Rain, and more darkness. Another low pressure blowing through. There are no more leaves clinging to the cherry tree. I have lived on this property for more than forty years and every year I comment on how wet and dark it is this time of year. I think it has to do with the time change. I blame the government… not really but don’t get me started on our president.
November 4, our friend Richard Nelson died. I flew down to be with him and his other close friends, Debbie Miller, Liz McKenzie, and Hank Lentfer to be with him and to try and lend his loved ones support. The doctors at the teaching hospital were so compassionate and accommodating in the ICU, Liz played recordings of bird songs that Nels had recorded and Debbie had done everything that could be done to make the room lovely and the medical care top notch, she massaged his feet and showered him with love every second. Hank spoke to him like an honest camp buddy, making jokes and loving helpful, soulful comments that I know Nels appreciated. I did my usual and told stupid jokes and teased him, I had prowled his house and brought him some books from his bedside. I read him some short poems by Nanao Sakaki and several selections that he had marked from J.A. Baker’s The Hill Of Summer.
He was on a ventilator and could not speak, but after reading to him. I asked, “Do you want to go now Nels?” and he raised both his hands and lunged forward a bit, which was the most movement that I had seen out of him the day I spent with him. I said, “Okay Buddy,” then after we consulted with all his doctors and spoke among ourselves, Debbie, Liz, Hank and I… all agreed that Richard Nelson should live and die unhooked from a machine. He was unhooked, and he breathed on his own. At first his breath was difficult and labored, then his lungs seemed to clear, and he seemed peaceful and easy. He died without struggle or obvious pain forty minutes later. He died of cancer that had spread from a cyst in his jaw that over a long time became a cancerous tumor, eventually allowing rare form of cancer to rapidly spread to his lungs, bones, liver, and kidneys. In the end he had pneumonia like symptoms, but it was cancer that shut down his organs and finally killed him.
Like crosses on the roadside to mark accidents, the facts of his death have very little to do with the life and accomplishments of this great man. He was a terrific writer, scholar, teacher, and broadcaster. as I’ve said over and over in the last few weeks, “there was no one like him, and there will be no one who can replace him.” I’ve written about him in at least two entries on this blog. Go back and take a look. I felt he was my brother and my inspiration. He was funny and full of energy. An unassuming genius. He taught me to hunt and how to surf, how to butcher a deer, how to subsistence fish, and how to give thanks for the life I take in.
He wasn’t a saint, and he could be a pain in the ass. But he was smarter than me and worked harder than I do, and I think he knew it. Like I said, my big brother.
But to get to know him for yourself, read him and listen to his radio programs. There will be a celebration of his life in Sitka the end of April and I expect a lot of people will come to pay tribute to him. But until that go to:
encountersnorth.com
read:
Hunters of the Northern Ice/ Hunters of the Northern Forrest/ Make Prayers To The Raven/ Shadow of the Hunter/ The Island Within/ Heart And Blood: living with Deer In America.
I wrote two poems in the last two weeks one that tried to capture Nels, and one that tried to capture the feeling of grief at his death. Like most poems written when emotions run high, they are not great and would probably never be considered for publication anywhere. But the heck with it …. that’s what blogs are for I suppose.
YOU: A PRESENCE
You had sun in your eyes,
energy so intense that shadows formed
behind whatever you were looking at,
“Un-fucking believable!”
as if unicorns were prancing with diamond saddles
through your berry patch rather than
a pair of Anna’s hummingbirds flashing in their
mating ritual at your plastic feeder outside
your rippled office window.
“Look at them! Oh my God!
Imagine, their hearts! Imagine their muscles!”
Two feathered jewels had you caught in the sunlight,
and I was staring at you,
your attention fixed and taut as a wire.
nothing else in your mind but the blue green dance,
rapid skulling wings, the needle beaks, muscled chests
dipping, probing, ecstatic, and you mouth open, chest open
being filled with light and sound.
A philosophy student once tried to explain
the concept of Heidigger’s Dasein to me while
we were on an island near your old cabin,
“Imagine that all this,” and he gestured to the trees
and the ocean, the seaweed, the otters eating urchins near the beach
“Imagine, that all of this was your authentic consciousness,
and all the rest… the story you keep telling yourself,
your talking head, inside your head
was just an artifact of culture putting you to work, with language.
I think of you now, Richard King Nelson: a presence.
A living pair of binoculars, the expensive kind,
that let in more light than most people can see.
FALLING OVERBOARD
I flew the knife edge of the coastal range thrusting up,
and from the hospital there were waves breaking
by the Golden Gate, your machines clicking
the ventilator sucking and pumping down your throat
your hands bloated, feet swollen, one eye open
unblinking, I read to you of an owl flying a hill
then I asked, “Do you want to go now, Nels?”
and you lurched forward with both your waxy
hands grasping the empty air above the tubes.
That was all it took to begin the process of
the slip, the fall, then the sudden sputtering
gasping for breath.
Ship lights receding, rolling with the swells
lifting then sucking down into the trough
no vessel, no horizon, only the sullen valley of the wave.
Cold comes, as your legs stiffen and peddle a bit,
at the peak, the wave sloughs, wind whips
light from the last bit of sun splintering wave tips,
and you arch your neck before you drop again,
coughing salty water from your lungs as you beat the surface
trying to rise in the last direction the boat was heading,
a glimpse now of a birthday cake, in the distance
at the top of each swell, your life as it once was
warm, with soup and tinkling bird song as it rolls away,
Sleepiness overtakes you now, easy, nothing is the wave,
nothing the splashing drops at the summit of the next,
nothing your hand in front of your face,
nor the ocean you are becoming.
