We lived out near Old Sitka Rocks in the North Pacific for more than forty years. We had a muddy lawn about fifteen feet up from the beach. One year during a famous Thanksgiving day storm waves broke right on the grass. But that only happened that one time. We had a tiny garden plot that eventually became overgrown, and a large patch of salmon berries right out in front. The berries wanted to take over the entire yard so had to be cut back every year. Brown bears roamed through the neighborhood. Our neighbor got a photo of a rather small brown bear, cross right into the berry patch, and once a very large brown bear swam across the inlet and came out right in our yard, shook herself and ambled up the drive way to make her way up the wild mountain on the other side of the road to town.
Today we live in a beautiful community designed for older people. The apartments are small but comfortable with a small back garden for each of the three hundred units. The units sit on about fifty acres of garden. A berm to protect against flooding surrounds the community. On top of the berm is a sprinkler line to protect against wildfire. Many people have dogs and it is expected that everyone will clean up after their dogs, and deposit the droppings in one of the many 20 gallon garbage cans along the side of the trails. The trails extend up and down the floor of the Carmel River valley and on these walks through parks, hillsides and one grown over golf course. On the trails you can see, hundreds of types of birds, deer, bobcats and occasionally a Mountain Lion. On our morning walks the most common animals I see are coveys of quail running along the top of the berm like a bunch of silent circus clowns, or we almost always see little cotton tail bunnies, either scampering into the brush or using their secrete powers of invisibility to stand stalk still, not even moving their eyeballs as Dot and I approach hoping they cannot be seen. I’ve seen no evidence of anybody hunting the quail or bunnies, though both are probably pretty tasty. It all seems very pastoral and civilized. Flowers grow in proliferation even in the winter. The pallet of color shows pink and vivid red.
I have long been interested in landscape…no… maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’ve always been interested in dread, and Alaska has more dread than California. There were more brown bears on the island where we lived than in all the rest of North America….. yes that is correct. More brown bears than the rest of all of North America. Brown bears are the only other large omnivore, other than human beings and this may account for the number of instances of physical conflict between bears and humans. Garbage Cans turned over, trips along spawning streams canceled because of bears. Occasionally there may be direct physical attacks. Though with the proliferation of powerful guns, the bears suffer more from physical threat than to the humans. Hunting is also a mainstay of peoples lives in Alaska. In Sitka we were allowed to kill six Sitka Blacktail Deer per year. The meat is clean and good tasting. And people enjoyed hunting them as well as consuming them. I counted myself as a deer hunter.. But like a lot of men who grow old hunting. I tired of the killing. That moment you bring a deer into your sights was no longer a thrill but more of a tense moment that was an outrider of grief. It didn’t usually last long. But it was there. Making a dead animal became hard. Making a dead animal into packets of healthy food, was not that hard.
I’d eat one of these fat quail which run around our housing complex.. I suppose I could kill one with a sling shot or even a spear. But I don’t think it would be culturally acceptable.
So… how does living in such a place now effect my writing? A. we seem to put death at much more of an arms length in California. Even though as Walt Whitman said, “There is no more death here than anywhere.” Its difficult to find empty units here in our community but you don’t have to wait long and something will come open. Bobcats have been known to eat pets. Mountain Lions have been known to eat hikers. Surfers love the waves at the near bye beaches but there are injuries and some fatalities. People here are obsessed with crime, and the fear of it. My daughter in law went to a community meeting in his neighborhood to put forward the idea of building a sidewalk along the side of the road up to a neighborhood park, and a comment came forward that building a sidewalk, would “encourage crime.” Just how was not clearly expressed but with was shared that the road in question met a larger road that ran fifteen miles to Salinas, which was understood to be a crime hub. The only point I’m trying to make is everywhere has scary things in or near. crime, death and serious injury is everywhere. Everywhere with boundaries has tension. It’s just in California, it seems to me, that there is quite an effort to avoid this particular fear, perhaps you might call it the fear of the wild.
My writing in Alaska was soaked as much as possible in wildness. Not just landscape but wild humanity as well. I felt the tension everywhere I went: Bears in the woods, or the undertow at the beach. You had to face it head on and be prepared. In California, my experience so far is we try and fence all the wildness out. Landscape is pastoral. Even Mountain Lions don’t seem to be a threat. If someone were to be killed by a big cat, it’s assumed that something would be done to make sure that wouldn’t happen again.
Will my writing become tame? Some might suggest that it wouldn’t hurt me if it did. Some people think I perhaps try and rub my readers nose’s in the randomness of violence. Like the Goth kid who goes to the Prom to show their distain for polite conventions I tend to act tougher than I am.. I don’t know. I don’t think I do that, try and rub your nose in horror. and gore… (good law firm name!) …but maybe.
I hope I will learn more about California and discover more of the wildness here.
Two wild turkeys running around down town Monterey. Not a brown bear but kind of scary looking.
Camilla flower
heavy in the winter rain
falling to the ground,.
Here is a recording of me reading five poems: some from California, some from Alaska. You can hear for yourself if leaving Alaska has made me soft.
