorfler. All afternoon I’d heard it in the forest just beyond the meadow behind the garden, where it was knocking around stumps and making a racket. Then around four o’clock, I went out to lie in the chaise. Gussie came along and lay beside me. I had my eyes closed, soaking up the rays and petting Gussie’s warm back. And when I opened my eyes, there was Mr. Bear out in the meadow, about 400 yards away. I was afraid Gus would see it and make a chase, so I got him to follow me to the cabin. Once he was safely inside, I went on the deck and got another good look. By the time I got the binoculars focused, though, it had wandered back into the woods. Then Gussie sensed something was up and started barking. I figured I’d take the camera out and see if I could get a photo from behind the garden fence. Gus stayed inside, and he was beside himself, barking and whining and scratching at the sliding glass door. He hates to miss out on adventure of any kind. So I went back in. I don’t know if the bear was male or female. Maybe next time I can have a closer look with the binoculars.

Worked hard in the garden this morning, pruning the grape vines, ripping out some old netting and wire, and eradicating every stalk of blackberry within the garden fence. I pruned the hell out of the Concords, which were in a bad state, all tangled up with blackberries and growing out of control and leaning on broken posts. I reset the posts. I also pruned half of the wine grapes. After that, I trimmed around the garden fence. My decision to spray Roundup around the fence has turned out to be a good one. It killed a small swath around the barbed wire, and now I can trim without the weeder’s strings breaking all the time. And the fence is far enough away from all garden beds and fruit trees, that the Roundup wouldn’t have affected them. I hate to use chemicals, especially around an organic garden, but it saves a lot of hassle.

More trimming slated for tomorrow—up at the pond. The grass never stops growing. Every night after dinner Gussie and I take a walk up to the pond and he goes for a swim. He thinks he’s a retriever, fetching every stick I throw in. The pond weed and algae has diminished significantly, I’m glad to report. Maybe when it gets hot enough, I’ll get up the gumption to swim in there, too. All those newts kind of creep me out, but I suspect that when it gets hot I’ll want a place to swim. The river is great for swimming, but it’s an exhausting walk back up.

May 23, 2005

A perfect day at the ranch—sunny, warm but not hot, light breeze, oodles of birdsong. My big chore of the day was mowing around the pond. I made a nice, wide swath, some twenty or thirty feet around, and cut a wide path to the shortcut through the forest. I hit a huge patch of yerba buena with the trimmer, and the whole place smelled minty and fresh. With the grass all short, the pond will be tick-free for Neil and I to go up and check out the newts and watch Gussie swim for sticks. While mowing I saw two blue-tailed skinks, neat lizards with bright blue tails. I’d seen them before at my house in New York, where they lived in the stone terrace.

The bear was in its usual spot again—the woods behind the garden. I could hear it back there all day making its racket. No sight of it, though. Once the cherries are ripe, I’ll throw all the windfall ones over the fence for it. That might deter it from trying to get through the fence.

The deer family has a fawn! I saw it last night after dinner, a tiny thing with white speckles. I guess I was right about one of the does being pregnant. It’s dusk now, and I’m hoping momma and baby will come into the meadow again.

I encountered another critter last night of a completely different sort. I was on the couch listening to some tunes, when I saw something black creeping across the kitchen floor. It was a scorpion. I’d heard there were scorpions around here, but I expected to see one in the wood shed and not in the house. Bad karma that it is, I stomped it. I was afraid of getting stung if I tried to pick it up and throw it outside. Here it is prior to the stomp:

I think I saw a digger squirrel today, too. This morning Gussie was sniffing around the pile of boards I shave into kindling, and something was squeaking in terror. I was inside sweeping, and so I went out with the broom to investigate. I stuck the handle into the little cave the thing had found in the pile of wood, trying to drive it out Gussie’s side, and the thing popped out his end and leapt through the air so fast all I saw was a dark flash of fur. It looked to be bigger than a mouse, and it didn’t squeak like a mouse. I think it disappeared into one of the many digger squirrel holes under the deck. Ergo, I think it was a digger squirrel. I’ve come to hate these little buggers. They make holes all over the meadow, holes that the mower wheels get caught in. Little piles of dirt pop up in new places every day. They must have a huge network of tunnels all over the property. They’re like the Viet Cong. They’re the Varmint Cong.

Here’s a picture I dedicate to my nephew Ezra. I took it while Gussie and I were lazing in the yard eating pistachios (a snack Guster favors as much as any liver treat).

Worked out this sonnet today:

Strawberries

Not enough for a bowl of cereal,
so I tasted them there in the patch—
four sweet spotted hearts, arterial-
red, but cold. And here’s the catch:
I was thinking of some other berries,
ones that bit back, their long stems
a swarm of thorns, and how she,
too, had bitten my sticky thumb
as we ate them in an Iowa ditch—
me feeding her as if she were a queen,
she baring her straight stained teeth.
How apt that such gems ask a fee—
tart flesh to feed a lonely wretch
for a little blood left on a latch.

Week of May 10-16

2005-05-16T11:46:00.000-07:00

May 10, 2005

The cabin’s feeling more and more like home to me. I spent last night in Grants Pass, taking care of some school business and running the usual errands. As nice as it was to eat Middle Eastern, to get on the Internet, to watch the evening news, and to chat for a while with the pretty woman waiting my table at a breakfast joint, I was glad to make the turn down the DH road, to nap in the bed I’ve come to know, to light the woodstove, to cook a rack of ribs in the little propane oven. Right now I’ve got the kerosene and propane lamps burning, a hot bed of coals in the wood stove, and the solar inverter humming behind me as it powers my laptop. Gussie’s curled at my feet, content to have just hollowed out another marrow bone. The cabin smells of burning madrone and barbeque sauce. I know my way around this place in the dark now. I know where everything is and how everything works. Staying in town for the night, I missed my routine, even the morning chore of hand-cranking the coffee grinder, which takes me about 100 turns on the handle. While my water boils in the new kettle, I crank the grinder and look out the little kitchen window at the meadow, the old barn, the tall trees. Here, there’s very little to worry about—a bear getting into the garden, Gus getting lost, me falling ill or getting injured. The likelihood of any of these things happening is slim. Out in town, there’s so much more to juggle. Wearing a watch and carrying a wallet and a cell phone and three sets of keys and two checkbooks, and making sure not to lose any of them. Toting a laptop and my solar backpack and a bag of clothes, and worrying about them getting stolen. Keeping Gus on a leash and away from speeding cars. Worrying about what to do with him while I’m in stores, restaurants, the laundromat, the grocery store (thank goodness for the folks at Dutch Bros. coffeehouse, who allow me to bring Gus inside). When we got back this afternoon after the muddy return trip over the mountains, the sun broke through and the rain stopped, and it all seemed symbolic. We were home.

One thing I do like about going to town, though, is getting mail and email. In yesterday’s mail was a DVD from Jim Dowling: two episodes of Deadwood and a bag of oatmeal cookies. What a guy! I plan to watch one episode after writing this entry. There was also a letter from Neil Curry, who’s due to arrive from England two weeks from Thursday. He says he’s going to learn to play cribbage. I liked hearing that. Another treat was a copy of The New York Sun Crossword Collection # 6, containing my “Record Spinners” crossword. Yes, folks, I’ve been anthologized as a crossword creator. Good action. Another treat was a couple of DVDs from Paste magazine. I’d written the editor to say that I enjoyed watching the latest DVD out at the cabin, but that I couldn’t locate my previous two, which I thought I’d brought out here with me. Having never gotten around to watching them back in New York, I was looking forward to playing them here. I wonder if they were in the box that got lost in the mail. Anyway, he sent me new copies. I love that magazine. And I have a feeling he’ll be including my letter in the next issue. Finally, I had a letter from Sam W., one of my students. So nice to hear from her. It always feels a bit like Christmas to take all this stuff back to the cabin and open it.

I checked things out after unloading the new supplies. Dutch Hen laid two eggs while Gussie and I were away. She’s a machine. My garden looks much happier. I think the mulching and the rain have helped. Garlic is sprouting, one of the stalks three or four inches high already! I’ll have my first strawberry tomorrow or the next day. And cherries are forming on the cherry trees. I need to remember to buy Mason jar lids to can the cherries come June.

May 13, 2005

Finally, a few sunny days. Yesterday was just perfect. Cloudless. Warm. Pleasing breezes. Aside from mowing a swath around the garden fence and spraying more of the nasty herbicide in the pond, I took it easy. I read, did a couple of crosswords, worked on a new story, made chocolate chip cookies (rivaling Blue Mountain Center’s), and watched birds.

Goldfinches have discovered the thistle feeder I hung on the deck, and they visited all day, bright yellow and vocal. Between them and the hummers, I had trouble concentrating on my reading. A pileated woodpecker cackled periodically, and I finally got a good look at it in the late afternoon when it landed in a nearby tree and then flew across the meadow. Western tanagers and Steller’s jays added to the noise of my fine feathered friends. The female grouse continues to visit my apple tree every evening. Last night I watched her through the binoculars again.

I heard my first bear yesterday. Around four o’clock, in the tree line beyond the garden, came the crack of an old tree being knocked down. I heard snorfling, then more wood cracking. It was a bear tearing up an old tree to get at the grubs inside it. I didn’t catch a glimpse, but now I know they’re around. I was glad Gus was inside. If he heard the noise, he would have gone to investigate, I’m sure.

I stayed up past midnight working on the new story. I can’t seem to get to bed any earlier these days. I’m sleeping in later, too. I still wake up at seven, but then fall back asleep, lapsing back into vivid dreams. The other morning we slept in until nine o’clock, something I haven’t done in years.

May 14, 2005

This cute woman at the breakfast joint has turned into a Muse. Of course, I’m exaggerating, but it seemed like there was a connection. Anyway, she’s been the inspiration for a couple of poems. Here’s one:

Eggs Over Hard

We meet and there is no place to put my hands.
Your teeth, white as a stove, go where mine won’t.

Balancing? you say. Both of them, I reply.
You ask why I have two checkbooks, and I’d tell you,

but it’s a long story that ends with a divorce,
so I say something about being between banks.

I have lived so long now breathing my own air,
when we share it I come up short. You could be

twenty-five. I want you to be forty, and I don’t.
We both know that my eggs are getting cold,

that the party at the other table has closed its menus,
that the crown of my head is a clear-cut slope;

still, something reaches through the two feet
between us—you holding pen to pad as if to

describe it; me with fingers poised above calculator
as though math might explain my spiked pulse.

I’ll inhabit that charged space for days, shake
our sweet scene like a sugar packet—until it, too,

grows cold as a number. Age is a coat without pockets.

May 15, 2005

Exactly one month today that I’ve been here. One-sixth of my residency.

Sunday at the homestead, cool and drizzly and dreary. Again. I lit a fire for the first time in a few days. After breakfast I took advantage of the colder weather to suit up in my mowing clothes and trim down the whole garden, a big chore with the lousy mower unit and the weedwhacker. But it needed doing. These mowing clothes—an old pair of khakis and a sweatshirt, are filthy with grass stains, but I don’t bother washing them. Come summer, when I no longer need to mow, I’ll probably just burn them. Mowing is an odious task. I keep finding myself pining for the typical blade mower I’m used to, instead of this one that works like a giant weedwhacker on wheels. It’s hard to push and the strings are constantly breaking. But it’s all I’ve got. After mowing, I lit a slash fire out in the meadow and burned some of the broken branches from the apple trees and many of the boxes cluttering up the mud room. I need to start straightening the place out a little in preparation for my first (and probably only) visitor, Neil Curry. I fear he’s going think the place too cluttered and dirty. I know I felt that way when I first arrived. But one thing I’ve discovered about living in the wilderness: it’s impossible to keep a clean house, especially with a dog around, and after a while you give up on certain aspects of cleanliness. The floor is forever dirty with blades of grass and wood chips and ash. I sweep the linoleum of the dining area and the board floor of the cooking area. When I get really motivated I turn on the generator and use the vacuum, but I could pick up more sucking air through a straw. So I resign myself to the fact that there are grass blades and wood chips on the floor. As long as the bedroom, bathroom, and cooking area are clean, I’m happy.

I finished a wonderful little novella today, God’s Mountain, by Erri De Luca. It’s an English translation of an Italian book, and it’s about a thirteen-year-old boy coming of age in 1960 in Naples. There’s a bit of magical realism with a boomerang, which turns out to be much more than a toy, and an old, hunchbacked, Holocaust-surviving cobbler sprouting wings. There’s also Maria, the lovely upstairs neighbor who becomes the boy’s lover. I recommend it. This book was magically refreshing—a two-day read—after the month-long, laboriously thorough and repetitive Lewis and Clark biography. The latter was worth reading, but when I finally turned the last page the other day, I felt as though I’d done the expedition myself! I’m looking forward now to turning my attention to more of T.C. Boyle’s stuff. I have a tome of his short stories and a few of his novels.

As I type this a home-made pizza dough is rising in an oiled bowl. Toward the end of God’s Mountain, there’s a scene where they go out for pizza, and after reading it, I was craving pizza like never before. It’s been five weeks since I tasted gooey cheese on a crispy crust. The last was at my parent’s house, where we had a few pies from Uncle Tony’s as my farewell dinner. My mouth is watering thinking about them. I know tonight’s pizza won’t taste anything like Uncle Tony’s, but it’ll sate the craving. The Fannie Farmer cookbook I’m using is excellent! So far, everything I’ve made from it has come out great.

I’m heading into town again tomorrow for a resupply mission and to check for bills and email. Deadwood tonight, thanks to Jim!