Impressions From A Solitary Morning Walk

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

I took the morning’s walk by myself today since Helen was unable to join me.  Without the benefit of our usual conversations about all we see and notice around us, I was left to my own devices – devices that yielded the following impressions given at random and without any care for proper temporal sequencing:

A single robin first seen on the grass at the edge of our driveway where he was foraging for worms: conscious of my approach,  he carefully hopped or flew a few feet further away from me each time I attained some predetermined robin tolerance point (PRTP) during my walk.  The brevity of each PRTP relocation evidenced his live-and-let-live philosophy, and the careful eye trained upon me at all times was his surety that the philosophy was shared.

Red-orange pine flowers covering the ground, intermingled with the gravel of our driveway to give it a reddish cast in the morning’s light.

Small jack pine cones littering pavement, gravel, and grass alike without any demonstrated affinity for one or the other.

Bird song near and far, with a back beat given by the distant calls of the pair of mated mourning doves who share our neighborhood and visit our feeders; the unlikely sight of a single mourning dove perched overhead on a telephone wire, waiting for its mate and seemingly bereft and disconsolate in its absence.

Bits of blue plastic ribbon from some unknown source ground into the tar of our metalled lane without coherent pattern or rhythm .

Berries of all sizes growing high and low among various vines and bushes, showing themselves by means of their pastels and primary colors against the dominant green – red, yellow, salmon, and the whitish green of nascency.

New green growth on the tips of several bushes and trees, especially the large cedars down the side lane opposite our house – not-yet-fully-assimilated new growth serving as spring finery for mature trees seeking the attention of those who pass by.

The lack of Beau, the neighbor’s three-legged dog who usually follows us as we walk by the fence delineating his territory, treating us to earnestly barked admonitions.

A distant, single, drawn-out neigh of one unknown member of the neighbor’s horse herd already let out from their barn to graze in the fields farthest from the lane on which I walk; and the noticeable lack of their breathy snuffling of anticipation as I  pass the fence where they often await our passage.

A patch of the new neighbor’s previously well-cut, well-trained field now awash in blackberries due to the lack of any spring cutting; internal speculation as to whether the patch is being let grow due to laziness or to provide privacy from my gaze.

The blessed wild beauty of Len and Rebecca’s (our former neighbors now living in the city) undeveloped, extensive acreage and curiosity about how long it may remain that way.

The bright red-violet shout of welcome from the massive, blooming azalea planted across from the head of the driveway where it enters the turnaround in front of our house as I trudged the remaining few feet to our door carrying the morning papers I was about to read while cooling down.

Tall stalks of yarrow growing in miniature forests underneath the blackberry vines lining our marsh, and my musings over a hypothetical symbiosis; the carpet of vibrant yellow buttercups whose outermost edge lies within our  fenced-in pasture and delineates the boundary between marsh grass and edible grass – a veritable DEW line across which I dare not take my tractor until high summer for fear of becoming stuck.

The view from atop the large hill down which my aching knees must carry me on my return home; the view looking eastward into the rising sun dappling the uphill portion of the previously-and-yet-to-be-travelled lane (that portion rising from the ravine into which I must yet descend) with the shadows of morning.

The welcome sight of the black and white striped sign  affixed to the telephone pole placed too perilously close to a sharp turning in the lane as a warning for inattentive drivers; the sign presently serving as our western-most turning point for the final leg home, a marker we will eventually surpass as our walks extend with the daylight.

A pale yellow bird house with a soft, washed-red roof adorned with two bright blue minarets perched atop a dirty, off-white porch railing – snuggled into the corner where the railing turns, yet set parallel upon a single top rail rather than kitty-corner across two.

Five vehicles passing me by as I keep to the edge of the road: two neighbors on their way to work and one returning from an errand; an immense garbage truck returning from picking up the commercial wastes generated by the neighboring horse farm; and Helen on her way to the early morning doctor’s appointment that prevented her from accompanying me on this morning’s walk, telling me through her rolled down passenger window that she’d left the front door of the house unlocked in honor of my impending homecoming.

 

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Life and Death on the Farm

Posted on May 24, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Take your place on the great Mandala
As it moves through your brief moment of time
Win or lose now, you must choose now
And if you lose youre only losing your life

The Great Mandala, Mary Travers, Peter Yarrow, Albert Grossman

I have to confess the Farm is barely large enough to qualify.  At 10 acres, it is a bit on the small side to be a working farm.  Yet it is large enough to hold animals were we to wish to raise any, and is definitely of enough size to challenge the two old – and getting older – folks who live here by ourselves.  Well, not precisely by ourselves, since there are four cats and three lovebirds inside the house, and 10 acres worth of assorted plants and varied wildlife outside.  Both kinds of life add to our challenges as well as to our satisfaction with living on this land.

At any given moment, the Farm is also big enough to encompass both ends of life.  In her annual spring ritual, Helen has planted many new flowers and more than a few seeds, so we are assured that new life will appear this year.  The pines lining our driveway are busy contributing new life as well, for many of them have quite a striking crop of developing cones.  There are several new pine shoots sprouting along the hillside on which their parents grow, evidence of the efficacy and fertility of last year’s pine cone crop: some will mature; some will be nibbled to death by deer, voles, moles, or other critters; and some will be pulled out by human hand for having committed the sin of growing too close to something they might well have avoided but for the serendipity of fate.

And since it is spring, new life dominates all we can see from our windows.  For new life isn’t restricted to newly planted shoots or bulbs.  Our mature plants are adding new spring finery – new growth in that particular shade of bright pea green which takes a season in the sun to darken into just another branch or twig.  Young birds and animals have yet to make their appearance, but given the birds’ energy and their constant song, new bird life isn’t far off.  Thanks to the magic of time, the two fawns from last spring seem to have grown into young deer who have that certain look about them.  They display themselves now more casually than they did last fall; I suspect they are distracted by lustful thoughts and risk discovery by human eyes in the heat of the chase.  Since most of our years here on the Farm seem to have produced new fawns wandering about in an infant daze under the watchful eye of a nervous doe, I have no reason to believe that this year won’t eventually provide evidence of the cycle repeating itself anew.

But this spring is also a time of death on the Farm.  Two tall pines adjacent to the house have died and are soon to be taken down by a professional tree surgeon.  Their needles have turned brown and, in the case of the tallest of the two, have fallen with incredible dispatch.   Helen first noticed needle showers underneath this giant several weeks ago, and the tree is now virtually a skeleton, moss already accumulating on its branches.  Whatever the cause of its death, it was quick and sudden (and, hopefully, painless) in terms of tree chronology.  The other dying pine lingers on with spots of fading green amid a vast sea of brown.  It still retains many needles, despite being the first of the two to demonstrate to us its intention to expire.  We realized it was dying last spring, but decided to give it one last year before having it removed.  From the state of the roof edge underneath it, we might have been smarter to cut it down when we first noticed its impending death, but I simply didn’t have the heart.  Besides, its lingering death knell has done us a good turn: because of the resultant heavy needle fall, we hired a man to blow off our roof and  it is now clean of pine needles and the blessed recipient of an anti-moss application.

The stumps of both trees will remain.  I haven’t the equipment or the inclination to remove them.  I am hoping each will come to harbor new evidence of life: offshoots; squirrel holes; birds nests; woodpecker drilling sites; insect grubs.  Damn it, even blackberry canes would be welcome, despite their indestructibility and Farm-wide omnipresence.  (As an aside, I find it imperative to state that I have come to believe that individual blackberry canes possess intelligence; that they knowingly lay in wait, only to begin growth at that precise most-vulnerable instant when humanity, unnoticing of them or the prospect of them, has passed by a likely spot where they might prosper.  And since any old spot, no matter how bleak, how desolate, or how unlikely from a human perspective, looks, to a blackberry cane, to be an appropriate spot from which it may grow and spring, I often have the feeling that new canes are a form of woodsy locomotion used by the parent bushes to follow us about and spy upon our doings.)

The taller of the two dying pines is planted on a hillside and its roots will continue to serve by holding the hillside in place, helping in death to keep it from sliding into the downhill meadow it overlooks.  In this way, the stump will continue in service to this land, to this Farm, both by providing continuing stabilization to the hillside as it decays until such time as new growth is able to take its place and as a cradle for other forms of new life.  I can only wish to emulate this cycle.  I have long wished to be cremated and have my ashes serve as compost for the roots of a newly planted tree – perhaps an apple or other fruit bearing tree – so that I might benefit the growth of something new; something which will eventually die and become a nurse log for yet other new life in its turn.  What better use could there be for one’s remains?

I’ll miss this particular hemlock – a stately, worshipful, brooding tree – a great deal, since it is one of the two largest trees on the Farm and has long done duty as one of the Farm’s two giant sentinels who watch for our return home when we’ve been away.  Soon, only its neighboring giant will remain on solitary watch; soon only its stump will remain as its monument.  We haven’t any choice but to remove it, since it grew very close to the house and the inevitably falling branches would likely damage the house severely or possibly take one or the other of us with them on their way to ground.

And so this small Farm is large enough – large enough to contain and respect both ends of a single life; large enough to accommodate the curious vitality of the overlapping waves by which the concept of life is sustained.  The Farm is small enough for us to know there isn’t a single cottonwood tree on the premises, but large enough for cottonwood spindrift to have become as if a blizzard this spring when the winds are just right.  This spring, the spindrift is arriving in more frequent and heavier-than-usual clouds; each a drift of minute seeds swaddled in fluff, each cast away by a hopeful parent to produce life or to fail to produce life as the winds and fate decree and as the Farm’s hospitality may allow.  The blackberry canes had best be aware they have a challenger for dominance this spring, as the spindrift leaves little doubt of its intention.

And so it goes.

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The Enhanced Colors of Spring

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Last summer we found a cheap thistle feeder at the supermarket and hung it outside our living room windows.  It attracted crowds of goldfinches.  In fact, there was no room at the inn on most days, with birds hanging on the feeder’s suspension hook waiting a turn at one of the available perches and others flying at perch occupants in hopes they would abandon the perch so that the aggressor might take their place.  We enjoyed the resulting show so much that we bought two new seed feeders and a suet feeder to hang in place of the thistle feeder when the goldfinches migrated south for the winter.

The thistle feeder was hardly the first bird feeder we’ve had, but those were hung amid the pine branches on trees near the house.  I’ve always loved goldfinches, and had only previously seen them lining the chain-link fence surrounding our pastures on early morning weekend walks to fetch our newspapers from their receptacles hung on the post of our mail box.  Their song is precious, especially as they gleam in an early morning sun.  First warned of my presence by my crunching of driveway gravel, they would watch me approach only to fly away as soon as I crossed some predetermined avian Maginot line.  And so I hung the thistle feeder on the eave overhanging our living room deck in hopes of seeing them up close, a privilege previously denied to me.

Winter brought an array of interesting birds.  A large pileated woodpecker frequented the suet feeder along with flickers, a downy woodpecker, and a hairy woodpecker.  Chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, steller’s jays, and other small birds fed regularly at the seed feeders. These birds were of interest because of their variety, not their color.  They were mostly black, brown, white and gray, although several possessed surprising patches of red or rose.  But their most striking features lay in the intricate overall  design of their feathers.

The last few weeks have proven to provide the most interesting bird watching.  The hairy woodpeckers have found a feeder hung outside our kitchen window, one they can hang upside down upon and reach up to pick seeds from the feeding holes.  They are beautiful birds and fun to watch.  The feeder is next to the window, so they are only a foot away when we watch and they seem to sense that we cannot get at them through the glass.  A sudden movement will startle them away, but if we move slowly and deliberately we can stand and watch them feed for as long as they’ve a mind to do so. Their acrobatics are both clownish and graceful.

If you had asked me last year what sorts of birds lived on the Farm, I would have mentioned robins, sparrows, steller’s jays, woodpeckers, starlings, juncos, nuthatches, chickadees, quail, goldfinches, the occasional owl, and others I have seen walking our lanes and roads.  One long ago summer, we enjoyed the sight of a male pheasant strutting boldly up and down our lane, but we could never discover his nesting place. And all the while I knew there were other, shyer birds living here with us, because I could hear calls that fit none of those named above.  Our new feeders have drawn these recluses to our windows this spring.

The spring’s first surprise was an evening grosbeak.  I have been eagerly awaiting the return of the goldfinches since they are lively and fun, and a week or so ago I caught just a glimpse of something resembling a goldfinch, but much larger.  A visit to Merlin, the Cornell University iPhone bird application, suggested it might be an evening grosbeak.  With time, I was able to be certain of my identification as it or its clone returned to the feeders on several occasions.  And then, a few days later, I was startled to see that the bird had become orange instead of yellow, and another visit to Merlin revealed I had seen its cousin, a black-headed grosbeak.  Who knew there was so much color hiding in our underbrush and thickets?

This spring has also brought us white and golden crowned sparrows, lively birds which seem to be passing through the Farm to a more northern summer home.  We saw them for three or four weeks, but now they seem to have vanished.  I still watch for them and I may yet see a straggler or two on their northern migration.

Before this last year, I would not have considered myself a bird watcher.  But there is something fascinating in watching a wild bird so close up, especially when one can do so from the comfort of a couch or favorite armchair.  There is little cost to us beyond that of the seed and suet and the perpetual tasks of restocking the feeders and cleaning up our deck anew.  Our Orkin man is appalled at the fallen seed and husks, insisting that it will attract varmints we don’t want.  I am certain he is right, for I have seen squirrels foraging for seed on the deck, and, if they are present, other small animals are likely there during evening hours.  But it seems a small price to pay to see all of this color and motion so close up.

It took awhile for the shyer birds to begin frequenting our feeders.  The first were the steller’s jays, often seen about the Farm over the years but never up close.  They are shy of people, and prefer to roost up high in a tree and hurl insults as you pass beneath.  Peanuts proved their downfall, and once one of the more intrepid among them discovered peanuts in the shell, the rest were not far behind.  And with the jays came other birds who don’t normally frequent the environs of our house.

I like to think that we have provided a peaceful place for them to approach so near, a place only contaminated (from a bird’s vantage point) by Marco, our black cat, who periodically makes his appearance on our deck to see if there is anything but seeds to dine upon.  He has proven successful a time or two at finding a more interesting meal (from a cat’s vantage point), but he is so distinctive against the decking that his appearance usually clears the decks of anything avian.  The jays often squawk at him from the safety of nearby tree limbs, and he appears to know better than to attempt a foray in their direction,  He greets their insults with studied disdain, and then saunters off in another direction as if to imply that their insults are nothing more than an irritation.

In Marco’s defense, he has been successful in keeping the prospective varmint population to a minimum – a fact to which we can testify given the variety of guts, heads, and other miscellaneous offerings he’s left on our front and side door mats as offerings.

And so it is that this spring has been far more colorful than those of the past.  For then we had only the flowers to brighten our days – the forsythia, azaleas, roses, crocuses, quince, snowdrops, tulips, daffodils, heathers, and other varieties known only to Helen but not to me.  To this spring has been added an avian mixture of oranges, yellows, grays, roses, browns (solid, speckled, striped, and mottled in every imaginable design), blacks and fawn.

I await only the insects, butterflies, and bees to make the Farm complete.

Posted in Humptulips County | 1 Comment

A Fine and Misty Spring Morning

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

A fine and misty morning has dawned.  Mist is rising from each of our fields, lingering evidence of an early tryst between earth and sky.  The very air approaches corporeality, a near  transubstantiation offered as if in thanksgiving for the bounties of the coming hours and serving as the binder in a translucent stew liberally flavored with the pastel seasonings of Spring.

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Dreams And The Catching Thereof

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Yesterday I entered the last year of my seventh decade.  After a certain time of life, birthdays begin to be sobering affairs as they produce an inevitable rumination over the meaning of life’s events.  I begin to wonder what value I have added, always thinking of George Bailey and his angel Clarence and wondering if my guardian angel showed up and performed a similar miracle for me, what I might learn.  Alas, this is mere daydream and never to be, leaving me instead to my own incompetent speculations.

But such thoughts never last long, since my focus has always been forward.  While the length of the future has declined by a year, there is still enough of it left in which to chase dreams.  Chasing dreams is a necessary part of life – a part ignored by too many of us.  For only if we chase dreams do we have any real likelihood of catching them.  I don’t believe in the concept of luck when it comes to living a life; those who seem to others to be merely lucky, are far more likely to be those who worked hard to position themselves to catch fate as it passed by.

Effective dreaming is much more than cogitation and pondering.  Chasing dreams requires the expenditure of real effort.   The dreams of which I speak are active affairs, the kinds of dreams that don’t simply exist in the daze of momentary distraction or in the deepest undercurrents of night. Daydreams are a dime a dozen and of little value beyond a momentary release from boredom or tension; those of the night serve the mind’s health, but seldom advance personal goals.  True dreaming requires elbow grease, spit and polish, baling wire, duct tape, bits of discarded lumber, slightly bent nails, an old hammer with a well polished handle, used paintbrushes in an old tin can requiring turpentine to become flexible again, a notional will-o’-the-wisp, and the spark of will power.

Most dreams are hard to achieve because they depend in large part upon the assistance of others.  For an author to publish a story or novel, the assistance of a publisher and maybe an agent is required.  But unless the author first writes the story or novel, there is nothing a publisher or agent can do for him.  So first he must write, chasing the dream in the solitude of composition.  Fortunately, there is always satisfaction to be found in the effort: the sense of fulfillment coming with completion; the sense of achievement resulting from application of personal standards.  The same is true for most endeavors, artistic or otherwise.

All I know with certainty is what I’ve learned in my 69 years: that I stand no chance with a passing whimsy if I make no effort to catch its eye; that I cannot attract serendipity if I am too unrehearsed to whisper enticing amusements into its ear if it ever appears.

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April Hymns

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for the springing fresh from the word

Eleanor Farjeon, Morning Has Broken

It’s pre-dawn, the time when advance columns of light leaking over the horizon from a still unrisen sun do battle with the night’s shadow.  There is just enough light to see larger shapes and vague hints of what the coming day may bring, but not enough to reveal detail; just enough light to reveal a heavy mist rising over the line of trees behind our downhill neighbor’s house – a sinuous mist tracing and revealing the curves of the river hidden below the bluff screened from view by the tree line.

It’s too soon to know if the sky will be overcast, for color is not yet manifest.  But given the forecast, I’d guess that gray interspersed with blue will be the order of the day.  So far, the day is far from gray in aspect, for birdsong is everywhere this morning – as it is every April morning – providing plenty of aural color.  April is a time of northern migration for many bird species, and as the transients pass through the Farm they join with the residents in choruses of call and response, of “this is mine and not yours.”  And on each April morning, rain or shine, the transients join with the residents in the morning’s choral entreaty to the coming light, join in hymns of hopeful praise to the rising sun, seeking a blessing upon their journey even as the residents seek blessings upon our fields and trees.

And as soon as the sun rises, the chorus suddenly stops as fact once again conquers dream, as it must on each new morning.

Some of the transient species may stay here on the Farm; most will move on.  Not many of those that summer over on the Farm have yet arrived: the robins already have a strong, entrenched presence; it is too soon for goldfinches.  The Farm’s year round residents seem not to care about the transients as long as they stay away from our feeders – or should I say ‘their feeders’.  The year round residents are known intimately to us because of the feeders; the transients are made known by their songs and an occasional glimpse.

The birds’ paean to morning has ceased now.  The sun is up.  The sky is more gray than blue, but there is plenty of blue to be seen.  The daylight is strong and clear; not watery or weak.  A V-shaped skein of geese has just flown north, honking as they passed.  A small in-migrating flock of crows can be seen investigating the tops of firs for secure places from which to trade corvid insults with the resident Stellar Jays.

It’s a good day in Humptulips County, a day full of promise.  Could any day that is announced with such a glorious chorale, with so much praise, be otherwise?

 

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The Gospel According To Momus

Posted on March 30, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

About 50 miles northeast of our Farm lies the debris field from the landslide which has brought Snohomish County to the world’s attention.  It is unclear how many remain buried there, as the numbers provided by authorities make little sense.  But the loss of life has been substantial.  The human dead range from infants to the elderly; the death of other life forms is incalculable.  The landslide spared nothing and no one in its path, and took life without regard to philosophy, age, infirmity, genus, or species.  If something living lay in its path, death was dealt; nothing was spared by the briefly animated wall of mud and debris that scampered down the valley like a screaming banshee, cutting down the living as it frolicked, adding their mass to its malefaction.

Most of the people living in the valley beneath the hill where the landslide originated prefer the rural life; and a large subset of them prefer to live their lives as far away from any seat of authority as possible while still retaining the basic amenities of civilization.  Among this subset – among the dead – were those who advocated a withdrawal from Snohomish County, the separation of its northeastern portion into the rebelliously named “Freedom County,”  a proposed rural utopia where no one in authority could ever tell anyone where or how to live, or how to site or build a home.  Notwithstanding the roar and rant and antics of its advocates, Freedom County never became an official entity, but its nascent spirit is alive and well in the area surrounding the slide.

The hill from which the slide originated dominated the valley where the dead lived.  It was the same horseshoe-shaped hill from which five slides have originated since 1949; the same hill considered to have the potential for a large catastrophic failure in a 1999 report filed with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the same hill known to geologists and locals alike as ‘Slide Hill’.  Either those resident immediately beneath Slide Hill were unaware of the prior slides and/or the report’s warning, or they did not care.  There were probably some of each.  The dead lived there due to an overwhelming desire to live within the beauty of the valley, a valley lying alongside the Stillaguamish River.  Some of the dead probably knew the risk of living there, and consciously chose to accept it; some of the dead probably chose not to be conscious of it, choosing, instead, to ignore the plentiful written, oral, and visual evidence of recent landslides (the most recent in 2006); some of the dead may not have known anything about the risk of landslides, failing, in their bliss of residency, to use any thought or any sight or any hearing whatsoever.

It is difficult to believe in the existence of anyone in the latter category.  Consider this extract from an article published in the March 24, 2014 issue of the Seattle Times:

“The 2006 slide took place in winter, on Jan. 25.  Three days later, as the new channel cut the land, residents and agency staff reported the eerie sound of trees constantly snapping as the river pushed them over, wrote the Stillaguamish Tribe’s Natural Resource Department on its website.  But the sound of construction competed with the sound of snapping trees.

“They didn’t even stop pounding nails.” said Tracy Drury, an environmental engineer and applied geomorphologist who assessed the area with Miller soon after the landslide.  We were surprised.”                         ‘

*  *  *

“We always thought there was a possibility that a catastrophic event could come,” said Pat Stevenson, environmental manager of the Stillaguamish Tribe. “We were hoping that wouldn’t happen.”

For those of the dead who knowingly chose to live in the slide path, accepting the risk as a matter of their philosophy to live free of governmental authority, their death is either  fulfillment or irony, depending upon the beliefs of the commentator.  For me, such a death is a waste, coming as it does from a bad habit of constantly spitting into the wind; for those dead who accepted the risk, believing fiercely in their right to do as they wished, whatever the odds, I supposed their death might have seemed, to them, to be a form of culmination  a last formal bow to the inevitability of the power of Tyche, the Greek goddess of fortune, a salute to her from a fallen warrior.  We, the living, will never know what they thought, since their last thoughts are forever hidden from us – but it is difficult for me to imagine that anyone caught in the vast slide of mud and debris could have had such a rational thought amid the terror which ended their life so abruptly.

I, at least, find myself unable to judge those of the dead who knowingly accepted the risk of landslides, even as I marvel at the possibilities of their underlying philosophy; for the remainder of the dead, I feel only pain, a pain shared by all who live here in Humptulips County.

Meanwhile, the search of the debris field for the dead – whatever their respective beliefs or state of awareness may have been – goes on, and will likely continue for many days.  Humanity never rests easy until its dead are known; spiritual recovery never begins until the doors of the crypt have closed.  And so the massive search continues, despite the miserable weather, despite the horrific conditions, despite the physical and mental weariness of the searchers.

Momus was the Greek god of mockery, tossed out of heaven for mocking the gods themselves – he found fault, for example, with Aphrodite, the goddess of love,  finding the noise made by her feet too loud, even while finding no fault with her overall form.  I have to wonder if Momus, upon his eviction from Mt. Olympus, resettled himself on the top of Slide Hill, patiently waiting there for someone to come along and be mocked; I have to wonder if the searchers, seeking both the dead and mementos of the dead in order to lessen the grief of the bereaved, will find, instead, only a memento of the god – the sole remaining copy of the Gospel According to Momus.

I pray they will not; I pray, instead, that the living may find knowledge and, in the fullness of that knowledge, a sort of peace.

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Singing For Supper

Posted on March 9, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

We are entering that season which is neither winter nor spring – the season I call ‘Not Spring’.  Temperatures have moderated, hovering in the upper 50s and even reaching 60 degrees on one or two occasions.  There hasn’t been any snow or frost for the last couple of weeks, and the March rains have begun in earnest.  Wave after wave of storms are arriving on Humptulips County’s shores from the direction of Hawaii, drenching the land and soaking it into instability on hillsides lacking vegetation.

This is the sort of weather that promises life while seeming dreary.  Seen from inside a warm, dry house, a dull, overcast, rainy day makes us seek the homely comforts, the kind of comfort to be found in a good book, a bowl of soup, a cup of tea or hot chocolate, or a warm fire – the kinds of comfort we spend the rest of the year working to achieve; the kind of rest we seek after enduring another frenetic rotation of the seasons.

But there is much more to these Not Spring days than can be seen through cloistered, indoor eyes – especially when the wind dies down and the rain falls straight down onto the earth.  Rain fell steadily yesterday, but if the loudly promised winds blew at all, they failed to reach the Farm.  Yesterday’s rain fell in straight, determined lines, but not in a torrent.  I suddenly found myself restless in the midst of my comforts, as if the rain was calling me, compelling me to come outside.  So I went out onto our front porch to find out why.  There I found the first truly spring rain of the season.

Spring rains have an ambience all their own.  They possess a soothing, pattering, tinkling noise peculiar to the season.  Instead of falling with the necessary force required to denude trees as fall rains must, spring rains are gently persistent.  They seek to spare the plants from damage, to rouse and awaken each green fuse (as Dylan Thomas would say), to urge the resident life-force to circulation and resurrection.

Our front porch is covered.  It was designed by my brother, Frank, to tie our house to the landscape from which it rises.  It overlooks our turnaround and our fields to the front and to the right, and butts up against flowerbeds and a pine grove on the left.  It is lined with cedar planking to add decoration to its shelter.  It is a favored location to partake of the outdoors, for it brings shade in the summer, protection from all forms of precipitation, and the comforts of a porch swing and outdoor furniture in all seasons.

As I stood on our porch and listened, I became mesmerized.  First by the music of the rain: the soft swoosh of its descent onto grass, its tinkling feeding of the puddles freckling our black top, the plink of each drip of overflow from the edge of the rain gutter; then by a full-throated chorus of birds celebrating the rain’s fall, celebrating its promise of spring, a chorus composed of the songs of nuthatches, stellar jays, chickadees, starlings, robins,  juncos, woodpeckers, and all of the other kinds of birds I am too unsophisticated to name.  The rain served as woodwind, bass, and percussion, the birds as flute and clarinet gracing the rain’s steady rhythmic line.

And as I watched, a lone chickadee came to light on the topmost branch of the dogwood tree immediately adjacent to the place where I was standing.  It sat in the rain and preened, then hopped to another branch and then another, always taking a moment to preen again on each new branch, always watching me with one cautious eye.  It seemed to be aware of my state of ardor, respectful of my enjoyment of the music, for it added its slight song occasionally to the chorus between preenings.  But it was not fooling me.  For ten feet to my right, in front of our kitchen window, hangs the chickadees’ favorite feeder, a gift from our friends Tom and Carrie.  I gradually became aware that the chickadee had come to remind me of its interest in the feeder, waiting as patiently as it could for me to return to the house, to my natural habitat, so that he might get on with the business of life.

The chickadee’s song was quiet, almost lost within the mix of rain and chorus, but distinctive due to its proximity: brave in its soft utterance; alive, hopeful, and reassuring in its persistence.  Eventually another chickadee answered from the pines across the turnaround, and my watcher bobbed as if to say goodbye and flew off to a pine across the way.  From there he resumed his watch.

When his message finally came through to me, when the penny dropped, I returned inside.  For I realized my friend had been trying to remind me that this time is Not Spring and, despite its incipient promise, the seeds, buds, and grasses that sustain the chickadees and other birds are not yet in evidence.  Back inside, I went to stand by the kitchen window to drink a glass of water – all that falling water having made me thirsty.  And as I looked out, there on the feeder was a chickadee stabbing at seed and watching me through the window, as if he knew it was all right to be distracted by his feeding given the safety of the barrier between us.

I want to think the chickadee feeding there was my friend from the dogwood, for friend he was as he sat calmly watching me, safe in the knowledge that he could fly far faster than I can run and higher than I can jump.  I want to think that my friend respected my wish to enjoy an early spring symphony and patiently waited for me to take my full enjoyment of it so that he, in turn, might visit the feeder.   I want to think he and I enjoyed a form of cross-species communication and cooperation; that he, having first let me drink my fill of song, having first said grace, having first sung for his supper, was now entitled to have me watch him eat his fill of seed.

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The Fog Bank

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

Carl Sandburg, Fog

Yesterday dawned as if it would become a beautiful day – as it eventually did.  When, at dawn, I glanced to the east while returning to the library with coffee in hand, I saw fields bathed in the early wan sunlight that is the hallmark of a cloudless late winter’s day.  The fields were blessed with wispy highlights of frost as if fresh from a trip to a cosmic beauty parlor, the overnight temperature not having dipped low enough to render them completely white.

When I looked west from the library, however, I noticed that the trees defining my horizons seemed to be in the process of transformation – those in the front rank were recognizably trees complete in every detail, while those in the rear were dissolving into abstractions.  And as I continued to watch, the front ranks began dissolving as well.  It was if I was watching the fine, swift, dizzying brushwork of an accomplished water-color artist creating an impression of a horizon, an impression meant to serve as background in a painting to be entitled “A Winter’s Dawn.”

It was if I was watching the hand of God at work.

The transformation soon revealed itself as the work of weather, not of God.  A fog bank  crept cautiously from the trees into my neighbor’s fields as if something there might offer it challenge.  For all of its caution, its approach had the implacability, the inevitability of a stalking ocean squall; it soon engulfed the house and then our eastern fields, the speed of its passage measured by the limbs of the cedar outside the large library windows as they turned from green to gray to mist and back again within a matter of several minutes.

I wonder where the fog was going, and whether the means of its travel was an accident of science or a matter of will; I wonder at the timing and the manner of its eventual dispersal or if it  has shape and substance still.  All I know with certainty is that I was captivated by the magic of its passage, taken by surprise as if a pawn captured en passant.

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A Mug’s Game

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

I’ve been writing for some time, and just looked up to find that it has started to snow.  So far, the snowfall is light and none of it is sticking, but the weathermen have been spreading rumors that we might have up to 5″ of snow before the day is over.   If it continues to snow and the forecasted depth is achieved, miracles will certainly be written in fine print somewhere among the drifts.  Possibilities are indeed endless there in the snow, and their hidden existence excites me.  I don’t know why an active snowfall always makes me feel like a child again, but it does.  Perhaps I am still hoping for a day off from school.

That notion isn’t nearly as crazy as it must sound, coming, as it does, from a 68-year-old man.  For I find I have been perpetually in school, learning something new about life and its complexities from everything I’ve attempted.  I was fortunate in my choice of profession, for being a business lawyer requires one to learn something new from each client’s business, and the constant discovery kept me young at heart.  In my estimation, a life this long without continual exposure to the white magic of learning would not have been a life worth living.  I have long been puzzled by those who opt out of an education, who do not feel the joys of its challenges, who aren’t the least interested in anything new, who don’t wish to wrestle with life.

My current challenge is learning about the publishing industry.  With one book ‘finished  – are they ever ‘finished’? – and a start on a second underway, I have discovered that the keys to success in the publishing world are well hidden, well guarded.  Major publishers prefer authors to have an agent; agents are not interested in newly hatched authors (especially those of my hoary vintage), unless the newbie can grab their attention with a single throw of the dice.  I understand the agents’ problem.  They must be swamped with manuscripts, many of which probably fall well outside their genre of interest despite the submission guidelines they carefully post on their websites, and many of which are likely as murky as the bottom of the Dan River in North Carolina must currently be – the river that Duke Energy recently spilled great quantities of coal dust into.  The agents’ plight must be akin to that of a law firm recruiting officer who has advertised for sixth year associates, only to have to wade through tens, if not hundreds, of letters from third year law students who are hoping the recruiter will ignore the published strictures in their case because they are so patently worthwhile and so obviously in need of work.

Who knows?  I may well fit into that image, although I am trying my best not to do so.

But while I believe I understand the agents’ problem, finding an agent is still a mug’s game from my vantage point.  I am certain I will not spend much time on the search; I know I prefer to go about it in the background while I continue doing what I love best – creative writing.  Hence, I began work yesterday on the new novel I have been thinking about and planning for during the past month.  That planning required me to read Native American mythology – a task which proved to be no task at all, but yet another joyous exercise in learning.  For Native American mythology is earthy and whimsical to a degree I was not expecting, and it expresses a notion of wholeness, of completeness in the world that is refreshing when the reader is the by-product of a consuming society.

When I began my first novel, I wasn’t thinking about publication.  In fact, I told myself I would be happy simply creating something that could stand upon its own feet, that friends might enjoy reading.  I had little interest in the toils of publication, seeking instead to create the equivalent of a first-time woodshop student’s wall-mounted bookshelf.  But, as one nearly always does, I discovered a catch.

I found the catch to be a constituent element of each character I created.  If you read closely, you will soon find the lie in that last sentence – the lie inherent in the phrase “I created’.  For while I may have drawn the initial rough caricature of each major character from whole cloth, I soon found that he or she had a way of blossoming upon the unwritten page that was as unique and idiosyncratic as it was wholly unexpected – as if each of them had grabbed my keyboard from me, taking charge in order to better express who it was he or she wanted to become when the pages were finally filled to completion.

Since each character is composed of equal parts spit, baling wire, duct tape, and imagination (theirs and the author’s), the author becomes their caretaker – a steward with the corresponding fiduciary duty to let their story be told because they are incapable of telling it aloud themselves; their story can only be told in print, and each telling can only happen when that printing interacts with an intelligent reader.  So if an author comes to care for his characters and if they desire their story to be heard, guess who must make the effort to publish.

And so it is I find myself playing a mug’s game and hoping to shorten the very long odds.  A good friend who is a published author in a genre other than my own tells me that finding an agent requires a form of incest – a writer who already has an agent must refer the unrepresented author to his or her agent for there to be any hope of success.  So must I now seek to cultivate the acquaintance of those who have access to an agent?  Must I drift endlessly from one publishing-themed cocktail party to another?  Not likely, for I hate cocktail parties with a passion.  In fact, my completed novel ends during a cocktail party, in the corner of every cocktail party room where those who perpetually disdain such experiences inevitably find sanctuary.

So I will continue to send off queries to agents in hope of a miracle or two, while working on my second draft – the draft where I fully expect the real miracles to occur.

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