February: sitting in the sun listening to the birds.

No clouds, 70 degrees by nine o’clock. phainopipola with her one note call in the rosemary bush on the deck out front. Humming birds and finches buzzing and trilling within the manzanita tree, morning doves cooing out of sight. I sit in the patterned shade most mornings and simply listen, I don’t read or even think of anything other than the sounds coming to my ears. Not dozing just letting them echo into my brain, perfectly happy, and warm. There are no other sounds… occasionally a car on the highway in the distance. Occasionally a coyote yipping once and then joined by another.

We are in the Anza Borrego Valley in California. I have been coming here since I was six years old. Jan and I lived here for the winter in 1977-78. I was a horse shoer and Jan worked on an ornamental tree farm that had a health care plan, including dental! My parents lived here then and in the late afternoons we often swam in their pool to beat the afternoon heat. That spring Jan and I made the agreement that we would go back to Sitka, Alaska and I would actually look for a job, even though there were not any horses on Baranoff Island. I promised her I would not sulk about going back to wet southeastern Alaska and I would throw myself into the job hunt, but if I didn’t find a job I liked we wouldn’t stay. I found a job as a work leader with the YCC along side Steve Reifenstuhl, Mark Gorman and Ralph Surrette and we had a life changing good time, working on trails, sowing grass seed and picking up garbage at White Sulfur Hot Springs, Yakutat, South Baranof and Kruzoff Island, and that was all she wrote. Jan and I became Alaskans.

But Borrego Springs, California and the high desert remained a part of our life.

All the beauty here is not grand nor obvious. So much is tiny and just underfoot.

The town is small, I have no idea what the actual year round population is.  Even now in the winter standing on the hill above the churches looking down on the valley there are so few lights on in the houses as the sun sets it’s hard to imagine a gathering large enough to fill a high school gymnasium.  On weekends there are many cars driving through, motorcycles and RV’s pulling tear drop trailers, and dune buggies around Christmas Circle which is the large round about in the center of the town.  It is a lovely park covered in green grass and shade trees. There is a public market there on weekends selling fruit and vegetables and the usual crafts made by the nomadic people of all ages: people with dark brown skin selling everything from tie-dye to crystals to pottery and fresh tamales.  In the winter the medium ages skews towards the elderly but in the summer it’s harder to tell because most of the people remain nocturnal sleeping in their one cooled room in most of the day and easing out at night for socializing.  I have only been here in the summer a few times and I found it brutal, but exotic.

 Jan loves it here.  The warmth and the silence make her happy.  Though she can’t hike the way she used to we have a four wheel drive and we can get into the back country of the desert where we “amble” now slowly moving around looking at the small flowers and watching/ listening for birds.  We don’t carry big cameras, just our iphones, which are great for flowers but terrible for birds.  We are both working while down here, Jan has phone meetings almost every day.  I work on my writing.  I read and research my next Cold Storage Book, and am at the card game stage, writing down the plot points and mixing them up and laying them out.  The next Cecil book is resting happily at SOHO press where my editor has promised to get back to me soon.  So I am in that sweet spot in a writer’s life where I’m out from under a deadline and the ball in the editor’s court. 

 Jan is doing all right but her mobility is worsening and of course I worry even when I know my worrying doesn’t help.  We just try to be happy every day and when we fall we pick ourselves up.  Suzie is doing the hard work of taking care of young Dot, who I also worry about, though I should really worry about Suzie for it sounds like Dot is a terrible rascal eating all manner of non-edible things including a fourteen penny NAIL, and a lid for a bucket as well as Suzie’s shoes. Young Dot is becoming both huge and more and more strong willed and I am getting geared up for going home to train her into submission.  Yes….I know. Good luck with that.  But no matter, I miss Dot terribly. 

 I will be reading from my newest book on March 4, at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, of Seattle, Seven o’clock, then at Powell’s in Cedar Hills, on the sixth in Portland, also at seven.  I hope to see all my friends in those cities.

 Here is a new desert poem:

DESERT CAREGIVER

Could I be devoted enough

to become a cloud

held gently in the bowl

of mountains above your head?

Could I love you enough 

to become rain

and fall once again

onto the tender skin beneath 

your eyes, so as to mimic tears

which have not fallen yet

then rise with the sun again

along with the small finches, working north

across the desert, forcing their songs

to become the only prayers breaking,

the deepest silence the earth

can conjure, could I love you that much?

When all I know for certain is that you don’t

want to share your suffering with anyone

and that there is not water enough here,

to bubble out of the ground,

nor a prayer powerful enough

to draw forth a river.

So we may both die thirsty,

as so many others who have come before,

while the small birds

flicker over this dry country

migrating north

to cooler, wetter climates.

 Take care good friends.  I hope I may see some of you in Seattle and Portland.  I will have more news soon about readings coming up in Juneau, and in Sitka.

Phainopipola

with her one note song, calls me

from the mistletoe.

jhs

The growing Dot.

January With A Dot

Snow, off and on for weeks now, interrupted by rain. So, ice packed down with water on top. Bare branches dropping black seed pods onto icy snow. Black leafs, slick and wet buried in the ice come to the surface and seem gooey with rot, but just the perfect thing for a puppy to pounce on, sniff and then eat up in one gulp. Storms blowing through and we have a new pup named Dot, or Dorothy when I’m trying to scold her.

Dot at eight weeks. She is a Bouceron.

She is eight weeks old, a Bouceron. I was on a list of four shelters from Seattle to Whitehorse for a dog for nine months, I tried for a pup for a local litter but each one was snapped up. I made an inquiry with this breeder in Florida and I got hooked into it. The breed is very old and reputed to be very loyal, trainable, sweet, active, a barker but not a biter. We have had Labs forever and I wanted to try something different, something maybe… a little… well smarter. I’m sorry Lab owners, I love them I do, but they can be lunk heads. I wanted to try my hand at training a dog to actually sit, stay, come, and not talk me out of it with their adorable eyes. I know it’s on me. This dog has good breeding and her dad is a national obedience champ so it really is on me. If she turns out to be a lunk head, you will know who to blame. I’m going to have her balancing my checkbook within a year. That’s what I’m telling Jan anyway.

Dot was not so impressed with the snow at first but now she finds it fascinating. In fact she seems to find everything fascinating. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an attentive creature. She likes to stare out at the world. I would give anything to know what she is thinking. It’s as if she is meditating. Then of course she goes into frantic puppy examination, sniffing and nibbling at everything that moves. The first few walks were very very slow, everything had to be licked and examined. Every smell had to be followed, but then she stops for long moments and stares, sometimes at me, sometimes up wind: Processing, processing, like the Terminator: range, density, power supply, category. Then if she has slept and pooped recently she pounces and races around. If not she will sniff some more. Then she will race around. At night she usually has a massive case of running around and licking and bitting and throwing all of her toys in the air: pure exuberance. Then I put her in her crate, she doesn’t whine or bark but falls right asleep. When she wakes up she has to go right outside to pee, and she stares out at the ocean and contemplates things for perhaps thirty seconds… which seems like a long time for a puppy,.. and again I’m wondering what she is thinking.

I have to admit, that having a puppy makes me feel old and young again. Old because I’m slow at jumping up and grabbing her when she is circling the floor by the door, and I know I need to grab her to put her outside. Young because I have had so many puppies in my life that I am flooded with sentimental memories by almost everything about her: her breath and her gait, her goofy expression when she looks up at me and how her ears flop up when she runs.

Sentimentality is a horrible thing in writing. When students ask what it is and how to avoid it, I sometime point to the quote of J.D. Sallinger who said, “Sentimentality is loving something more than God has loved it,” then he went on to describe how a photograph of a cute kitten might not be sentimental but if you add a red bow on the baby cat that is sure to make it sentimental. Many students still look up at me unsatisfied with that answer and in fact may look a bit like the puppy Dot, with their big ears a bit floppy and their eyes confused. Then I try to say, “If you want to have your reader feel kindly toward a character or an animal,you have to show them something on the page why that character or animal is worth feeling kindly towards” If you don’t you are just relying on the sentimental feelings the reader brings with them already to complete your message. Some famous writers dance up close to the line of sentimentality all the time but they get away with it. Steinbeck was famous for it. Think of "Of Mice And Men” I think he gets away with it because he is so heartless at the end, and because he has a fairly unpopular left wing political agenda he is trying to peddle and his readers know it. (Bleeding Heart anyone?) If he were pushing a right wing agenda of the Ubermench and he kills off the mentally defective Lenny then I think he fails disastrously.

Anyway what I’m trying to say about Dot is this: she makes me happy not just because she is ridiculously cute but because she seems to be fully awake in the world and without complex ego needs. Her mind seems attentive and joyous, and I like spending time with her because of that. I recognize that the world is dangerous. Roads have cars, and puppies seem to think that all cars are coming to see them. They want to greet every car. This is concerning, but somehow lovely, and I have to protect her from that. I have to teach her to trust my judgement in this, and a lot of other things. As I have to learn to trust her attentive and wise animal nature, I’m sure she knows and observes much more than I do. In this we will work together. I am fairly certain that Dot will be my last puppy.

I’m continuing with my Ketamine treatments in Seattle. Each one addresses the lessons I learn by having the drug light up so many of the neuro-pathways that lay dormant in my brain, and after each experience I realize how small my depression is, how big the capacity of my dormant brain is to navigate through this tangle of living. Ego, desire, frustration, are only such a small part of the options of response to what is happening around me. I realize this freshly with the treatments and the realization stays with me and the depression withers. I know it sounds like some kind of hippy voodoo but I suppose I just don’t care at this point. I am better. I have more energy and I want to live. I don’t have any strange side effects other than happiness, and energy. I don’t want to join a cult or even want to preach this as a universal solution. In fact I don’t know if it would work for anyone else, but I know it works for me, and it must work for others because it’s getting harder and harder to make an appointment.

Here is another Ketamine Poem;

KETAMINE

My doctor gives me ketamine

To keep me from having all these useless ideas,

Like how to hang myself first thing every morning.

Instead, she wants me to be

More like a mangrove swamp in Florida:

No thoughts at all. No voices telling me to stop

As I wade into the warm water further, and deeper

Until there is no me at all, just

A Roseate Spoonbill flapping in damp air from root

Structure to upper limb, and a Blue heron

Yawping off somewhere else.

She wants me to be aware of no narrative at all, 

As the colors fuse into a molten Andalusite crust,

While the white Ibis and the limpkin  stare inward,

Toward the Gar, and the Schoolmaster fish,

And the fiddler crab whisking mud, 

While everything gets ready

for the next hurricane

by just living: clicking  darting out

sucking down, gulping in

or spitting out,

like one big unthinking,

interconnected, breeding thing,

without ego,

or distinct choices to make.

In her office

My skull, becomes an iron pot cooking sugars

With steam attracting

Bees blustering

All around my head

While I’m wading down the brown

Rolly sidewalks

Toward my sister fiddling on her phone

Waiting so she can take me home

where I will lay in her grown daughter’s bed

who is off getting her PhD. in genetics from Oregon State

and I will sleep the rest of the day,

then through the night snoring loudly,

louder than the bees.

So there is a little post card from the world of the latest depression treatment. On Thursday Jan and I will be going to the desert for a month to dry out.and see family. Our neighbor who wants to “co-parent” Dot will be bonding with the little dog for that time. I will miss her mostly she will be a completely different dog by the time we get back in March. But she will be bonded with Susie which will be a good thing too.

What Is Time To A Pig? comes out February 4. I will be giving readings in Seattle, at Third Place Books, and in Portland at Powell’s in early March. There will be more details here as the time gets closer. I hope to see all my friends in those towns. in March so keep your eyes out for those dates and times.

Good luck my friends. Stay warm and dry, I will post from the desert and let you know about news of the Pig book soon.

with only love,

Rain on Snow.

A puppy with big feet plays

with a squeaky toy.

jhs

Last Words of 2019

The last day of 2019: some rain, gusty winds. There are no leafs on the cherry tree.  Jan is finishing up working on her skiff which sank at the dock while we were away on our ferry trip, but our friends rushed to our aid and rescued it, arranging for a haul-out and an emergency flushing of the engine which did not end up getting badly soaked.  All in all not as bad as it could have been.  Thank you to our good friends, the Harbor Department and to our good mechanics.

            Our winter ferry trip was wonderful.  It has become a tradition for us to take a ferry ride over Christmas if at all possible.  We book a stateroom and decorate the room.  We pack way too many books and games and snacks for our cabin and have a perfectly wonderful lazy time.  We are in and out of cell reception so for the most part we are not checking phones or email.  We did get the one call from the harbor department about Jan’s skiff and there were a flurry of calls thereafter but that was fine. 

           The weather was very foggy and rainy. The bird watching was not great, but the reading was fine. I read a book about Thomas Merton coming to Alaska in 1968.  I also read a novel called My Year Of Rest And Relaxation which our son Finn found in the book exchange on the ferry.  He had read it and loved it and gave it to me.  I had started to read a long, rather scholarly book about the corpse of John Wilkes Booth… don’t ask… suffice to say it’s a research project.  When I told Finn that I had learned just about enough about the mummy or the suspected mummy of JWB he gave me this novel about a woman in New York City in 2001 who fairly successfully induces a year long hibernation through a collection of analgesic, psychotropic, and anxiety relieving drugs prescribed by the most brilliantly rendered quack of a psychiatrist I’ve ever seen on a page.  It really doesn’t sound like a page turner does it?  But in fact I found the book mesmerizing.  It was in turns, funny, brutal, horrifying, heartbreaking and beautiful.  I have to say that the main character is a perfectly rendered terrible person: sarcastic, smarmy and emotionally dead… but also deadly smart. As the book goes on the reader gets glimpses “back stage” in her life at her parents and her upbringing. Those glimpses are so sad, heartbreaking really, not in an over the top way, but in truthful and natural sense of the character.  It all seems natural that she turned out the way she did and I didn’t feel so quick to judge her.  Her wild choices started to make perfect sense.  The last page of the book puts her and our entire modern era in into a sharp focus, as if we may had all been asleep.  I was very impressed by the writing too, on a sentence by sentence level… so clear and lovely at times, and purely mean and sharp as a razor at others.  Not a show off as a writer. Just a very good writer who chooses words … and leaves them out… wisely. 

            Anyway… that’s part of what I like about long ferry rides., time and quiet to read and appreciate such books.  Also I love spending time with friends.  I got to stop in Skagway and see Bea Lingle and have coffee with her and her friends.  She is 91 and is up on everything.  She has coffee every day downtown as far as I know, and the company is lively.  It was fun visiting her. 

            Juneau ferry terminal is far out of town, but Finn and I walked down to Auke bay and I had a diet coke, he had a beer and we watched some football.  It seemed like an imposition to ask friends to drive out to the ferry to see us, and truth is I don’t have as many friends in Juneau as I used to, I should probably keep my political opinions to myself more.  The weather was spooky and very dark for the walk, high winds and weird shadows on the road.  I spent a long year back in the eighties in Juneau working on a single murder case where someone took a shot at me and the Troopers surveilled our apartment and Juneau will always have a spooky vibe for me. 

            Ketchikan always has a fun vibe even though there is a lot more crime and I did dozens of more cases down there… more murders too.  People love to talk about crime in Ketchikan.  They also like to drink and they don’t feel so bad about it.  The weather was horrific when we were in K. Town big low pressure howling through.  So we took a cab with “Walking Wolf” as our driver both ways.  We had Bloody Mary at the Arctic Bar, and a pulled pork sandwich at Annabelle’s and  a salad.  I could not interest anyone in my party in purchasing any “Ahoy Fuckers!” tee shirts from the Arctic, which I thought was a little glib of my son and showing he had spent a little too much time in L.A.  “Walking Wolf” started in with all his jokes for tourists on the ride back and I almost told him that Finn was a comedian when Wolf offered to write down some of the jokes for him.  But I did not.  There is nothing that Finn hates more than when I tell people he is a professional comic and they start wanting to give him jokes.  But I was kind of pissed at him by then for refusing an “Ahoy Fuckers!” tee shirt from his dad.

            I think the most fun on the trip was talking with the crew, eating in the cafeteria and playing board games.  The crew on the ferries are so professional, honestly.  They took such good care of us.  Jan and I have been featured guests on nice cruise ships and no one treats us better than the crew on the ferry during the winter.  The Captain and the pursuer paid close attention that we were back aboard when we went wandering around on shore.  They kept letting us know that they wouldn’t leave without us.  I always felt we got a little bit extra of the best food.  But really I don’t think we did.  A young guy named Curtis was super friendly and curious about the games we were playing.  Even when it was dead in the cafeteria, I would ask him if he wanted a turn at a game, he would say, “Thank you but I’m on duty and it wouldn’t be good if the Captain came down and saw me playing games.”  He wasn’t complaining.  He was just serious about his job, and he just kept cleaning tables.  You couldn’t put a glass down and he would be around to pick it up. 

            We gave little gifts, cards, cookies and such to each of them on Christmas and when we left.  We gave each other little gifts.  In our family we take some time and write each other some sincere cards of love and affection each year.  We try to make them fresh each year.  It’s not always easy.  This year we included Emily, Finn’s wife and new life partner.  She is perfect for our family.  Loves games and books.  Loves Finn and likes to sleep in when she is tired, likes to hike but doesn’t like to show off.  Jan and I adore her.

            We left on the ferry Christmas morning with our friends Robert and Barbara and Liz.  We went to Hoonah then Juneau, Skagway, and Haines.  Then we picked up Emily in Juneau, off to Petersburg, Wrangell ,Ketchikan back through the same circuit adding Kake to the list then Juneau again then Hoonah again and home to Sitka on Sunday morning. Four nights.  Perfect for us.  Jan, Finn and Emily had the rear triple staterooms on the Matanuska.  Highly recommended.  We usually ate dinners on board. We supplied our own breakfast or supplemented breakfast with kitchen food: Our own bread and their scrambled eggs,  Our oatmeal, their bacon and toast.  On Christmas Night they served prime rib and roast duck for $18.  And free fresh baked desserts, cookies and fruit.  It was lovely.

            I love the ferry system and support it in every respect.  One hundred people got on in Haines to go to Juneau.  Lots of people traveled from Juneau to Sitka.  Some legs of the trip were virtually empty… especially Christmas day.  But there are lots of streets and roads that are empty on Christmas day.  In Alaska there are some beautiful and expensive roads that are rarely traveled, yet they need maintenance.   These boats are lifelines for our small towns.  They are travel infrastructure just like roads, water and power.  If you love the ferry system the way I do, why not express yourself to your elected officials? Think about how you would want to pay for the ferries.  Fees? Taxes? Permanent Funds? Maybe even donations , could we give some of our PFD to the Ferry system?  It’s a thought, worth considering.  There are no free rides anymore, but it’s such a wonderful ride, what can we do to save it for everyone?

I hope everyone has a safe New Year’s Eve. If you look through this blog you will see I’ve had some ups and downs in 2019 and I’m sure I will have more strikes and gutterballs in 2020. I’m going to continue doing the best I can for myself and for the ones I love in the coming new year. Early January, I’m heading down to Seattle for another Ketamine treatment, then I’m headed down to Florida to meet up with Liz to pick up a puppy to bring home for Jan and me. So I look forward to lots more walks in the Spring and more good stories of dog antics and new ways to battle depression.

Don’t forget that What Is Time To A Pig? will be out in early February and I will be out and about reading from it in March.

I hope you are all well and keeping your heads up.

with only love.

John Straley

Home. Our Party: Finn Straley, Jan Straley, Emily Basham, John Straley(Mr.Squinty) Barbara Teepe, Liz Mckenzie

Storm from the south:  

we roll in a following sea

gifts scatter the deck!

Presence

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. 

Strikes and Gutterballs

There is a storm blowing through today. The wind is stripping the red leaves off the cherry tree. I feel happy being home. Jan and I have been traveling a bunch. Fairbanks, Portland and Seattle, Carmel and Monterey. Our son got married and I read a poem for him and his bride on a beautiful warm day under some California Oak trees, then a few weeks later a read a poem for my sister-in- law’s celebration of life in Seattle. In Fairbanks Jan and her partner won second place in an invention competition for their patented process to lure seabirds and marine mammals away from hazards such as oil spills using a naturally occurring scent that mimic’s food, and we stayed with our fine friend Terrence Cole and Maureen Long where we told jokes and ranted about local politics and dying of cancer. Laughter and tears all around. Strikes and gutterballs as they might say in the Big Libowski.

Before the Falcon, Before the House Of Stones

                                    for Emily and Finn on their wedding day

Right now, while laughing day turns to dancing night

tourists clamber up a house of stones near the shore,

Finn and Emily… I’m sorry it’s not a great shot of Emily… she is stunning… but she always is. This is the most natural smile ever captured of Finn looking happy so I took the shot. Of all his many talents smiling for a camera is not one of them… or mine really. When asked to smile we both grimace as if being tortured.

where during long winter storms, breakers

pound the coast like the bruised fists of warriors.

Stunted pines bend their backs to the wind

where falcons watch, for  

helpless birds tangled

in the shanks of beach grass.

But before that, the poet levered

those stones that seemed formed in place

hundreds of meters straining

them into the walls of his creation,

while the birds of prey built

no nest at all but found only shallow

depressions somewhere on the

cliffs near shore to make their home.

And before that, the beach grasses lay where they were

germinated by splitting and binding

one strand to the next like the helix

of DNA, or the diagramed family trees of everyone here.

What I’m trying to say is this: Families are created,

dynasties in fact,

easily or with great effort on days like this,

creatures stepping off into the air, over the topography of earth

from the Gulf of Alaska

to Monterey Bay,  

from the great tide pool just down the hill

to Pirates Cove in Sitka Sound,

such are beginnings of first stories told over cribs and nests.

The tide goes in,

the tide goes out,

love and biochemistry,

rocks and poetry.

Today lovers look into the tide pool and see the stars.

Today, we make time stand still

through the soft lens of our minds eye

where these children plant their feet on the ground

then glide out over the sea, where all our ancestors

await woven together somehow

yet still separate,

singing the song of the tides,

this moon,

this earth:

their entwined orbits

falling toward each other.

Always rising up… always

falling down

forever locked together

in service to each other

                             and in love.

For Jan’s birthday we took our skiff out to a light house near town where we played games with our friends Bob and Barbara, and watched Thin Man movies and ate chocolate cake and watched whales from the top floor, while an earlier storm blew through.

I’m at the age I feel I should put in a memorial section of each blog post. But others have gone. Buckwheat Donahue from Skagway is gone and there have been great obituaries written by his good friend Jeff Brady which can be seen in the Juneau, Whitehorse and Skagway papers. But fans of the Cecil Younger series may be interested to know that Daniel Oxley passed away two weeks ago from a brain tumor. Dan was my cousin and the model, the tone of voice for my character Todd in all the Cecil Younger books. He was a singular human being: Good, smart, eccentric and unforgettable all his life. As a young man, my father bought young Dan one of the early Polaroid Cameras, and Dan used it to take pictures of manhole covers, almost exclusively. He covered the walls of his room with them. It wasn’t until he did that did the adults in his life noticed that each one had interesting and distinct geometric patterns on them. It was the most obvious thing in Dan’s world but not obvious to many other people. This is why I thought he would make an interesting sidekick for a detective. Later his obsessions included volcanos and suspension bridges. When he came to visit me in Sitka he stood on our suspension bridge and took photos of our “long dormant, Mount Edgecumbe” for hours on end. He was beyond thrilled. How to describe it…? Overstimulated perhaps.

On the injured list, remain Jan Straley who plows ahead with her Parkinson’s disease. Her spirits are great but it claws at her mobility in ups and down days that change more rapidly and capriciously. See Peter Dunlap-Schoals fine graphic book “My Degeneration” for info on that disease.

Richard Nelson is down in San Francisco watching birds from Debbie Miller’s deck and going in for his Cancer treatments. He is not much for taking calls or answering emails so he communicates now mostly by great pulses of life force emanating from the bay area. I send him goofy photos of exotic wildlife telling him that I bagged what ever it is in my yard and asking if he has a good recipe for it.

At the top of the continent Alaska’s great historian, Dr. Cole is finishing off about ten straight weeks of chemo therapy along with the dry heaves and a daily dose of watching Perry Mason. He has now told me that he would prefer it if I called him “Mr. Mason” as in, “I swear, Mister Mason, he was alive when I last saw him!” I said I would be happy to call him “Mr. Mason” if he called me “Paul.” as in, “Paul, run out to Malibu and check out that woman’s story!” and we both started wearing checked sport coats all the time.

I don’t want to have cancer. I want to die of heart disease like Bing Crosby on a golf course in Spain. But I know, we rarely get to choose the circumstances of our natural deaths.

Shelves in Terrence Cole’s basement, with a characteristic hat and a baseball.

Here is the poem I wrote for my dear sister-in-law Linda. Her celebration of life was a fine affair. I kind of steered it toward a comedy roast of my brother towards the end…. which I couldn’t help. Linda was great at laughing at Hugh when he was being too serious or going off on tirades. She made life safe, and fun. Anyway here is the poem.

The Astronaut Chooses Her Words Wisely

Later, looking at the records

colleagues assumed she had toggled both ends

of her tether carefully to her suit,

when she pushed off from the orbiting station

with thrusters operational, positioning generators

at their unsealed status and all interior suit bladders intact.

As the void pressed in the bladders pushed back,

as the sun blared its frigid light 

on everything in the emptiness.

The ship itself had skin of titanium as tender as a balloon,

where she had been the mission specialist, payload engineer

calculating supplies, and the inner atmosphere to be expended:

the fuel, the waste, the balance of all the something

against the force of all the nothing, which she ticked off

like bite marks on her pencil until the day

she was scheduled for the spacewalk and pushed away.

Her last transmission mystified her crewmates

because she had not at all been one for grand gestures.

But in her official profile she had told examiners

that every communication should pass  

three tests before being sent:

was it true,

was it necessary,

and was it kind?

Later, those who knew her believed

she had maintained her three parameters,

for as she gained speed

to slingshot around the pull of that luscious wafer

            she called “La Bella Luna,”

the tired technician at mission control tapped

his console to hear only her crackling voice through the relay:

“Control: I am off station.

                                        but not afraid.

                                     I am still in love with my damp and tangled earth,

                                                but am not lonely now flying

into this collapsing, expanding and probably, unknowable night.”

All I really know today is that loving the people around me is all that really matters now, and that spring will come again, with or without us. If the ketamine treatment showed me anything it was that the ego, try as it might can’t change a thing when it comes to love and death.

Either that, or I dreamt it.

Red leafs on green grass.

Sea foam slides up the beach sand,

my hands down your legs.

jhs

End of Summer

Kitchen window

Jan and I are getting ready to leave for Carmel, California to attend our only child’s wedding. Finn is marrying Emily Basham on September 14.  She is a smart, strong and beautiful woman and they seem to be wonderfully happy together. This makes everything more beautiful in our lives.

Fall creeps slowly upon us as we pack. Our fucia plants seem to be the only things left blooming, yet the afternoon wind had knocked one blossom down onto the ground.  When we came back from Seattle two weeks ago a storm had knocked down most of the fireweed in our wild patch of garden and they had gone to seed, so now the wind blows their fluff  around in the dazzling light like fairy dust. Our cherry tree shows a few red leaves but there are still a lot of bright red huckleberries fat on the branches next to my office.

For those of you keeping up with the ongoing story of depression and the treatment I have been seeking, so far I am unequivocally positive about the results of the ketamine treatment.  I have far more energy and I do not have the compulsive thoughts of self harm that I once had right up to the moment I started to the treatments.  While I feel appropriate sadness, when I look back on sad events I don’t have the narcissistic impulses or the self loathing to take on more than my share of suffering. Yet I do have insight into mistakes I have made and how to handle things better in the future.  It’s as if my ego has shrunken down to some much more appropriate size than the swollen gout-like leg that everyone always had a knack for bumping into, especially when I kept thrusting it in their way. I have dreams I’ve never had before.  I think new thoughts. I have new energy but I am the same person. It is a strange phenomenon that I am still processing. 

Last flowers

I have been writing another Cecil book and am very close to the end of the first draft.  I hope to show something to my editor before Christmas.  My next book, What Is Time To A Pig is due to come out on February 4, of 2020.  I have just been asked to recommend writers for cover blurbs.  Do any of you readers out there have recommendations for writers to do a blurb? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  What Is Time To A Pig? is set in the near future seven years after President Trump’s re-election war with North Korea after the Koreans fired a long range missile that fizzles out over Alaska dropping undetonated warheads over Cold Storage. There is a radical group of Islamic Native Americans of the Second Ghost Dance Movement whose leader is named Ali Wild Horses and he wants to get his hands on one, he unfortunately enlists a helpless white guy named Gloomy Knob to help him and they both end up in nearby Ted Stevens Federal Penitentiary, when authorities discover there is one last bomb still out there wired to blow up any second.   Now everyone either wants to get it back or wants it to blow up and poor Gloomy Knob is being tortured for answers he doesn’t have.

So, who should I ask to blurb a book like this?  Names? Names?  Come on people!

Recently I have been reading a book on the American gun culture called Unintended Consequences which was given to a friend of mine who I based the character of Boomer in Baby’s First Felony.  He is a very smart and kind man but he is a very “from my cold dead hands” kind of guy.  I like him and I have been talking with him about what gun enthusiasts and non-violence guys like me, could do together to address senseless mass shootings.  It’s a work in progress so far. I believe he sees gun ownership as a foundation of individual liberty, and without that there is no sense in talking about cooperative social justice.  He sees that as a sham.  But we keep talking and I insist there is something we both can do to keep innocent people from being “bullied and slaughtered” (is how I put it to him) and he agrees with me, so we keep talking. 

His book is really long. I’m also reading Make Prayers To The Raven by Richard Nelson.  He was intending to come down to the wedding but he is very sick and he is down in San Francisco seeing a host of specialists.  I have all of his books and have read them all, but he has never signed a book for “Little Finny” as he thinks of our boy, so he signed a copy of Make Prayers for Finn and Emily as a wedding gift. I couldn’t help myself and started reading it again.

I love Richard Nelson, he is like a brother to me. Going out in the woods with him is like being with a Las Vegas comic and a holy man all in one.  He is so full of energy and enthusiasm he nearly bursts at the seams.  He cannot contain himself at the discovery of something new.  Yet he is reverential to the slightest, and smallest turns of beauty.  He can restrain himself when restraint is called for, by the decorum of the other beings, where I would just blunder along in my lack of awareness.  I have learned so much from his writing and from his example.  No, he is not perfect, and of course we are completely different kinds of writers and thinkers, we have differing opinions about a lot of things, but knowing him is one of the great privileges of my life and my admiration for him brims out of my heart and my brain.

You may know him from his Encounters radio programs, but if you want to know him for his more serious and scholarly work go back to the beginning.  I happen to love Hunters of the Northern Ice for it’s exquisite attention to detail.  You don’t have to take it all in but go back to it in pieces, as an investigator I have to marvel at how he saw things and recorded them with mostly his eye and his pencil. He writes about movement and action brilliantly.  You can literally put together how people hunted before snow machines and before the outboard motor became ubiquitous in the Arctic from the descriptions in this one book.

Some people criticize him for not showing the effects of colonialism on the cultures he was documenting. But that was not his brief.  He went there as a guest to understand their cultures before they became inundated by the outside forces, which I think he did beautifully and honestly.  To blame him for not noting the ravages of colonialism is like blaming the firefighter who goes into a burning building to rescue precious religious artifacts for not stopping to admire the flames.   

But don’t take my word for it, go to the library and pick up all of his books.  They are carefully and lovingly written and they are classics.  Hunters Of The Northern Ice, Hunters of the Northern Forest, Make Prayers to the Raven, Shadow of the Hunter, The Island Within, and Heart And Blood. 

Here is one of his quotes, and there are many that I love:

“As time went by, I realized that the particular place I'd chose was less important than the fact that I'd chosen a place and focused my life around it. Although the island has taken on great significance for me, it's no more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart, not whether it's flat or rugged, rich or austere. wet or arid, gentle or harsh, warm or cold, wild or tame. Every place, like every person, is elevated by the love and respect shown toward it, and by the way in which its bounty is received.” The Island Within

This book may be his most widely read and celebrated, but all of his books are worth going back to. His voice is more than his radio show’s enthusiastic call to participate in wonder, he is our true scholar and man of wisdom. These books should not be overlooked or easily categorized in favor of the easy or the popular. They are essential. Now more than ever.

More to come for all my friends soon.

Fireweed fluff blows

on the sunlit wind like snow:

summer is leaving.

jhs

Fireweed today.

Days After

Another hot day in Seattle.  My doctor’s appointments are done, and my brother’s wife, Linda Staley died on August ninth at six twelve in the morning.  She was a smart and beautiful woman, who grew up in Bellingham and went to Smith College. She taught English in Guatemala before marrying my brother fifty-two years ago.  Linda was kind and generous to me from the first time I met her when I was twelve years old.  She hosted more dinners than I can count and her kitchen was fun and full of lively conversation, about books, and politics, baseball, family news and always good advice. She knew me at my most foolish and yet I don’t remember any dismissive remarks or harsh words. We argued on subjects but always kindly, at least that’s how I remember it.  She helped me when I needed a place to live and she even typed some of my college papers. She was even considerate to some of my most trying friends when they passed through the Pacific Northwest.  She was funny and loved my brother and loved to tease him along with the rest of his siblings.  She seemed indispensible and now we will have to see.

Linda and Hugh’s bed where Hugh puts some of her keepsakes during the day.

Tonight the bed in her apartment is empty and the flowers which friends had brought are drooping.  I realized now that the white flowers I thought were lilacs were in fact hydrangeas.  On her deathbed, Linda knew the correct name of the flowers and gently set me straight. Today there are roses in bloom in the gardens, and that’s all I really know.  My brother, holds himself together with memories and lots of visitors, but sweaters in a closet, or finding a calendar she filled out for events in the future will ambush him with tears.  He thinks he can bear it. Then he knows he can’t. Then he is positive he must, and he will: the shadowboxing of grief, I suppose.

The six ketamine treatments were intense and tiring.  It’s hard to gauge their effectiveness.   Each infusion lasted an hour and was accompanied by about forty-five minutes of floating out of body experiences with compressed time confusion, rapid eye movement, sensations of insight, and hallucinations like pulsing color fields.  My head feels scrubbed clean now, and somehow enlarged, as if there is more room for possibility, more room for optimism.  The whole sensation may be ephemeral and I think I’m going to withhold judgment on the ultimate usefulness for depression, just to say that it hasn’t hurt me, so far.

            I read an interesting book called “The Overstory” by Richard Powers.  I just finished it a couple of days ago and have been thinking about it a lot. I absolutely loved the writing in the first quarter of the book.  I enjoyed how he put the trees in the setting front and center not only in the plot line but in the timing of the book.  Humans seemed like little bugs zipping around in another dimension of time compared to the ancient rooted wooded leviathans, and the whole issue of arboreal communication and “brain function”… if you will… and how they may enlist human beings as their proxies is a fascinating aspect of the story line. But in the end… I was let down by the lack of wit the characters showed. Only one of them showed any real uplift in their spirit beyond the adoration of nature… it was like spending time with a series of cult members.  But I won’t go on.  I recommend this book highly… if nothing more than the beauty of the writing and the things you can learn about trees.  Some say its in the running for a Great American Novel… possibly… but only if you are already of the faith, and I would make the argument that no matter how much discussion of science there is in the text that a leap of faith is necessary to fully buy into the motivations of the characters. 

Including her baseball signed my Edgar Martinez… who she dearly loved.

But here again, is a case where I wish I could be chopping vegetables in Linda Straley’s kitchen, drinking wine after she and my sister had both read the book and Linda was spicing up her marinara sauce.  We would be looking at each other through the steam and laughing, batting our opinions of the book back and forth, she would correct me where my memory was faulty and I would come to learn something more from the text than I had ever expected.

Then we would sit down to eat.

Blessings be upon all of us, and all of you tonight with your families together.

Summer day, no wind.

Roses wilt in a hot room.

I miss you so much.

jhs

The Unexpected IS The Unexpected

August 3, 2019

It is a warm day in Seattle; I am sitting in only my shorts in my nephew’s apartment above his house in the Mount Baker neighborhood south of downtown.  Jan is reviewing a scientific paper on the couch while the Blue Angels fly over the lake.  It is Sea Fair weekend and the boats are tied to the log boom where her parents used to tie their old runabout where she and her sisters used to swim and horse around while the adults drank beer and watched the hydroplanes race.  Now it seems to be mostly fancy yachts out there and the hydros blast around the course on turbo engines battering the water at what seem to me to be unimaginable speed. We are some half-mile from the lake but the sound of the jets and the boats are piercing, yet we keep the doors and windows open to keep a breeze coming through.

My nephew bought this house because he grew up in the old house across the street.  He played with his toy trucks for hours on end under a cedar tree that still stands on the corner.  I remember when my brother and his wife bought that house for thirty thousand dollars.  Now of course the houses in this neighborhood could not be had for much under a million bucks.  One sister still lives in a house five blocks away and another about nine blocks away in another direction.  They have talked about selling out particularly during Sea Fair, with the noise and all, but it is lovely here and with the mass transit getting around is easier.

The summer gardens are amazing, so many kinds of chrysanthemums, and roses, I stopped the other day on my walk and rubbed my fingers through the sparklers of lavender which were growing up on a sidewalk strip. Lilacs droop over wooden fences under streetlights, and even magnolias give off a warm scent in the evening. Walking back from a sisters house can seem like a stroll in a southern city.

My brother’s wife, Linda Straley, (I will write more about her in days to come) is sick, has stopped taking nourishment and recently stopped taking fluids.  She doesn’t want to prolong her life.  She has an inoperable bowel obstruction as a result of her cancer that she has been fighting for many years.  We visit her when she and my brother feel up to it.  She is gracious and kind to us as she has always been.  My brother fusses over her and she is a bit annoyed with him but then they both calm down and enjoy each others company.  They are a loving couple and have been a huge part of our big rowdy, loving and intelligent family. It is hard this saying goodbye.

I have had two of the ketamine infusion treatments so far and have signed on for the full treatment of seven.  The doctor and the staff are very professional and very organized.  I sit in a reclining chair I wear ekg monitors on my chest with my shirt on, I have an IV put in with a small gage needle so it is not very painful at all, I wear a blood pressure cuff set to an automatic monitor that takes my bp every 15 min. and I have an pulse and oxygen reading on my finger.  The doctor talks with me and tells me about the dosage and what to expect, then turns the lights low and starts the IV pump. First they give me a little anti nausea medication and some anti anxiety medication in case I become anxious.  I receive the ketamine for an hour.  The first fifteen minutes I don’t feel much at all then after the first blood pressure test I start feeling the effects, and by the end I feel a full floating, out of body experience, compressed time, the kind of false profundity you get when you are stoned. Though my memory stays good.  The nurse introduced herself to me and when she came in to check on me, more than half way through, I said,  “Jennifer, the doctor said the effects would be unexpected but did you know Jennifer that the unexpected, is REALLY unexpected,” which I thought was very profound at the time… but looking back on it now I think that feeling of profundity was a side effect of the drug.  Right toward the end I had the sensation that beautiful bugs were souring the inside of my skull and it felt really great and when they escaped through my ears and nose and eyes, I had a flying sensation, a real whoop di doo feeling of going off the top in a roller coaster sensation and the bugs took all of my anxiety out and away out into the universe into all time and space kind of thing.  A kind of a spinney Grateful Dead feeling.  But it lasted only a second.  Then the doctor was there asking me how I was.  Was I nauseated?  Had I been frightened?  No. No.  “It was just…. Interesting.  Very interesting.”

Now… is it effective for depression?  I’m sure it is too soon to tell.  All I can say for sure is that for years when I lay down at night I thought of suicide. It’s just a bad habit I have.  I think about killing myself to got to sleep.  Telling myself not to think about it doesn’t work.  But since the treatments, I don’t.  Why?  I don’t know.  Also… as a depressed person I would use any other sad situation, like the death of my sister in law to trigger my own depression.  Maybe it’s the narcissism of the depressed person I have talked about before, I also don’t know.  But now, I feel stronger, more able to love my brother and my sister in law.  Not to go into my own useless agony but to try and help them in a meaningful way.  At least to think of them in a more… what?... richer more sensitive way than what I was able to before.  Is that possible just because of the treatment?  Probably not… but maybe; because I know I am better than I was before, and better is better for those who need help, and if I’ve learned anything it is that my suffering does not help those who are suffering tonight.  So we will pick some flowers from her son’s garden to take in the morning, to sit and talk, and savor another sweet moment together as a family while we can, because that is so much better that useless despair.

Lilacs in summer

 sitting in a clear glass bowl

 beside your bedside.

jhs

Summer Birthday and Leaving Home

Rain today after some beautiful days of sun. The fireweed are in full bloom but are bent over from the rain and the wind. The blossoms are thinning at the top and I’m afraid that when I return from Seattle in three weeks they will have mostly gone to seed. It has been a good year for the berries and we have enjoyed lovely jelly each morning. Up high on Harbor Mountain the blueberries are barely ripe while down here at tideline they are starting to grow soft on their stems. The buttercups are still cheerful in the green grass and up high the lupin hold bright pearls of dew most of the morning as clouds roll up the hills. Lovely summer and I don’t want to leave.

My poor brother is saying goodbye to his beautiful wife of more than fifty years. She is at her end of a gallant fight with cancer. My brother was an oncologist and suffers from too much knowledge, and too much of a need to try and save her. But there is nothing more to be done. My sister in law is kind, graceful, and elegant. She will be that way during this transition as well. Jan and I will do what we can to help.

My sister Martha came to visit for my sixty sixth birthday. Jan arranged her travel for my gift. It was a wonderful thing, we sat and talked and walked, picking a few berries and looked at the flowers. My sister is much smarter than I am, and I always enjoy talking with her and reconnecting. I love getting her opinions on books and the news and on the people in our lives. It makes me feel so lucky all over again to be the baby in a big family. Friends came for dinner and we ate a terrific meal out on the deck and when it started to rain we laughed and moved under cover, shoulder to shoulder cramped together in too small a space, which was all the more lovely as humming birds dodged and darted at my polka dotted balloons hanging under the eves.

I gave a toast saying only, “It’s been a tough year, and the only thing I’ve learned is this: love is the only thing that really matters. Thank you all for being my friends. Thanks especially to Jan for bringing my sister Martha who I love as much as life itself.” Which is true… and I drank from my bubbly water then we ate Italian Cream cake that Jan had made that very day, which made me cry with happiness.

On Monday I start my ketamine infusion therapy down in Seattle. I have no idea what to expect, but I have heard very positive reports. As I have said I will try to write about it as long as I am not tripped out or too exhausted. Why? I guess I want to let people know about these types of therapies and what you too should expect if you want to give it a try. Millions of people suffer from depression and most of them do not take up arms against it for fear that they will appear weak or whiney. I get that, and I understand. But it does not help. Getting help, helps, and I am in favor of getting help.

So stay tuned. I will let you know.

A male humming bird

landing on a red balloon.

Only love matters.

jhs

Hanging On

Mid Summers Eve 2019, Sitka

 It is a fine sunny day today after a few wet weeks. One morning the fog was so thick I could not see the cruise ship coming towards the dock but I could hear it approaching, closer and closer and at what seemed to be the very last moment before grounding on our beach it emerged from the clouds as large as a floating ten story hotel, (which is essentially what it is) right there before my eyes like a magic trick… or a great brown bear charging from the brush. She docked and began disgorging her passengers who bussed into town to buy their Tee Shirts and books and take their photographs of the Russian Cathedral while standing in the street, and ask their goofy questions about what the elevation is here and if we take American money.  I didn’t want a deep-water dock right down town. But somehow I don’t mind one three houses down.  I can’t see the boats from my house or office and very few tourists wander down here to take pictures of the ship.  Some people hate tourists and I understand that, but having been both tourist here in Alaska and other places I have empathy for their disorientation and discombobulation when they disembark.  I’m a worrier by nature myself, and without my wife I have a hard time orienting a map.

Years ago I was walking through the historical park in Sitka in the fall and I met two young women who had come from their arctic village to go to Mount Edgecumbe High School.  This was their first trip so far south, one girl wore her traditional kuspuk and the other wore a beautiful new blouse and tight blue jeans and I must say a lot of perfume.  I asked them what they thought of Sitka.

            “Too many gusuks,” the perfume girl said, explaining, “white people,” and this I understood, then the other in the traditional gingham covering, said,  “And these trees… so big.. and they stink…” she waved her hand in front of her face. 

            This surprised me. Then I realized there were no trees of any size where she lived.  Certainly nothing like these old spruce and hemlock in the park.

            “And the dead ones,” she cupped her elbows in her hands, “The dead trees look like rotten meat… it’s horrible.”  She shivered. 

            I could clearly see the old rotted stump we were standing near disgusted her.  I considered that she was just teasing me or playing with me, making the most of my being a white man and so stupid.  But she looked honestly sick to her stomach and I gave here every chance to say “I jokes” but nothing came.  We talked more about Sitka and I tried to tell them about places they might enjoy: the gym, the library and the movie theater, the soccer field, and the grocery store where you could buy candy in bulk. I did not ask them about their village because I have found that new students to Edgecumbe get really sick of explaining to people about where they come from possibly too because they are often extremely homesick when they first arrive and talking about home to ignorant people who have never even heard of, and can’t pronounce the name of their home, makes them feel even more lonely and alone.  They seem more excited to talk about their own life’s new adventure.

It was probably thirty years ago that I met those girls but I think of them often.

This summer the buttercups have bloomed in and around the short greenery. Tiny yellow flowers appear almost instantly in the lawn after I cut the grass.  I find them cheerful and particularly happy little things, but a friend of mine grumbles and sees them as weeds that need to be eradicated. 

            “Jesus,” she said, “fucking buttercups.”

            The cherry tree outside my office window for the first time has born fruit.  Jan sat in a red chair with her binoculars and counted seven tiny cherries on the entire tree, amid all the other withered stocks.  A neighbor suggested that we cut the tree down and try again in another location. Forgetting or possibly not that this first effort for the tree has taken thirty-five years, a span of time we won’t be able to replicate. But this neighbor was ardent in their opinion, so hungry I suppose, for cherries.  

            It is a time for strong opinions. Last month at the writer’s symposium in Skagway there were tears and fist banging on the subject of cultural appropriation and who had the right to tell the story of history. There was a great deal of tension between those who felt powerful and those who felt powerless. While in fact, the distinctions seemed blurred to me and it felt that we were all very fortunate, and lucky in our circumstance, but perhaps that point of view was an artifact of my ignorance and lack of experience, just as my assumption that the tall trees around my home smelled “good,” or that we all… including the President of the United States, should know the difference between the truth and a lie, but perhaps all my assumptions about the world are naive. I feel naïve, and lonely often these days. Especially when I read the news.

The work of understanding this world is never done.

            I’m off to Seattle soon for psychiatric treatment. The doctors decided that electro convulsive therapy would be too dangerous for my vision and I finally offered that being blind would be too high a price to pay and way too depressing an outcome.  So I’m going to try and go forward with ketamine infusion therapy. I will try to write about it here if it is not too trippy or exhausting. 

            Until then I will be putting our house back in order after putting in new floors and remodeling the bathroom upstairs.  It was a huge job with great results.  (the forty year old carpet was truly disgusting) and the new bathroom has handrails, high toilet, and a shower that’s the envy of a high end spa. Where our old bathroom had a free bathtub from Raven Radio a toilet and sink we found on the side of the road.

            We will also spend the summer nurturing our buttercups, and our apple tree with three blossoms, and watching our seven cherries ripen: counting our luck, and cultivating what wisdom we can as we stay involved in the world. I will be writing a new book about my faithless detective Cecil Younger while, thinking of my readers, and those long ago girls, wondering where they are, hoping they are home somewhere, and happy.

Sunshine and north wind,

 seven cherries on the tree:

 Hello honey bee!

jhs