There is something you should know about the neighbors, quiet tho they are.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
For Sale: Scenic South Dakota
There is something you should know about the neighbors, quiet tho they are.
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Dakota, Oaks, Indians, and the Hundredth Meridian
Quercus alba
Salix babylonica
Tsuga canadensis
I had been saying the names of trees of the east aloud as I walked. Slowly, the words shaped, intoning the latin with reverence, as tho by this tongue reserved for temple and laboratory I might call them up from the earth.
Acer
Cornus
Ilex
A monk at vespers, a Darwinist considering a list of beetles, wondering what any god could have meant in making so many.
Pinus
Platanus
Then I would break, look around at escarpments of eroded bluff and dun colored grass with not a tree to break the sun and say a single bewildered word, - 'Dakota.' How did I get here?
To run out of water in the Badlands is to understand why the place is named so. Not stone, but rather thickets of vertical mud define the horizon. A labyrinth of crumbled clay that still pushes out the bones of creatures that millennia ago strayed in and died. A few divining cottonwoods show where there is moisture still, but it is more muck than water, and with the occasional steer wandering thru, unsafe to drink. I slip a bottle from my pack, head for the road, and hold it to oncoming traffic, turning it upside down as a car approaches, hoping by the gesture to communicate thirst.
Surprisingly, the car pulls over.
- You need water?
- Yes. You got any?
- No. You need a ride?
- I do need water.
- I can take you town.
It is 7 miles to town. It's 11 now and past 90 and all my bottles are empty. This is the first car to pass in a hour. I can be smug and parched, or give up some pride in my humility and get in the car.
- Town sounds fine.
- Get in the back. We're Indians, she says, pointing to her passenger, then puts her hand in front of her mouth and gives a mock ululation.
The passenger is quiet of expression, eyes like sunken wood knots above a dribbly beard. He has that look of poverty that has given up feeding off anything that need be chewed, a withered stick in overalls.
- You smoke? He lifts a nub of something.
- Tobacco?
He turns without considering my answer and puts his eyes on the road, then brings the nub to his mouth but doesn't light, then again lowers his hand. The driver puts the radio on. Wood-knot drops the nub and reaches over the gear shift to put his hand under her shirt, then runs his fingers lower and snaps her panties. The driver glances at me thru her mirror. She turns up the radio, as tho sound could cover or account for action. I turn my head to the window, the Badlands slipping away. Wood-knot tries for lower.
Liriodendron tulipifera, I mouth.
For 15 minutes the front seat is the theater of attempted - and thwarted - digital cunnilingus. Far different from the last time I was on a reservation. That had been in June, on the Blackfoot in Montana, and then I had it in my head not to expect any charity since it was the anniversary of Little Bighorn. But I was wrong. A man out walking for his diabetes started talking to me, then went back to his house for a box of tea, a sack of apples, and a roll of toilet paper - probably the most thoughtful thing anyone has given me in a long while. Even the next day he took a good guess at where I went and tracked me down in his buick to bring me water.
We pull into the college of Lakota. Driver gets out so I can get what I flagged them down for.
- What are you doing? asks Wood-knot.
- I got to let him out.
- Him who?
He turns.
- Oh, hey. How's it going?
- Just thirsty, I say.
I'm thinking back to the Crazy Horse memorial, and the artist's model charging out of marble, hair streaming and muscles swelling, pointing towards the lands where ancestors turned to dust. Not like any Indian I ever saw. It's hard for me to imagine a man who lived free tho fugitive to have pectorals and biceps like that. It starts me thinking on another Indian who wouldn't live on a reservation or take white man's food, and to see what that life does to a person just consider a photograph of Mohandas Gandhi.
Some say that the carving is meant to be more a measure of the spirit of Crazy Horse than an accurate representation. There are no photographs, after all. And the story of Crazy Horse the man and the story of the carving of Crazy Horse the monument are both the sorts of tales to inspire an awful stillness in the heart. But I have trouble connecting the two. I do not think the countenance of any man improves a mountain.
Liriodendron.
Liriodendron.
Lirio...
but I can't remember any more. I could say a few west coast trees, but I want to save those. To name them now would bring me contrary to my destination. I'm nearing the hundredth meridian, the true line between east and west. To one side of it, more than 20 inches of precipitation. To the other, less. The difference between dust and corn. The land has been getting greener. There are more trees - and more of them deciduous - on the reservation than there had been in the last few acres of Wyoming. The air is still dry but lets out small sighs of humidity in the low draws. Russian olive and crack willow are starting to show.
I sit outside the grocery store to drink water and tea. A dog hobbles over on three legs and lays down against my ankles. I'll feel bad about it trailing after me as I walk out of town, but feelings of regret will be tempered with ones of suspicion as I sit in a doctor's office one week later for treatment of a rash that has spread upwards from my ankles.
The heat of the day well passed, I walk another seventeen miles, then turn my watch one hour forward as I come to Central Time. St. Louis Time. New Orleans time. Chicago time. A line of trees shows a creek in the light of a softly-fallen afternoon. I come near what seemed a cottonwood but proved more compact the nearer I come. No arching trunk or quaking leaves that flip silver-side up in the wind, but a neat dome of twisting limbs on a stout trunk. Something in the genus quercus. I drop my pack, walk over and place my hand on the bark.
- This is an oak tree.
Quietly. Almost without grasping. Prayer has brought me this, and now I must make of prayer a thing of earth.
- This is an oak tree.
I say it louder, as tho English could abase what Latin has set up and so bring down the divine.
- An oak tree.
There are no hills for an echo, so the words just spread out and fade as I run the tips of fingers over bark, then climb hand over hand within the branches, upward to the limit an animal of 65 kilos can perch. The sun is dropping down, down, and I am in an oak tree.
Close by is a yucca, the last of the wild yucca that I will see. Totems of the west are giving out. Sagebrush has become wheat. Dust, corn. Buffalo, combines. Indians, Farmers. For some there is no clear exchange. Where are the pronghorns? And are they each worth a Holstein? Two days later, in the town of Winner, South Dakota, I check my coordinates. Ninety-nine degrees, fifty-one minutes, thirty-two seconds west.
This one tree marks the beginning of the east. A burr oak, I think. Yucca for oak.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Prairie
The boy is at the piano. Twenty-three and free of care and beautiful no matter what he wears. Blue jeans and a tee-shirt faded grey. A mop of black hair he is careful not to comb.
- Play some Debussey, I say.
- I wish, he says, turning to face me, eyes the blue of telegraph insulators. Can you?
- No. I might be able to bang out Waltzing Matilda, given a few hours practice.
He goes back to playing, letting his hands ramble without favoring any particular chord or register that one gets the feeling he is practicing not so much music as indifference.
- Play some Bach.
He stops, takes his hands away and turns.
- No. Bach is nothing but repetition. People who play Bach are in love with 8th notes.
There is nearly a look of contempt to him as he returns to his music, bending his head lower, straying further from melody and touching upon the harsh and discordant. Somewhere in his velveteen stubble there's a smirk. Goddamn Adonis.
- Play some Sinatra.
That had been on one side of the divide, and now I had crossed it at Glacier and come to where the water flows the other way and what stretched out before was a spare parchment of land, given no marks of language or number but punctuation alone, and those but few. A land of a limited account of simple strokes then repeated - grass, sage, hill, grass again - to the flat horizon. Land that would answer well to the offerings of Bach.
There was no water besides that in a flowing cattle trough. Since I intended to boil it, the streaks of green waving within were not a bother. I washed my face in my hands then looked for fuel. There were no cottonwood or willow branches around, there not being water enough for such an abundance of plant life, that whatever fire there was would have to be of sage and cattle chip. Frequently this would be my experience on the prairie. There would be just enough dry sage or mullein stalk to start a blaze in a stack of dung of buffalo, or wild horses, or steers, depending. I tore up the last of Don Quixote and set it alight under a stack of twigs and manure, then let the load burn till it glowed like charcoal and sat down beside it.
A hot wind licked over the soles of my feet, blowing away the stink of rot. The smell suggested I had crossed the Rockies in a pair or sun-ripened beavers, or else bathed with the juice of a boiled owl.
A range of mountains rose up to the east - the Crazies - and another to the south - the Absarokas. The last light of the sun struck the ridge of the Crazies all over with alpenglow, while towards the Absarokas, a storm cloud dragged itself like a gorged tick, grown too hideously full for its own legs to move, before tearing open on the peaks and bleeding a gutload of rain and electricity. Unseamed from beneath, the topside of the storm rose up and swelled with the convection till the cloud hit air too cold to rise further and spread instead in an arching anvil of color. Inverted buttresses of salmon and coral bent back into the body of vapor, no longer larval, matured. The velvet underbelly of a conch. The bristled back of a magnificent nudibranch.
As the storm raged in silence, too far to the south to hear the spill of lightning, a troupe of antelope came over a low draw, curious maybe at the smell of burning sage. They were nearly as quick to notice this newcomer as I they, and one gave a snort somewhere in sound between the surprise of a white-tail and an elephant's trumpet. That was enough to spook us all, and the pronghorns ran off - dancing almost. Balletic creatures making a few last impressive turns before the curtain call.
The fire ready, I dipped water from the trough, slipping the can around wavering fingers of algae. Storm, mountain, metamorphosis, alpenglow and antelope. The Magnficat was in my mind. I went back to the fire to set the water to boil.
- And some think art is dead.
- Play some Debussey, I say.
- I wish, he says, turning to face me, eyes the blue of telegraph insulators. Can you?
- No. I might be able to bang out Waltzing Matilda, given a few hours practice.
He goes back to playing, letting his hands ramble without favoring any particular chord or register that one gets the feeling he is practicing not so much music as indifference.
- Play some Bach.
He stops, takes his hands away and turns.
- No. Bach is nothing but repetition. People who play Bach are in love with 8th notes.
There is nearly a look of contempt to him as he returns to his music, bending his head lower, straying further from melody and touching upon the harsh and discordant. Somewhere in his velveteen stubble there's a smirk. Goddamn Adonis.
- Play some Sinatra.
That had been on one side of the divide, and now I had crossed it at Glacier and come to where the water flows the other way and what stretched out before was a spare parchment of land, given no marks of language or number but punctuation alone, and those but few. A land of a limited account of simple strokes then repeated - grass, sage, hill, grass again - to the flat horizon. Land that would answer well to the offerings of Bach.
There was no water besides that in a flowing cattle trough. Since I intended to boil it, the streaks of green waving within were not a bother. I washed my face in my hands then looked for fuel. There were no cottonwood or willow branches around, there not being water enough for such an abundance of plant life, that whatever fire there was would have to be of sage and cattle chip. Frequently this would be my experience on the prairie. There would be just enough dry sage or mullein stalk to start a blaze in a stack of dung of buffalo, or wild horses, or steers, depending. I tore up the last of Don Quixote and set it alight under a stack of twigs and manure, then let the load burn till it glowed like charcoal and sat down beside it.
A hot wind licked over the soles of my feet, blowing away the stink of rot. The smell suggested I had crossed the Rockies in a pair or sun-ripened beavers, or else bathed with the juice of a boiled owl.
A range of mountains rose up to the east - the Crazies - and another to the south - the Absarokas. The last light of the sun struck the ridge of the Crazies all over with alpenglow, while towards the Absarokas, a storm cloud dragged itself like a gorged tick, grown too hideously full for its own legs to move, before tearing open on the peaks and bleeding a gutload of rain and electricity. Unseamed from beneath, the topside of the storm rose up and swelled with the convection till the cloud hit air too cold to rise further and spread instead in an arching anvil of color. Inverted buttresses of salmon and coral bent back into the body of vapor, no longer larval, matured. The velvet underbelly of a conch. The bristled back of a magnificent nudibranch.
As the storm raged in silence, too far to the south to hear the spill of lightning, a troupe of antelope came over a low draw, curious maybe at the smell of burning sage. They were nearly as quick to notice this newcomer as I they, and one gave a snort somewhere in sound between the surprise of a white-tail and an elephant's trumpet. That was enough to spook us all, and the pronghorns ran off - dancing almost. Balletic creatures making a few last impressive turns before the curtain call.
The fire ready, I dipped water from the trough, slipping the can around wavering fingers of algae. Storm, mountain, metamorphosis, alpenglow and antelope. The Magnficat was in my mind. I went back to the fire to set the water to boil.
- And some think art is dead.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Vagabonds, like and unlike myself
There is within every settled nation, another vagabond one. Tho it is a nation of transients, it would not be right to call it a transient nation, for its tradition is much older than any Constitution and its body more unassailable than any union. It exists within the fabric of the larger, as many individual needles pulling their own threads across the weave.
It appears to be composed of young, single men, mostly. Only occasionally is there a girl, and almost never alone. Backpack, guitar, and dog. Wellworn book and military surplus gear. A few dollars, a pouch of tobacco, and some rolling papers (they never seem to smoke filters) is nearly enough for them. Rarely do they ask me for money. Frequently, however, for marijuana. I suspect this may have to do with my own appearance. (I have neither guitar nor dog, but the backpack clearly marks me as no local) They are, universally, curious, well-travelled, and under thirty.
Certain cities become hubs for them. Usually it is a university town where they are more likely to see others of their own age and so receive sympathy. Rails and interstates are beneficial, but not necessary. Eugene. Arcata. Bellingham. Missoula. Strangely, I encountered the same vagrant fiddler twice on two occasions in these last cities. First in Bellingham, WA when I had taken a photograph of him: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59600646@N04/5825567867/in/photostream
And then again in Missoula, where I learned that in the month and a half that had passed, he had hitch-hiked to Texas, then to BC, and now was on his way to Butte where he had a ride arranged for Alaska.
Nor was I the only to find his story, as a google search of his name revealed an NPR correspondent in Texas had given him a ride and an interview.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/09/136137420/a-young-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-road-smile
Who are these young men? What made them? And what happens to them after their twenties? Do they assume responsibilities and fade back into the status quo? Do they leap borders and go abroad? Or are they like some ephemeral insect, seen in a brief and terminal season?
Perhaps, now that the Indians are gone and circuses are out of fashion, they must find some other clandestine group of which to become member, and in the searching join the mobile, shifting nation.
Missoula has no small number of them. I was sitting outside a coffeeshop with my own pack and when I started talking to one of the tramps in length. I had just picked up a stunned bird from the roadside and had found a place for it to either recover or finish up its dying. The act aroused his curiosity and we began a conversation.
We spoke about books we had read, tho really it was more of a comparative reading list than any discussion. Each was sizing the other, measuring him to our own standard.
- What book are you carrying? I ask
- Leaves of Grass.
- That is probably the best book ever written in the English language.
- I read it most days. You've read Kerouac, yes?
- Yes. But only Big Sur.
- So not the Dharma Bums?
- I read portions of it at a friend's house. Have you read anything by Markham?
- No. Should I?
- Her writings about being a pilot in British East Africa are spectacular. A friend introduced me to her. She knew Hemingway.
- Then I'm sure someone like you has read For Whom the Bell Tolls.
- No, I haven't.
- Oh?
I sense my position slip.
- But you've read the Sun Also Rises?
- No.
- Why not?
- I don't much like Hemingway.
- Why not? he says again.
- He has no loyalty. To anything.
- Well, no.
The reason is good enough. We speak for another twenty minutes, during which we both throw names back and forth. Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, F. Scott, Ginsberg, Pynchon, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Chatwin, Maugham, looking for the weak spot. Have you read this? No. Have you read that? Yes. We meet each other's approval, tho our favorites are at odds.
Considering our clothing and behavior, it seems we were both under the sickness of emulation. He was covered in canvas and dark clothes, the better to hide the soot of freights, with a bandanna around his forehead to keep his shoulder-length hair from his eyes. I was dressed in a tidy buttowndown and apple cap, a pair of khakis reaching my boot-tops, my bandanna around my neck, as tho ready to start my shift at the Union Pacific, or else cross the Pyrenees and renew the fight against Franco.
I had just started reading Don Quixote at the time, and found rather more in common with the ill-made knight than I would have liked. Both the Manchegan and I believed the tales we had read as histories, not fictions. Each of us willing to abandon our homes and ourselves in pursuit of an elegant and obsolete ideal. Each desirous enough to see what is not there.
This young man across from me was little different. Aside from manner of dressing and choice of transportation, there was not much to distinguish us. Like trying to shade the differences between sparrows. He had just chosen to follow idols of a more recent make.
It appears to be composed of young, single men, mostly. Only occasionally is there a girl, and almost never alone. Backpack, guitar, and dog. Wellworn book and military surplus gear. A few dollars, a pouch of tobacco, and some rolling papers (they never seem to smoke filters) is nearly enough for them. Rarely do they ask me for money. Frequently, however, for marijuana. I suspect this may have to do with my own appearance. (I have neither guitar nor dog, but the backpack clearly marks me as no local) They are, universally, curious, well-travelled, and under thirty.
Certain cities become hubs for them. Usually it is a university town where they are more likely to see others of their own age and so receive sympathy. Rails and interstates are beneficial, but not necessary. Eugene. Arcata. Bellingham. Missoula. Strangely, I encountered the same vagrant fiddler twice on two occasions in these last cities. First in Bellingham, WA when I had taken a photograph of him: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59600646@N04/5825567867/in/photostream
And then again in Missoula, where I learned that in the month and a half that had passed, he had hitch-hiked to Texas, then to BC, and now was on his way to Butte where he had a ride arranged for Alaska.
Nor was I the only to find his story, as a google search of his name revealed an NPR correspondent in Texas had given him a ride and an interview.
http://www.npr.org/2011/05/09/136137420/a-young-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-road-smile
Who are these young men? What made them? And what happens to them after their twenties? Do they assume responsibilities and fade back into the status quo? Do they leap borders and go abroad? Or are they like some ephemeral insect, seen in a brief and terminal season?
Perhaps, now that the Indians are gone and circuses are out of fashion, they must find some other clandestine group of which to become member, and in the searching join the mobile, shifting nation.
Missoula has no small number of them. I was sitting outside a coffeeshop with my own pack and when I started talking to one of the tramps in length. I had just picked up a stunned bird from the roadside and had found a place for it to either recover or finish up its dying. The act aroused his curiosity and we began a conversation.
We spoke about books we had read, tho really it was more of a comparative reading list than any discussion. Each was sizing the other, measuring him to our own standard.
- What book are you carrying? I ask
- Leaves of Grass.
- That is probably the best book ever written in the English language.
- I read it most days. You've read Kerouac, yes?
- Yes. But only Big Sur.
- So not the Dharma Bums?
- I read portions of it at a friend's house. Have you read anything by Markham?
- No. Should I?
- Her writings about being a pilot in British East Africa are spectacular. A friend introduced me to her. She knew Hemingway.
- Then I'm sure someone like you has read For Whom the Bell Tolls.
- No, I haven't.
- Oh?
I sense my position slip.
- But you've read the Sun Also Rises?
- No.
- Why not?
- I don't much like Hemingway.
- Why not? he says again.
- He has no loyalty. To anything.
- Well, no.
The reason is good enough. We speak for another twenty minutes, during which we both throw names back and forth. Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, F. Scott, Ginsberg, Pynchon, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Chatwin, Maugham, looking for the weak spot. Have you read this? No. Have you read that? Yes. We meet each other's approval, tho our favorites are at odds.
Considering our clothing and behavior, it seems we were both under the sickness of emulation. He was covered in canvas and dark clothes, the better to hide the soot of freights, with a bandanna around his forehead to keep his shoulder-length hair from his eyes. I was dressed in a tidy buttowndown and apple cap, a pair of khakis reaching my boot-tops, my bandanna around my neck, as tho ready to start my shift at the Union Pacific, or else cross the Pyrenees and renew the fight against Franco.
I had just started reading Don Quixote at the time, and found rather more in common with the ill-made knight than I would have liked. Both the Manchegan and I believed the tales we had read as histories, not fictions. Each of us willing to abandon our homes and ourselves in pursuit of an elegant and obsolete ideal. Each desirous enough to see what is not there.
This young man across from me was little different. Aside from manner of dressing and choice of transportation, there was not much to distinguish us. Like trying to shade the differences between sparrows. He had just chosen to follow idols of a more recent make.
Thursday, June 30, 2011
A Good Man in Idaho
Avery, Idaho is the sort of town where a dog can fall asleep on the Main Drag. Stuck some 40 miles up the St. Joe River from the nearest town of any size, with national forest all around. The railroad liked it and kept it going, even after the town was nearly destroyed in the great burn of 1909. Then the population boomed in the resurgence of the timber industry during the 1920s, growing to over a thousand. Then steadily getting whittled down to the present population: 57.
Still, there is a post office. But the postal service had a hard time finding anybody who would want to move up the St. Joe River rd, so they had to find someone there who would do the job. And they found Wade.
Originally from Kansas, he had now spent most of his life in the Idaho panhandle, having first come there to work with the Forest Service. But he gave that up when he realized every time he told them where the old growth was they cut it down.
I had been boiling my dinner on a fire ring on the banks of the St. Joe when Wade walked by, looking for western tanagers - a songbird lately come back from migration to Central America. We got to talking about birds, then about nature, then about ourselves, and realized we were living similar lives separated by several decades. Dark was coming on quick, so we made plans to meet for coffee in the morning.
It was a good thing I came to Avery. My impressions of Idaho had been mixed since the first coffee shop I came to in Post Falls asked me to leave as soon as I went up to the counter. Then in Coeur d'Alene a young woman tried for an hour and a half to save my soul after I gave some unsatisfactory answers to a few of her pressing questions. And finally in St. Marys, the last town of any size I would come to on my way to Montana, a nice older man had seen me sitting on a bench and started talking to me about his grandson who was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. He gave me five dollars to buy myself a drink. While I went to give him his change, the owner of the cafe called the cops on me to report me for panhandling. It felt I was living a fugitive life.
Wade gave me coffee for free the next day, since he is friends with the owner of the one coffee shop in town. Tho the town being small as it is, it would be hard to not be on good terms with someone.
Talking about places we had been and hoped to go, we ended the morning looking for morels - which after scouring the sides of the mountain for, I would find growing in his front yard. Then, since it was a Saturday and he had the mail to sort, I went thru the town library - of which he is librarian - and found a few books I thought he might like. Travels with Charlie. The Woman Warrior. Cold Mountain. The last one in particular I thought he might like since there is an entire chapter about a goatwoman.
Wade had told me about the goats that come out to sun themselves in the late afternoon on the northwest-facing slopes of the peaks. There is a place that he knows that faces opposite. He has been up there every time of day and in all kinds of weather. Summer, winter, snow, lightning, whether there are goats or no. He suggested that we grab supper at the bar and then go the six miles out of town to the place.
We were still talking about nothing much when the owner of the bar came in.
- He used to lead sheep up into the Bitterroots, said Wade.
- I'd like to hear about that.
The owner did start talking about it when questioned, but said, more-or-less, that 'it was a job.'
- We took them up into the hills and it would be about two weeks just to get them up to the pasture. Longer if the feeding was good along the way.
- They don't do it anymore?
- Forest Service says it's too damaging to have them up there. But they had some fellas do a study and they found them sheep didn't do a darn thing to hurt anything.
Sheepherding was something that paid money while allowing him to be outside. There was no great joy to it, it seemed. But Idaho is the wrong place to mention anything about ranching and land without talk of wolves coming up, which are pronounced without the 'L.' Making the singular rhyme with 'roof' and the plural with 'hooves.'
- The old timers worked damn hard to get rid of them wooves, and they did it for a reason. Then somebody had to go and bring in new ones. Ones not even from here. Foreign kind.
- I understand a similar thing happened with the first people.
My comment goes unheard. Probably for the best.
- From Canada, he spits. Bigger and meaner. And they don't eat what they kill.
Neither Wade nor I say much during this. I mention this to him later.
- I know when to be quiet about something, he replies.
More pragmatically, he has to live in the same town as this man, and 57 people does not allow for enemies.
We got on bicycles and went the 6 miles out of town. Every other mile on this trip from Seattle I have walked. But I cannot now say that I have walked the entire way across the country, since for 6 miles in Idaho I pedaled.
The hike up to the peak where Wade watches goats was unhurried but quick, and soon we could look across at the side of the valley opposite.
- That's Billy face, he says, indicating which slope with his arm. And on the other side of the arrete is Nanny Face. And that is Bordeaux Peak.
- Those the official names?
- I named them all.
He grins.
- You come up here a few times a week?
- Sometimes a few times a day, he says, then tells of a storm that roused him up here.
- One night lightning stuck down and I shot awake in bed, thinking, ' I never been up there in a thunderstorm.' So I drove out, hiking in the rain, and came up here. Suddenly I hear this great roaring rockslide and now think, 'Shoot. My truck is blocked in now. I'm going to have to walk the six miles back to town in the rain.' It was that slide over there in Skookum Creek.
He points to another, smaller valley, one not on the road.
- That slide dammed the creek and made a little pond. Trout the length of my finger grew there. But the pond only lasted a summer.
We sat up there for a bit less than an hour, looking for goats, tho only one ever came out, and it too far away to tell whether it was a nanny or a billy. When it got awful close to dark, he showed me a good place to camp, where the cedars would keep me dry if it rained, but I might run afoul of a woodrat if I were careless. Before we say goodnight, I shake his hand. He might be the last person I meet in Idaho. I thank him for sharing the peak with me.
- I figured you'd get it. I show it to people who I think will understand.
- If ever you had a place like it yourself, you understand when someone else does, I say.
We say our goodnights, and he goes his way thru the cedars. I stay awake for awhile with my back to a tree, just thinking.
The next day, I continued up the St. Joe River Rd. Twenty four miles past the cedar campground, I was on top of eight feet of pack snow, looking down at the tracks of two wolves. Each track was the length from my wrist to the second digits of my fingers. I had spread my hands over each set, as tho to measure warmth from a bed of ember and so judge how long I had been in trailing. The melting showed they had passed the day before, so I was no likely to see them. But as their path was not at variance with my own, I followed the prints over the snow, and so came into Montana.
Still, there is a post office. But the postal service had a hard time finding anybody who would want to move up the St. Joe River rd, so they had to find someone there who would do the job. And they found Wade.
Originally from Kansas, he had now spent most of his life in the Idaho panhandle, having first come there to work with the Forest Service. But he gave that up when he realized every time he told them where the old growth was they cut it down.
I had been boiling my dinner on a fire ring on the banks of the St. Joe when Wade walked by, looking for western tanagers - a songbird lately come back from migration to Central America. We got to talking about birds, then about nature, then about ourselves, and realized we were living similar lives separated by several decades. Dark was coming on quick, so we made plans to meet for coffee in the morning.
It was a good thing I came to Avery. My impressions of Idaho had been mixed since the first coffee shop I came to in Post Falls asked me to leave as soon as I went up to the counter. Then in Coeur d'Alene a young woman tried for an hour and a half to save my soul after I gave some unsatisfactory answers to a few of her pressing questions. And finally in St. Marys, the last town of any size I would come to on my way to Montana, a nice older man had seen me sitting on a bench and started talking to me about his grandson who was hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. He gave me five dollars to buy myself a drink. While I went to give him his change, the owner of the cafe called the cops on me to report me for panhandling. It felt I was living a fugitive life.
Wade gave me coffee for free the next day, since he is friends with the owner of the one coffee shop in town. Tho the town being small as it is, it would be hard to not be on good terms with someone.
Talking about places we had been and hoped to go, we ended the morning looking for morels - which after scouring the sides of the mountain for, I would find growing in his front yard. Then, since it was a Saturday and he had the mail to sort, I went thru the town library - of which he is librarian - and found a few books I thought he might like. Travels with Charlie. The Woman Warrior. Cold Mountain. The last one in particular I thought he might like since there is an entire chapter about a goatwoman.
Wade had told me about the goats that come out to sun themselves in the late afternoon on the northwest-facing slopes of the peaks. There is a place that he knows that faces opposite. He has been up there every time of day and in all kinds of weather. Summer, winter, snow, lightning, whether there are goats or no. He suggested that we grab supper at the bar and then go the six miles out of town to the place.
We were still talking about nothing much when the owner of the bar came in.
- He used to lead sheep up into the Bitterroots, said Wade.
- I'd like to hear about that.
The owner did start talking about it when questioned, but said, more-or-less, that 'it was a job.'
- We took them up into the hills and it would be about two weeks just to get them up to the pasture. Longer if the feeding was good along the way.
- They don't do it anymore?
- Forest Service says it's too damaging to have them up there. But they had some fellas do a study and they found them sheep didn't do a darn thing to hurt anything.
Sheepherding was something that paid money while allowing him to be outside. There was no great joy to it, it seemed. But Idaho is the wrong place to mention anything about ranching and land without talk of wolves coming up, which are pronounced without the 'L.' Making the singular rhyme with 'roof' and the plural with 'hooves.'
- The old timers worked damn hard to get rid of them wooves, and they did it for a reason. Then somebody had to go and bring in new ones. Ones not even from here. Foreign kind.
- I understand a similar thing happened with the first people.
My comment goes unheard. Probably for the best.
- From Canada, he spits. Bigger and meaner. And they don't eat what they kill.
Neither Wade nor I say much during this. I mention this to him later.
- I know when to be quiet about something, he replies.
More pragmatically, he has to live in the same town as this man, and 57 people does not allow for enemies.
We got on bicycles and went the 6 miles out of town. Every other mile on this trip from Seattle I have walked. But I cannot now say that I have walked the entire way across the country, since for 6 miles in Idaho I pedaled.
The hike up to the peak where Wade watches goats was unhurried but quick, and soon we could look across at the side of the valley opposite.
- That's Billy face, he says, indicating which slope with his arm. And on the other side of the arrete is Nanny Face. And that is Bordeaux Peak.
- Those the official names?
- I named them all.
He grins.
- You come up here a few times a week?
- Sometimes a few times a day, he says, then tells of a storm that roused him up here.
- One night lightning stuck down and I shot awake in bed, thinking, ' I never been up there in a thunderstorm.' So I drove out, hiking in the rain, and came up here. Suddenly I hear this great roaring rockslide and now think, 'Shoot. My truck is blocked in now. I'm going to have to walk the six miles back to town in the rain.' It was that slide over there in Skookum Creek.
He points to another, smaller valley, one not on the road.
- That slide dammed the creek and made a little pond. Trout the length of my finger grew there. But the pond only lasted a summer.
We sat up there for a bit less than an hour, looking for goats, tho only one ever came out, and it too far away to tell whether it was a nanny or a billy. When it got awful close to dark, he showed me a good place to camp, where the cedars would keep me dry if it rained, but I might run afoul of a woodrat if I were careless. Before we say goodnight, I shake his hand. He might be the last person I meet in Idaho. I thank him for sharing the peak with me.
- I figured you'd get it. I show it to people who I think will understand.
- If ever you had a place like it yourself, you understand when someone else does, I say.
We say our goodnights, and he goes his way thru the cedars. I stay awake for awhile with my back to a tree, just thinking.
The next day, I continued up the St. Joe River Rd. Twenty four miles past the cedar campground, I was on top of eight feet of pack snow, looking down at the tracks of two wolves. Each track was the length from my wrist to the second digits of my fingers. I had spread my hands over each set, as tho to measure warmth from a bed of ember and so judge how long I had been in trailing. The melting showed they had passed the day before, so I was no likely to see them. But as their path was not at variance with my own, I followed the prints over the snow, and so came into Montana.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
One Year On: A Recommitment
Outside the town of Pescadero, California is St. Anthony's Cemetery. Though by the sound of it Catholic, and with plenty of Spanish names carved into granite, there appears no current affiliation besides the one great one: living may visit, dead may stay.
I enjoy old cemeteries for the reason that I may wander without having to inquire of the inhabitants. This particular plot - rising on a hill with open fields to all sides - was very nice at sunset, when the air would almost visibly change temperature and the roar of the ocean would come in from miles away. Or when the wind blew off the Pacific and stirred the grass like the steps of a young girl. And off to one slope, where the view is not as spacious, an old blue gum eucalyptus sheds bark and broken branches over a strangle of myrtle.
Something about old trees. Something reverent for having survived thru the quiet of centuries on light and leaves. Even when the diet of ages changed, and the years did not eat with the seasons but fed on fossils and built of themselves a century muscled of iron, the eucalyptus lay down each summer a layer of wood. This is a patience I will never learn.
A buzzing comes from the tree. From a crack where a fire scored the side that faces east, honeybees have settled into a hive. It is twilight now, and tho it will soon be too dark for any strays to return, many come into and leave and trace little arcs over the spreading dew. Cross-legged, back to the tree, I settle myself and face east with the bees.
A current of wings and little golden bodies catch the light. Some curious scouts descend, landing on my shirt, my glasses, my face. I have no allergy and - not being a flower - need not fear being overmuch attended. The few inspecting workers fly off, toting home the packs of nectar and pollen - I'm no threat - and the stream of bees goes on.
Who was it who sat beneath a tree? Siddhartha? St. Francis? They knew what they were doing even when they did not know why they chose the seat. Then the earth was parchment whereupon the divine scrawled messages in a hand more legible. Sometimes missives writ large across skies with punctuations of comets and footnotes lightning. But far greater by signs small and significant. It may still be so. The rain still falls. The wind still blows. The grass stalk still bends.
The nebula of bees pulsates around hill, tree, stones, and me. So busy and so necessary, tiles in a shifting mosaic, shaped and shaping the earth as it grinds out life at the mill wheel of the sun. Not looking at hills and bees and tree - not looking only - I marvel. I behold what I have set myself before. Here I seek the communiques that others saw plainly in centuries previous, seated on a raw nerve of earth.
However things must have been different then, the print larger perhaps. I do not see what they saw, but I can see as they saw. Even without sense enough to know what I sought, I knew to come to this place to think it, and the answer - which I had already suspected - became plain. I would take my own adventure - on foot - across the continent. No motors. Just my feet.
Many admirable people had done the same, and for many great causes. And sometimes, they have changed history, rejecting the stories written for them with chapters they have authored, for themselves and nations. For myself, I had no such desire. There was nothing I could preach, much less I could even profess. I would speak but moreso listen. I would step over every beetle in my path and sweep away the ashes of every fire lit. I would raise no awareness other than my own, as I wandered from hillside to mountain to lake to shore, connecting those wells of buzzing, electric nature. Mine was Diogenes' errand, roaming the hills with my lantern. I make no honey. I have no sting.
Two weeks later, I had breakfast with friends in town, shouldered my pack, and started out down Stage Road, past St. Anthony's Cemetery. North to the Olympic Peninsula, then east to the Atlantic. Goodbye bees.
Then I could draw a path, but could not walk it. Now, a year on, I have reversed, and can walk but no longer tell. Still, eastward I go.
~Missoula, Montana
Monday, June 13, 2011
Photographs: the Wheatlands; Eastern WA
The land - tho with space aplenty for desperation - still produces a few good men.
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