Fog, light rain, high clouds. So much more of the same it is tempting to call it fall time around here. Yet the salmon berries in the yard are opening up. I would have mowed the lawn (really I would have) but it never stopped raining long enough for the mossy front yard to dry out. My shoes sink down with that squishy sound as if I were walking on sponges still. We have been taking Dot and our beach chairs to the recreation beach down the road so we can run her on the cobbles and eat our sandwiches under cover for a change of pace. Dot is still tentative about swimming. We found a dead cormorant on one outing and Dot barked at it until I threw it up into the woods so that we could get some peace. The next day the bird was gone, so I suspect some collector or a large animal gathered it up. It appeared the cormorant died of a broken neck with some wounds to it’s body which could mean it had been killed by an eagle but I could not examine it in detail.
Saturday was the day that had been planned for a day of remembrance for Richard K. Nelson. People were planning to fly in from all over and we were going to have a big old celebration of life. But the virus put the kabosh on that. In stead Jan, Liz McKenzie (Nels’s old partner, co-producer and permanently listed in Facebook under “it’s complicated”) met at the rec area and toasted him with tears, root beer, and peanut butter and salmonberry jam sandwiches. Then tried to work into our conversation every one of Nel’s favorite expressions, “Balls on a heifer!” (for something surprising) “Balls to the wall!” (for working really hard) Fine Thank You Fine. (The answer to Howareya?) Sitka, Alaska 99835 (The answer to where is the best place on earth?) There are others but many are not appropriate for airing before eleven o’clock. Nels had kind of a classic farm boy sense of humor.
Fine dining al la Richard Nelson. I think he ate a pb and j sandwich every day of his life or would have given the choice. He grew up with an incredibly bland midwestern palate. He told me he grew up never eating salad dressing nor condiments at home. His mom sold potato salad at a gas station that was famous in the region but she had never tasted it because it had mustard in it! Too spicy. He told me he never ate Catsup until he went to graduate school in California, so too Pizza, or a taco! Later he virtually lived on venison burritos.
The radio station did an excellent broadcast of an old encounters show and a show that I thought was very moving about the making of Encounters. You can cut an paste it here:
https://www.kcaw.org/2019/11/15/encountering-the-life-and-work-of-richard-nelson/?fbclid=IwAR17iYxDJl1k-h9MeFvE_2PM-yMna1KkdSGNDrgVhSCbCbfqvVgOPnPfZzw
It features the voices of Lisa Busch and Ken Fate who helped Nels get the show up and running. I thought the reporter at Raven did a terrific job putting it together even though he didn’t know Nels other than through his work.
If you want to hear more original Encounters programs and learn what else is going on in northern audio field recordings go here: https://www.encountersnorth.org
This site is kept up by Liz and has many of the old shows, they truly are unique and capture the genuine enthusiasm for the wild, that Nels embodied.
This is my little offering to Nelsapalozza
PRESENCE
You had sun in your eyes,
energy so intense that shadows formed
behind whatever you were looking at,
“Un-fucking believable!”
as if blue 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 old 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 taught 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.
jhs
Here is a recording I made reading from the beginning of my third novel. You can hear Dot bumping around on the porch. She is calming down a bit.
