"I'M GOING TO MAKE IT THROUGH THIS YEAR IF IT KILLS ME" My trip to Washington DC to see the Mountain Goats and John Brown.

I am in Seattle now to see a consulting psychiatrist about new therapies for my depression. We will be talking about zapping my brain with electromagnetic impulses or taking doses of horse tranquilizer, while under his supervision down here. That.. or I will go back home and keep at my new regimen of diet, exercise, prayer and meditation, and see if that keeps me going. But that’s not what I want to write about today… really… though it colors everything I write about. (all my readers know that my melancholy joi du vivre is the mood of all my dance music)

Seattle is beautiful right now, the flowering trees are in full bloom, dogwood, and rhododendron, even lilac. In the early mornings before the planes start hectoring the sky the birds are in full song in my nephew’s neighborhood. Downtown is another story where the homeless gather under the bridges in their tents the sidewalks flow with piss and more and more mentally ill work their strategy to get money from passers by, while they brush their teeth in public water fountains and fight each other for their territories to beg. Every walk downtown presents dilemmas on whether or how much to give. No amount of personal generosity will solve the problem, of course, some systematic large scale communal decision needs to be made, to help us all.

Jan was in Washington D.C. for a meeting about her new grant to help Native Students learn to address paralytic shellfish poisoning in their villages. Her grant will teach them the science of this problem which is the number one threat to their ocean subsistence food. They will learn the testing the causes, how to do the tests, and how the western science dovetails into their traditional knowledge of the resource . She is partnering with the Sitka Tribe and the Sitka Sound Science Center, bringing more than a million bucks into the community, that has a structure already set up to use it effectively. I’m so proud of her and her partners.

I went back east to be with her and I spent a day going to art museums with her. Jan’s Parkinson’s disease has slowed her down some but her enthusiasm has not dimmed a bit. The key is not to try to do too much. We just do fewer things and take our time. Do things we enjoy and enjoy doing them slowly and together. This has been a learning process for both of us. All we did the first day was walk to the American Portrait Gallery… it’s free. We wanted to see the portrait of John Steinbeck, but dammit, it was in storage. Our dear friend Nancy Ricketts has a wonderful portrait of her father Ed Ricketts by the same artists who did Steinbeck portrait and we thought they might be interested in Ed’s portrait as a companion piece.

The portrait gallery was a surprise with how it effected me, I had a personal reaction in seeing many of the “people” hanging there. Here’s an example. In the hall of the presidents every president is represented there, and there is a smattering of people throughout. But when when we got to the striking portrait of Barack Obama there was a long line and many people stood in front of the painting and either took selfies or asked the next person in line to take their picture with the painting… as if they were getting their picture with the actual man. I thought it was an amazing testament not only to the President but to the Artist.

From the National Portrait Gallery

One floor down Michelle Obama’s Portrait was hung and hundreds of people visited there as well and as we stood there nearly every person who came said the same thing that both Jan and I thought. “It’s striking, but it doesn’t look like Michelle,” and each person said, either, “Michelle” or “her” as if they were talking about a member of their own family.

In a way these people were members of our family, our American family. Also I loved that this museum is free. That is the way it should be, there should not be a fee to go see your family. This is our heritage. This is where we come from like it or not. Here are some of the people I felt “kin” to:

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, Florida Natural History Writer

E.O. Wilson, Biologist

Toni Morrison, novelist

We all gathered around and took pictures of our various friends and family members. I have many more. I took a photo of Walt Whitman, John Brown, Tecumsa, Rachel Carson, Merle Haggard, Ulysses S. Grant, and Beyonce. When I left I knew the troubles of America, genocide, and slavery, the unjust wars and I felt the challenges ahead, but also I felt the force of greatness and possibility too. That’s what I think Patriotism should be, the mix of responsibility and pride.

That night Jan and I went to see the Mountain Goats. This is our favorite band, and we have seen them all over the world. John Darnielle is the singer songwriter who writes all the songs and is the lead singer. He writes with wit and irony… or is it irony? His followers are devoted to the point of obsession. Jan and I like and admire him. He has written and very nice blurb for one of my books, he is a greatly admired novelist and I think he writes about disaffected youth much, much better than J.D. Salinger ever did, but his hard core fans can recognize his most obscure unreleased songs, only distributed on cassette or handed around by fans, from the first three notes of John’s guitar and sing every word right along with him. Men and women cry out “I love you!” frantically in cracked voices from the audiences of two or three thousand. And this for a relatively portly forty-ish year old man with a bowl haircut and, glasses who wears a sports coat on stage and sings in a reedy high register about Mexican wrestling, obscure science fiction tropes, and terrible, terrible break ups.

Imagine last Saturday in the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. the Mountain Goats were celebrating the release of their new album release “In League With Dragons” and John tells a brief story of driving through Iowa and he thinks of a story of a couple “saying horrible things to each other” and cheers start building from the crowd of about twelve hundred. He says when confronted with what to call the song he decides “the best thing to hope for these people is that they don’t reproduce… and hence… NO CHILDREN” then the crowd erupts and every one begins singing in a seeming full throated kind of bliss:

“I hope that our few remaining friends

Give up on trying to save us

I hope we come up with a fail-safe plot

To piss off the dumb few that forgave us

I hope the fences we mended

Fall down beneath their own weight

And I hope we hang on past the last exit

I hope it’s already too late.

And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here

Someday burns down

And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away

And I never come back to this town….

Again… in my life

I hope I lie and tell everyone you were a good wife

I hope you die

I hope we both die.”

Now… I don’t chant at protests and I don’t really sing at concerts. I’m repressed and that’s not something I like about myself and maybe the horse tranquilizers will help me with this. But on Saturday night I watched the crowd. A young woman in a tank top.. maybe in her thirties. Ball cap on backwards, tattoos down her arms, eyes closed and singing her heart out, was raising her fists in the air when she comes to the “I HOPE YOU DIE, I HOPE WE BOTH DIE!’ part of the chorus, and I have to say… I get it. This is the love song that nobody else writes, this is undoubtedly the more common part of the love experience that John Darnielle gave voice to and there is a joyful aspect to just letting it out… but maybe it’s not really irony. See too his songs like “Lovecraft in Brooklyn” There are reasons to be a crazy fearful misanthropes sometimes… at least part of the time and if you can’t let that part of you out what do you do with it? It festers maybe and blossoms into a real monster? I don’t know…

Much like my visit to the portrait gallery the experience in our nation’s capitol was a mix. I’ll end with a short anecdote. The next day before our flight we went to the Phillips Gallery and we sat in front of a beautiful Renoir and just looked at it. I was talking to Jan about how impossible in must have seemed to try and paint “light” and to see the relationship between color and light. When a beautiful woman in her late seventies came up and looked closely at the painting, Then she turned to us and asked us to look at the young man with the goatee who was looking down at the young girl on the right side of the painting. She said, he looked just like her great nephew. Then she said the sister of that boy was with her the last time she was here at the Phillips: her great niece. The niece was 24 and off to Africa to work for a relief organization and two days after their museum visit she was killed in the Ethiopian plane crash. This older woman started to cry, I rubbed her back and we talked about her tadgedy. The girl had left a museum magnet of the painting on the woman’s refrigerator and today was the first day she had worked up the courage to come back and look at the painting. She said… “I just wanted to talk with you to make a connection… and somehow share my grief.” Her name was Clair and both Jan and I said that we were grateful that she did. We asked if she would care to have a cup of tea with us, and she declined because she was meeting a friend of her niece in a few minutes. But we both agreed that we were glad to have met and that the only answer to loneliness and grief was human connection in whatever dose you can find it. Then she left us with the great beauty and our bitter sweet memory of her grief and our chance meeting. Much like all of my experiences lately, there is a melancholy joi du vivre to be had… and savored with each heart beat.

Windows are open.

One dogwood flower blows in,

like a telegram.

jhs

This is not Clair’s boy nor her niece. I decided to protect her privacy in that.

STAYING ALIVE

It’s been a good spate of spring weather, cold but clear, and the sea has been remarkably calm, the herring are finally beginning to spawn on the outside coast long after the herring fleet has moved on, which is probably for the best. I cleaned up, fertilized, and watered our rhododendrons, and still only one is showing any blossoms. No hummingbirds are coming to the sugar water, and I’m struggling to find a steady pace writing the rough draft of my new Cecil manuscript..

I’m trying to come out of another low period, you’d think the sunny weather would help and though I like the sun my mood doesn’t always respond to the light alone. I walk and bicycle and watch my diet and that is helping but still the black clouds linger over my head like some old cartoon character who was popular in my parents day.

I gave a reading from Winter and Spring haiku books the other day, Norm Campbell showed his newest drawings and my buddies played some music as I read. I had a wonderful time and the audience seemed to enjoy the ten minute presentation. Then I read from my latest novel at smaller gathering and I chose a well written selection that was grim and it ran too long and when I got back to my seat all Jan said was “Too long… people got fidgety,” and of course that put me in a funk.

Writing is hard, it’s lonely too. I sit alone for most of the day now and I never really know what I’m doing, or rather, I never really know if what I’m writing is meaningful or clear to anyone else. But on the other hand writing the things that I do, in the way that I do is such a self-indulgent pursuit. I should really get out of my head and think of others more.

View from my office at seven thirty pm, this week.

Jan’s book about Ed Ricketts is almost sold out everywhere and will not be published by Shorefast Editions anymore. They had published a her beautiful book before they decided to take on my Haiku books. I ran into this article I wrote for 49 Writers today and it made me happy.

John Straley: You Need All The Friends You Can Get

49 WritersDecember 17, 2015

Writers tend to be a whiney lot. At least I have been in my time, particularly when it comes to the subject of publishers: they don’t appreciate me, they are too big, they are too small, they don’t promote my book, it goes on and on and on…

The only time we truly love them is the first week after the acceptance letter arrives and then the complaining begins.

But the truth is without them we would be mostly obscure, untended weeds, growing wild on the internet. A good publisher takes us in, gives us a good trimming and dresses us up; they make us presentable and introduce us to the world. They also discover something inside of us, inside of our words that we might not have even known was there. They help us focus that quality and bring it to our readers. Of course after it’s done, we take all the credit, but the truth is, without them, without the editor or publisher who first championed our work, our words would have lain fallow in journals, or on blogs read by maybe a few dozen of our friends.

William Stafford once said that an editor is, “A friend who makes sure only our best work is shared with the world.” When I heard him say those words, I was a young man with a large collection of rejection letters and firm belief that there was a national conspiracy against my writing spearheaded by the editors in New York. I was stunned by Stafford’s sentiments that these people were my friends.

Now I am sixty-two and I have published many things, including nine books of my own. I’ve had experiences from disastrous to profitable on the financial side, and stultifying to illuminating on the educational side. But recently I had the chance to work with a small press which was, like the accommodations at the three Bears house, “Just Right” all around.

First let me start off by saying that the best publishers are “book people”, and the best publisher for your project is the kind of person who enthusiastically shares your vision. My wife had an idea for a book, and Shorefast Editions of Juneau turned out to be the perfect publisher, because they shared a simular vision and they knew the territory of the book.

Jan Straley is one of Alaska’s pre-eminent marine biologists studying whales in the north Pacific, but as a student she walked the beaches of Washington State and picked through the tidepools. This was how she discovered the book Between Pacific Tides by Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin. This book became her treasure map, helping her to identify animals, not by scientific groupings, but by where they could be found on the beach.

Katrina Woolford Pearson, who runs Shorefast Editions, was born and raised in Juneau and has more than a 25 year history immersed in the world of books. She is a fourth generation Alaskan who is committed to publishing the literature of this place and she thrives on collaborative projects. She loves Steinbeck and the Ricketts/ Juneau/ Sitka connection. (Jack Calvin’s wife was from Juneau) You see? These are small details for a scientist and a publisher to share, impossible to predict but… it created a collaboration of seemingly unlike minds.

When Jan was just out of college she learned that the “Ricketts” on the credits for Between Pacific Tides was the famous “Doc” in the Steinbeck books: Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday and The Sea of Cortez. Later, in 1977, after she graduated from the University of Washington and was working as a wilderness ranger in the North Cascades of Washington State she was offered a job as a biologist in Sitka and she jumped at the chance. After all, Sitka was the northern-most range of all the intertidal animals in her favorite book. Sitka was the frontier. She was going there even though she had just married a 24-year-old poet who was making his living as a horseshoer.

Little did she know it then, but in 1932, Ricketts, Calvin, Calvin’s wife Sasha, and budding anthropologist and world literature student Joseph Campbell, made a trip in a small boat up the inside passage from Seattle to Sitka collecting and doing research for Between Pacific Tides. The expedition ended in Sitka where the Calvins made their home. The conversations on the boat were wide ranging, including discussions of literature and native culture (Sasha was Aleut, her father was the Russian Orthodox Bishop in Juneau). They discussed how human beings and human intellect were somehow not the key to understanding the complex interconnectedness of all the life that they were observing in their scientific collecting. These conversations had a profound influence on all of them, giving rise to Ricketts’s very early philosophical musings on what would later become ecological thinking.

Campbell, of course, would go on to write the seminal works The Hero With a Thousand Faces, The Masks of God, and The Power of Myth. The themes of his work depended on his ability to break through the previously impenetrable barriers set forth by the Ivory Tower thinking of the time. This conversation began on that trip up the coast in Calvin’s small boat, the Grampus, where they meditated on the tidepools during the day and discussed the poems of Robinson Jeffers at night.

After the trip, Ricketts wrote a scientific paper on the effects of wave impact on intertidal life on the beaches around Sitka, which he described as being similar to the beaches surrounding his home in Monterey. This paper was never published.

So, in 2015, this was all it was: an unpublished scientific paper by a legendary biologist with an interesting backstory and a vague Idea for a book.

Then there was a dinner at the Channel Club in Sitka with Jan and Katrina where they discussed some ideas. Jan had an idea of additional essays and Katrina had ideas for who might be included. Jan suggested Katrina meet Nancy Ricketts, Ed Ricketts’s daughter who still lives in Sitka. At that meeting, Nancy charmed Katrina. She not only had a sharp memory but an archivist’s collection of photographs from her past.

Nancy Ricketts was with her father when he read the galley proofs of Cannery Row. He groaned at the oversized caricature Steinbeck painted of him, but conceded that “it had been done out of love.” Nancy wanted to add to the historical picture of her father who she loved so much; she wanted to show the world that “Doc” Ricketts was also a good father. Jan and Katrina agreed.

So too did they want to correct some misconceptions about Ricketts as a writer; and for that they contacted Katie Rodger, his leading biographer and also some of the leading scientists of intertidal life to add perspective on the research Ricketts had done.

Colleen Mondor was asked to write the story of the Grampus trip and I wrote an essay on the charisma of place to give Jack Calvin his due respect in the story. But the point I’m trying to make is, this all came together because of a good idea that was shepherded along by an editor and then made real by a good publisher willing to take a risk.

The physical book then took shape with the help of an amazing designer chosen by the publisher and an artist likewise chosen, all working as part of a team that shares a common vision. None of this happened from the top down. None of this happened from a strictly dollars-and-cents mentality. This happened because a team of people loved the subject and loved books.

Ed Ricketts was an eccentric man of appetites, a Renaissance man. No one book could contain him. Ed Ricketts from Cannery Row to Sitka, Alaska is an eclectic book and most publishers would not touch it. It’s science, and art, and oral history, but that’s what makes it a labor of love and a book that is anchored to the love of the world in which it is set. It is a beautiful thing, like a tidepool, like the stars, like the mind of the eccentric genius who inspired it.

All of this came together for us on November 28th in Sitka when the publisher, editors, writers, book designer, and Nancy Ricketts launched the book into the world. This was the most wonderful kind of literary event because it was not the celebration of a single person but truly a celebration of a place and an idea. All was gratitude and mutual love, Katrina expressed it, Jan expressed it and all I could do was chime in and then I asked Nancy questions about her Pop, which delighted the more than a hundred people who jammed into Old Harbor Books, to observe the culmination of this project and to celebrate Nancy’s ninety-first birthday. It was a lovely night that belonged to everyone. The gathering truly was like a tidepool or a cluster of twinkling stars, not one brighter than the others. Which again, is the way I am sure, Ed Ricketts and Jack Calvin would have wanted it to have been.

Re-reading this made me happy because it reminded me that no good comes from being whiny, and good people who go through bad periods are usually still good people, no matter if things happen which hurt your feelings. Good books are still good books, and the community built around them still goes on. Jan worked hard on her book and Shorefast: Katrina Woolford and Collen Mondor made it into a beautiful thing. There is nothing to feel bad about in that.

I know Ed Ricketts would approve, of staying alive and continuing to reach out, continuing to make connections for this creative work, for the poetry for the business of Shorefast books, Nothing really ends, but everything changes form.

If you want to find Ed Ricketts: From Cannery Row to Sitka Alaska, you can find the last few copies at Old Harbor Books in Sitka. So too the haiku books of mine. They are beautifully made thanks to Sarah Asper Smith, Ben Huff, and Shorefast Editions. We will always be grateful to them as those books continue their journey out in the world.

No birds singing now

where the rhododendron bloom,

in the rich, cold soil.

jhs

Two Desert Poems

Sonny Liston Considers The Ways Of Vanity From Heaven

Anna’s hummingbird

on a barrel cactus thorn:

his chest thrust out as if

he is sucking up all the oxygen

in the Universe.

He takes off buzzing like

a fighter plane stooping

out of the sun, proud

as Cassius Clay pounding me down

February 25, 1964…

Was that his vanity making

him do all that,

taunting me as he gave me that whooping

calling me a “big ugly bear?”

My mother raised 21 children,

and Ali finally died of Parkinson’s disease

didn’t he?

That didn’t end in vanity

did it?

I wonder now if beautiful creatures

inadvertently take the way of vanity

as I did in my life

flirting with pretty girls

in Casinos

acting as if I’ve read some

some book or another when

I’d only glanced at

the back flap

and

sometimes,

diving off

from a tall cactus plant

to challenge some tough opponent

finding nothing but my own reflection

in that flat, hard glass

right before everything

went silent.

Palm Canyon, after the rains.

Write here…

In A World Gone Generous (For my sisters Mary and Pam)

the adults settle in while the children fuss,

or stare straight ahead until they wiggle

into their dream worlds

waiting for the first words.

And the first words have always been:

“Dearly Beloved”

spoken to the children and friends,

spoken  to the spirits

who wander the shade,

lest we forget

that this was once 

an inhospitable country.

A thousand years ago

on this spot

were stones as hot as skillets

and fresh water as rare as an arrowhead

scuffed up from the dirt.

Those first people,

the Chumash and the Cahuillas  (ka wee yas)

are walking past us now

still desolate with thirst

and struck dumb in disbelief

at just how much there is

right here

right now. 

In the shade too, are those who

once loomed large in our lives

and didn’t understand us then.

They stand just out of sight,

their sun dazzled eyes seeking ours

knowing there is no currency

to their apologies.  

Dearly Beloved

when you spread your mud cloth on the sand

those thirty years ago

you would have no way of knowing

this day was waiting for you,

with troubled marriages

troubled children

troubled times

to live through.

But now

in your seventieth years

you are victorious

in the love

as perfectly suited to this earth

as rain

or cactus flowers

or your grandchildren

fidgeting to play

with the ghosts of the Cahuillia

children passing through. 

Those who didn’t understand you then

have no power over you now.

No referendum, no

law can change the reality

they are no longer a part of,

this is why their inconstant forms

shift from foot to foot

silently both wanting

and not wanting to come in.

And though they are not forgiven

we can if we wish, 

welcome them to take their place

in a new world made generous 

by this blessed shade

by this blessed company

and by your well deserved

and honest love.

Two Marys And A Rant

Frost lasts all day on the grass.  The daylight is lengthening into the afternoon and the sunsets have been long scarlet smeasr across the horizon, brightening up the world at the last seconds of the day.  Frost on the side of the road and yet I’ve been riding my bicycle into town.

 Today I got word that Mary Randlett an old family friend and artistic inspiration died at ninety four and so too, the poet Mary Oliver.  Mary Randlett was a northwest photographer who lived next door to my childhood home and I’ve written about her and her kids before.  She has many books and can be found in most northwest libraries.  If you see black and white landscape photographs that capture wet beach sand patterns, or rhythmic patterns of clouds shredding through dark forests, whether knowingly or not the photographer was drawing inspiration from Mary Randlett. 

 Mary Oliver of course was known as a spiritual poet who used nature as her muse.  More than almost any other modern poet her words were treasured by readers, kept on walls, above desks or next to beds as needed medicine when spirits sagged.  I only met her once for a week long symposium here in Sitka.  She struck me as a flinty New Englander, wearing her old sweatshirt and camp shoes with that certain flair, sweatshirt over a pressed cotton shirt.  She still smoked unfiltered cigarettes back then and she didn’t suffer fools.  She loved her, and her female partner’s privacy, and didn’t really want to be any movement’s poster child.  Or at least that’s the way it seemed to me.  I’m not claiming to know her well. 

The view from my desk. Four o’clock pm.

 I think these two Marys had something in common.   They grew up at a time when women were expected to be ladylike and they weren’t particularly suited to it.  They were more comfortable out in the brush, with muddy dogs, flopping out ahead and a notebook or a camera in hand.  They didn’t mind getting dirty and were happy eating whatever was in the refrigerator when they got home and getting down to work.  They loved the “warm animal of their bodies” and other people’s opinions about art or religion could rile them or infuriate them, but opinions about their manners or appearance or their “lifestyle” I don’t think they gave a fig about.  I knew Mary Randlett in the very early sixties remember.  I was young, but even then when she would take me sailing and strip down to her underwear and halter top in the tiny boat and scream “come about sailor” as canvas would fly and rattle… even at seven years old, I knew she was a different kind of adult. 

 If you are interested you can find Mary Oliver’s New York Times eulogy

here:

 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/obituaries/mary-oliver-dead.html?emc=edit_ne_20190117&nl=evening-briefing&nlid=4331107220190117&te=1

 Which… I think most of her readers will find condescending if not down right snotty.  Okay… that’s not fair… I found it condescending and snotty.  They described Mary Oliver’s work as having “a pedagogical if not homilectic quality… and because of its brevity found its way to having a broad audience… frequently being quoted by clergy.”  Then the writer refers to Bookscan numbers, indicting Oliver for the crime of selling a lot of books (along with Billy Collins)

 By the way, I am not opposed to difficult, or obscure words, in either reviews or poetry but not when the difficult or obscure word is not the appropriate word to use. I don’t think anyone who was approaching Mary Oliver’s work with an open mind would describe her work as “pedagogical or homilectic” unless they were just plainly trying to act superior.  Oliver loved to be direct and yes she came from a Christian background and she was making parallels between her experiences out in the woods with certain sacred or illuminating experiences that are referenced in homilies (the root of the word homilectic as I found when I looked it up.)  But using the twenty dollar word particularly at a time when her readers are grieving and going to her obituary is insulting to the spirit of Oliver’s work. 

 And yes… okay I’m ranting now… Oliver did want to teach us something about the world, (“pedagogical”) and yes… it had a religious theme.  But she did it so gently and generously.  She knew who she was writing for, she wasn’t some flower-child celebrity, she wasn’t Jewel, for Christ sake, she had great skill and she communicated her passion for the world she saw and loved clearly.  She gave her lessons generously, and you could take them or leave them and lots of people took them.  She could have hidden behind her vocabulary and her technique but she didn’t and I think she was brave in that, AND I hate to see the New York Times take one last fucking piss on her (and more importantly on her readers) in her obituary.

 Also… I like Jewel. I just think Mary Oliver was a way better poet, (Jewel a way better singer and guitar player) and I will stand on any Bar in Alaska and make that argument to all comers.

 Okay…  That’s it.  I will probably regret that… but…I’m an Alaskan and I spend too much time alone. 

 I have not seen Mary Randletts obit.  But I expect it will be more celebratory and more kind.  At least I hope so. 

I hope you all are well. 

Cherry tree, winter

with frost covering the ground.

Our hearts are fragile.

jhs

CHERRY TREE IN WINTER

After a storm blew through the sky cleared and the temperature warmed up.  The wind shredded what few leaves had remained on the trees. The storm also tipped quite a few garbage cans along the road so the ravens and crows had quite a holiday, as the wind created a carnival theme with the plastic bags and soggy coffee filters in the trees or flattened half filled bread bags out on the pavement.  Most of the bears have snuggled down in their dens up high but if it warms up enough they might stumble down all drowsy to feed on the orange peels and apple cores along the roadside.

 Jan went out in her skiff yesterday when the wind was blowing from the east to put out a recording buoy in the lee of the island to record the songs of the male whales still hanging out in the Sound.  It’s possible the feed has been so thin this summer that more whales might want to stay in Alaskan waters rather than spend the energy to swim to the Hawaiian breeding grounds where there is very little or no feed.   But the urge to go to warm weather is strong and whether wise or not they will often go.  This may be why the calf rate is down and the whales are dangerously thin in the spring. 

 All the while we charge ahead toward the Solstice.  Soon enough the earth will tip the other way and we will gather more of the sun’s light here in the Northern Hemisphere a few minutes each day.  I look out at the cherry tree and I can imagine it aching for warmth, for the sap to begin to flow and the increase of sunlight to begin the regeneration of leaves. 

Cherry tree out my window at four thirty pm.

 But of course I’m projecting. I forget that there are places where people revel in winter’s arrival. Where white snow against the blue sky is a joyful time of year. The time of sledding and skiing, fires in the stove and cooking meat in the pot, bread dough rising.  Hunters returning with their sleds: mechanized or pulled by animals.  For these people the early days of Spring or “Mud Season” is a somber, depressing time of year, when the crusty snow melts down into muddy ruts and the trails bog down and for several weeks it’s not good for travel by any mode of transportation, and then the bugs hatch.

 But summer will come with travel on the river and the fish charging up the current.

 My doctor tells me that I have done pretty well this year with health kick 2018.  The various medications I take are doing their jobs.  My numbers are good, weight and blood pressure are okay, but I may have to travel out of state for mental health treatment.  Something called “trans-cranial electromagnetic stimulation,” which is what they do nowadays instead of electroshock therapy for difficult to treat depression.  Apparently, I am a little like this cherry tree in winter, I appear to be losing my life force…I yearn for it but I have none in reserve. 

 This is different than having nothing to live for.  I have a lot to live for: Jan and Finn, my work, and all the beauty in the world, the books I haven’t read yet, the music I have not heard.  I want to live.  But there is a melancholy that inhabits me as if I have been left out in the cold somehow which robs me, sometimes… during my low periods …to have hope in the return of Spring.  My medication keeps me alive and awake, but nothing more.

 Millions of people suffer from this same thing and millions of people treat it in various ways: diet and exercise, meditation, philosophy, religion, healthy patterns of social interaction, unhealthy patterns of interaction, service to community.  I have tried all of these things and find them all useful but the older I become I find the power of the Cold and Darkness as I’m calling it here, to be coming stronger every day.

 I often think about narcissism and the role that plays in the disease. Like alcoholism, depression may be caused by a neurological programming problem in the sense of self… or the ego.  I have gone to Church and pursued “giving my self to a higher power”.  I have found that living for others, and giving gifts is quite useful in breaking out of the crushing lows.  Meditation and exercise that drives the ego out of the focus of the mind clearly helps.  Gift giving that expects nothing in response, is quite useful as long as it doesn’t resort to the manic. The poet Theodore Roethke used to mail a gross of golf balls to the Pope and to President Kennedy when he was in a manic high. 

 Lucky for me I am not bi-polar.  I just have the lows. “Intractable, treatment resistant, unipolar depression” is what my psychiatrist calls it.  “Just pull up your fucking socks!”  is how my Father described it.

 And before we start in on my poor father.  He was a good man.  He was an alcoholic but he did that to self medicate for his own depression.  He was hospitalized when he woke up in his early forties and he couldn’t stop crying.  When he came home I remember he sat in front of the windows of our house with a drink in his hand for hours at a time and just stared out at the garden. 

 But he was never violent.  He said some terrible things, but he loved us and was very clever and funny almost always. My mom drank too much and was maudlin when she did, but she had a genius level IQ and read two or three books a week.  I think my dad was intimidated by her intelligence and he loved her dearly until the day he died.  Beside some verbal cruelty I never suffered any real abuse. I was lucky and had a mostly productive life with a wonderful education. We were rich in our little world, but my father suffered from genuinely debilitating depression.  I believe my grandfather did too, and my great grandfather committed suicide. I know much less of the stories of the women in my family, who bore their burdens in silence as so many did. So, how much of my depression did I inherit and how much is situational: Jan’s illness, my losing my eyesight, the loss of friends and normal foolishness of life?  I don’t know.  Other people suffer much more than I do. Hundreds of millions of others…  but the fact that I don’t live in Yemen or am not a twelve year old boy soldier during the Civil war at Shilo,  doesn’t really help me when I’m standing on a bridge in Juneau on a cold and windy night thinking how much better it would be to kill myself away from home so Jan wouldn’t have to deal with the body.

 But I won’t kill myself.  It is murder.  Even if it weren’t me, I would never kill Jan’s husband, or Finn’s father.  I wouldn’t kill Nels’s, or Terrence’s friend.  I wouldn’t even kill Katrina’s former friend, the man she won’t speak with anymore.  I wouldn’t do that to them, because it’s selfish beyond words, and even if I am a narcissistic prick, I’m not a murderer.

 But I am a writer, and I find explaining things to be a comfort.  I had a friend who went to hear the Irish writer Ken Bruen read in New York once and someone asked him, “Your books are pretty depressing, why is that?” and Ken Bruen said, “You think I’m depressing, you should read this guy from Alaska, John Straley, Jesus, talk about depressing!” 

 So… everyone has a voice I suppose, I thought I’d come clean about it a little today, besides I don’t think my books are THAT depressing. 

In this grey world 

        the frozen cherry tree

 dares not bend.

 jhs

NOTES FROM OUR RECENT TRAVELS

Oahu Hawaii, Waikiki Beach

 Seventy-seven degrees in the direct sun with perhaps a five knot north wind blowing from the South here, the direction is uncertain in the canyon lands of the giant hotels. 

 We are staying in an old Japanese hotel where we have stayed before, it is two stories and about sixty rooms surrounding a swimming pool, on Beachwalk drive.  It caters to Japanese tourists, the rooms are simple and clean.  One building has traditional Japanese style rooms with rattan mats only and no shoes,  staff waters the rock garden from wooden buckets and wooden ladles.  The office has no walls and is open twenty-four hours where you leave your metal key with the kind woman whenever you leave.  The motel cat has a long leash and lounges by the pool.  Beyond the hotel, the whoosh of traffic mingles with the sound of the ocean.  Birdsong blends with backup horns and sirens, it is not silent but it is serene in this little oasis.  Each room has tropical flowers in bloom by the door, patrons sun themselves in the day, and in the evening bring their ice buckets with a cooling bottle of wine to enjoy as the night sounds of speeding motorcycles rise with the moon.  Last night we drank a wonderful bottle of sake I had never tried before which was recommended to us in the little café tucked behind the pool.  The wine list suggested that it was recommended, “for drinking over a long period of time,” and we found that to be true.

 Jan is here for a meeting of North Pacific researchers to discuss the declining numbers of Humpback Whales in the Alaska-Hawaii stock.  These are the whales that feed in Alaska and breed in Hawaii.  If you see a whale in Alaskan waters there is a ninety-five percent chance that whale is part of that genetic stock.  Scientists believe that mothers teach their offspring where to go to feed and breed.  In the last five years or so Jan and her colleagues who keep track of these things noticed they were seeing far fewer moms and calves coming back in the spring.  They also noticed lots more really skinny whales.  Then they started noticing whales who seemed both skinny and seemed to be carrying more parasites, then old friends they had seen year after year stopped showing up in Alaska, then lower numbers.  How much lower?  That’s what this meeting is about.  What is going on?  Getting a picture of a population is like a bunch of blind men getting a good description of an elephant… or a whale for that matter.  It’s a big picture.  Our home town seemingly has a lot of whales… but we also have a lot of herring.  Other places that used to have a lot of whales, have no whales.  Whales are gathering where there is food.  Of course.  They have always done that.  Is this another crisis caused by global warming?  The blob of warm water, ocean acidification?  Advocates of their own political cause want to shout out “Of course… Yes, Yes,” but really it’s hard to say and it needs to be studied carefully because to shout out one certain cause and have it proved wrong does a disservice to the whole process of science in this day and age of skepticism.  Particularly in this time when everybody wants to wrap science into our make believe political rhetoric so that science will serve the purpose of the energy extractors exclusively. If there is one thing I’ve noticed as a plus one in the scientific world, it is that good science is deliberate and slow and it only serves itself.

 I am thankful that there are good field biologists out there who monitor changes in the world, who can sound the alarm to convene meetings such as these to make sure that attention can be paid while there is still time to act.

 This trip we packed for Anchorage where I taught a class and gave a reading at a new place called the Writers Block which was a welcoming space in Anchorage.  I taught a class through 49 writers on working on a book length project and getting it positioned for publication.  I tried to stay away from the usual clichés but the hardest part of writing a book is actually sitting down and writing it. There is just no getting away from that, and the only way of making it any good is in the revision.  The only secrete to publishing is in creating something that other people want to read.  It sounds straightforward but nothing in that is easy. The mind lays traps for the writer all the time.  Reading and understanding how books work is a great gift, but not if it cows you into submission.  If you are afraid of sounding like some other writer then you can barely begin using sentences at all.  Writing what you know, of course is great advice but not if you are petrified that someone is going to recognize them selves in your book.  Writing an important history is worthy goal but not if you are paralyzed by the inability to make every single detail exactly accurate.  History like science relies on peer review.  How can I say this?  A lot of getting a first draft done is learning how to let go and explore your research and what you already know.  Revision is about relaxing and making it better and better every day.

 The next stop was northern California where the fires were burning until the rains started the day before Thanksgiving.  We stayed with good friends for two nights then went to our son’s future in- laws for Thanksgiving dinner in the hills above Monterrey.  It is beautiful country and when the rain fell it felt like the whole state breathed a sigh of relief. Where we were the air was amazingly fragrant: rain on dry sage, and lavender.  Songbirds I could not identify.  Finn is going to marry a beautiful and smart woman from a very emotionally available family.  They were so kind and generous to us.  I come from a family of mostly alcoholic smart alecks who thought we were each one funnier than the next, I couldn’t believe how kind and sincere her family was to us.  I didn’t make a single crass joke all weekend.  The food her parents made was spectacular and the love vibe was sincere and not at all too sweet.  Jan and I were so happy that our cheeks hurt when we left. 

 Now Hawaii.  We stopped at the Goodwill surplus store and all four of us bought all new beach wear and swim suits for seventeen bucks total.  Then to the hotel.  Jan has talked about living in Hawaii, but we have become too Alaskan I think.  My vision is too bad for the traffic and I love the local culture there but I’m afraid we are too old to assimilate at this point, also there are just too many cars. The heat does not agree with Jan’s Parkinson’s disease, and the real estate prices can’t compete with what we have in Sitka. But still, in the morning when the birds are coming awake and the swell is smooth, I would love to get to the break as the sun rises and surf some sets before the day goes crazy.  I would be happy to swim in those inland rivers and listen to those raucous birds and feel that warm sun bake into my bones, then to cool off one more time at sunset as life calms down before supper.  I would love to get into the rhythm of this place just one more time before I die. 

 Waikiki morning:

the early cardinal singing

before tourists rise.

 jhs

FINDING THE NEW BETWEEN THE YAWP AND THE GNOME

Home and the rain has been falling hard off and on for days, with some sucker holes of blue sky sweeping through.  There are a few leaves on the cherry tree and there is only one red plastic chair out on the point but it blew over days ago.  I’m still using the outdoor shower in the morning and it is wonderful standing in the widening cone of warm water surrounded by the sky of rain falling through the grey-green world.

I have been home reading crime novels I picked up on my travels.  I have loved learning about the dark world of crime in southern Italy in Black Souls, and the wonderfully comic and mysterious world of Laos in Don’t Eat Me.  I also bought an unabridged Leaves of Grass which was illustrated by Rockwell Kent which is lovely.  Now I’m reading Commonwealth by Ann Patchett for a book club that I’ve been invited to in California at Thanksgiving, the Patchett is a nice change of place after Black Souls and I have to admit for the first few pages of her novel I was waiting for a vendetta beheading… that never came.  So I just relaxed into a brilliant and civilized story. 

 During the days looking out on the water I’ve been thinking about how much I love Rockwell Kent’s art, particularly his illustrations he supplies to literature.  He always seems to raise up the text and never just makes a cartoon of it.  Kent was an artist who came to Alaska in 1918 and seemed to be infected by wilderness.  Like Melville he had a very light hand on the thread of wonder.  He never tried to truss up the subject of “wilderness” and and throw it in his luggage to take home.  He knew the thread would break.  Kent became famous for among, other things the art work he supplied for several portfolio editions of Moby Dick , also his book put together from his diary of his year living on Fox Island at the mouth of Resurrection Bay with his young son.  The book was entitled Wilderness and he also put together a classic Christmas story of their only Christmas together there on the island. That book is almost as resonant as A Child’s Christmas in Wales for most Alaskans.  It’s a beautiful book that truly evokes life living rough in maritime Alaska.

 Kent is sometimes compared to Whitman and Melville for their experience of a kind of spiritual and sensual ecstasy while confronting the wild forces of nature.  I read an essay once by Robert Bly talking about the two poles of American poetry being represented by Walt Whitman’s vigor and Emily Dickinson’s reticence, something between the ecstatic “Yawp” of Whitman and the “gnomic scholarship” of Dickinson, as Emily Dickinson signed all her personal letters in later years as “Your Gnome,” or “Your Scholar.”

 There is a world of sensuality that lies between these two poles. In his own work, Kent threw himself into the storm.  He lavished himself in the wild and the sensual, like Melville, like Whitman, but when he applied his work to these other artists work, he did not illustrate, he simply alluded to their own passions for to illustrate would have been too much. Think of Whitman’s Song of Myself where he reaches near ecstasy as he celebrates the human body, or Melville where he describes the whalemen flensing then bucketing the spermaceti from melon of the great Sperm Whale. These are sensual declarations.  Then take a look on the end papers of Rockwell Kent’s edition of Wilderness. See the figure of the naked man flying above the sea as the compass rose, and notice his shadow emerging from the shore.  He most likely drew this image a hundred years ago as men died by the thousands in muddy trenches in France. Here was the dawning of the age that gave birth to existentialism and the death of hope… but to Rockwell Kent here it was, the man in ecstasy, to add any more would have run afoul of the law, surely in 1922 when the book was published. The free man, in perfect living ecstasy.

 American art has always had a tug of war going between the head and the heart; between the mind and the body. Which one directs us, and where does the compass swing true?  I suppose this is what keeps the artist busy.

 As winter comes, I have chores ahead.  I will need to do my editor’s revisions on What Is Time To A Pig. I have been waiting for those, and I am beginning to write the next Cecil book.  I have been thinking a lot about how to balance out my head and my heart.

 I remember sitting on a bed in a hotel once talking to a friend during a writers conference,  I remember saying that writing well should be both as easy and as hard as maintaining a close friendship.  There needs to be a rock steady commitment to the principle of the friendship and at the same time there needs to be restraint… a freedom for the friends to grow and change. In writing it is a commitment to the story and a light touch to let the story change and grow.

 In America… some stories break your heart.  Colonialism.  Slavery. Industrial Capitalism,  Numbing materialism,  Some of these plot twists have no good outcomes.  Some stories just break your heart and cause us to go back, and back and back to old ones that overwork old tropes so that old friends start to disappoint.  Some old stories are just too sad.  And some new stories are built on things yet unfounded in these tentative times.

This is why we must keep looking for the new and the hopeful… or stop trying.  This is why courage remains the most important tool in a writer’s kit.  Courage to look unflinchingly.  Melville clearly had it to write his masterpiece that went unappreciated his entire life: a long complex story where the allegory goes unexplained.  No one ever explains what the White Whale really represents.  That’s what makes that book so perfect.  It is something that is emotionally so true, and intellectually so illusive.  Rockwell Kent had courage as well not to give in to the plain or the literal.  Figures floated above the landscape like magic, just as I imagine his heart must have felt.

 As the rain continues to fall, I keep making notes. I miss my old friends, but I can’t ask too much of them.  The rain continues to fall and I look for the new under the old slick leaves and in the new books that pile up on my bedside, and the old books that I can always read more carefully.

 Love, and friendship… must replenish the spirit.  But so too…I must have faith that in the dark night that seems completely empty of stars, or of rescue, there must be that next new idea which must surely come. 

Crows land

and dance on the yellow grass

while I kiss your neck

at the sink.

jhs

Going Home

I am home again after being in Ketchikan, Juneau and Skagway.  The cherry tree is in full fall color and the leaves are scattered across the lawn.  Rain has been falling like b.b.s from the sky and a hard southeastern wind has been blowing up the coast. 

We took the ferry from Ketchikan on Jan’s birthday after a crass art tour and a spectacular helicopter charter with Ray Troll.  I never thought Revillagigedo was so beautiful in its mountainous center or had so many goats!  The crass art tour was also great. Ray Troll knows where to find it all.

After that excitement and a pint sized bloody mary at the Artic Bar we boarded the Matanuska Ferry and traveled to Prince Rupert B.C. and back across Dixon Entrance, which can be extraordinarily rough, but this trip was a gentle roll both directions. We came back to Ketchikan, then on to Wrangell, Petersburg, Kake, Sitka! (where we off loaded our laundry and some extra weight of books we have read and went for a walk with Ernie Eggleston) then to Hoonah and landed in Juneau at four thirty AM.  The Driftwood hotel had it’s shuttle waiting for us and we checked right in. Jan’s birthday trip was lovely and relaxing.  We love traveling by ship. We played dominoes, read mysteries and I slept more soundly than I had in months.  Three nights on the ferry in almost perfect weather.

Juneau brought classic wet fall storms.  I read at the new State Library with Heather Lende and Ishmael Hope, two of my favorite Alaskan writers.  Heather I have known for years, and Ishmael I have known as a child but who is now coming into his own as a scholar and a poet.  The reading was a fun gathering of smart and loving people, on Alaska Day which, like Columbus day has become somewhat controversial, for it’s colonialist commemoration of the Alaska purchase from Russia, but Heather reminded us to find the good, and Ismael reminded us to cast a wide net in our reading and understanding.  I read haiku in order to share my love of the landscape and how it has shaped us all.

Then the stormy small plane ride to Skagway where I observed the unveiling of the memorial to those lost when the Steam Ship Princess Sophia went aground and almost three hundred and seventy people died when it broke apart and sank on Vanderbilt Reef precisely one hundred years ago.  Entire families, and almost eighty employees of the Whitepass transport lines died in the frigid October waters.  Twenty horses drown.  One dog, a Red Setter survived and swam to shore. 

The Princess Sophia was transporting hundreds of people from the northern gold country back down south.  It was the last boat of the season, carying men and women who worked on the steamers up and down the rivers.  There were gold miners, and administrators of businesses.  There were entire families. One family of eight was leaving Dawson after twenty years. Their youngest was barely two years old. Everyone in the north country seemed to know someone who died.  But this, the one hundredth anniversary is the first major memorial to those who died.  It was 1918 when the ship went down. The news of the tragedy was overshadowed by the two other great killing events of the twentieth century: the flu pandemic of 1918, and the end of the first world war which ended that November.  The sinking of The Princess Sophia, lasted only weeks in the national consciousness.  

As they read the names of all the lost last week in Skagway, I knew there were Alaska Native people on board, but I could also clearly hear names of immigrants, many Irish, some Spanish or Italians perhaps a dozen Chinese. There were four African Americans on the registry, and numerous names which must have originated in Eastern Europe: Polish, Czech, Hungarian perhaps, and of course there were white Anglo Saxon Protestants, but the dead were alone together read in alphabetical order so only the families were grouped together as one can only hope they were on the night they died.

I suppose the only point I am making here is that there seems to be a nostalgia for a White Nation of America abroad in our body politic today.  The beefy boys who chug milk and talk about racial purity and “taking our country back.”  This is an illusion, of course.  It’s a fear that they will wake up and realize that they and their children never were in fact guaranteed the privilege of membership in the management class by virtue of their racial purity.  They talk about the “hard working Americans” who are having their jobs stolen by caravans of immigrants.  Well, I don’t know.  But I’m imagining the Chinese people who died on the Sophia had probably worked hard enough to earn a ride home, so to the Czechs and the Irish, and they all died just as hard and just the same. Together.

I was thinking because on the Matenuska this trip going through the cafeteria line there was a short order cook working the big steel grill and he appeared to be ethnically Chinese I’m not sure if he was or not, but he was incredibly fast and good at his job.  He had a very long single braid that hung down from under his cap down past his butt.  The kitchen on the old ferries have old massive steel fittings and stainless grills.  The whole place spits steam from sinks then grease, and good smells from the grills and pots.  I went into a dream that I could have been back in 1918… I could have been waiting on a bowl of chili and a biscuit after a season of cooking for myself over a wood cookstove of eggs fried hard in bacon fat.  I could be warm and happy to be going home. 

And I was.  I am.

Hard rain,

on yellow leaves, your smile

a warm fire. 

jhs

Life Is Long

Back at my desk, fifty-four degrees and there are high clouds of a storm off shore.  The cherry tree in front of my office shows some yellow leaves and a few red ones fallen on the green grass. The fireweed blossoms have gone to white fluff the are carried off by the on shore gusts of wind. 

 It feels good to be home.  I’ve slept long hours in my own bed.  I spent a terrible night in a fine hotel in Tacoma after the PNBA book fair. The people were kind and there were readers who remembered me and I enjoyed meeting them but I had to do more “pitching” of the book than I am comfortable or used to.  I also had a confrontation with an old friend which troubled me, I had just started taking some medication I had lived without for some time and it was working its way into my system and hadn’t reached its potency… blah blah blah but the result was I was having a bad time where I couldn’t sleep in the middle of an emotional crisis standing in front of a window looking out onto the quiet street of Tacoma Washington, wrapped in a clean hotel sheet.  I fell asleep around six o’clock and had some breakfast and took some more pills. Then walked and walked. Tried to solve my problems to no avail.

Sometimes all anyone can do is hang on and just outlast your crisis and hope that it grows smaller in the rearview mirror.  One thing I try to do when hitting bottom is to get gifts for other people to try and jump out of my own sick ego.  I filled up a bag of books for a friend who was going to pick me up that morning.  I knew she was coming from a writers workshop so I found her a black notebook which I thought would suit her.  I knew my nephew had lost a book he had liked when his cabin had burned down and I found another copy for him.  I found books that I thought other family members would like, and I stuffed them in my already full bag.  By the time my ride came around I was feeling better and had a grocery bag full of books that was almost ripping out of the bottom. 

 My friend picking me up was Ann Randlette who had lived next door when I was six year old, in Woodway Park, Washington.  It was an idyllic time and place: big plots of land with old trees and magnificent gardens.  Ann was a couple of years younger, her mother Mary, was an artist, a photographer and she exposed me to the northwest coast poets and painters.  We slurped our sugary cereal underneath Morris Graves paintings, and when I turned ten years old Mary gave me a volume of “Party At The Zoo” by Theodore Roethke, with Mary’s own portrait of Roethke glued inside.  Bob, was Ann’s brother and we were friends and eventually went to the same school.  Her brother Peter was impossibly young and cute when I left Woodway to follow my dad’s job to New York City in 1965, or so.

 Ann picked me up and we drove to Olympia.  Mary lives close by in an assisted living facility.  Time has robbed her of most of her memories.  Ann has bought Mary’s little house.  I looked at all her beautiful artwork and then I fell asleep on her couch.  This is the first I had spent any time with her except for her coming to a reading in  something like fifty five years, but amazingly we were so comfortable still from knowing each other for so long that soon enough I was snoring like a sawmill on her couch while she checked her email and sorted through the signed books I gave her: an old man… who had once been her playmate, swinging on a rope swing out over a nettle covered ravine… hours on end.  Then we went to Peter’s house for dinner where we talked about old, old friends and what had become of them. Peter had been a professor of media studies at Evergreen, his house was homebuilt on four acres of healthy second growth fir trees: fat furrowed trunks with thin underbrush at the base, and milky light filtering through: perfect Northwest light that his mother had loved to photograph.  He showed me his mother’s collection of Morris Graves paintings.  Some were painted on burlap sacks that Mary got from Morris once when she was visiting and he was just going to throw them away.  She asked if she could have them and of course he said “sure”.  Peter had just sold two of them to help finance a years worth of his mothers placement in the nursing home. 

 It was twenty-four hours of intense contrast: a sleepless night of staring down at hard pavement wondering if I should smash the window I could not open and then the reawakening of the beauty in the past.  Life is long, even in just a day.

 I am happy to be alive today.  Tomorrow night I have a reading here in Sitka. It doesn’t matter, really how many people come, I know Jan will be there and Dick Nelson said he would come.  Even if he forgets, which is more than likely, he told me he would and that means the world to me and when he forgets it will give me something to tease him about which is almost better.  Home, everyone here gets a free pass and they know it.  Because I know they have to take me back no matter what condition I’m in when I get here.

 Green grass, yellow leaves,

fireweed has turned to fluff

and I still love you.

jhs

 Ketchikan at the public library on the 14th.

Juneau at the State Library on the 18th 

Juneau at the Public Library downtown in the evening of the 19th.

Skagway on the weekend of the 20th and 21st for their bookfestival.

Fairbanks  in the Murie Building on the evening of the 27th UAF Contact Northern Studies. 

Ask Me

I’m on a hillside on the eastern slope of the north Cascades just north of Winthrop Washington, above the Chewuch River. Bitterbrush has turned brown and the vine maple trees are golden. The aspen trees glitter green and silver like billions of dollars in different denominations of money. The wind is dry and warm.  Last night coming up the driveway I saw a skunk in my head lights and there are so many deer in town it is almost comic.  I even saw a giant bull moose loping through a hay field near the highway.

 This is the country of my youth.  When I was ten years old in 1963, my dad and I went on a pack trip here and two years later my dad sent me to work for the packer outfitter, presumably, to toughen me up.  I worked in the woods for different outfitters from the time I was twelve until I was 24 and I moved to Alaska.  I learned to shoe horses here and throw a diamond hitch.  I packed mules and horses in the back country and rode saddle horses sometimes six or seven hundred miles in a season.  I met Janice Morrison in the backcountry here where she was working as a wilderness ranger for the Forest Service.  I wooed her by bringing her fresh vegetables and fruit on horseback at the end of her ten day trips.  I married her in 1977 the same year she moved to Sitka, Alaska to take a job for the Fish and Wildlife Service.  It took me two months to join her, and another year for me to want to live in Alaska, so strong was the pull of the high Ponderosa Pine country of the North Cascades.  In some ways my heart is still here.

Mr. Miller. My Guru from age 16 until now. The master of calm all day work.

 Before my parents died they bought my siblings and I twenty acres here on this hillside, and we built this cabin.  My parent’s ashes are scattered here. We’ve celebrated birthdays, wedding anniversaries, Thanksgivings, and many sledding parties here.  Because of the distance from Alaska, I have not come down as much as I would have liked, but I’ve paid my share of taxes and some little bit of the maintenance. But as the years have gone by and as time takes its toll the long drive and the costs have made it difficult to keep up with.  My siblings and I have decided to sell the place, reluctantly, and tonight I am nostalgic.

 Sitka, Alaska is a place of rain and one very long protracted Fall.  The Methow has four distinct and lovely seasons.  Only the early Spring with it’s mud season that lasts a few weeks could be said to be unattractive for any length of time.  The rest of the year has dry fine snow, or crisp mornings with warm afternoons.  Recent summers have had hot forest fires with attendant smoke that have brought coughing and sore eyes.  But today the early fall weather is beautiful with temperatures in the high sixties and fine colors.  But again it could be my sentimentality that changes everything, for my heart taints everything I see around me.  I was young and strong here.  I discovered life away from my parents here: love and sex and adventure.  Nothing viewed through that lens can be seen objectively.  That’s why it’s probably best not to live here. 

 When I first lived here it was at the end of a long road and the people were loggers mostly and orchardists, there were a few ranchers and trappers.  There was a sawmill.  I remember a drunk driving his old pickup around and around the circle of the old town drag and my father pulling back inside the café and off the street.  The drunk driver wore an old fashioned round tin hard hat and a dirty striped Hickory shirt with frayed sleeves. He was wild with red-rimmed eyes.  I was scared and fascinated,  just as I had been scared and fascinated by the mules and the one black bear I had seen in a medow.

 Today the valley is populated by recreating tech millionaires from the coast.  There is a cocktail bar and if someone is drunk driving in town there are just as likely to be on a fat tire bike.  I’m done complaining about the changes.  It makes me sound old.  But I do notice blue collar work has become rather fetishized.  The local horseshoer is now something special… a character…. someone to be revered rather than just another part of the community.  The local horse trader is a pretty woman with colorful shirts and although extremely capable and physically strong and a top hand all around, she also performs her part for her clients as part of her talents, as does her husband a professional folk singer.  I love this valley still, and of course my first boss, Jack Wilson who is long dead, and now lionized as a visionary of the cross-state highway was riveter turned mule skinner performer long before the highway was built. But even still, his need to be lionized has atomized into a kind of institutional self-conscienceness about the west in this part of the west.  The family country house, is perfectly appointed now, and the country clothing is well selected. I don’t mind, but still… I’m not sure the authentic western lifestyle was ever meant to be so comfortable or so affluent.  But… who am I to say?  I was always affluent by cowboy standards, and now my feet are practically webbed from living in the rainforest country so I am by no means a range cowboy.  I cannot hold on to everything in my life.  I married an ocean woman, I didn’t know that when I saw her in the back country that first day in her ranger uniform, but I did.  She loved Ed Ricketts and Between Pacific Tides and when she got a job offer to move to Sitka Alaska she was gone… in an instant.  I was chasing her then and I have been chasing her for the last forty years.

 The reading in Moscow, Idaho was a bust.  No one showed up.  That’s nobody.  Zero. 

 This happens.  It takes a certain alignment of circumstances to fill a room. My old friend who owns the bookstore was mortified, but when I think back on it I shouldn’t have been surprised.  Her store does not tend to sell many mysteries and her events usually are on Wednesday nights and this was a Monday.  Her events are typically sponsored by the University MFA program so she has a built in audience and that audience is not coming out on a Monday to see someone who is not going to be on any of their tests, or part of their program.  I should have seen it coming… but I didn’t.  I was upset, honestly for about ten minutes.  Then I felt bad for her. 

 One guy showed up looking for a place to have a beer.  She recommended a place and he split.  I offered to read for him and he wasn’t having any.  He wanted to get drunk.  I couldn’t help with that.

 She and I walked down to the end of the block and had a cup of tea.  I read her the introduction to my new book of One Hundred Poems Of Winter  which I had planned to read that night.  She enjoyed that.  I didn’t drink any alcohol for it didn’t feel like a special occasion and I didn’t want to risk the depression that could come along with being alone and drinking, particularly since I have run out of meds (and my clinic in Sitka won’t refill to a distant out of state pharmacy… apparently).  She went back to close up her store and I walked back to the motel and called Jan who could take the call on the boat in Prince William Sound by standing on the top of the back deck and we talked for a while as I lay in my motel clean sheets and listened to the traffic rumble by on highway 841 (?) outside my window.  I read her the William Stafford quote from his poem “Ask Me” from my essay:

Some time when the

river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made,

ask me if what

I have done is my life…

On a night like that, and too on a quite night on this hillside on the north Cascades alone, I think of my mistakes. So many. Books I have written and loves that have come to me unbidden, and followed, or not… lies I have told, or simply ill considered observations or remarks I have made in anger, are those things taken in total my life?  The tree outside the cabin, is scarred and has dead limbs on one side.  Surely much of its wood is rotten, its trunk is a home for woodpeckers and squirrels, maybe that skunk sleeps in its knotted roots. Is that my life, or is even that giving me too much dignity?  I don’t know.  The wind and rain must bring love to such a tree on this dry hillside.  Ask me mistakes I have made…  The same night enfolded Jan in Prince William Sound and me and the bookstore owner alone in our separate beds in Moscow Idaho, as well as all the people I still love and have no contact with on this noisy night by the highway.

Tell me mistakes I have made…

What the river says, 

that is what I say. 

 jhs

Poetry Signs by William Stafford, placed alongside Highway 20 (The North Cross-State Highway) written after Bill visited each sight then placed and celebrated the year of his death. Jan and I used my first advance from The Woman Who Married a Bear to pay for the sign materials. The project was the brainchild of Sheela McLean and Curtis Edwards with teasing/goading from me.