The Way Light Works On Trees

Rain in Carmel. Just north of us the flooding has been horrendous. We have been lucky our berm has held. We went for four days without power. All this meant for me was I kept going to bed so early that I started waking up in the middle of the night. I found ways of milking juice out of my phone, so I listened to most of Emily Wilsons translation of the Odyssey. (he’s made it Home but now the pesky suitors!) I love this translation right from the begining. “Sing to me of a complicated man.” Plus I enjoy how she changes up all the mentions of the “Rosy fingers of dawn on the wine dark sea.”

The lack of power, the food rotting in the freezer and the stinky clothes in our hampers, suggested a trip. So we packed the car quickly and in the dark and took off. We went to see the wild flowers in Anza Borrego State Park. Just arrived after an eight hour drive. Dot came along of course and she has been a real trooper all the way.

I will have more details on the desert next week.

Today I just want to post a few photos of what light can do on one cottonwood tree and a vase of flowers sitting on our kitchen table.

Light…

is mood and meaning;

the plot and atmosphere.

There is no story

without it. .

Herre is an old poem that I wrote back when I was doing cases. I wrote it in a hotel room in Wrangell one weekend in a hard southeastern storm. I wrote it the day after I learned that the great poet Jack Gilbert died. It’s called. “I’m Tired of Poets Telling Me What God Wants.”

Redwing Blackbirds

I’m sorry I missed posting last week. Two things happened which made it difficult: my sister Martha and her husband Kenny came for a visit, and I am close to finishing the draft of my next book.

Dot resting her knees while entertaining company.

When I decided to resume writing this blog I was clear in my own mind that I would do it every week as long as I could keep up with my goals for writing the new novel. My process requires that I have daily goals. I find that meeting the daily goals keeps my motivation up to finish. Every day has to be a small victory. I am prone to depression and if I go too long without a daily victory I lose steam and get bogged down. Success looks different, depending where I am in a project. Rough draft requires counting words per day. For this project I need to write fifteen hundred words per day. The way I have things set up that’s about three typed pages per day. Totally doable. I work on the book five days a week. For revising I keep track of number of hours in the chair trying to fiddle and fuss with trying to make it better. I try and revise three and a half hours every day. Again, five days a week. If I can keep this up I can write one book a year. (moving from Sitka to Carmel has stolen about four months from year) My health and Jan’s health also need to be taken care of for there is no work if we are too sick to manage the work. And now.. it looks like Dot has some issues with her knees that is going to take many trips to the vet. Yesh…Did Shakespeare have a dog? Probably but there weren’t that many Veterinarians to deal with in Elizabethan England.

Anyway… last week was eaten up with having a great deal of fun with my sister’s family. I still took time out for the book but I didn’t have time for the blog. Each blog takes about two work days or eight hours. What I cut short on the blog is the revision, and I’m sure my readers can see all the mistakes that slip through because: 1) not having an editor for the blog and 2) not spending enough time on my revisions. There was a time that I hoped I would grow out of my rather crippling dyslexia… but no: writing backwards, or upside down if writing by hand, still persists. Word blindness is particularly troubling while trying to pick up typos. I’m telling you this not to complain but just to let you know that writing these things take time. Even when they are rife with mechanical errors. If I reread the draft immediately I might pick up five percent of the errors. My mind simply sees the correctly spelled words I intended and not the mistake I put down. If I wait twenty four hours I likely can correct seventy five percent of the errors. So I have to wait at least overnight before I can revise somewhat effectively.

I had a wonderful time with my family. I love all my siblings and we always seem to have a good time when we are together. There were a lot of trips around town and long meals where we all watched baby TV which consists of watching baby Arthur playing with his grandma’s walker and canes, watching him eat berries and throw balls, only to have Dot gather them up and sometimes crush them. Only to discover that after that entertainment is done with it’s time to start planning, shopping for, and cooking the next meal.

Something did occur to me after they left. I was feeling the effects of my typical post party depression. Not the serious kind of depression but just feeling a bit glum missing someone after they leave. To make sure we didn’t get sucked into real depressive behavior, Jan and I took a walk on the beach and took care of some chores, I made some soup for a friend who just had back surgury. Then we bought some lunch for ourselves and drove to a park to eat. We went to a park that is an old golfcourse that is now open to the public for walking. The man-made lake has filled in around the edges with Cattails and from the picnic table the wetlands was alive with the sounds of Redwing Blackbirds, Coots and a few songbirds around the edges. It was windy and the cattails hissed and clattered against each other so too it was noisy with birdsong and the black birds kept a sharp buzzing and chattering going, kind of like a chorus of electric guitars being played finger-style.

Young Arthur… always entertaining.

Just the sound of the birds thrumming cut through my emotional funk to make me happy. The whole scene reminded me of a billion tiny electronic connections being made. The pond had become a charged ganglia of sparking sounds in the nervous system of this valley. It somehow reminded me of my own brain, lively, chattering…. not at all dulled by melancholy but alive with penetrating connections: birds to birds, wind to birds, birds to ducks, and of course all of it making some connection to me.

Jan walked around the pond using her folding cane and Dot and I sat calmly at the table so as not to short circuit any of the avian activity, we all had a fine time.

The new book I’m working on is called “Big Breath In” and it’s a stand alone. That is it’s not part of either of my established series. I’ll read the opening of it and post it below. At least you can get a sense of what I’ve been spending my time doing.

What the River Says

In 1968 I was in a private boys school on Manhattan Island. A day in the spring we had a guest speaker who was a well known writer and historian whose expertise was in the American Civil War. The Q and A section of the presentation got off track. I don’t remember exactly how but someone in the Senior class got a whiff of prejudice and started goading him. The writer made some lamentable comments, the two I remember specifically were; “What young people listen to today is not music.” This went over like a lead balloon but his next comment almost created a full fledged student revolt. “What you listen to is noise inspired by inferior Negro culture.” Holy Crap! The young, mostly white, liberal revolutionary guard went off: Booing, yelling, some walking out. I had a friend in my class who finally got a chance to speak asked our guest: “What do you think music is?” The speaker said something akin to: Music is an elevated expression of western culture.” Not helpful in getting the booing to stop. When the cat calls died down my pal said. “Sir, respectfully No. Music is the organization of sound, which has been done by people all over the world forever.” My friend went on to become an important A and R man and vice president of SONY music. But that day he was my hero. Later that night at home my dad balled me out for showing disrespect to the visitor. We didn’t know enough about western culture to dismiss its superiority out of hand. We should have sat and listened and then had a civilized debate among ourselves. This was the sixties and my father had a hard time with young people acting “smart assed” as he put it.

But today I was thinking back on my buddies definition: Music is the organisation of sound. I was sitting with my dog Dot by the river listening to the sound of water and the sounds of birds moving through: there was the chirping of sparrows and the chirring of thrush, the cawing of crows and the melodious singing of song birds. But underneath all the singing was the sound bed of the river, whose water was down a good deal from the flood stage: a gurgling and clunking over stones, a hissing as it turns around a gentle corner. For almost all my life I have found the sound of a river flowing to be some of the most beautiful, most calming sounds I have experienced, from the sound of the Hudson River passing under a wharf to the Pasayten River tumbling over sharp glacial stones to the Carmel River running slowly over rounded river rock. Its beautiful but is it music? Even my revolutionary friend described it as an organisation of sound “done by people.”

First, is it organized? Lets leave the birds out of this for the time being, because I don’t know enough about the birds to speak clearly. But just the sound bed of the river, its shaped by many factors, the amount of rain feeding into the river, the pressure created as the water is squeezed through the channel in the rocks and soil. A waterfall makes a much different kind of sound than a stream like the Carmel River right at my spot of the river which has reached the meandering stage where the water is more pushed along the bed than flowing down. Certainly the sound of wild water flowing is shaped by rainfall, elevation drop, and the geology of the bed. But again in any sense is it “organized?”

Here is a video of the Carmel River at near High Water.

Maybe we are off the edge of “What does it matter?” into the realm of semantics. But i don’t think so. Rivers are clearly are shaped, birds are shaped by a slow and gradual process which we might call evolutionary. In a real sense geology, climate, and gravity organize landscape. All of these elements together work to select certain features that we see before us. Geology selects riverbeds, Elevation change selects speed of flow. Gravity is the motivation towards change. This seems to me to be “organisation”.

What the river doesn’t have is a performative sense of purpose. The way that human music has. The river makes music, but it’s not making this music for me. In the north at break up the river cracks and clatters, in some places candle ice creates bell like tones. At Niagara Falls the elevation change creates a Mahler type thrum and roar. But at no time is there an indication that it does this to please us or express our conflicts and define our group lessons the way fiddle-tunes, Delta Blues and Symphonies do.

But I’m sticking to my new found belief that wild sounds are a type of music. Who organizes it? The earth organizes it. I only wished I had raised my hand and added that thought to the discussion back in 1968. I think our guest speaker’s and my father’s head would have exploded with the impudence of it,.

Here is recording of me reading “Ask Me” by William Stafford. Here Stafford imagines a frozen river and it reveals something another side of himself that his fan’s usually miss in his work. William Stafford, like John Haines had a great cold… almost an iciness coursing through his work.

Plum Blossoms

falling on the trail at sunset,

Why am I so sad?

Two Birds

Jan goes to physical therapy at least twice a week. She meets her therapist at an old hospital building in down town Monterey. The building is right on the edge of the historical adobe building district. The adobe buildings recreate the look and feel of life in the Mexican era of Monterey: cool indoor spaces, black wrought Iron hardware some with gardens others with courtyards now converted to coffee shops. It’s a lovely neighborhood. But for some reason there are two Turkeys who wander the outside of the old hospital.

This turkey wants in. Here he is unpuffing himself. I was intimidated to reach for my camera when he was in full display.

Wild turkeys up close are at the same time beautiful and scary. When not aroused a turkey reminds me of a velociraptor with a blue head, a lurid red wattle and long taloned claws. In a group they are called a gang or a rafter of turkeys, only if they are domesticated. Wild turkeys come in flocks. These two in downtown Monterey seem to be either wild or feral, because I don’t remember entering their cage when going to the hospital and I see no sign of anyone telling them what to do. Last week I found one turkey standing right in the middle of the front door, watching himself in the glass reflection and he was puffing himself up in full display… which is a pretty remarkable sight, their full plumage is finely detailed with many different patterns in different parts of their bodies.. They appear massive and all puffed up with short necks and colorful feathers fanned out from their posterior. Then when the display is over they become much more sleek with long snake like necks bobbing out over their feet with their wild ugly head bouncing on the end of the neck.

Native people advise human beings if they ever run into a bear to “Not run, don’t make a panicked sound and try to make yourself look as big as possible.” If you are wearing a coat hold it up above your head to seem more bulky. If you have to speak keep your voice low and remain dignified. This too the turkey seems to do. The only sound I heard was a low chugging, deep in the throat moaning sound.

I suppose the turkey blocking our entrance to the hospital was looking at his own reflection thinking he was looking at a competitor for a females attention and was puffing up to make the reflected turkey back down and eventually he did. And Jan was able to go in for her balance and strength excercises.

Hummingbirds in a group are called a “charm” of hummingbirds. Which is a lovely sounding name. But here too the match head sized little buggers can surprise you. Inside our little fenced in yard we have two hummingbird feeders which are getting a lot of action the last two weeks. What I’ve observed is I can’t go out in the yard, particularly if I’m wearing my red, Alaska Gold Panner’s hat, without getting dive bombed and barked at by what I’m suspecting is a male hummer. It appears the the male hummers are little muscular bundles of pure testosterone. Their bark sounds like a blast of air escaping the mouth at a percussive speed. If you could imagine a snipers rifle small enough for a hummingbird to fire, it would sound like the skull cracking bark of a male hummingbird. A lovely little bird hovered just below my hat brim and it barked. The bird was an emerald green and the bark seemed to contort the entire body up from its bejeweled belly out of its fighting chopstick face.

When the Spanish first came to north America they called these little birds, “Jewel birds” again… lovely. But I found the little buggers to be more aggressive and than jewell like. no matter where I sat in the yard I got yelled at by the little rascals. Kind of like being called out by a tiny little drunk in a tavern on St. Paddy’s day in New York. Irritating.

So here is what I learned this week. Males are vain and aggressive no matter their size.

Soft rain, hummingbirds

buzz the feeder all day long,

They are fussy children.

Here is a lovey and erotic poem by Pattiann Rogers about other aspects of male hummingbird behavior. HUMMINGBIRD: A SEDUCTION . Happy Valentines Day.

If the Owl Should Call Again

I knew John Haines a little bit. He was a great eminence in the Literary would, and I was shy around him because he had the air of a great eminence. We would cross paths at different University events or readings. He was polite but I always felt foolish and tongue tied around him. I did see him naked many times however. When we lived in Fairbanks in 1989 John Haines and I swam at the University Pool at the same time and our lockers were next to each other. Being naked with him didn’t make me more eloquent but it did let me feel that I was entitled to refer to him by his first name.

John had a serious demeanor, with wire rim glasses and a very deep resonant voice. He gave remarkably moving readings and he was well read and astute. He seemed to be a natural professor In the last years of his life he grew resentful that he was not held in greater esteem in his home country. That country was the old mining claims in the deep cold districts near Fairbanks. He was a profit of the unpeopled world of inhospitable country Yet he was hurt by the fact he was not more celebrated than he was.

This is a tricky thing for all poets and particularly for writers who sing the praises of remote and unpopulated places. It may be beautiful work but how many people are there to feel its real power and then sing its praise. John really was a great poet and it made me sad that he ended up unhappy.

I thought of this… and John the other night when Jan and I walked back from the restaurant with two good friends from Alaska. The street was dark and the street lamps were muted stepping stones down to the corner that turned toward town. A Great Horned Owl was hooting in a tree very close to our house. We tried to get a good look at it but the owl remained spectral: an unseen presence. We never got a glimpse of but the call haunted us all the way home.

Athabaskan people from the Koyukon river down to the Navaho of Arizona, all believe that the Owl is a harbinger of death. They believe this so strongly that their children are not allowed to touch an owl feather or dissect one of its pellets in Biology class. Owls are predictors of death. Hearing one means death is close.

Dot and me after our morning walk. Photo by Gaylen Needham

I remembered one of my favorite poems of John’s: If The Owl Should Call Again. The poem makes me sad that John didn’t die beloved in his own country. But the truth is being loved by others is a matter of giving up your own desire for fame. People will love you… or not… there is not much you can do about it. Just as the Owl will call of its own will, we have very little say in it, no matter how much we exercise or diet. We do our best each day and wait for the Owl to call our name.

The truth is John was a man of the inhospitable world… that was his genius. So it shouldn’t seem that much of a surprise that his reputation did not grow as he approached death. A great cold billowed in his words.

I too will die a long way from my home country, and this doesn’t bother me much. Everywhere has just as much nature as the next. Everywhere has the same possibility of love. Everywhere was shaped by the same forces and I am small in their face.

Flowers bloom all year,

in this strange and fertile place. :

death grows smaller here.

Here is a recording of me reading “If The Owl Should Call Again,” by John Haines:

Big Animals

Rain today after some beautiful days of sun. The river is low in its banks. We are not rich but we are incredibly lucky.

These photos were taken on my morning walks. The last photo was shot in the tire repair store where I went when a mechanic found a small nail in my tire.

Last week I wrote about Alaska and California and I think I may have insulted Californians as being somehow philosophically lightweight because they don’t have Brown Bears wandering in their communities. I’m sorry for this. It hit me in face when I realized that while I was writing my “Alaska has more weight because of the Big Animals in the woods” …two mass shootings happened in California one not all that far from me here.

First let me explain something about “Big Animals.” Years ago a mentor of my friend Richard Nelson came to visit in Sitka. Catherine Atla was a Athabaskan elder who had taught Richard many things about Koyukon natural philosophy. She drove with Richard toward the end of our road where there was an easy trail . The walk was surrounded by large trees and wetlands. It was much different from from her home country in the boreal forest in the sub arctic north. But they both have Grizzly bears and the big bears are treated by most native people with mythological respect. Bears are sentient creatures and can hear your words, If you speak with a lack of respect it can bring bad luck. Either in hunting or in a straight up conflict. So powerful were these creatures, like the traditional Jewish tradition it is forbidden to say the animals name out loud, for fear of offending the Bear. When they got deep into their walk Catherine Atla turned to Nels and asked, “Are there any Big Animals around here?” Nels assured her that any Big animals in the area had heard them and taken off as soon as they got out of his car.

“Big Animal” then is the phrase for the powerful force in nature that can change your ruin your luck.

California’s Flag has a Grizzly bear on it, though they have no more in their woods or mountains. But clearly have lots of Big Animals out there who can bring bad luck at a whim.

How to prevent mass shootings? I don’t know. Sadly i think the political rhetoric of the time has made it near impossible to get military grade weapons off the street. I respect and admire those who work tirelessly to do just that, I frankly cant see a time in the near future that those hideous guns will become unavailable. Possibly some day. But not now.

The common wisdom holds that most mass shootings are committed by men with repressed frustration and then they become isolated from any stable and loving community. They isolate and sometimes fall into community with someone who is clearly mentally ill. As in the Columbine killings, a follower is befriended by a sociopath and let their somewhat normative highs school frustrations build to a deadly and suicidal boiling point. The two Columbine shooters had access to loving families but for whatever reason turned away from them. Some suspect it was the influence of the sociopathic manipulation of the one member who needed the follower to help motivate him to commit the act. But I clearly don’t know. Boys like this are Big Animals in a sense.

You might say that now I’m being offensive to bears by comparing them to homicidal killers. And while it’s true I don’t think Bears intend any ill harm to humans but if you spend enough time in their habitat there will be dangerous confrontations. I myself have utmost respect for all bears, but I’ve had to kill three in self defense. So, I might not be the right one to ask. Nels told me that I must have done something to ruin my luck.

Lets leave the gun debate out of this discussion of Big Animals. Let’s take the case of D.D. who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband. DD is Canadian. He both is and isn’t a stereotypical offender of this kind. He grew up along the coast of British Columbia. then lived in Ranching country further inland. He was described shy as many perpetrators of this type are described. He had a girl friend who was left wing and very uninhibited. They were Obama supporters, they they broke up. DD sank into a clear depression. He became homeless for a time and then isolated himself, spending more and more time on line ;when a friend gave him a job doing manual labor. But then he found the rhetoric of anger and hate. He was always involved in video games but after the break up he became involved with the Gamergate scandal which metastasized into a hatred of women. He stayed isolated and sought some sense of the world by accepting the conspiracy theories of the Right wing, Q anon style hatred of liberals. Eventually he was standing outside of Nancy Pelosi’s house with a hammer. He waited outside for about four hours and eventually he decided to go inside with the plan to hold her hostage and “interrogate” her.

Let me stop right here and make a point: I don’t think playing video games made him do this. His politics didn’t make him do this. His politics only helped him choose a target but didn’t force him to become violent. The hammer didn’t make him do it. What made him do it is that his life had become a living hell. He was alone and only listening to hatefull screeds. He thought this action which he saw as revolutionary, would elevate him among his peers he had never met and most of whom he didn’t know the names of. He thought his killing the husband of the speaker of the house would make him famous particularly among his peers, who he had never actually seen in real life.. How is this different from a dangerous delusion?

The tire shop with an old useless pop machine.

Before he went in that house he was a person to be pitied. Now he is a person who is to be punished. What could any of us do to prevent the next DD? Screaming at our political enemies is not goig to do it. Would programs to get isolated and frustrated men out into the world? Would compassionate pro-social ways for these guys to spend their time be useful in preventing violence. Perhaps some kind of Universal Service that forces everyone to have experiences in the real world with both men and women. Give them other choices than the dark web. I’m biased, of course. I was a trail crew leader with an old Carter program, called the Young Adult Conservation Core. Most were working class kids who came together and found real community. Every twenty years they have reunions. They may not be fabulously wealthy but they all seem to be good citizens.

Okay let me say this to people who will say that I’m hopelessly naive. I know that I am. It wasn’t the hard work alone that made the YACCrs good citizens. DD had hard work, after all. But it was the security and community commitment that helped them be good people. There were men and women together and they learned to respect each other through their hard work. Would programs that offered this kind of pro social work and development possibly help stem the violence? I don’t know, but could someone at least discuss it … or something else other than gun bans?

But the fact is there are no easy answers. I honestly think love and kindness towards lonely and isolated people is the only real option that has much chance of success. It’s hard because many of them have chosen a path of hating people like me. DD called a radio news station after his arrest and apologized for “not killing more of them.” I get it. He was talking about people like me. I get that and in fact even if he doesn’t realize it now, it is too late for DD… but… DD wasn’t born that way. He became that way and why cant we give them some other options? We won’t save everyone. But we could offer a hand of respectful assistance to everyone.

And before you start penning your hateful screed to me. I will listen to what you say, but just know this, I’,m not going to take you on at your level. I will try and work the problem of how to get people to stop killing one another. I will try and preserve my humanity and while at the same time try and encourage you to preserve yours. But I’m not going to get in a public fight with you.

.

Wet day …plum blossoms

glittering with bright raindrops.

There is no anger.

Here is a recording of me reading some Henry Miller about his life in Big Sur in the fifties.

CORRECTION: in an earlier version of this blog, I described Catherine Atla incorrectly. Catherine Atla was a Koyukon Athabaskan Elder.

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Becoming Californian?

We lived out near Old Sitka Rocks in the North Pacific for more than forty years. We had a muddy lawn about fifteen feet up from the beach. One year during a famous Thanksgiving day storm waves broke right on the grass. But that only happened that one time. We had a tiny garden plot that eventually became overgrown, and a large patch of salmon berries right out in front. The berries wanted to take over the entire yard so had to be cut back every year. Brown bears roamed through the neighborhood. Our neighbor got a photo of a rather small brown bear, cross right into the berry patch, and once a very large brown bear swam across the inlet and came out right in our yard, shook herself and ambled up the drive way to make her way up the wild mountain on the other side of the road to town.

Today we live in a beautiful community designed for older people. The apartments are small but comfortable with a small back garden for each of the three hundred units. The units sit on about fifty acres of garden. A berm to protect against flooding surrounds the community. On top of the berm is a sprinkler line to protect against wildfire. Many people have dogs and it is expected that everyone will clean up after their dogs, and deposit the droppings in one of the many 20 gallon garbage cans along the side of the trails. The trails extend up and down the floor of the Carmel River valley and on these walks through parks, hillsides and one grown over golf course. On the trails you can see, hundreds of types of birds, deer, bobcats and occasionally a Mountain Lion. On our morning walks the most common animals I see are coveys of quail running along the top of the berm like a bunch of silent circus clowns, or we almost always see little cotton tail bunnies, either scampering into the brush or using their secrete powers of invisibility to stand stalk still, not even moving their eyeballs as Dot and I approach hoping they cannot be seen. I’ve seen no evidence of anybody hunting the quail or bunnies, though both are probably pretty tasty. It all seems very pastoral and civilized. Flowers grow in proliferation even in the winter. The pallet of color shows pink and vivid red.

I have long been interested in landscape…no… maybe it’s more accurate to say that I’ve always been interested in dread, and Alaska has more dread than California. There were more brown bears on the island where we lived than in all the rest of North America….. yes that is correct. More brown bears than the rest of all of North America. Brown bears are the only other large omnivore, other than human beings and this may account for the number of instances of physical conflict between bears and humans. Garbage Cans turned over, trips along spawning streams canceled because of bears. Occasionally there may be direct physical attacks. Though with the proliferation of powerful guns, the bears suffer more from physical threat than to the humans. Hunting is also a mainstay of peoples lives in Alaska. In Sitka we were allowed to kill six Sitka Blacktail Deer per year. The meat is clean and good tasting. And people enjoyed hunting them as well as consuming them. I counted myself as a deer hunter.. But like a lot of men who grow old hunting. I tired of the killing. That moment you bring a deer into your sights was no longer a thrill but more of a tense moment that was an outrider of grief. It didn’t usually last long. But it was there. Making a dead animal became hard. Making a dead animal into packets of healthy food, was not that hard.

I’d eat one of these fat quail which run around our housing complex.. I suppose I could kill one with a sling shot or even a spear. But I don’t think it would be culturally acceptable.

So… how does living in such a place now effect my writing? A. we seem to put death at much more of an arms length in California. Even though as Walt Whitman said, “There is no more death here than anywhere.” Its difficult to find empty units here in our community but you don’t have to wait long and something will come open. Bobcats have been known to eat pets. Mountain Lions have been known to eat hikers. Surfers love the waves at the near bye beaches but there are injuries and some fatalities. People here are obsessed with crime, and the fear of it. My daughter in law went to a community meeting in his neighborhood to put forward the idea of building a sidewalk along the side of the road up to a neighborhood park, and a comment came forward that building a sidewalk, would “encourage crime.” Just how was not clearly expressed but with was shared that the road in question met a larger road that ran fifteen miles to Salinas, which was understood to be a crime hub. The only point I’m trying to make is everywhere has scary things in or near. crime, death and serious injury is everywhere. Everywhere with boundaries has tension. It’s just in California, it seems to me, that there is quite an effort to avoid this particular fear, perhaps you might call it the fear of the wild.

My writing in Alaska was soaked as much as possible in wildness. Not just landscape but wild humanity as well. I felt the tension everywhere I went: Bears in the woods, or the undertow at the beach. You had to face it head on and be prepared. In California, my experience so far is we try and fence all the wildness out. Landscape is pastoral. Even Mountain Lions don’t seem to be a threat. If someone were to be killed by a big cat, it’s assumed that something would be done to make sure that wouldn’t happen again.

Will my writing become tame? Some might suggest that it wouldn’t hurt me if it did. Some people think I perhaps try and rub my readers nose’s in the randomness of violence. Like the Goth kid who goes to the Prom to show their distain for polite conventions I tend to act tougher than I am.. I don’t know. I don’t think I do that, try and rub your nose in horror. and gore… (good law firm name!) …but maybe.

I hope I will learn more about California and discover more of the wildness here.

Two wild turkeys running around down town Monterey. Not a brown bear but kind of scary looking.

Camilla flower

heavy in the winter rain

falling to the ground,.

Here is a recording of me reading five poems: some from California, some from Alaska. You can hear for yourself if leaving Alaska has made me soft.

Lucky Refugee

Yesterday at about two PM during the intermittent rain showers we were lazing around in out home by the Carmel River when we got word that Monterey County had issued another mandatory evacuation notice for our neighborhood. This starts a whole decision making tree that sends all our neighbors into a process of gathering to discuss, looking for more information, weighing options and calling friends and family for advice.

It’s my understanding that all this consideration stems from the meaning of “Notice”. If the notice said Mandatory Evacuation Order, there would not be any decision making to be made at all. We would leave or someone would come and take us out of the flooded area. But no… it’s a notice. So my neighbors met at the river itself to look and the levels… which were only two feet higher that it had been the day before. Our gage on the river itself said the water was six feet deep. Our neighborhood only really had to worry when the water was 11 feet deep. So lots of discussion under the bridge. Should we go… or not? We live in a little community of about three hundred condos that is surrounded by a berm to prevent flooding. The manager of our community leaves messages on his phone. We call that to help us in our decision making. The recorded message essentially says, “ We are perfectly safe and will remain so as long as the rain doesn’t do anything unforcast or unheard of…. BUT the County wants us to evacuate. The lovely man who came around to put a sign on our door knob that says “OCCUPIED” or “EVACUATED” said, “These signs just help us know who is still here … you know… in case it gets worse.” Then he paused and said, “Just keep and open mind about your choices.”

Now this may sound frustrating but it feels kind of civilized to me. “Go if you want, but we will look out for you if you decide to stay.” We are an over 55 community. There are several octogenarians living here. They are not moving quickly or easily. Jan, my bride does not move easily or quickly. Sometimes and in some circumstances moving hastily can be dangerous in itself. Driving on crowded rainy roads may be more dangerous than the prospect of the river flooding you out. Then there is the possibility that the future is unknowable and things could turn to shit and we’d be auditioning for local news footage over a crawl reading “Tragedy Comes For Seniors.” with film showing Jan carrying five copies of “Between Pacific Tides” through a muddy current while I’m carrying my mandolin over my head as Dot swims ahead of us.

We left. Why? It turns out it was a good excuse to go spend time with our grandson, who lives on high ground away from any river. We had no reason to think we would have been in any actual danger but why not drive about ten minutes through the light rain and watch a one year old frollic around his house with his loving parents? So we did. It really was a delightful situation. Who could turn us away? We are global warming refugees, for Pete’s sake. But in truth we were not dogged by danger. Now don’t get me wrong there were some people just north of us who were in real danger, but I don’t think we were. We were grandparents who wanted to visit their baby boy.

Carmel River at six feet.

The mood in Finn and Emily’s Codo was lovely. We ate Chinese food last night and ate a lemon meringue pie Jan had put the finishing touches on while I was loading the car. Dot played with Bonnie. Arthur ate raisins and played with both his grandma’s cain and her new “evacuation” walker which is smaller and lighter than her home walker. Finn and Jan played games, I watched an old Bob Hope movie with Arthur and played with his nesting Russian Dolls. As I said, civilized.

I did think about something while we were putting little women inside of big women and I was struck by how calm and loving this sheltering home was: Years ago when I was worried about my capability of being a parent a friend said, “Ah don’t fret, just love them. That’s it.” I’ve thought back on this advice over the years, and it does make sense… but still it begs the questions: is that feeling of love in your heart enough to make a place safe and warm. Does a loving family like ours really protect us from flood waters, or if you are sheltering in place in a home in Ukraine, does a loving little boy offering you a bite of his toasted cheese sandwich really protect your from falling Russian mortor shells?

Jan and Finn playing Qwix

Of course not, I am by nature a romantic. I come by it honestly my mother was a romantic. She believed in the goodness of love and kindness. But yet she was very fearful. She would have fled her home at the first breath of evacuation. She would have made her evacuation into an epic story. but consider this: when a community is threatened by war or actual floods, is the community’s first instinct to call out the romantic poets to keep us safe. Probably not.

But still I have almost recklessly happy this Martin Luther King weekend.to be with my family, and I am grateful to the actually brave men and women who do their best to keep us safe. I hope that the electrical workers repairing lines and the rescue workers trying to talk grumpy people into evacuating get to go home and tell their own epic stories. I hope all of them have at least some of the happiness that I’m feeling as a lucky refugee.

Arthur double fisting his toasted cheese.

Camilia’s in bloom

during the years biggist floods

while baby eats toast.

Here is a recording of me reading from Blown By The Same Wind.

A Letter From A Strange Land

Why on earth would someone who has lived for 45 years in one place pack up and leave to live in another region, another climate and another cultural network of giving and getting? Why would anyone want to move to a place where they would be a stranger?

Recently Jan and I did just that. We left Sitka, Alaska where had been for 45 years, and we moved to Carmel, California. The planning, packing sorting and shipping was an ordeal. I was scrupulous in throwing stuff out and giving it away at first but by the end I was dumping drawers of crap into boxes and taping them up to be loaded on a truck. What does John Straley crap look like, you wonder?

Stubby pencils, keychains with shark teeth, book bags from crime conferences, old pocket knives, dice that have fallen out of games, toy cars, five Mr. Potato Heads, Ulus, dozens of cords for electronics that I may or may not still own, guitar picks scattered throughout everything, miniature screw driver kits for fixing glasses with two drivers missing, possibly broken thermometers, pink pencil erasures, posters from book events, mis-matched swim fins, reviews I’ll never read again, ball point pens with the names of defunct law firms written on them, hundreds of business cards, video punch cards, coffee punch cards from cafe’s that have long ago shut down, envelopes that my friend Ray Troll scribbled little drawings of fish on. (I can’t throw those away can I?) Old ammunition from guns I got rid of, perfectly good half used post-it pads, fishing lures that no one uses anymore, and books, and books, and books. I gave away a full chord (4x4x8 feet) of books and I still have too many books, plus boxes and boxes of draft manuscripts which took me a weekend to burn, plus T-shirts from every possible charitable organization, burger joint, blues band, science conference, public Defender Agency gathering, rodeo association, or jails that I ever took a liking to. I got rid of five guitars, and I still have two.

Moving exposed me to an embarrassment of riches.

But why did we do it. We had to go to a new house because Jan’s Parkinson’s disease had reached a stage where we couldn’t accommodate the stairs and the sheds and the trail maintenance around our place. We needed access to our doctors and just got plain sick of traveling to appointments in Seattle. After a three day stay in the local Sitka hospital it was clear we needed to be near better facilities.

Live Oak leaves in winter.

And finally, to be truthful, the long winter weather was getting to me. Last winter I slipped on the ice way to many times. (and I’m the one without Parkinson’s) Two concussions, 22 stitches, two emergency room visits, just for me. So we sold our two waterfront houses and moved to a two bedroom condo in an over 55 facility called Hacienda Carmel.

But that’s not really the final thing. Our son Finn and his wife Emily, plus their son Arthur, live fifteen minutes away in Monterey and we get to see them about twice a week. Arthur turned one in November. Just seeing how he changes week to week could fill up an entire journal. This baby makes my heart sing. That’s a real reason for a move.

Yes my chest freezes up when I think of our old house. I miss the ocean and the wild mountain hillside like a missing a limb. I also miss playing music with my pals in Sitka. I miss having someone to call when I need help with chores, or need a ride to the auto repair shop. I miss knowing so many people in a small wintertime town. I miss being a part of a community: giving money to candidates I actually know, giving things to charities whose good work actually benefits friends and neighbors.

But those things come with time… hopefully. But now I’m a stranger, which isn’t a bad thing. It gives me a lot of new things to learn - flowers which bloom all year round and the names of new birds. Yesterday I saw a bobcat on my walk around the new community. That was thrilling. I’ve always wanted to live by a river and, with the heavy rains, many people go to the bridge or stand on the protective berm around our community and watch how much the river rises each day. We chat and we make vague promises to try to get together and I’m sure, given enough time, we will.

Jan, Finn ad Arthur making Cinnamon Rolls on Christmas morning in our new house.

Time with good health is not something to assume will be there when you need it, but being open to the possibility of time and new acquaintances is what hope really is, I suppose.

I decided to start writing in this blog again to combat the new feeling of loneliness, and to stay in touch with old friends. I’ll try to write here at least once a week. Next time I’ll catch you up on my new book, Blown By The Same Wind - you can check out some of the reviews on the main page here.

If you want to get to this page simply enter: johnstraley.com/blog I’m not sure I’m going to be using the mainstream platforms of social media anymore. I’m sick of the rhetoric there, but we will find a way to find each other… I’m sure of it.

Finn and Arthur out on a walk.

Warm rain and warm wind.

Baby dabbles in the mud

as I say his name.

jhs

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

A lovely morning in Monterey - blue sky, and the smell of Australian trees. The gulls here seem chill compared to gulls in Sitka, Alaska, standing on the rocks, checking out the world calmly, not flying frantically around looking looking looking for food.  A couple of hundred yards offshore there is a mob feeding on something just below the surface. The local park has a gathering of Canada geese and some coots. There are a few glimpses of hummingbirds, match heads flaring out of sight.  I drink my Mexican instant coffee sitting in my shirtsleeves in the sunshine, and for a moment I think I’m hallucinating.

I thought some of you might want to know more about the new book.  The title for SO FAR AND GOOD comes from the last of the poem Thinking For Berky by William Stafford. Google it up, it is a wonderful poem.  There is a kind of longing in it, a sympathy for people a little bit on the edge which I have always liked. I always start my novels by choosing a title, which I think is kind of backwards from the way most writers work.  When I got a little stuck while writing the draft I always went back to the feeling of the poem.  Love and loyalty really want to have center stage in this crime novel while the violent world presses in from all direction.

Weird… I know, but that’s how it works.  Cecil is in prison for the crimes he committed in BABY’S FIRST FELONY.  Cecil knows a lot of the people stuck inside with him from having represented them and many are dissatisfied.  This is what makes his jail experience a bit different than most.  He gets hooked up with a gangster who wants Cecil to teach him to talk to his parole board.  He wants to learn how to talk with white women for they are abundant among the decision makers in his life. When the language lessons go wrong it means that Cecil will catch a beating, but the Gangster is well connected.  Meanwhile on the outside, Cecil and Jane Marie’s daughter, Blossom, wants to be a private eye like her Pops.  She becomes the Nancy Drew on the outside, providing her dad with information. The case involves one of Blossom’s friends who finds out her parents are not her biological parents.  Why, what now, and what happened? It gets messy and of course Blossom ends up in danger. What can our hero do to save his daughter? Can his student help him out? Will he? What will he want in return?

Love, loyalty, Justice.  Like the hokey pokey: that’s what it’s all it’s about., SO FAR AND GOOD, works as a title, because in jail, “the good” seems so far away… but it’s always present somehow.

Pebble Beach sunshine: 

Grackles, swoop down on our table

to steal our Hors d'oeuvres.