Hoh-hum Inn: October 07, 2010

The first frost I remember happened sometime during the night of October 6th. The next day, my gear iced-over and my hands crabbed and numb, I wandered a quarter-mile when I passed a bed-and-breakfast. It was just sunrise when I knocked on the door.

A woman opened the door and looked out with an expression that read nothing different in visitors than from the obituaries. She liked to state her purpose in sentences composed of single words.

"Dishes. Silverware. Coffee," she said, swinging her arm in short arcs. "Breakfast." She pointed at a long, unfinished wooden table with a spread of cornbread, hash browns, eggs, bacon, jam, cheese, and juice.

"A lot of company upstairs?"

"No."

Her husband, one of those butter-fed farmers whose waistband has outgrown any belt, sat himself down with us. He and his wife used to take stock into the park, leading llama and horse trains up near the Blue Glacier, before storms closed that trail. Since I had just crossed the Olympics, we had something to talk about and took turns agreeing with each other.

They were - the husband and wife - part of the old Olympic mayflower crew. For both of them, their however-many-great-grandparents had come out when the territory was still disputed. Then with the fervor of the newly settled, they had furiously taken to the chores of the peninsula: cutting trees, staying dry, breeding children.

But, this being a land that measures its rain in feet, the first two were never done to satisfaction and the children were always covered in mud.

"They called them stump ranches," he said. "And that's what we've got." He nodded to the window and to a wide pasture below, his dairy herd wandering around the man-high stumps of cedars, cut some time when presidents still had beards.

"Loggers now leave the stumps and leave the branches. Used to have to take them all out since it interfered with salmon runs. But then fish and wildlife changed their minds and said you have to leave the branches, and even bring them back if you took them away. They don't know what the salmon want."

This being around the time when a genetically-altered salmon was being put before the FDA, I asked him his thoughts.

"I don't think they want that either."

I was not, as it turned out, the only one. A Swede, visiting Seattle for a conference, came downstairs. We continued talking about the topics most favored in those parts: logging and rain. I am not necessarily anti-logging so much as I am pro-tree. So I was glad the farmer had no particular loyalties either way - this being spotted owl country - and that roadsigns now read "Jobs grow with trees" instead of anti-owl slander. ("Up to our necks in owls," as George Bush senior had said, " and out of work for every American.")

I drained my coffee and set down my fork. "More?" the woman sniffed. Then, allowing herself an overdraw of words, "The pig gets it otherwise."

"Maybe I'll take some."

She bagged up the rest of breakfast while the Swede got in his car.

"Lunch?" she said, offering me the bag.

"Yes. What do I owe you?"

"Nothing."

"I can pay. I've got money."

"Nope." She turned her head.

History

“What kinds of movies do you like?” the Frenchwoman asked. We had just finished watching the film Carnivale at the Seattle Alliance Francaise. I had agreed to volunteer for the night, collecting tickets at the door.

“Ones with lots of color and spectacle, good music and pageantry. Each shot should stand alone as a composition. I like the films of Tarsem Singh and Shekhar Kapur, Baz Luhrman and Jane Campion,” then, mindful of the company, “and Michel Gondri and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.”

“I prefer ones of ordinary life,” she said. “For anthropological reasons. In a hundred years it will be good to see and hear how people of the last century acted.”

I have wondered what it would be like to spend a day with every one of my ancestors who shared my last name, tracing back thru centuries till I landed somewhere in a forest in mediaeval Britain. But to be balanced, it seems best to let microscopes and mitochondrial mapping taking me as far as they lead through the matriarchs, beyond any name can say. It would pass thru Italy, but Italians have come from somewhere. Greece? Turkey? Mesopotamia? Ethiopia?

Go back further than families to the collective tale of the Earth, and history reads like the foundation of Greek myth, with its cast of beloved and tragic characters bullied about by time:

Pangaea breaks and divides Tethys into the several oceans. Blue turns to green and the green marches over the land. Seeds split. Cells divide. Trilobites proliferate and disappear, the dinosaurs rise and fall. Life makes space for life. Animals walk out of the sea, then bargain away their legs and slip back. Birds keep their wings and forget flight. Somewhere in Africa, someone drops from a tree and does not climb back up. And out beyond the Earth, stars separate from nebulae, flame, and spin off planets of their own. A unity divides and divides and divides.

The rest is history.

The human life-span is too short to take in the scope of something so great and so ancient as the Earth. We can’t even begin to compare to some of the other organisms. There are oysters that live for several centuries, trees for millennia, and there are lichens that may even be approaching the tens of thousands. (I would like to be indignant that a lichen gets to spend 10,000 years clinging to a rock, but I can’t argue that my scant 26 years have so far been that much more influential.)

And I don’t have the memory of a Bristlecone pine, laying down the years by millimeter till they tally some 4,000 together – fat rings when the summers were good, sparse ones for famine. A tree that old knows how the world has done for itself in all that time.

For myself, though, every event that led up to the year of my birth – and for most thereafter – I have had to go on faith alone to believe. I was not around for any ‘magna-this’ or ‘declaration-of-that.’ I don’t know what a passenger pigeon looks like, let alone tastes. With difficulty, I can imagine all of Canada under ice, or Antarctica a jungle, as the bone-collectors and rock hounds maintain. All of this I had to read somewhere or hear off of someone, or sometimes even watch a movie about it, and believe that the divination was right.

I want to believe and I want to see. I want to see Glacier National Park while it is still worthy of that name, and not believe alone that there had once been ice there. I want to see the space between the mountains before they get mucked up again in some new-fangled way. I want to be a traveler in the grizzly kingdom while its still an unconditional monarchy. I want to see now what people of a hundred years will want to know.

I think now I understand the Frenchwoman’s point. But I wouldn’t care to watch a movie about ordinary life, or to make one, even if it were mine. Especially if it were mine.

Screw the anthropologists.

I'm not interested in leaving behind testament. I’d rather be out, somewhere in the trees, folding little origami cranes and teaching them to fly.

Nomadism

There is a profound difference between being a nomad and being whatever it is that I am. Nomads, be they traditional - Bedouins, shepherds, Mongols - or contemporary - fruit pickers, snowbirds - measure wealth in what is mobile and how they must move to maintain or increase their wealth. A land in itself is not what they love, but what that land can produce, and most importantly, when. A snowbird does not stay in Arizona when she's got to turn on the air conditioning.

Knowledge of the seasons, the renewal rate of the fallow, and above all ensuring the passage are the values of nomadism. A nomad must move or die, to find wherever the grass or the dollars are. "Land, lots of land and the sky up above. Don't fence me in..." An attack on the journey for any wanderer is an attack on the homeland.The true country is the road.

Abraham left the city of Ur to become a nomad. A winter in Seattle and I can understand his reasons, even without the booming command of a Creator or any attendant promises of fathering nations. I have the good fortune, though, of being nearly fifty years the junior. Old Abe, I believe, had to wait till he was 75 to get the divine green light. All those decades wasted toiling in decadence before he could have his bed of earth and blanket of sky.

But he swapped one routine life for another. The completion of a nomadic cycle (I am aware of no single English word for this act) is a true revolution, so that the nomad ends exactly where he has begun. The snowbird returns to Washington; the mobile bee-keeper to the almond orchards of California, or buckwheat in North Dakota, or wherever the blossoms happen to be. A nomadic life is not a threat to settled society, but a complement to it. In some ways, a reiteration.

The term is sometimes used to mean anyone who travels, but nomads always return to their start to find their beginning at their end. Even a modern-day pilgrimage, to a capital or grave of some influential, is a spiritual nomadic act. It is leaving and returning, and finding ways to leave and return again in small acts of daily devotion - listening to a record, writing a letter, prayer. This is nostalgia, letting one's mind wander around the internal monuments to memories of a worn-out life.

I am not immune to nostalgia. But I am not the prophet either. I am Abraham's son, the one God didn't favor. The one who had to wander the deserts, untethered. The vagabond. The rambler. Call me Ishmael.

I'm no nomad. I'm a dandelion seed blowing around till I find some crack in the sidewalk.

Seattle: Pike Place

Really, I just wanted to offer some proof that I'm not just sitting on my thumbs in the woods.

The next step: Mount Assiniboine

In some ways I think I am a disappointment. I don’t look the part of the steely adventurer. I am not especially tall, and at about 150 pounds, not physically impressive. I have no striking features, no piercing eyes or hawk-like nose, no Indian braids or mountain man’s beard. I am not sun tanned, and I can’t brag of thru-hiking any of the great trails. I talk too much or not enough. I don’t like coffee or the NRA. I tell bad jokes and fart.

I don’t have any of the stories that people want. There were no showdowns with wild beasts, nor fording of any raging rivers or fighting any boiling fires. I did not scramble up any mountain’s peak and dangle precipitously by a string, or dodge an avalanche. I didn’t even pick a particularly odious parasite off my keester. Nor is it likely that any of those things will happen. Those things are all attempted by the stupid.

There is no great cause that I am walking for and I have no message to spread. I no longer want to teach, not since realizing that teaching assumes that I know better than you. And even sharing I am less likely towards, since I am not sure I have anything worthwhile to say. I am raising neither money nor awareness, besides my own.

I did think that things would become at least a bit more distinct by now, that I would feel more sure of myself and of my desires. That I would have something worth listening to. Instead I find that everything worth hearing seems to be external to myself.

That’s nothing so profound, it’s just how I feel. And really, if I had to say what makes me walk, it’s just a feeling. It feels right. And it is right for right now.

So no, I am not finished. Seattle was never the end. It’s just where I was when it got cold.

Come spring, this is where I’m going.

Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park, British Columbia, via many other places. I'm going to get there and walk all around and over it, and then head south to Glacier. Obviously I did not take this photo, though the next time I put up an image of that mountain, I intend it to be one of my own.

The next step: The Cottonwood Country

I have seen the face of what lies east of the mountains and know it to be a spare and cheerless land with room aplenty for desperation. From the lea-side of Shuksan to the Dakotas and south to Mexico is a thousand mile slice of dust and dry stalks, grit-wind and unexceptional towns, each one boarded over with movie-theater size adverts selling Technicolor dreams. Visit Hawaii (it’s beautiful), drink Pepsi (the models are beautiful), consider cosmetic surgery (you’ll be beautiful). Every town provides glimpses of other places and the means to get there, and never the home-turf. It makes me think of Steinbeck who wrote about this in Travels with Charlie, "I was to see over and over in ever part of the nation a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any here."

Should I go east, then it will be to that waterless land that rations its green till the Lakes. I think of it as the Cottonwood Country, for that is the most widely found tree of that land. Those trees do not grow so well where the rain is measured in feet, yet still prefer to sink their toes in streamsides than pumice dust. There they grow as they can till they can send their breeze-loving seeds on the west wind to drift across the Rockies and blow about the plains till they can find some mud, sprout, shoot, and set seed in turn till the descendants come at last to a place too hot, too wet, or too salt and do not sprout. By then there are other trees – maples, poplars, pines, oaks, birches, willows – and the cottonwood country has long since ended.

That land has its defenders and heroes who do not see it as I do now. For they, open skies are the wages of freedom, and a world held between a sheet of blue and a sheet of brown does better for them than one between grey and green. Cattle do not do well in forests. Guns are better shot in the open where the crack of the echo can scare the crows into flight. I care for neither cattle nor guns. My soul needs shade. When the west wind blows over the Great Basin and across the prairies, bending the cottonwood, the cottonwood does not beckon to its own country, but thru and past, to wherever it has sent its seeds.

Bleak rendition, I realize, of a full third of the nation, and unfair to those who have chosen it as their Eden. But I am a Pacific-American, by choice if not birth, and my heart sets to the nearer side of the dividing mountains. From the Sierras and Cascades, west. This is the place – for now – that I need.

I think then, that the spring will send me north, to British Columbia, where the dome of trees keeps the sun from the earth. I want to keep the salt on my skin and the smell of cedar in my clothes. I am avoiding the cottonwood country. So long, and so treeless, I think. Perhaps, I may even go around it.

Photographs

A friend gave me a very precious gift. In June, in Santa Rosa, I was given a Holga camera by a friend, who accepted in exchange a cheap pinhole camera made from a tea tin. I do not know how well the pinhole camera worked, but I now know the results from the Holga. My regret is that I neither knew its complete operation, nor its worth, until these photos, taken in Washington - mostly on the Olympic peninsula, with a few from Seattle.

Sometimes the images turn out quite sharp, and serve as touchstones of memory, as when I took this photo of a farmhouse outside the Quileute Reservation at sunrise. Operating as a dairy and a bed and breakfast, I knocked on the door, looking for something hot to drink. The first frost had just happened.

I met this man and his wife (below) who have the most incredible garden, full of strange statues and doors that lead nowhere over many acres. Many photos were taken in places too dark that they did not show up well. But here, when he entered a clearing, the light hit him well enough. I do not remember his name, but I recall he has Parkinson's so badly that he cannot use silverware but must only eat with his fingers. He does not care that the deer eat his plants. It is too big a garden anyway.

Though old, the woman is not feeble, and has many times circled the Earth with her husband, and a few without.

The dark lines and shadows give a prescience to each moment. I don't think that there is a meaning ascribed that was never there. But rather a meaning that becomes more visible once it is preserved.

I strive to catch the small moments of beauty that happen daily. Here, a spoon lodged in a fencepost. The camera has two settings, which I have only just learned today. One setting ensures a brief exposure of about 1/50th of a second. The other is manual and can expose for as long as the shutter is held open. Only learning this now, I realize why some photos of mine are too blurred and others so sharp as the settings went back and forth while the camera knocked around my pack.

Toy cameras, these are called. A Holga costs around $30 and is made only of plastic, including the lens. It weighs not even so much as a deck of cards and is the size of a small lunchbox. The setting for close-up shows a stick figure. Slightly further away, twist the lens till the hashmarks on top move from the stick man to the stick family. A bit further out, twist again till the gallery of stick people. One more twist and there are no more stick figures, but a stick mountain, for landscape shots, as the above. Cape Flattery, where the land just ends.

Sometimes, I forget to advance the film, and the result is a double exposure, as when a night shot of a hamburger shack overlapped with a self-portrait.

These shots lack the clarity of a glass-lensed camera. And they will never have the color-value of digital, though there are color films available. They are lurid dreamscapes, where the world is preserved not as it appeared, but as it felt to be.