At the Ballard Locks, wondrous things. The locks allow boats coming in from Puget Sound to reach Lake Union and Lake Washington, in Seattle. They've also been outfitted with a fish ladder for salmon, and several other mechanisms to let fish through the dam. Fish congregate there in large numbers, some stymied by the barrier, others on their way up or down the fish ladder.
We visited today in the clear sunlight. A kingfisher sat just below us on a concrete block as we walked along the dam. Twice, she dipped swiftly to the water's surface and returned with a tiny silvery fish in her long solid beak. Smack! and smack! she whacked the fish against the concrete, turning it in her beak, and smartly striking it again. Then she arranged it so the head would go down first, and swallowed it.
She wasn't the only creature hunting among the rich pickings at the locks. A small crowd had gathered to point at the smooth dark head of a small seal, protruding from the water in the middle of the canal about 100 feet away. He'd sink beneath the water, and around where he'd gone down, the fish would begin leaping, here, there and again, silver sparks jumping from the foamy water to escape.
Then the most wonderful thing of all. Where we stood, on a concrete walkway along the water, we could look straight down into the greenish canal, where the sun lit a channel of visibility down under the ripples. There, schools of fish swam, their heads pointing upstream into the current. Each only two to five inches long, I'd guess. Suddenly, as we watched, the sinuous form of the seal rose up from the green depths just below us. Then, for fifteen minutes, he hunted, first slowly swimming, then abruptly zooming forward as he'd zero in on a fish, twisting and reversing and swimming upside-down near the surface.
He'd vanish for a time, reappearing at the surface in the center of the canal. But as we looked down, we'd see the neatly lineated schools of fish suddenly roil and become confused. We knew, then, that the seal was near. And moments later he'd reappear, as close as if we were standing behind the barrier at a zoo.
We watched him for a long time, waiting for the fish to scatter into a starry mass, then watching the smooth predator fatly trail through, until he'd suddenly go slim and swift as a porpoise. His big flippers trailed him like oversized bedroom slippers.
I'd never seen a seal so nearby, nor in mid-hunt. This coast roils with life.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
McNaught
Today, in the late afternoon, I emerged from the office to seek the McNaught Comet. At first the sun still blazed brightly, half-sunk. I tromped down the sidewalk by the strip malls, the rushing traffic of 164th Street blasting by me on the snow- and dirt-crusted road. To the traffic light, from where I peered down the hill, to the horizon of tall pines, mountains behind them, and a clear and glowing sky. No comet.
I penetrated the parking lots. Walked past Walmart. Sought a clear view of the horizon, always seemingly obstructed by this or that - a building, a stand of pines. Circled a corporate complex inured from my entry by a fence. Trudged down a road towards more residential climes: found the entry to the corporation, and slipped past the fence, walking down the wooden steps leading to their levels and levels of parking lot cut into the hill, like a cake. I crept along the edge of a building, feet leaving marks in the snow behind me. Then I stood where the hill fell away. Beyond, a grassy, half-snowed field stretched, down towards the pines. A clear wide view of the horizon faced me. The sun had sunk completely; the mountains stood white and sharp against the golden sky.
No comet.
Cold now, disappointed, resigned, I started on my way back to the office. Perhaps I was facing the wrong stretch of sky. Up the layers of snowy parking lot, over the strips of grass alongside. Out onto the road again with its partial sidewalks. Back to 164th. I cast a glance behind me.
Comet.
There it was. Somehow - perhaps as the sun had sunk just so, with the sky deepening in color - it had come at last into relief. A blob of white asserted itself against the sky, with a hazed tail climbing up and a little to the side above it. Higher still, and well to the left, Venus glowed. I stood on the streetcorner amid the strip malls by the traffic light, and gazed at Comet McNaught in its high indifference.
So I crossed the street, plunged down again towards the flanking neighborhoods, and found an empty, dark parking lot wedged between the commercial and residential spaces. There, I could see the comet clearly, in the purpled and orange sky, mountains below it. No traffic obscured the view; just a few power lines; and I could stare quietly. The comet was not bright, nor enormous. But it was strange and distant, shining there, soft in the evening light, with its long history of omens and stories trailing behind it like its tail. It was somehow lovely to look at. I stared for a long time, until the horizon started to creep up toward it. Half-frozen, I went back, those few blocks to the narrow foot-beaten passage between low bushes that led to the office again.
I'm home now, resting, showered and tired. Last night I played ultimate out at a park near here, from 8 to 10 pm in the falling snow. The flakes were tiny dots, millions of them, so that a glance up presented the view with a complex star-scape of dotted, falling white. We ran about on the wet sand.
Omens and omens - a hummingbird's visit, the wandering bushtits, a clear pale comet. Travelers all.
I penetrated the parking lots. Walked past Walmart. Sought a clear view of the horizon, always seemingly obstructed by this or that - a building, a stand of pines. Circled a corporate complex inured from my entry by a fence. Trudged down a road towards more residential climes: found the entry to the corporation, and slipped past the fence, walking down the wooden steps leading to their levels and levels of parking lot cut into the hill, like a cake. I crept along the edge of a building, feet leaving marks in the snow behind me. Then I stood where the hill fell away. Beyond, a grassy, half-snowed field stretched, down towards the pines. A clear wide view of the horizon faced me. The sun had sunk completely; the mountains stood white and sharp against the golden sky.
No comet.
Cold now, disappointed, resigned, I started on my way back to the office. Perhaps I was facing the wrong stretch of sky. Up the layers of snowy parking lot, over the strips of grass alongside. Out onto the road again with its partial sidewalks. Back to 164th. I cast a glance behind me.
Comet.
There it was. Somehow - perhaps as the sun had sunk just so, with the sky deepening in color - it had come at last into relief. A blob of white asserted itself against the sky, with a hazed tail climbing up and a little to the side above it. Higher still, and well to the left, Venus glowed. I stood on the streetcorner amid the strip malls by the traffic light, and gazed at Comet McNaught in its high indifference.
So I crossed the street, plunged down again towards the flanking neighborhoods, and found an empty, dark parking lot wedged between the commercial and residential spaces. There, I could see the comet clearly, in the purpled and orange sky, mountains below it. No traffic obscured the view; just a few power lines; and I could stare quietly. The comet was not bright, nor enormous. But it was strange and distant, shining there, soft in the evening light, with its long history of omens and stories trailing behind it like its tail. It was somehow lovely to look at. I stared for a long time, until the horizon started to creep up toward it. Half-frozen, I went back, those few blocks to the narrow foot-beaten passage between low bushes that led to the office again.
I'm home now, resting, showered and tired. Last night I played ultimate out at a park near here, from 8 to 10 pm in the falling snow. The flakes were tiny dots, millions of them, so that a glance up presented the view with a complex star-scape of dotted, falling white. We ran about on the wet sand.
Omens and omens - a hummingbird's visit, the wandering bushtits, a clear pale comet. Travelers all.
Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Night creatures
Saturday night, went to Seahurst Park for the night creatures beach walk. The crusted stones; the wet dark sand, rippled water climbing to our feet under the lamps and flashlights as we walked. About thirty people present; assorted children; ten "beach naturalists" trained by the Seattle Aquarium. We walked with lights glowing, patches of dark people surrounding central burning lamps, in rings of illumination dotted across the beach.
The rocks covered in enormous barnacles. One of them, the elephant barnacle, looked so like an elephant that before I even knew its name I said, "It looks like an elephant." Fist-sized, protruding from the rock, its hard sharp snout poking into the damp open air. When we touched it, it clamped up tighter, lifting its strange nose closer to the top of the round opening of its tent-like covering.
Crabs in the sand, hunkered down, crouching as we came close. Empty moon snail shells; an occasional hermit crab's claws and staring frightened eyes from within the curve of a shell. The lovely smell of salt in the cold humid air. A wet, decaying scent, the firm sand underfoot taking our prints.
Worms draped about among the barnacles, long snot-textured black slimy thin things that looked like they couldn't be alive. A tiny gunnel, smaller than my pinky finger: a blackish-grey eel-like fish perched between crusts on the rock. It had a little eel's face and staring eyes.
Water creeping into my hiking boots. A Dungeness crab moulting against a rock, the extraodinarily large body beside the ridiculously small hull still dangling from its front. Under a rock, the tiny shore crabs, gray and square, scuttling rapidly into the sand. Anemones, green spotted blobs with a smear of pink where they'd retracted their tentacles, a clamped rosy mouth waiting to sprout a thousand impossible tentacle-arms like a medusa or a monster. We found one lying in the water, opened, and its tentacles adhered stickily to our fingers as we touched them. "They're injecting poison into you; that's what you're feeling," explained our naturalist. We cringed and withdrew.
What else? Strange chitons, like brown growths on the rock with furred edges. Then, after our walk, gathering at the firepit, sitting around it drinking coffee spiked with cocoa mix, and listening to the leader naturalists tell Indian folk tales. The story of how the animals brought fire to the humans in the beginning - Coyote and Crow and Chipmunk, with Chipmunk's long white stripes down his back where the witch guardians' claws scraped down his back when they nearly caught him as he fled. The tale of Salmon-Boy, who became a salmon and lived among the salmon people, then returned to his human people only long enough to teach them all he knew. When, in spring, the salmon returned along the river, he recognized his soul among them in an ancient, exhausted fish, so pale and worn he could almost see through it. So he thrust his spear into it, and at that moment, he died. His people sent his body out to sea, floating, to rejoin his animal people.
The rocks covered in enormous barnacles. One of them, the elephant barnacle, looked so like an elephant that before I even knew its name I said, "It looks like an elephant." Fist-sized, protruding from the rock, its hard sharp snout poking into the damp open air. When we touched it, it clamped up tighter, lifting its strange nose closer to the top of the round opening of its tent-like covering.
Crabs in the sand, hunkered down, crouching as we came close. Empty moon snail shells; an occasional hermit crab's claws and staring frightened eyes from within the curve of a shell. The lovely smell of salt in the cold humid air. A wet, decaying scent, the firm sand underfoot taking our prints.
Worms draped about among the barnacles, long snot-textured black slimy thin things that looked like they couldn't be alive. A tiny gunnel, smaller than my pinky finger: a blackish-grey eel-like fish perched between crusts on the rock. It had a little eel's face and staring eyes.
Water creeping into my hiking boots. A Dungeness crab moulting against a rock, the extraodinarily large body beside the ridiculously small hull still dangling from its front. Under a rock, the tiny shore crabs, gray and square, scuttling rapidly into the sand. Anemones, green spotted blobs with a smear of pink where they'd retracted their tentacles, a clamped rosy mouth waiting to sprout a thousand impossible tentacle-arms like a medusa or a monster. We found one lying in the water, opened, and its tentacles adhered stickily to our fingers as we touched them. "They're injecting poison into you; that's what you're feeling," explained our naturalist. We cringed and withdrew.
What else? Strange chitons, like brown growths on the rock with furred edges. Then, after our walk, gathering at the firepit, sitting around it drinking coffee spiked with cocoa mix, and listening to the leader naturalists tell Indian folk tales. The story of how the animals brought fire to the humans in the beginning - Coyote and Crow and Chipmunk, with Chipmunk's long white stripes down his back where the witch guardians' claws scraped down his back when they nearly caught him as he fled. The tale of Salmon-Boy, who became a salmon and lived among the salmon people, then returned to his human people only long enough to teach them all he knew. When, in spring, the salmon returned along the river, he recognized his soul among them in an ancient, exhausted fish, so pale and worn he could almost see through it. So he thrust his spear into it, and at that moment, he died. His people sent his body out to sea, floating, to rejoin his animal people.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Fremont News
The only news stand in Fremont is going out of business - my favorite one, on Fremont Avenue. It's a hole-in-the-wall kind of place. Usually, a cashier with multiple piercings sits at the front counter, bent over some magazine or another. Further in, the rabbit hole seems to burrow into its space among the shops. Magazines crowd the stands, turning their colorful faces outward. I usually haunt the poetry journal section, but nearer the front, newspapers also breath their papery gray scent into the air. At the back, a cheerful scatter of postcards, greeting cards, journals and other miscellaneous paraphenalia decorates the walls.
It is typically anachronistic of me to be entering print journalism now, when all of print media seems at the edge of total collapse, like a tired, wan old giant out of some fairy story. I told the cashier how sorry I was to learn they're going out of business. He, a sharp-faced, tall gnome with a bristly blond beard and spikey blond hair, looked at me with brilliant blue eyes and said, "Me too!"
We talked awhile. The internet, he said. Competition, he said. 100 foreign-language newspapers we used to carry, he said, down to eight, now. They're one of the last news stands in Seattle, with one surviving shop on Broadway; Bulldog, the University news stand, once had a Broadway branch, but they closed that, and now only have their little shop on University Ave - the Ave, as students say.
I don't know how people can give up the scent, the feel, of a solid book or newspaper or magazine in their hands. There's such spectacular romance to print. The internet sucks the life out of literature, consumes the reality of it, and turns its texture to a sort of evanescent pillar of air, substanceless.
"For me, it's heartbreaking," said my thin-faced elf, leaning down to me where I stood a step lower than him.
Me too.
It is typically anachronistic of me to be entering print journalism now, when all of print media seems at the edge of total collapse, like a tired, wan old giant out of some fairy story. I told the cashier how sorry I was to learn they're going out of business. He, a sharp-faced, tall gnome with a bristly blond beard and spikey blond hair, looked at me with brilliant blue eyes and said, "Me too!"
We talked awhile. The internet, he said. Competition, he said. 100 foreign-language newspapers we used to carry, he said, down to eight, now. They're one of the last news stands in Seattle, with one surviving shop on Broadway; Bulldog, the University news stand, once had a Broadway branch, but they closed that, and now only have their little shop on University Ave - the Ave, as students say.
I don't know how people can give up the scent, the feel, of a solid book or newspaper or magazine in their hands. There's such spectacular romance to print. The internet sucks the life out of literature, consumes the reality of it, and turns its texture to a sort of evanescent pillar of air, substanceless.
"For me, it's heartbreaking," said my thin-faced elf, leaning down to me where I stood a step lower than him.
Me too.
Thursday, November 02, 2006
Birthday guests
The tiny bushtits gather every morning among the oblong yellow leaves and thin branches outside our kitchen window. They make a miniature, merry band of thieves, small as grey gnats. They're the same color as the rain. Ignoring me completely as they explore, their nubby beaks poking from round faces, they hang upside-down on their twig legs. A flock of elves.
Meanwhile, I sit at the kitchen table, writing articles. A big bouquet of roses, interspersed with clustered white pinks and crowned by irises, leans over my laptop as I type. I bought it for Paul's birthday. I also made us a steaming white bean soup for a birthday dinner, speckled with shredded parmesan, served with wine and bread and a leafy salad.
Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A book of verse, a flask of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And wilderness is paradise enow.
-Omar Kayyam
Three weeks ago, an Anna's hummingbird visited me here, just in time for my own birthday. She sat on a twig in her green coat, complete with shimmering lapels, her jaunty beak thrusting upward like a sword. Hummingbirds live here in Washington State year round, according to my Sibley's guide to birds.
So we have our little army of visiting winged creatures, even here in the center of town. Perched above the city like this among the tree branches, level with neighboring rooftops in the rain, I feel separate and magical. Cold grey autumn has settled in, and its tiny pilgrims keep coming by.
Meanwhile, I sit at the kitchen table, writing articles. A big bouquet of roses, interspersed with clustered white pinks and crowned by irises, leans over my laptop as I type. I bought it for Paul's birthday. I also made us a steaming white bean soup for a birthday dinner, speckled with shredded parmesan, served with wine and bread and a leafy salad.
Here with a loaf of bread beneath the bough,
A book of verse, a flask of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness
And wilderness is paradise enow.
-Omar Kayyam
Three weeks ago, an Anna's hummingbird visited me here, just in time for my own birthday. She sat on a twig in her green coat, complete with shimmering lapels, her jaunty beak thrusting upward like a sword. Hummingbirds live here in Washington State year round, according to my Sibley's guide to birds.
So we have our little army of visiting winged creatures, even here in the center of town. Perched above the city like this among the tree branches, level with neighboring rooftops in the rain, I feel separate and magical. Cold grey autumn has settled in, and its tiny pilgrims keep coming by.
Tuesday, October 03, 2006
elegy for September
Now that I've lived here a month, the idea of pining after unreachable blackberries seems as ridiculous as the time the sunlight on Point Reyes shocked me after a night of rain.
September passed in a wash of sunlight. For a few days, here and there, Seattle lived up to its reputation and sat morosely in a chill drizzle. But so far, for the most part, the expected winter rains have held off.
I ate up all the sunlight that I could, walking to Gasworks Park every couple of days, and filling my palms with the blackberries that grow here like weeds. Fat, purple blackberries so ripe they nearly melted off the branches. They stained my fingers and the white bowl I poured them into when I brought a shirt-full of them home, one afternoon.
Under Aurora Bridge the water glittered as the sun sank down, slowly turning the sky gold, then pink, then quiet purple. The skyscrapers of Seattle's downtown hold the light longer than the low green hills where white houses cluster into neighborhoods. They glow a lavendar-tinged gold: straightbacked, flatfaced, a blind and shining gaze over the water.
Now, October's begun at last. Delicious October, the month of leaves, of the early slow death that brings no grief. October with its garish melancholy. It delights me.
September passed in a wash of sunlight. For a few days, here and there, Seattle lived up to its reputation and sat morosely in a chill drizzle. But so far, for the most part, the expected winter rains have held off.
I ate up all the sunlight that I could, walking to Gasworks Park every couple of days, and filling my palms with the blackberries that grow here like weeds. Fat, purple blackberries so ripe they nearly melted off the branches. They stained my fingers and the white bowl I poured them into when I brought a shirt-full of them home, one afternoon.
Under Aurora Bridge the water glittered as the sun sank down, slowly turning the sky gold, then pink, then quiet purple. The skyscrapers of Seattle's downtown hold the light longer than the low green hills where white houses cluster into neighborhoods. They glow a lavendar-tinged gold: straightbacked, flatfaced, a blind and shining gaze over the water.
Now, October's begun at last. Delicious October, the month of leaves, of the early slow death that brings no grief. October with its garish melancholy. It delights me.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
This parched flatland
Aug. 30, 2006
Badlands. Spires of rock, the green and grey siltstones and ribbons of shale. The mounds of red and yellow paleosol.
Everywhere the lunar surroundings, the climbing towers, the thin cliff faces.
Junipers clustered in the narrow valleys; and then, beyond, the flat prairie, cut by rock. Plateaus of green amid the sliced, eroded landscape.
Bison dark and hunched on the green landscape below. The upper plain, where prairie dogs stood straight as reeds, or rested in yoga pose, rounded bodies relaxed atop their burrows with small feet sticking out. From time to time they kicked back their little squirreline heads and yelped out shrill reasonless calls, paws outstretched, resting on their black-tipped short tails.
The road wound up through the strange rock formations. Around each bend a new landscape, a series of wrinkled hills like elephant's feet, or stacked spires like icing. All ashen grey, cut by long, even red-beds, which formed recognizable and perfectly flat lines stretching across the shattered landscape.
A few pronghorns; horned larks; a brown thrasher among the junipers. Turkey vultures floating above the backbone of the hills.
And sunlight, evening light gradually dropping down, clear and still and quiet, with the prairie wind blowing harsh against the car doors as we paused, and drove on, and paused again, to look out from under our bucket hats at the lonely, fierce landscape.
Now I'm here in the motel room outside Rapid City. Remembering the day, snippets of it -- like the tiny tumbledown gas station with its gutted atmosphere. "Hilltop," it was called; it looked as though it had been bombed; a faded sign with peeling paint proclaimed a mostly effaced welcome; canvas covered the interiors of the windows, and the sidedoors were broken and abandoned. The signs over the gas pumps flapped in a hot, dry wind. I entered with trepidation.
But within, the shelves were cheerfully stocked, and a middle-aged woman sat placidly reading at the cash register, and offered me a friendly hello. Outside, the wind shoved the door shut so hard it was tough to open. "Oh, about once a week," said the woman mildly, when I asked how often it was so windy.
"Hilltop" formed a mere mound above the surrounding flat, commanding a view of the dried landscape, that has suffered record drought, this summer.
South Dakota - this is it, this parched flatland, cut by the abrupt crumples and valleys of the Badlands.
Badlands. Spires of rock, the green and grey siltstones and ribbons of shale. The mounds of red and yellow paleosol.
Everywhere the lunar surroundings, the climbing towers, the thin cliff faces.
Junipers clustered in the narrow valleys; and then, beyond, the flat prairie, cut by rock. Plateaus of green amid the sliced, eroded landscape.
Bison dark and hunched on the green landscape below. The upper plain, where prairie dogs stood straight as reeds, or rested in yoga pose, rounded bodies relaxed atop their burrows with small feet sticking out. From time to time they kicked back their little squirreline heads and yelped out shrill reasonless calls, paws outstretched, resting on their black-tipped short tails.
The road wound up through the strange rock formations. Around each bend a new landscape, a series of wrinkled hills like elephant's feet, or stacked spires like icing. All ashen grey, cut by long, even red-beds, which formed recognizable and perfectly flat lines stretching across the shattered landscape.
A few pronghorns; horned larks; a brown thrasher among the junipers. Turkey vultures floating above the backbone of the hills.
And sunlight, evening light gradually dropping down, clear and still and quiet, with the prairie wind blowing harsh against the car doors as we paused, and drove on, and paused again, to look out from under our bucket hats at the lonely, fierce landscape.
Now I'm here in the motel room outside Rapid City. Remembering the day, snippets of it -- like the tiny tumbledown gas station with its gutted atmosphere. "Hilltop," it was called; it looked as though it had been bombed; a faded sign with peeling paint proclaimed a mostly effaced welcome; canvas covered the interiors of the windows, and the sidedoors were broken and abandoned. The signs over the gas pumps flapped in a hot, dry wind. I entered with trepidation.
But within, the shelves were cheerfully stocked, and a middle-aged woman sat placidly reading at the cash register, and offered me a friendly hello. Outside, the wind shoved the door shut so hard it was tough to open. "Oh, about once a week," said the woman mildly, when I asked how often it was so windy.
"Hilltop" formed a mere mound above the surrounding flat, commanding a view of the dried landscape, that has suffered record drought, this summer.
South Dakota - this is it, this parched flatland, cut by the abrupt crumples and valleys of the Badlands.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Westward to Seattle
Our new apartment, just north of the center of Fremont, Seattle, perches two stories above the street on the windowed west side, overlooking a steep hillslope. On the east side, the building's pushed into the hill, so that the door to that side opens one story below ground level, and one must mount stairs to reach the parking lot. Along the third, south side, our apartment's windows look out on the upwards slope. Trees and thick, spiny blackberry bushes grow there, and deeply colored ripe blackberries tempt the eye, mostly beyond reach, or outside windowscreens that do not open.
I walked around the building today, to see if I could scale the southeast fence that would have allowed access to the blackberries. Vines overgrow the access, alongside signs that proclaim "DO NOT TRESPASS". I would, though, if it weren't for my knee, injured playing ultimate earlier this summer. Perhaps Paul will crawl over for me.
We arrived here last Wednesday after a cross-country drive, stopping in the Badlands, Custer State Park in South Dakota, Yellowstone, and the Cascades in Washington. We saw wildlife: bison walking along the road in the prairieland of Custer State Park, flanking our car. We sat motionless and breathless as that vast bulk of animals passed - twenty of them or so, with calves. The bull brought up the rear, ruffed by dark brown fur, his head hanging enormous on that hump-shouldered frame, his eyes deep-set and calm.
In Yellowstone, on the steep slopes of Dunraven Pass, we stopped amid a traffic jam. Fifty onlookers crowded the narrow pass, binoculars or long-lensed cameras pressed to their eyes. A mama black bear and two cubs wandered just below, no further than 100 meters from us, wandering the steep pine woodlands in search of pinecones. One baby, about as big as a - a what? a coffee table? a golden retriever? so hard to define that rotund bulk of childish fur, black, endearing and playful with nose and ears sticking out - stopped atop a boulder with a big cone between his paws, chewing on it with the gleeful, unselfconscious and awkward delight of childhood. The mama flopped on her back awhile to relax and scratch her chest.
And then the wolf, who lay in spotting-scope range, barely visible in the shadows of the scraggly trees in the prairie down the hill. We waited until at last he rose. After a moment's stately retreat, he turned, and I had an instant's glimpse of his grey profile, tongue lolling, body rangy and lean. Then he vanished up the hill, where, onlookers told me, the rest of his pack waited. Patient watchers had seen the whole pack earlier in the morning, both pups and adults, but Paul and I arrived only ten minutes too late to spot them.
We spent two and a half days in Yellowstone, camping at the crowded but relaxed campsites in the cold nights. In the days, we took walks through the backcountry - past an alpine lake where gilled salamanders swam, up the slopes of Mt. Washburn, and along the heat-soaked canyon of the Yellowstone River below Tower Falls. Around us, the yellow and white and red rocks - the osprey sailing and screaming - the pines clinging to their cones and their stiff needles in the dry weather. One evening, we began a walk along the top of the canyon. But a dry and ominous fog swept in, reminiscent of smog and smelling of ash: the lingering breath of a forest fire in the northeast of Yellowstone. We had to turn back, since we didn't know where the fire was until we asked a waitress about it back at Roosevelt Lodge.
I should mention, too, the geysers and pools. Bright waters, blue and green, surreal and smoking, covered in fog. The bursting mud-pits, bubbling and spitting, as though some beast lay uneasily sleeping beneath. Dragon's Mouth Spring, exhaling hot steam with a dragon-like roar. Fountain Geyser, which enthusiastically and impressively spouted a huge tower water for minutes on end, repeatedly splashing us where we stood on the walkway. It stood near little Jet, which spat water from small but artistic calcite spouts. And Grand Prismatic Pool, deep and shrouded, blue and red like a baleful eye, its rainbow of colors reflected in the fog overlying it.
Now, after the last of the journey through leaning mountains, after our picnic along the cliffs beside the shining Madison River rippling over the rocks, and after the cool moist stillness of the mossed Cascades, I sit in the sunlight in our living room. And it's time for dinner, so I'll bring this entry to a close.
I walked around the building today, to see if I could scale the southeast fence that would have allowed access to the blackberries. Vines overgrow the access, alongside signs that proclaim "DO NOT TRESPASS". I would, though, if it weren't for my knee, injured playing ultimate earlier this summer. Perhaps Paul will crawl over for me.
We arrived here last Wednesday after a cross-country drive, stopping in the Badlands, Custer State Park in South Dakota, Yellowstone, and the Cascades in Washington. We saw wildlife: bison walking along the road in the prairieland of Custer State Park, flanking our car. We sat motionless and breathless as that vast bulk of animals passed - twenty of them or so, with calves. The bull brought up the rear, ruffed by dark brown fur, his head hanging enormous on that hump-shouldered frame, his eyes deep-set and calm.
In Yellowstone, on the steep slopes of Dunraven Pass, we stopped amid a traffic jam. Fifty onlookers crowded the narrow pass, binoculars or long-lensed cameras pressed to their eyes. A mama black bear and two cubs wandered just below, no further than 100 meters from us, wandering the steep pine woodlands in search of pinecones. One baby, about as big as a - a what? a coffee table? a golden retriever? so hard to define that rotund bulk of childish fur, black, endearing and playful with nose and ears sticking out - stopped atop a boulder with a big cone between his paws, chewing on it with the gleeful, unselfconscious and awkward delight of childhood. The mama flopped on her back awhile to relax and scratch her chest.
And then the wolf, who lay in spotting-scope range, barely visible in the shadows of the scraggly trees in the prairie down the hill. We waited until at last he rose. After a moment's stately retreat, he turned, and I had an instant's glimpse of his grey profile, tongue lolling, body rangy and lean. Then he vanished up the hill, where, onlookers told me, the rest of his pack waited. Patient watchers had seen the whole pack earlier in the morning, both pups and adults, but Paul and I arrived only ten minutes too late to spot them.
We spent two and a half days in Yellowstone, camping at the crowded but relaxed campsites in the cold nights. In the days, we took walks through the backcountry - past an alpine lake where gilled salamanders swam, up the slopes of Mt. Washburn, and along the heat-soaked canyon of the Yellowstone River below Tower Falls. Around us, the yellow and white and red rocks - the osprey sailing and screaming - the pines clinging to their cones and their stiff needles in the dry weather. One evening, we began a walk along the top of the canyon. But a dry and ominous fog swept in, reminiscent of smog and smelling of ash: the lingering breath of a forest fire in the northeast of Yellowstone. We had to turn back, since we didn't know where the fire was until we asked a waitress about it back at Roosevelt Lodge.
I should mention, too, the geysers and pools. Bright waters, blue and green, surreal and smoking, covered in fog. The bursting mud-pits, bubbling and spitting, as though some beast lay uneasily sleeping beneath. Dragon's Mouth Spring, exhaling hot steam with a dragon-like roar. Fountain Geyser, which enthusiastically and impressively spouted a huge tower water for minutes on end, repeatedly splashing us where we stood on the walkway. It stood near little Jet, which spat water from small but artistic calcite spouts. And Grand Prismatic Pool, deep and shrouded, blue and red like a baleful eye, its rainbow of colors reflected in the fog overlying it.
Now, after the last of the journey through leaning mountains, after our picnic along the cliffs beside the shining Madison River rippling over the rocks, and after the cool moist stillness of the mossed Cascades, I sit in the sunlight in our living room. And it's time for dinner, so I'll bring this entry to a close.
Thursday, June 08, 2006
British scrapbook
The Lakes
Today the grace of the fells. Mist rising from the valleys in torn sheets, a steady rain. The cave at Ryland Water, the vast arc of it, angles of shale protruding from the ceiling and the walls of its interior. The dimness in its inner reaches, water dripping from above, the pool of dank water at the entrance.
Bluebells in carpet over the hills and in the forest, where vast, thick trees wound their roots through eroding soil, contorted hands holding the landscape together. A solitary flowering rhododendron on the hill, glowing white, contrasting to the straight pines behind it black with water. We walked, rain slowly soaking us through, breathing in the wet England air. Paused, at one point when the road met us, at a small bus stop, temporary shelter under concrete on a bench, where we had a cup of tea from the flask and blocks of gingerbread from Grasmere. Attracted amused stares from within passing cars as we sat soddenly with our plastic mugs.
Outside, now, a fog hangs over the dark fields. The owls stopped calling when I went out - the near ones, at least - far off, the clear whinny of a different type of owl continued to softly ornament the night. But I found one nonetheless, a pale smudge in my torchlight, high up and indistinct in a tree.
The creek behind our tent talks quietly. The low bleat of a mother sheep sounds over the higher one of her lamb. Paul's soft breathing purrs in the night.
This countryside is calm and yet magical, here in the Lake District. The fields roll out tamely, the town sits quaint (an American word, objects Paul) and cozy by the lake. Flowers bloom in the flowerboxes. But the surrounding rock lifts fiercely into these severe flanking fells. The lake lies black and secretive, as though cloaking an Arthurian legend. The woodlands hold their still and separate enchantment, conjured into silence on a secret they would speak. The heights are umber and dull red, the lakeshores rocky. A heathery yellow-flowered bush clings to the slopes and banks in hardy tangles.
And so I crawl back into the inner room of the tent, from this enclosed awning where I sit now in a camp chair and write. I close my eyes among the night sounds. I listen to their promises, their voices, murmuring their spells and incantations, speaking to me softly of my dreams.
~
Coniston Old Man, the destination of today. We hiked up on the footpath past the dry stone walls; paused for coffee by a little glittering creek among the grass and low trees. In the lower country, we passed cottages and small farms, the path wending up through the green lowlands. Sycamores and feathery pines leaned up above us, greening with spring.
The mountain itself had windy, bare slopes, covered in grass, with slate bedrock thrusting up. I wrote:
We walked with I- and L-, Paul's parents, and L- kept us going at a good clip, though with frequent stops for tea and coffee from the thermoses of hot water, and for banana cake and sandwiches and flapjacks and chocolate biscuits. Most of the time, though, she marched a little ways ahead of us, her body compact and economical in blue slacks and boots, two aluminum walking sticks keeping her steady.
Boulders and talus on the slopes, the bigger ones "like a giant had thrown them downslope as a game," said Paul; the streams on the far side of the summit tumbling down a steeper slope and making little waterfalls in the brilliantly sunny day. Our vista from the top more clear, said Paul, than he'd ever seen it. I- gloated, pointed out various landmarks at distance - the nuclear power plant, the miniature Eiffel Tower lookalike on the point going out to sea. I- likes details, and chattered all while I walked near him, a running commentary on technical, local, and cultural curiosities.
We thumped on down the steep mountainside. The ground, either hummocked grass or broken rock, took concentration to navigate. We descending to Levers Tarn, pausing at the dam for tea and cake and crisps. Below, the streams gathered together beside a still-working mine, glinting greenish with the copper in the water, the stream boulders stained white. Sheep browsed and bleated alongside.
Down in the farm fields, Paul and I stopped to search for a woodpecker on a knoll of trees: several enormous ancient beeches among a stand of slimmer, though still mature and elegant, other trees. The woodpecker's hammering had rung out over the fields, arresting another couple on the path, passers by. "That's not too common, is it?" said the fellow, as he stopped us to point out the sound. So Paul and I went chasing, with my binoculars. On the knoll itself, the woodpecker went silent when we approached, and remained stubbornly so, except once, briefly, to tease us. We could not find it.
A few details: Coniston Old Man, 803 meters. The yellow-flowered bush that grows abundant on the lower slopes and by Coniston water: gorse, otherwise known as furze, whose flowers have an odor reminiscent of coconut. The English robin: sings like a song sparrow or a goldfinch, a rapid, varied bubbling and chattering call. Very territorial, L- tells me. A few of them peered at us with sprightly eyes from perches on the wire fences as we came back to camp.
~
Yorkshire
Slugs and snails. Of various sizes, though the most impressive ones are the black slugs, as long as my palm and as thick as my pinky finger, shiny and ribbed; as well as the largest snails, big colorful knots of spiraled shell, the muscular beasts within slinking with determination along the leaves. Both are abundant here. A constant commentary of "look out! slug" or "another one" accompanied our walk along the muddy footpath, our boots sliding as we made our way with deep descending forest on one side and the grassy farm fields on the other. They thrive on the wet that is among this country's most fundamental features.
Meanwhile, out over the fields, pheasants, their creaking grate call periodically screeching into the grey afternoon air. And sheep, of course, dotting the slopes of the hills, and their voices carrying up - low bleats of the ewes, and the higher replies of their lambs.
We wended through the fields and through woodland, dipping and rising with the countryside, and dropping down at last to the hedgerow lined farm road. Then spent a few hours at the Rivaulx Abbey. Ancient stone, great arches high overhead, a construction from the 1100's, a half-unbelievable feat.
Then slugs and snails again. And a pint, at the pub.
~
Wales
The hills rose about us to either side as we made our way down the footpath, that ran through the cut alongside a brook and a marsh. We passed through a tangled forest, mossy, dark and littered with dank, fallen trees. Mirkwood. Near the sea the landscape opened again - open coastal heath in the fading evening, and a wooden gate. "Do not feed or approach the ponies," it read. "Welsh mountain ponies are chosen for this area especially for their hardy nature, and they thrive on the coastal grasses that make up their diet. Their grazing helps maintain the native coastal vegetation in a natural way."
Their heads rose up at the hilltop as we walked on, three proud necks, then four, then a group of them, pacing along the path. We walked up the hillside, following.
And such a landscape they led us to. Cliffs down to the sea, cloaked by flowers. Deep inlets, wave-cut caves into the flat planes of shale. We trailed the ponies along the footpath, watching them groom each other, vie for dominance, and canter through the heath, their hooves pounding. The sea crawled into the gaps between the cliffs, dark and greenish and white with surf. The farther promontories of the peninsula hulked round and dim in the humid air.
Night followed slowly on, sinking down over the rise; a scattered twinkling of lights briefly visible of the far town. Then we walked back along the footpath as the moon rose. It left a long white streak on the water, illuminating a path to us from a great jutting rock in the sea, as though an ancient civilization had designed it - to measure this day of the calendar, this Welsh spring, this darkening moment by the surf and by the tossing, thundering sprytes of the Welsh ponies.
We descended into the dim, leaving behind that lonely landscape. The bats flitted on over us, and we moved into a deep heavy dusk, between the trees that swallowed us again.
Today the grace of the fells. Mist rising from the valleys in torn sheets, a steady rain. The cave at Ryland Water, the vast arc of it, angles of shale protruding from the ceiling and the walls of its interior. The dimness in its inner reaches, water dripping from above, the pool of dank water at the entrance.
Bluebells in carpet over the hills and in the forest, where vast, thick trees wound their roots through eroding soil, contorted hands holding the landscape together. A solitary flowering rhododendron on the hill, glowing white, contrasting to the straight pines behind it black with water. We walked, rain slowly soaking us through, breathing in the wet England air. Paused, at one point when the road met us, at a small bus stop, temporary shelter under concrete on a bench, where we had a cup of tea from the flask and blocks of gingerbread from Grasmere. Attracted amused stares from within passing cars as we sat soddenly with our plastic mugs.
Outside, now, a fog hangs over the dark fields. The owls stopped calling when I went out - the near ones, at least - far off, the clear whinny of a different type of owl continued to softly ornament the night. But I found one nonetheless, a pale smudge in my torchlight, high up and indistinct in a tree.
The creek behind our tent talks quietly. The low bleat of a mother sheep sounds over the higher one of her lamb. Paul's soft breathing purrs in the night.
This countryside is calm and yet magical, here in the Lake District. The fields roll out tamely, the town sits quaint (an American word, objects Paul) and cozy by the lake. Flowers bloom in the flowerboxes. But the surrounding rock lifts fiercely into these severe flanking fells. The lake lies black and secretive, as though cloaking an Arthurian legend. The woodlands hold their still and separate enchantment, conjured into silence on a secret they would speak. The heights are umber and dull red, the lakeshores rocky. A heathery yellow-flowered bush clings to the slopes and banks in hardy tangles.
And so I crawl back into the inner room of the tent, from this enclosed awning where I sit now in a camp chair and write. I close my eyes among the night sounds. I listen to their promises, their voices, murmuring their spells and incantations, speaking to me softly of my dreams.
Coniston Old Man, the destination of today. We hiked up on the footpath past the dry stone walls; paused for coffee by a little glittering creek among the grass and low trees. In the lower country, we passed cottages and small farms, the path wending up through the green lowlands. Sycamores and feathery pines leaned up above us, greening with spring.
The mountain itself had windy, bare slopes, covered in grass, with slate bedrock thrusting up. I wrote:
Climbing Old Man Coniston, Lake District, England
Green slopes cut by chattering streams, the flat planes of bedrock slate jutting up among uneven hills
Very few trees here at altitude, except in the stream cuts, though these are stunted and wizened from wind.
Goatswater Tarn - small dark blue lake surrounded by steep talus-covered slopes. Looming over the far slope: Dow Crag (see photos)
We walked with I- and L-, Paul's parents, and L- kept us going at a good clip, though with frequent stops for tea and coffee from the thermoses of hot water, and for banana cake and sandwiches and flapjacks and chocolate biscuits. Most of the time, though, she marched a little ways ahead of us, her body compact and economical in blue slacks and boots, two aluminum walking sticks keeping her steady.
Boulders and talus on the slopes, the bigger ones "like a giant had thrown them downslope as a game," said Paul; the streams on the far side of the summit tumbling down a steeper slope and making little waterfalls in the brilliantly sunny day. Our vista from the top more clear, said Paul, than he'd ever seen it. I- gloated, pointed out various landmarks at distance - the nuclear power plant, the miniature Eiffel Tower lookalike on the point going out to sea. I- likes details, and chattered all while I walked near him, a running commentary on technical, local, and cultural curiosities.
We thumped on down the steep mountainside. The ground, either hummocked grass or broken rock, took concentration to navigate. We descending to Levers Tarn, pausing at the dam for tea and cake and crisps. Below, the streams gathered together beside a still-working mine, glinting greenish with the copper in the water, the stream boulders stained white. Sheep browsed and bleated alongside.
Down in the farm fields, Paul and I stopped to search for a woodpecker on a knoll of trees: several enormous ancient beeches among a stand of slimmer, though still mature and elegant, other trees. The woodpecker's hammering had rung out over the fields, arresting another couple on the path, passers by. "That's not too common, is it?" said the fellow, as he stopped us to point out the sound. So Paul and I went chasing, with my binoculars. On the knoll itself, the woodpecker went silent when we approached, and remained stubbornly so, except once, briefly, to tease us. We could not find it.
A few details: Coniston Old Man, 803 meters. The yellow-flowered bush that grows abundant on the lower slopes and by Coniston water: gorse, otherwise known as furze, whose flowers have an odor reminiscent of coconut. The English robin: sings like a song sparrow or a goldfinch, a rapid, varied bubbling and chattering call. Very territorial, L- tells me. A few of them peered at us with sprightly eyes from perches on the wire fences as we came back to camp.
Yorkshire
Slugs and snails. Of various sizes, though the most impressive ones are the black slugs, as long as my palm and as thick as my pinky finger, shiny and ribbed; as well as the largest snails, big colorful knots of spiraled shell, the muscular beasts within slinking with determination along the leaves. Both are abundant here. A constant commentary of "look out! slug" or "another one" accompanied our walk along the muddy footpath, our boots sliding as we made our way with deep descending forest on one side and the grassy farm fields on the other. They thrive on the wet that is among this country's most fundamental features.
Meanwhile, out over the fields, pheasants, their creaking grate call periodically screeching into the grey afternoon air. And sheep, of course, dotting the slopes of the hills, and their voices carrying up - low bleats of the ewes, and the higher replies of their lambs.
We wended through the fields and through woodland, dipping and rising with the countryside, and dropping down at last to the hedgerow lined farm road. Then spent a few hours at the Rivaulx Abbey. Ancient stone, great arches high overhead, a construction from the 1100's, a half-unbelievable feat.
Then slugs and snails again. And a pint, at the pub.
Wales
The hills rose about us to either side as we made our way down the footpath, that ran through the cut alongside a brook and a marsh. We passed through a tangled forest, mossy, dark and littered with dank, fallen trees. Mirkwood. Near the sea the landscape opened again - open coastal heath in the fading evening, and a wooden gate. "Do not feed or approach the ponies," it read. "Welsh mountain ponies are chosen for this area especially for their hardy nature, and they thrive on the coastal grasses that make up their diet. Their grazing helps maintain the native coastal vegetation in a natural way."
Their heads rose up at the hilltop as we walked on, three proud necks, then four, then a group of them, pacing along the path. We walked up the hillside, following.
And such a landscape they led us to. Cliffs down to the sea, cloaked by flowers. Deep inlets, wave-cut caves into the flat planes of shale. We trailed the ponies along the footpath, watching them groom each other, vie for dominance, and canter through the heath, their hooves pounding. The sea crawled into the gaps between the cliffs, dark and greenish and white with surf. The farther promontories of the peninsula hulked round and dim in the humid air.
Night followed slowly on, sinking down over the rise; a scattered twinkling of lights briefly visible of the far town. Then we walked back along the footpath as the moon rose. It left a long white streak on the water, illuminating a path to us from a great jutting rock in the sea, as though an ancient civilization had designed it - to measure this day of the calendar, this Welsh spring, this darkening moment by the surf and by the tossing, thundering sprytes of the Welsh ponies.
We descended into the dim, leaving behind that lonely landscape. The bats flitted on over us, and we moved into a deep heavy dusk, between the trees that swallowed us again.
Friday, April 14, 2006
News Haven and Nursery Rhymes
What is it about putting all your papers in filing cabinets that makes you feel like your whole brain has been reorganized, neatly slipped into colorful folders? Tax time has come and gone in a far more forgiving fashion than expected. Life is slowly becoming more organized.
New Haven. The city's gray today. Outside our apartment, past the the yellow-flowered curtains hanging at the windows, the leaves are just budding on the maples. The Planned Parenthood office, where protesters like to hang out on the curb Saturday mornings until the police show up, sits squarely in red brick above the parking lot across the street. Later, I might walk down to Koffee, the warm, quirky coffee shop with the big window, its scraggly cement-and-grass-floored backyard decorated by perky parch benches amid the fire escapes of adjoining buildings.
It's just the right size, this city - for me, at least. Big enough to be interesting, with pubs and shops and the newsy, tiny News Haven magazine store crammed in at street level, awaiting discovery. The graceful buildings of Yale campus lift above the streets in arches and Gothic spires. Yet it's also small enough to be manageable. I can walk anywhere in town. On foot in the opposite direction from the city center, I can visit East Rock Park, a woodland crisscrossed by paths and by a river that runs along the foot of the vast red cliff. Redtails nest there on the rocks, woodpeckers drum loudly on the beeches and the pines, and the first kinglets and warblers of spring have begun to appear.
The other day, in fact, I went birdwatching with the New Haven Birding Club in East Rock. We trudged through the rainy morning, spotting two wood ducks, a black-crowned night-heron, pine warblers, kinglets, hooded mergansers and a brown creeper, among the usual assortment of chickadees, titmice, downies, hairies, and the red-bellied woodpeckers that are far more common here than in New Hampshire. White-throated and song sparrows hopped about in the brush, and we even saw a richly russet fox sparrow, mussed and damp in the drizzle. A winter wren made an instant's appearance, long enough to show its jocular, fat and cocky miniscule outline.
After we birded, we took up shovels and shears to help with trail maintenance. I was wet and cold, and so I chose to help shovel, replacing earth in the center of the paths from the sides. Soon I warmed up, shedding hat, shedding gloves and jacket, wiping wet sticky hair away from my cheek with a muddy hand. A good morning.
Speaking of birding, this is one of the finest bird sites I've ever seen, administered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
The Birds of North America Online
What else is happening? Last night, I got interested in nursery rhymes - I happened to be singing Itsy Bitsy Spider, and started thinking about why it's lasted so long through time. First, of course, there's the diction:
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Went up the water spout
Down came the rain and
Washed the spider out!
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain,
And Itsy Bitsy Spider
Went up the spout again.
All those T's, B's, P's and Sp's make for some very noisy and emphatic diction - even, and possibly especially, if you chant the rhyme instead of sing it. Perfect for boisterous, shouting children.
Also, I think there's something universal about its message. The itsy, cute little critter, the sudden hard luck, our pity on its behalf - and then its brave return when fortune smiles on it again. Everyone can understand and be pleased with that.
Finally, of course, there's the associated hand motions, always fun. Like tickling a little kid. Or tickling Paul, as the case might be.
I found this website on nursery rhymes, including the macabre Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies and the more playfully odd Humpty Dumpty:
Nursery Rhymes on BBC's H2G2
It includes the following delightful commentary:
Indeed, just what is it that makes some nursery rhymes seem rather sinister? Why did the makers of the seminal and utterly spooky British TV series Sapphire and Steel make frequent use of the nursery rhyme? We often think of eerie little music boxes playing spindly nursery rhyme-type tunes in horror films. But why? There's something almost Freudian about the way these invasive melodies can cause the hairs on the back of the neck to rise.
...It's the ability of nursery rhymes to allude to things, their elliptical nature, that makes them so fascinating. They share a lot in common with the Japanese Haiku format. Less structured, perhaps, than their Japanese cousins, they nonetheless contain within them tiny sparks which ignite our imagination. Perhaps Sapphire and Steel were right, perhaps nursery rhymes do have certain strange powers. Often they are evocative, like sudden flashes of colour, or like fleeting memories that bubble up unbidden. Nursery rhymes mysteriously breeze in and out of our lives, a bit like we breeze in and out of life itself.
And I think I'll leave today's entry at that.
New Haven. The city's gray today. Outside our apartment, past the the yellow-flowered curtains hanging at the windows, the leaves are just budding on the maples. The Planned Parenthood office, where protesters like to hang out on the curb Saturday mornings until the police show up, sits squarely in red brick above the parking lot across the street. Later, I might walk down to Koffee, the warm, quirky coffee shop with the big window, its scraggly cement-and-grass-floored backyard decorated by perky parch benches amid the fire escapes of adjoining buildings.
It's just the right size, this city - for me, at least. Big enough to be interesting, with pubs and shops and the newsy, tiny News Haven magazine store crammed in at street level, awaiting discovery. The graceful buildings of Yale campus lift above the streets in arches and Gothic spires. Yet it's also small enough to be manageable. I can walk anywhere in town. On foot in the opposite direction from the city center, I can visit East Rock Park, a woodland crisscrossed by paths and by a river that runs along the foot of the vast red cliff. Redtails nest there on the rocks, woodpeckers drum loudly on the beeches and the pines, and the first kinglets and warblers of spring have begun to appear.
The other day, in fact, I went birdwatching with the New Haven Birding Club in East Rock. We trudged through the rainy morning, spotting two wood ducks, a black-crowned night-heron, pine warblers, kinglets, hooded mergansers and a brown creeper, among the usual assortment of chickadees, titmice, downies, hairies, and the red-bellied woodpeckers that are far more common here than in New Hampshire. White-throated and song sparrows hopped about in the brush, and we even saw a richly russet fox sparrow, mussed and damp in the drizzle. A winter wren made an instant's appearance, long enough to show its jocular, fat and cocky miniscule outline.
After we birded, we took up shovels and shears to help with trail maintenance. I was wet and cold, and so I chose to help shovel, replacing earth in the center of the paths from the sides. Soon I warmed up, shedding hat, shedding gloves and jacket, wiping wet sticky hair away from my cheek with a muddy hand. A good morning.
Speaking of birding, this is one of the finest bird sites I've ever seen, administered by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology:
The Birds of North America Online
What else is happening? Last night, I got interested in nursery rhymes - I happened to be singing Itsy Bitsy Spider, and started thinking about why it's lasted so long through time. First, of course, there's the diction:
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Went up the water spout
Down came the rain and
Washed the spider out!
Out came the sun
And dried up all the rain,
And Itsy Bitsy Spider
Went up the spout again.
All those T's, B's, P's and Sp's make for some very noisy and emphatic diction - even, and possibly especially, if you chant the rhyme instead of sing it. Perfect for boisterous, shouting children.
Also, I think there's something universal about its message. The itsy, cute little critter, the sudden hard luck, our pity on its behalf - and then its brave return when fortune smiles on it again. Everyone can understand and be pleased with that.
Finally, of course, there's the associated hand motions, always fun. Like tickling a little kid. Or tickling Paul, as the case might be.
I found this website on nursery rhymes, including the macabre Ring-a-Ring-a-Rosies and the more playfully odd Humpty Dumpty:
Nursery Rhymes on BBC's H2G2
It includes the following delightful commentary:
Indeed, just what is it that makes some nursery rhymes seem rather sinister? Why did the makers of the seminal and utterly spooky British TV series Sapphire and Steel make frequent use of the nursery rhyme? We often think of eerie little music boxes playing spindly nursery rhyme-type tunes in horror films. But why? There's something almost Freudian about the way these invasive melodies can cause the hairs on the back of the neck to rise.
...It's the ability of nursery rhymes to allude to things, their elliptical nature, that makes them so fascinating. They share a lot in common with the Japanese Haiku format. Less structured, perhaps, than their Japanese cousins, they nonetheless contain within them tiny sparks which ignite our imagination. Perhaps Sapphire and Steel were right, perhaps nursery rhymes do have certain strange powers. Often they are evocative, like sudden flashes of colour, or like fleeting memories that bubble up unbidden. Nursery rhymes mysteriously breeze in and out of our lives, a bit like we breeze in and out of life itself.
And I think I'll leave today's entry at that.
Saturday, June 04, 2005
The rat in the rain
Like so many places, Washington D.C. is at its best in the rain. A cool, heavy smell of humidity pervades the whole city on a rainy day. I can almost taste the flavor of the wet pavement, the brick buildings and the damp trees. In the rain, I remember how much this city is one of gardens, each front step crowded by flowers hanging from thin stems and weighted by droplets. I'm sure not everyone would agree with my ideas on rain. But I like the way it staves off the thick heat. I like the way the young professionals crowd under the awning at the Trio Fox and Hound, drinking and talking, still dressed up from work.
Last night, I walked home in the faint drizzle and encountered a rat. He looked quite unconcerned, nosing about in someone's front garden in a particularly weedy patch behind a low cast-iron fence. When he noticed me looking, he quickened his pace just a bit, hurrying into a patch of shrubs, then tracking his way along a beaten path through the long grass that must have felt his exploring feet many times. His rear humped up behind him in typical rat fashion and his tail balanced him as he walked, a picture I've seen many times - my pet rat, Nutmeg, some years ago now, shared all the same mannerisms. I've never seen a city rat quite so close up before. Eventually he escaped my prying eyes and vanished into his narrow rat world.
And today, in the continuing damp, I sat with a coworker and two area science writers at the aforementioned Fox and Hound. A pleasant evening, all round. Our conversation revolved around science writing, as is natural, and politics, of course. We're in D.C., after all.
With all the politics surrounding me here in the consummately political capital of the U.S., I sometimes think about the personal nature of this blog and, in fact, most of my writing. Should I involve myself, more than I do in my day to day work, in the roiling political conversation that's ongoing on the streets, in the newspapers and, most of all, on the internet? In many ways I can't avoid it, nor would I want to.
But I rather liked what Tony Kushner wrote about Arthur Miller this month in The Nation: "He felt his successes and failures as a human being were consequential to something greater than himself, and so they were publicly examined and, in a sense, worth talking about. He wasn't certain that a single individual has relevance to our collective survival, but he saw no other question worth pursuing.
...Arthur focused his critical gaze... within the arena of an individual consciousness, in an important sense his own individual consciousness."
The rat in the rain. There's something admirable about its sense of self, that total independence of endeavor.
Last night, I walked home in the faint drizzle and encountered a rat. He looked quite unconcerned, nosing about in someone's front garden in a particularly weedy patch behind a low cast-iron fence. When he noticed me looking, he quickened his pace just a bit, hurrying into a patch of shrubs, then tracking his way along a beaten path through the long grass that must have felt his exploring feet many times. His rear humped up behind him in typical rat fashion and his tail balanced him as he walked, a picture I've seen many times - my pet rat, Nutmeg, some years ago now, shared all the same mannerisms. I've never seen a city rat quite so close up before. Eventually he escaped my prying eyes and vanished into his narrow rat world.
And today, in the continuing damp, I sat with a coworker and two area science writers at the aforementioned Fox and Hound. A pleasant evening, all round. Our conversation revolved around science writing, as is natural, and politics, of course. We're in D.C., after all.
With all the politics surrounding me here in the consummately political capital of the U.S., I sometimes think about the personal nature of this blog and, in fact, most of my writing. Should I involve myself, more than I do in my day to day work, in the roiling political conversation that's ongoing on the streets, in the newspapers and, most of all, on the internet? In many ways I can't avoid it, nor would I want to.
But I rather liked what Tony Kushner wrote about Arthur Miller this month in The Nation: "He felt his successes and failures as a human being were consequential to something greater than himself, and so they were publicly examined and, in a sense, worth talking about. He wasn't certain that a single individual has relevance to our collective survival, but he saw no other question worth pursuing.
...Arthur focused his critical gaze... within the arena of an individual consciousness, in an important sense his own individual consciousness."
The rat in the rain. There's something admirable about its sense of self, that total independence of endeavor.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Tribute
Someone I thought I'd meet someday.
Desmond Sheiham
Paul's best friend at Cambridge, of whom many stories were told with a smile over tea. Who had the guts to turn down a job at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, for moral reasons. Who used to stay up to have a late-night snack and chat about math. Who convinced Paul it's useless to vote; who had a fine, thoughtful cynicism I'd have liked to argue with him about.
I'll miss you, Des, even though I never knew you.
Desmond Sheiham
Paul's best friend at Cambridge, of whom many stories were told with a smile over tea. Who had the guts to turn down a job at GCHQ, the British equivalent of the National Security Agency, for moral reasons. Who used to stay up to have a late-night snack and chat about math. Who convinced Paul it's useless to vote; who had a fine, thoughtful cynicism I'd have liked to argue with him about.
I'll miss you, Des, even though I never knew you.
Apartment in winter
from 1/21/05.
I walked down towards Kingsley Street tonight, in the downy, damp snow. Paul used to live there, in the apartment above the drive, overlooking the small back parking lot that stood above a steep, wooded slope. I used to walk down the drive, open the thin creaking metal screen door, and bound up the linoleum steps to the hall where Paul lived. His door stood on the second floor. I remember, once, we found a dead bird on the balcony, and I avoided it for some days, where it lay with its neck exposed and head thrown back; until at last, with a sense of the inevitable and a quiet pity, I picked it up with my hand gloved by a sandwich bag, and took it down to lay it on the soil beneath some thin trees. Its center had gone to dust underneath, a thin veneer of which still lay on the cement where the bird had fallen, and among which a few small, innocuous-looking beetles wandered, confused.
Inside Paul's apartment stood his usual austerity, not of character or habit but of a negligent detachment; Paul does not decorate. He kept it neat but questionably clean, and a thin grim developed along the edges of the kitchen floor, and along all cracks of the bathroom. The living room, though, was carpeted, and Paul kept it assiduously vaccuumed; a pink-and-white flowered couch that he acquired on the street stood stolidly against the wall; his piano faced the window; his "sideboard," as he named the desk and its associated shelves that flanked the door, was scattered with an assortment of small objects, coins, CDs, his stereo, and a small number of books. The big window overlooked a sunless view of the parking lot, but also, more romantically, the edges of town falling away beyond it, with the Broadway bridge and the thoughtfully changing traffic lights and the deep pine and oak woodlands. It had a wide flat stone shelf at its base, and could be shuttered by wide white blinds.
On the small table in the living room sat his small squat teapot, white with tiny blue flowers, that I bought him for Christmas one year. Beyond, in the kitchen, a rack of spoons adorned the counter by the microwave. A stained stove; a metal sink; a few pots, and a drying rack. His bedroom, adjoining, we spent little time in, and I remember it as a place of clothing piled on the backs of chairs, with a mirror in which I would sometimes tidy my hair, or admire my image when I'd wind up in some large shirt of Paul's.
I used to stand at the window, I remember, especially in the late evening when exhausted after work. I'd gaze out over the softly twinkling lights, drained, separate, and Paul would silently make dinner for us, not his usual role, but sometimes necessary in my lethargy. In the days, the cool grey light would sift in, and I'd touch my finger to the blinds, making them swing slightly. I used to sit on the couch and wait for him to change his clothes or put the laundry in or make the tea. Then we'd sit together.
If he'd gone to put the laundry in, I'd hear him banging up the other set of steps two at a time; I'd hear the screen door slap shut.
All this slipped into my mind as I walked past that plain, rectangular brick building, set a bit back from the road. The habit of the short journey, three blocks from my apartment to his, drummed its quiet rhythm back into my thought. I hadn't visited Kingsley Street since Paul moved away. All the images were fresh; the wet street glistening, flagstoned there where State Street begins its downward descent; the snow past which I've walked so many times; the crumbling concrete steps that encounter Kingsley at the corner. I was walking there to join a carpool to frisbee, as my ride lived just a bit further down the street. But for a moment, I felt I was visiting Paul again, and I felt the soft, empty sadness of nostalgia, that is so sweet and bitter.
Soon Ann Arbor will all be this way, a sweet, sad memory of calm and still and softness. For years ahead of me the images will startle up in me, brought by a song, a scent -- the scent of humidity or snow; by a church, a person, a late night. I'll walk its streets in the dream of the mind.
I think of Paul, his parents visiting him now, living his new life in the wood-floored apartment with its enormous windows on the hexagon-section walls. We placed his couch and his lamp and his piano neatly in their places before the fireplace; the little table found itself a comfortable spot in the kitchen. We tucked his bed against the wall, where at night the lights must dance, as he as yet has bought no curtains - his parents said they'd bring some. There's a reality to his life in that place for me, a clearness, a sharpness Ann Arbor never holds. The east coast is blunt, present. New Haven is unromantic and gray, its streets with their faintly dilapidated shops opening to the green square in front of city hall.
So different, that, from the tiny dim cell he lived in at IHouse, cluttered with his meager belongings and the substance of my suitcase. So different a place without, all hard light, cold and clear and damp with winter, unlike the diaphanous California coast, San Francisco rising all delicate and white, the great rocks by the sea holding their desolate beauty as the gulls winged tiny over the surf. No standing heads of pelicans, like a flock of outrageous, prehistoric bowling pins, await me in New Haven. Somehow my future on the east coast promises to be hard and cold. Yet I'm eager for it, for its blunt reality.
I walked down towards Kingsley Street tonight, in the downy, damp snow. Paul used to live there, in the apartment above the drive, overlooking the small back parking lot that stood above a steep, wooded slope. I used to walk down the drive, open the thin creaking metal screen door, and bound up the linoleum steps to the hall where Paul lived. His door stood on the second floor. I remember, once, we found a dead bird on the balcony, and I avoided it for some days, where it lay with its neck exposed and head thrown back; until at last, with a sense of the inevitable and a quiet pity, I picked it up with my hand gloved by a sandwich bag, and took it down to lay it on the soil beneath some thin trees. Its center had gone to dust underneath, a thin veneer of which still lay on the cement where the bird had fallen, and among which a few small, innocuous-looking beetles wandered, confused.
Inside Paul's apartment stood his usual austerity, not of character or habit but of a negligent detachment; Paul does not decorate. He kept it neat but questionably clean, and a thin grim developed along the edges of the kitchen floor, and along all cracks of the bathroom. The living room, though, was carpeted, and Paul kept it assiduously vaccuumed; a pink-and-white flowered couch that he acquired on the street stood stolidly against the wall; his piano faced the window; his "sideboard," as he named the desk and its associated shelves that flanked the door, was scattered with an assortment of small objects, coins, CDs, his stereo, and a small number of books. The big window overlooked a sunless view of the parking lot, but also, more romantically, the edges of town falling away beyond it, with the Broadway bridge and the thoughtfully changing traffic lights and the deep pine and oak woodlands. It had a wide flat stone shelf at its base, and could be shuttered by wide white blinds.
On the small table in the living room sat his small squat teapot, white with tiny blue flowers, that I bought him for Christmas one year. Beyond, in the kitchen, a rack of spoons adorned the counter by the microwave. A stained stove; a metal sink; a few pots, and a drying rack. His bedroom, adjoining, we spent little time in, and I remember it as a place of clothing piled on the backs of chairs, with a mirror in which I would sometimes tidy my hair, or admire my image when I'd wind up in some large shirt of Paul's.
I used to stand at the window, I remember, especially in the late evening when exhausted after work. I'd gaze out over the softly twinkling lights, drained, separate, and Paul would silently make dinner for us, not his usual role, but sometimes necessary in my lethargy. In the days, the cool grey light would sift in, and I'd touch my finger to the blinds, making them swing slightly. I used to sit on the couch and wait for him to change his clothes or put the laundry in or make the tea. Then we'd sit together.
If he'd gone to put the laundry in, I'd hear him banging up the other set of steps two at a time; I'd hear the screen door slap shut.
All this slipped into my mind as I walked past that plain, rectangular brick building, set a bit back from the road. The habit of the short journey, three blocks from my apartment to his, drummed its quiet rhythm back into my thought. I hadn't visited Kingsley Street since Paul moved away. All the images were fresh; the wet street glistening, flagstoned there where State Street begins its downward descent; the snow past which I've walked so many times; the crumbling concrete steps that encounter Kingsley at the corner. I was walking there to join a carpool to frisbee, as my ride lived just a bit further down the street. But for a moment, I felt I was visiting Paul again, and I felt the soft, empty sadness of nostalgia, that is so sweet and bitter.
Soon Ann Arbor will all be this way, a sweet, sad memory of calm and still and softness. For years ahead of me the images will startle up in me, brought by a song, a scent -- the scent of humidity or snow; by a church, a person, a late night. I'll walk its streets in the dream of the mind.
I think of Paul, his parents visiting him now, living his new life in the wood-floored apartment with its enormous windows on the hexagon-section walls. We placed his couch and his lamp and his piano neatly in their places before the fireplace; the little table found itself a comfortable spot in the kitchen. We tucked his bed against the wall, where at night the lights must dance, as he as yet has bought no curtains - his parents said they'd bring some. There's a reality to his life in that place for me, a clearness, a sharpness Ann Arbor never holds. The east coast is blunt, present. New Haven is unromantic and gray, its streets with their faintly dilapidated shops opening to the green square in front of city hall.
So different, that, from the tiny dim cell he lived in at IHouse, cluttered with his meager belongings and the substance of my suitcase. So different a place without, all hard light, cold and clear and damp with winter, unlike the diaphanous California coast, San Francisco rising all delicate and white, the great rocks by the sea holding their desolate beauty as the gulls winged tiny over the surf. No standing heads of pelicans, like a flock of outrageous, prehistoric bowling pins, await me in New Haven. Somehow my future on the east coast promises to be hard and cold. Yet I'm eager for it, for its blunt reality.
Saturday, February 19, 2005
Things shared
My good friend Hamlet wrote a piece about Don Quixote that I enjoyed enormously. I love his notion that the everyday populace finds echo in Don Quixote, in terms of systems of morality that no longer make sense in today's world. Perhaps people understand and empathize with Don Quixote's absurdity as the only rational approach in the face of the world's "practicality." Perhaps the book reminds them, with a dose of snide, satisfying amusement, that fundamentally it's society that's absurd, not Don Quixote -- or any of us.
My sister, meanwhile, shared a website of bird photography by a fellow birdwatcher in Massachusetts. My favorite photo is this one. Birds are so tiny and apparently fragile in the face of nature's enormousness and inhospitality -- just look at the rushing water, that pointed rock. In a moment, that teensy round splotch will plunge underwater and pop back out again, flicking the damp off his feathers, as undaunted as a bobbing cork. He's as gray as his surroundings, part of them, really, unified with all that rough cold. "Behold the birds of the air, they do not sow, neither do they reap..."
But then, of course, I remember chickadees, which manage somehow to survive the north's frigid winters. Miniscule knots of feathers, they sometimes freeze to death in their sleep when they can't find enough food to power them through the entire night. Morning comes, and, next to a treetrunk somewhere, a huddled bit of fluff simply doesn't budge again.
Victory comes late—
And is held low to freezing lips—
Too rapt with frost
To take it—
How sweet it would have tasted—
Just a Drop—
Was God so economical?
His Table's spread too high for Us—
Unless We dine on tiptoe—
Crumbs—fit such little mouths—
Cherries—suit Robins—
The Eagle's Golden Breakfast strangles—Them—
God keep His Oath to Sparrows—
Who of little Love—know how to starve—
-Emily Dickinson
Neither great comment from Dickinson or the Bible, though, anthropomorphized as they are, seems to suit the real lives of wild creatures. Birds simply live out there, tough as wire, built both for the violence and the sweetness.
As for me, I'm reading Tess of the D'Urberville's. It's rough going. I feel tragedy lurking ahead, though right now I'm all caught up in the beauty and fragility of Tess' world and her love for Angel Clare, despite the dark portents creeping around the edges of her dairymaid's life. After every page I set the book down, wailing in my head, "oh, nooo...", not wanting to go further, wanting to remain suspended, willing the book to turn out happily and knowing it won't. Why did Thomas Hardy, that brilliant novelist, have to write so many tragedies?
So I've been doing that, and trying to finish my thesis, of course. Tilting at windmills - to bring this entry full circle.
My sister, meanwhile, shared a website of bird photography by a fellow birdwatcher in Massachusetts. My favorite photo is this one. Birds are so tiny and apparently fragile in the face of nature's enormousness and inhospitality -- just look at the rushing water, that pointed rock. In a moment, that teensy round splotch will plunge underwater and pop back out again, flicking the damp off his feathers, as undaunted as a bobbing cork. He's as gray as his surroundings, part of them, really, unified with all that rough cold. "Behold the birds of the air, they do not sow, neither do they reap..."
But then, of course, I remember chickadees, which manage somehow to survive the north's frigid winters. Miniscule knots of feathers, they sometimes freeze to death in their sleep when they can't find enough food to power them through the entire night. Morning comes, and, next to a treetrunk somewhere, a huddled bit of fluff simply doesn't budge again.
Victory comes late—
And is held low to freezing lips—
Too rapt with frost
To take it—
How sweet it would have tasted—
Just a Drop—
Was God so economical?
His Table's spread too high for Us—
Unless We dine on tiptoe—
Crumbs—fit such little mouths—
Cherries—suit Robins—
The Eagle's Golden Breakfast strangles—Them—
God keep His Oath to Sparrows—
Who of little Love—know how to starve—
-Emily Dickinson
Neither great comment from Dickinson or the Bible, though, anthropomorphized as they are, seems to suit the real lives of wild creatures. Birds simply live out there, tough as wire, built both for the violence and the sweetness.
As for me, I'm reading Tess of the D'Urberville's. It's rough going. I feel tragedy lurking ahead, though right now I'm all caught up in the beauty and fragility of Tess' world and her love for Angel Clare, despite the dark portents creeping around the edges of her dairymaid's life. After every page I set the book down, wailing in my head, "oh, nooo...", not wanting to go further, wanting to remain suspended, willing the book to turn out happily and knowing it won't. Why did Thomas Hardy, that brilliant novelist, have to write so many tragedies?
So I've been doing that, and trying to finish my thesis, of course. Tilting at windmills - to bring this entry full circle.
Sunday, February 13, 2005
Color
I seem to manage one entry a month in here. So - February. What colors my life, these gray winter days?
Arthur Miller, University of Michigan alumnus and the acclaimed author of Death of a Salesman, died on Friday. The Daily put out a special edition on his life and career yesterday, beautiful with sepia photographs. Today, dropping by the library to find the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, I found a copy sitting on the table by the computer where I type now.
Miller, who wrote for the Daily, won a $250 dollar Hopwood award for a play while at Michigan, the Daily explains, and from then on he knew his profession was writing.
~
Paul visited this weekend, and the rolic and fun reminded me of the reasons I love our town. Friday, we both played in the indoor ultimate frisbee winter league. Now I have an enormous scrape on my hip, underlain by a bruise, from laying out for a disc. Sitting over breakfast this morning, Paul commented, "You've got a bruise on your arm." I tilted my arm up and looked at it: a small round purplish blot the size of a dime. "I guess I do," I replied, and grinned. One more glory stain.
Yesterday afternoon, in the cool, pale Michigan sunlight, I dragged Paul around campus for a "rock tour." Next Monday, I'll take my Introduction to Geology lab class on the same circuit, showing the students the limestones and serpentinites and sandstones and travertines and granite gneisses of which campus is built. Saturday, though, Paul had to hear it all, as I expounded on the origins of this boulder or that foundational brick. Through the five years of my research, I've at least learned a thing or two. Geology has such a special glamour, an immediacy and solidity, a tactile nearness.
Then the bar and the nightclub, reeling down the street with ten friends, squashing ourselves into the small roiling space deep in the basement of the club listening to one of the town's most popular cover bands. We danced; the sweat slid down our skin; we found a corner and hid from our friends for short, happy intervals.
We'd had a friend for dinner, too; Paul's compatriot in mathematics, now living in Australia, from where he hails. We sat in my tiny, warm kitchen, the smell of warming bread lifting from the oven, onions sizzling on the stove. I listened to them talk their incomprehensible heiroglyphics for awhile before interrupting to declare that now they had to speak some sense. After the meal, I left them to it, retreating to the comfortable space of my bedroom to change into my nightclub clothes. I zipped up my tall boots and rolled up my jeans and slid my sheer black shirt over my skin, then sat at my desk, half-listening to their talk heating the air, my nose in the Black Warrior Review, reading the poems there.
When my world complexifies, as it will and must, I'll remember these thoughtless evenings, when everything centers around the reach of my arm for a frisbee, or the surrounding whirl of my friends under the throb of the nightclub's speakers.
Arthur Miller, University of Michigan alumnus and the acclaimed author of Death of a Salesman, died on Friday. The Daily put out a special edition on his life and career yesterday, beautiful with sepia photographs. Today, dropping by the library to find the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses, I found a copy sitting on the table by the computer where I type now.
Miller, who wrote for the Daily, won a $250 dollar Hopwood award for a play while at Michigan, the Daily explains, and from then on he knew his profession was writing.
Paul visited this weekend, and the rolic and fun reminded me of the reasons I love our town. Friday, we both played in the indoor ultimate frisbee winter league. Now I have an enormous scrape on my hip, underlain by a bruise, from laying out for a disc. Sitting over breakfast this morning, Paul commented, "You've got a bruise on your arm." I tilted my arm up and looked at it: a small round purplish blot the size of a dime. "I guess I do," I replied, and grinned. One more glory stain.
Yesterday afternoon, in the cool, pale Michigan sunlight, I dragged Paul around campus for a "rock tour." Next Monday, I'll take my Introduction to Geology lab class on the same circuit, showing the students the limestones and serpentinites and sandstones and travertines and granite gneisses of which campus is built. Saturday, though, Paul had to hear it all, as I expounded on the origins of this boulder or that foundational brick. Through the five years of my research, I've at least learned a thing or two. Geology has such a special glamour, an immediacy and solidity, a tactile nearness.
Then the bar and the nightclub, reeling down the street with ten friends, squashing ourselves into the small roiling space deep in the basement of the club listening to one of the town's most popular cover bands. We danced; the sweat slid down our skin; we found a corner and hid from our friends for short, happy intervals.
We'd had a friend for dinner, too; Paul's compatriot in mathematics, now living in Australia, from where he hails. We sat in my tiny, warm kitchen, the smell of warming bread lifting from the oven, onions sizzling on the stove. I listened to them talk their incomprehensible heiroglyphics for awhile before interrupting to declare that now they had to speak some sense. After the meal, I left them to it, retreating to the comfortable space of my bedroom to change into my nightclub clothes. I zipped up my tall boots and rolled up my jeans and slid my sheer black shirt over my skin, then sat at my desk, half-listening to their talk heating the air, my nose in the Black Warrior Review, reading the poems there.
When my world complexifies, as it will and must, I'll remember these thoughtless evenings, when everything centers around the reach of my arm for a frisbee, or the surrounding whirl of my friends under the throb of the nightclub's speakers.
Friday, January 07, 2005
Winter
The night cuts me, it is so cold and severe, and so beautiful. The red berries, glowing in studded scatter on the bare branches, pierce my heart.
Oh lovely night, shrouding itself in a veil of snow, that glitters and is not soft; I walk your stilled paths, and people pass me, by the library, on the square, hustling in their square wool coats. The snow drops like stars across their hunched shoulders. I revel in my solitude, my singleness among people. Inside myself I am a great vaulted space, vast and exalted, and I turn up my face; the passers-by notice my odd glow, and lift their eyes to stare at me.
This singleness, this great white night, this simplicity of solid brick with the lamps glowing soft and gold inside; the people walking and leaving their squashed prints, the square at once ordinary and otherworldly.
I beseech you - don't speak to me, for my soul is as still and solitary as a blackpoll in migration, tiny in falling arc over the globe's great sphere, in its inertia of motion.
How still the night is!
Oh lovely night, shrouding itself in a veil of snow, that glitters and is not soft; I walk your stilled paths, and people pass me, by the library, on the square, hustling in their square wool coats. The snow drops like stars across their hunched shoulders. I revel in my solitude, my singleness among people. Inside myself I am a great vaulted space, vast and exalted, and I turn up my face; the passers-by notice my odd glow, and lift their eyes to stare at me.
This singleness, this great white night, this simplicity of solid brick with the lamps glowing soft and gold inside; the people walking and leaving their squashed prints, the square at once ordinary and otherworldly.
I beseech you - don't speak to me, for my soul is as still and solitary as a blackpoll in migration, tiny in falling arc over the globe's great sphere, in its inertia of motion.
How still the night is!
Wednesday, December 08, 2004
A Daily moment
The Daily is the most tremendously relaxing place in my life. No matter what “angst, nausee, and all the bag of tricks” (as Iris Murdoch put it so eloquently) I’ve suffered in my day, I walk into this big, open hall and it all falls away.
Here, I work and worry and struggle over my articles, yet somehow, as I while away the hours, I feel more and more energized rather than more dejected and frustrated. Sometimes I leave exhausted, with a headache, yet I invariably leave content.
I listen to the chatter of the reporters around me; someone’s hip-hop or jazz always seems to be tinkling away in the background. There’s no such thing as “quiet” here. Why doesn’t it annoy me? I can’t say. I just know that the sounds float up toward the big ceiling and seem both small and important simultaneously; multiple and organic and busy and fitting.
Sometimes the television’s on, with a small knot of people gathered round it to watch a sports event or take notes on a presidential speech. I detest televisions. But here, its blaring tones just make me feel connected to the big, wide world. The reporters make acerbic comments and dirty jokes and I always feel part of it all.
Tomorrow I’ll spend the day here, tangle with the complex organization of a difficult article. I feel like I’m wrestling an octopus; it’s got multiple unwieldy tentacles, only wants to get away, and keeps squirting ink in my face to keep me in a great big fog. Am I not octopus enough to out-octopus you? I think wryly, trying yet another organizational scheme for its barrage of information. I’ll tame it tomorrow.
The light will pour in through the huge windows; an editor or two will bustle past and say hello.
I love this place.
Here, I work and worry and struggle over my articles, yet somehow, as I while away the hours, I feel more and more energized rather than more dejected and frustrated. Sometimes I leave exhausted, with a headache, yet I invariably leave content.
I listen to the chatter of the reporters around me; someone’s hip-hop or jazz always seems to be tinkling away in the background. There’s no such thing as “quiet” here. Why doesn’t it annoy me? I can’t say. I just know that the sounds float up toward the big ceiling and seem both small and important simultaneously; multiple and organic and busy and fitting.
Sometimes the television’s on, with a small knot of people gathered round it to watch a sports event or take notes on a presidential speech. I detest televisions. But here, its blaring tones just make me feel connected to the big, wide world. The reporters make acerbic comments and dirty jokes and I always feel part of it all.
Tomorrow I’ll spend the day here, tangle with the complex organization of a difficult article. I feel like I’m wrestling an octopus; it’s got multiple unwieldy tentacles, only wants to get away, and keeps squirting ink in my face to keep me in a great big fog. Am I not octopus enough to out-octopus you? I think wryly, trying yet another organizational scheme for its barrage of information. I’ll tame it tomorrow.
The light will pour in through the huge windows; an editor or two will bustle past and say hello.
I love this place.
Monday, November 01, 2004
Ultimate Club Nationals: Sarasota, Florida
Travel
Skin glowing with heat under fading fall skies,
Bringing memories with me, I burn with sun
From inside, a conflagration from my eyes.
This is the hope from journeying beyond one place:
The warmth of knowing there are seasons, elsewhere,
That differ, keeping their own slow clockpulse.
Within me I can hold six suns, hold worlds.
Meteor, I race from soul to soul, a free traveler
In the wide space that is the inner universe.
How large I find myself, in these rare moments!
Under a gray sky I burst into sudden flower
From a thousand buds, each a center of summer,
But secret, held within; the soul's constellation.
This is the self, they murmur:
This is how we survive winter.
~
Nationals amazed me. All night last night, and while I slept on the plane yesterday, I dreamed of frisbees, sideline calls and full-field runs. I still can't believe the height of the jumps I saw in the men's finals game between Sockeye and JAM. I'll never forget the lean, long, tanned profiles of the women on Riot and Prime, their faces gaunt with strength, their bodies lengthened by our sport, which favors height and legginess. They stood on the line with their hair in double braids and ponytails and their cleats black and bright blue and their shorts hanging around their narrow hips. Joy and perfection. I darted up and down the line as the play proceeded, trying to catch every layout, every defensive play, every score. I chatted with the random ultimate players next to whom I stood, and we "talked shop," analyzing game details and deciding who we thought would win.
At the national level, ultimate differs from the casual, free-and-easy sport I've learned to love in pick-up games and summer league. Tension and focus reign in highly competitive ultimate. Everyone takes the matter so seriously and discusses strategy as though deciding federal policy. Yet many qualities remain -- like the friendly faces everywhere, the intelligence of many of those who play (I've met an uncanny number of graduate students, assistant professors, lawyers and writers -- to name just a few brainy professions -- in ultimate), and the sense that we're all together in the same endeavor. And it's inspiring to know exactly how far our bodies -- just us, little ordinary people who play a sport for joy -- can take us.
My team tired me out more than the playing did this weekend, and I'm glad our season is over. It's hard to struggle together with 17 women, each of us with our own motivations and personal envies and little problems and internal conflicts. We've had moments of camaraderie and others where we drove each other to passionate outbursts of tears. My advisor calls some women "guy's girls" and overall, I guess that's me; I'll always prefer playing with the boys. But I'd not have missed this for the world.
Results can be found here, if you're interested:
Ultimate Club Nationals Results
Autumn field work
from 10/21/04.
Today, in the field with Lixin and a Slovenian student, Tiasha, I stood a little apart, gazing out over the late October fields, their grass a patchwork of brown and fading green, here tilled soil, there long grass, and farther on, the straight golden stalks of aged corn. I walked toward a stand of pine to relieve myself, feeling my boots crunch on the good earth below them, under a heavy gray sky that lit the changing sugar maples with a faded glow. Flocks of unidentifiable little birds blew over the fields, searching for seed. Two sandhill cranes walked haltingly past us, one pausing to scratch its head in a momentary display of trust. I stood among the pines, breathing in their dim green, and gazed out over the empty fields beyond. A large flock of starlings, somewhere in far-off trees, chattered in great multiplicity.
I felt free again, breathing in the cold, damp air. I felt so calm and solitary; so internal and self-possessed, and yet also entirely outside myself, a part of the empty, wild surroundings.
In the square chamber dug into the earth, walled by metal and accessed by a heavy metal door in the ground, Lixin stood, pulling gas samples into a syringe from flexible rubber tubes that protruded from the walls. She smiled up at Tiasha and me as we sat cross-legged above her at the opening, chatting with her. In her red turtleneck and lined brown pants that accentuated her little form, she looked practical and sturdy, friendly and capable. Tiasha and I took bottles of water from her back to the van, and stood at its several doors, filling sample bottles and measuring pH. We felt, I think, able and female together, the three of us. Tiasha, with her untidy blonde hair and her narrow, not unhandsome face, gave off an aura of sharp capability. We two self-possessed souls approached each other in utter surety, found the other equally sure, and fell into a comfortable mutual reliance, each giving up tasks to the other quickly and easily as we found them ably performed. The tasks were simple, to be sure, but I felt she and I could have worked effectively under many circumstances. I liked the way our joint dominance vied temporarily, then found, rather than a competitor, an equal.
On returning to the Kellogg Biostation central building, Tiasha walked down to Gull Lake to take photographs and wander around the lake, in her hiking boots and with her wool, hooded jacket tucked round her form. The maples stood ponderous and glowing in pink and orange and coral, their trunks girded with the rumpled wood of many years' growth. Lixin and I returned a bit of equipment inside.
At lunch, we had sat with S and his wife, Susanne. They told us stories of their research in Brazil and Peru and Michigan. Both tall and spare, with quiet eyes, they pleased me. Susanne had short, salt and pepper hair and a straight nose, and though she looked so athletic and competent she followed her husband with a look of deep, intertwined and almost submissive love in her body language and her face. He, wearing glasses and an ever so slightly scattered demeanor, nontheless inspired trust somehow as he helped us load soil cores into our van. On our drive home, we passed Susanne on her bicycle, the long lines of her leggings further accentuating her height, her legs pumping as she sped up the road and vanished along the straight avenue of trees.
Rural Michigan contains a calm beauty unlike the startling richness of New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, one senses a hardness, a spareness, a reluctance to give fruit underneath the glittering gorgeousness. The soil lies brittle and thin atop great, jutting rocks whose presence can always be felt. Michigan exudes a sense of abundance and fertility. Birds wash past in the autumn and spring, journeying along the migration belt, and the chatter of their search for autumn's fruit can always be heard.
Today, in the field with Lixin and a Slovenian student, Tiasha, I stood a little apart, gazing out over the late October fields, their grass a patchwork of brown and fading green, here tilled soil, there long grass, and farther on, the straight golden stalks of aged corn. I walked toward a stand of pine to relieve myself, feeling my boots crunch on the good earth below them, under a heavy gray sky that lit the changing sugar maples with a faded glow. Flocks of unidentifiable little birds blew over the fields, searching for seed. Two sandhill cranes walked haltingly past us, one pausing to scratch its head in a momentary display of trust. I stood among the pines, breathing in their dim green, and gazed out over the empty fields beyond. A large flock of starlings, somewhere in far-off trees, chattered in great multiplicity.
I felt free again, breathing in the cold, damp air. I felt so calm and solitary; so internal and self-possessed, and yet also entirely outside myself, a part of the empty, wild surroundings.
In the square chamber dug into the earth, walled by metal and accessed by a heavy metal door in the ground, Lixin stood, pulling gas samples into a syringe from flexible rubber tubes that protruded from the walls. She smiled up at Tiasha and me as we sat cross-legged above her at the opening, chatting with her. In her red turtleneck and lined brown pants that accentuated her little form, she looked practical and sturdy, friendly and capable. Tiasha and I took bottles of water from her back to the van, and stood at its several doors, filling sample bottles and measuring pH. We felt, I think, able and female together, the three of us. Tiasha, with her untidy blonde hair and her narrow, not unhandsome face, gave off an aura of sharp capability. We two self-possessed souls approached each other in utter surety, found the other equally sure, and fell into a comfortable mutual reliance, each giving up tasks to the other quickly and easily as we found them ably performed. The tasks were simple, to be sure, but I felt she and I could have worked effectively under many circumstances. I liked the way our joint dominance vied temporarily, then found, rather than a competitor, an equal.
On returning to the Kellogg Biostation central building, Tiasha walked down to Gull Lake to take photographs and wander around the lake, in her hiking boots and with her wool, hooded jacket tucked round her form. The maples stood ponderous and glowing in pink and orange and coral, their trunks girded with the rumpled wood of many years' growth. Lixin and I returned a bit of equipment inside.
At lunch, we had sat with S and his wife, Susanne. They told us stories of their research in Brazil and Peru and Michigan. Both tall and spare, with quiet eyes, they pleased me. Susanne had short, salt and pepper hair and a straight nose, and though she looked so athletic and competent she followed her husband with a look of deep, intertwined and almost submissive love in her body language and her face. He, wearing glasses and an ever so slightly scattered demeanor, nontheless inspired trust somehow as he helped us load soil cores into our van. On our drive home, we passed Susanne on her bicycle, the long lines of her leggings further accentuating her height, her legs pumping as she sped up the road and vanished along the straight avenue of trees.
Rural Michigan contains a calm beauty unlike the startling richness of New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, one senses a hardness, a spareness, a reluctance to give fruit underneath the glittering gorgeousness. The soil lies brittle and thin atop great, jutting rocks whose presence can always be felt. Michigan exudes a sense of abundance and fertility. Birds wash past in the autumn and spring, journeying along the migration belt, and the chatter of their search for autumn's fruit can always be heard.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Paris
I remember France, and the pale, looming city where I spent four months. I always felt that if all its people were somehow erased, Paris would continue on, unchanged, still as aloof and stately and substantial as before. There's a feeling of history lurking along the walls of its white buildings, as though the city belonged as much to ghosts as to the living.
At night on the weekends, Amanda and I would meet in her tiny apartment. She lived on the first floor in a comfy, carpeted, maroon-colored mousehole, with a sagging couch and one window that overlooked a tiny interior courtyard. We used to peer out the bars while we ate cheese, bread and a pink, mousse-like Greek caviar whose name I can't remember. We'd watch people hang their white laundry out their windows; sometimes we'd hear snatches of conversation or strains of maudlin French music exuding from other apartments.
Anyway, we'd change our clothes, put on make-up, clip silver barrettes in our hair, and sally out into Paris the night city. I always thought we made a striking duo: I, small and brown, beside Amanda, blond and tall; my short spikey hair to her lissome long locks. We liked to walk in St. Germain des Pres, where the narrow ways pour out their pedestrians and the Greek shops are lined one alongside the next, selling greasy gyros with fries. Paris thrums with activity at night, when the city, cloaked by darkness, looks less white and majesterial. Even in the darkest hours, people stir. I still remember the bicyclist that teetered drunkenly by us late one night, singly, alone in the at last abandoned street, careering from one sidewalk to the other with a clatter on the cobbles.
One night, Amanda and I decided we'd visit a jazz bar. Inside its cavernous limestone depths, the denizens were quite literally at full swing. We joined the dancing, but eventually began to feel it necessary to peel a couple of amorous older male dancers off our skin. We withdrew to a side wall, trying to avoid them. Amanda had noticed a young man about our age in a corner writing in a notebook.
"Let's go talk to him," she said. "If he's writing in his journal at 1:00 a.m. in a bar, how bad can he be?" She'd heard him talking in English, and thought him an American. We interrupted him without compunction.
He turned out to be a pilot, passing through with the U.S. military. Stationed in the area for only one night, he'd taken the train in from Charles de Gaulle airport to explore the town. The subway stops running at 1:00 a.m. in Paris, so he couldn't return to the airport until dawn; he'd settled in at the jazz club for a long wait, and was writing a letter when we spotted him. He chatted with us with his whole face open and friendly and his sandy brown hair neatly flat along his head. Now that I've lived in the Midwest, I know him better, that pilot. Clean-shaven, straightforward, without pretense, he reminded me not only of many Midwesterners I've met, but also of whole atmosphere here.
Let's get out of here, we decided, at last. Amanda and I would show him Paris. We lit out into the quietening streets, heading for the Seine. Notre Dame loomed beside us; he gazed up at its arches and gargoyles in awe. We crossed a bridge over the river, and sat to talk for awhile on the steps that led down to the concrete banks. The river rolled on in front of us; a gang of Parisian boys blasted by on their bicycles; then the city was left to stillness and the lapping of water and our quiet conversation once again.
Three a.m., then four. We made for the south of the city, walking down the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Jardin de Luxembourg. The long city stretched out under our tired feet. We passed a janitor at the curb washing the sidewalk, who looked up at us indifferently.
Our pilot addressed a loud, jovial word or two in English to the streetsweeper, as he'd done to other passers-by that night. "Nice night out here!" I remember thinking it strange that he'd venture to speak as though expecting the whole world to know English. I thought people would find him insufferably arrogant, a typical ignorant American. But the janitor - indeed, everyone to whom our pilot spoke - lit up at his open demeanor and his easy, natural smile. He smiled toothily in return; good-natured words in rapid French ensued. Our American friend grinned and replied in nonsequitor. On we went.
In the slowly pinkening dawn, as 5:00 a.m. and the re-opening of le metro approached, we straggled tiredly south toward the nearest metro station. The cafes began to stir; their owners emerged like aproned mice, threw open the doors, swept the mat and put out their little metal tables on the sidewalk. We gravitated toward the warm steaming smell of rolls and coffee, and took our few last minutes together to share a meal. Over hot chocolate and croissants, our pilot snapped a few photos of us, and asked the waiter to take a couple more. Amanda gave him her email address, but I'm not sure he ever mailed the pictures to her.
Then we bustled him onto the subway, and he was gone from our lives, and we were gone from his. I wonder how he remembers us. Imagine it -- you're a young man, arriving in a strange city, and two young women emerge like sprites from the depths of the roiling, indifferent night to shepherd you around town. I like the romance of it. Perhaps, for him, the memory has been subsumed in a long series of equally unusual encounters in strange lands. But I remember it clearly, and feel I can still smell the warmth and comfort of that cafe after our long ramble in the chill night air.
At night on the weekends, Amanda and I would meet in her tiny apartment. She lived on the first floor in a comfy, carpeted, maroon-colored mousehole, with a sagging couch and one window that overlooked a tiny interior courtyard. We used to peer out the bars while we ate cheese, bread and a pink, mousse-like Greek caviar whose name I can't remember. We'd watch people hang their white laundry out their windows; sometimes we'd hear snatches of conversation or strains of maudlin French music exuding from other apartments.
Anyway, we'd change our clothes, put on make-up, clip silver barrettes in our hair, and sally out into Paris the night city. I always thought we made a striking duo: I, small and brown, beside Amanda, blond and tall; my short spikey hair to her lissome long locks. We liked to walk in St. Germain des Pres, where the narrow ways pour out their pedestrians and the Greek shops are lined one alongside the next, selling greasy gyros with fries. Paris thrums with activity at night, when the city, cloaked by darkness, looks less white and majesterial. Even in the darkest hours, people stir. I still remember the bicyclist that teetered drunkenly by us late one night, singly, alone in the at last abandoned street, careering from one sidewalk to the other with a clatter on the cobbles.
One night, Amanda and I decided we'd visit a jazz bar. Inside its cavernous limestone depths, the denizens were quite literally at full swing. We joined the dancing, but eventually began to feel it necessary to peel a couple of amorous older male dancers off our skin. We withdrew to a side wall, trying to avoid them. Amanda had noticed a young man about our age in a corner writing in a notebook.
"Let's go talk to him," she said. "If he's writing in his journal at 1:00 a.m. in a bar, how bad can he be?" She'd heard him talking in English, and thought him an American. We interrupted him without compunction.
He turned out to be a pilot, passing through with the U.S. military. Stationed in the area for only one night, he'd taken the train in from Charles de Gaulle airport to explore the town. The subway stops running at 1:00 a.m. in Paris, so he couldn't return to the airport until dawn; he'd settled in at the jazz club for a long wait, and was writing a letter when we spotted him. He chatted with us with his whole face open and friendly and his sandy brown hair neatly flat along his head. Now that I've lived in the Midwest, I know him better, that pilot. Clean-shaven, straightforward, without pretense, he reminded me not only of many Midwesterners I've met, but also of whole atmosphere here.
Let's get out of here, we decided, at last. Amanda and I would show him Paris. We lit out into the quietening streets, heading for the Seine. Notre Dame loomed beside us; he gazed up at its arches and gargoyles in awe. We crossed a bridge over the river, and sat to talk for awhile on the steps that led down to the concrete banks. The river rolled on in front of us; a gang of Parisian boys blasted by on their bicycles; then the city was left to stillness and the lapping of water and our quiet conversation once again.
Three a.m., then four. We made for the south of the city, walking down the Boulevard St. Michel toward the Jardin de Luxembourg. The long city stretched out under our tired feet. We passed a janitor at the curb washing the sidewalk, who looked up at us indifferently.
Our pilot addressed a loud, jovial word or two in English to the streetsweeper, as he'd done to other passers-by that night. "Nice night out here!" I remember thinking it strange that he'd venture to speak as though expecting the whole world to know English. I thought people would find him insufferably arrogant, a typical ignorant American. But the janitor - indeed, everyone to whom our pilot spoke - lit up at his open demeanor and his easy, natural smile. He smiled toothily in return; good-natured words in rapid French ensued. Our American friend grinned and replied in nonsequitor. On we went.
In the slowly pinkening dawn, as 5:00 a.m. and the re-opening of le metro approached, we straggled tiredly south toward the nearest metro station. The cafes began to stir; their owners emerged like aproned mice, threw open the doors, swept the mat and put out their little metal tables on the sidewalk. We gravitated toward the warm steaming smell of rolls and coffee, and took our few last minutes together to share a meal. Over hot chocolate and croissants, our pilot snapped a few photos of us, and asked the waiter to take a couple more. Amanda gave him her email address, but I'm not sure he ever mailed the pictures to her.
Then we bustled him onto the subway, and he was gone from our lives, and we were gone from his. I wonder how he remembers us. Imagine it -- you're a young man, arriving in a strange city, and two young women emerge like sprites from the depths of the roiling, indifferent night to shepherd you around town. I like the romance of it. Perhaps, for him, the memory has been subsumed in a long series of equally unusual encounters in strange lands. But I remember it clearly, and feel I can still smell the warmth and comfort of that cafe after our long ramble in the chill night air.
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