The Virtue of a Small, Small Place

Posted on February 17, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art.  If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it.  It has to have shaped me.  I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.”

Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space

“All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren’t noticing which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”

Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It and Other stories  

We moved to the farm 20 some years ago from our home in one of the nicer sections of the city.  Our stated reasons were practical: a son needing space to run and ill-suited to do so in the city streets due to a hearing impairment; parents needing routine daily assistance  and living close by the farm.  But I confess that deep inside where the earliest memories reside, I was desirous of the move for other reasons despite the resulting commute it would occasion as I still worked in the city then.

For I grew up in the West and am a creature of its landscape as only a westerner can be.  Not the West crowned by the cloistered sky prevailing here in the Puget Sound region, but the West that lies east of the Cascade Mountains: the West of the semi-arid, expansive basalt plateau laid down by eons of volcanic eruptions lying under skies fully as wide as an uninterrupted horizon allows; the West known only to the plainsman.  Life under those western skies is an unending lesson in humility, for nothing can stand up to their drama or to their power – not the landscape nor the life-giving river-god which meanders through its vastness; certainly not something as fragile and as puny as humanity.  But the human spirit can feed from those western skies, as mine did; the human spirit can test its potential there, if one is but willing to try.

So our move to the farm was my personal feint at a return to the land – not to the land of my childhood for one cannot go back in time, and I would have little wish to do so were it possible, but to a living, breathing ecosystem which includes humanity as a constituent element.  I was happy to leave the city, to leave a place where humanity dominates and is the pseudo-lord of all it can see in every direction it looks.  For, if nothing else, my time under those western skies taught me that humanity is but one species among many, all of whom must cooperate to ensure the long-term success of that misunderstood anomaly we have labelled ‘life’.  This is a lesson whose impact is much improved when the student is surrounded by a vastness too large to be fully comprehended, a vastness far bigger than any town or city, a vastness capable of swallowing entire towns and cities and rendering them a mere footprint upon the land.

But when we first came to the farm to live, my passion was misplaced for I saw the farm as my home, a mere possession over which Helen and I had come to rule for a time.  I was never foolish enough to want to make it over entirely in our image for I haven’t the interest or the ability to attempt such a thing, but I wasn’t cognizant then of just how fragile our hold upon the land truly is.  We humans speak of “our home” or “our property” or “our farm” or “our estate” as if to imply that our temporary dominion is really permanent and forever.  I admit to seeing this farm initially in that way – until I was taught otherwise by its resident plants, birds and animals, by the myriad varieties of wind and weather which have blessed and cursed the farm by turns, and by the vagaries of circumstance and time.

I have come to realize that ours is a species-specific form of ownership.  Vis-a-vis all other human beings, Helen’s and my possession of the land is said to be in fee simple, a legal status which means that other humans must pay our heirs for the privilege of supplanting our right to be the sole human residents of this farm.  With respect to all other forms of life contemporaneously dwelling upon this land, we are simply two additional temporary residents in a shared community of life.

For this farm recognizes no ruler and understands nothing of dominion or empire; these are mere human conceits, mere human schemes.  This farm is our host, and each living thing resident here is but one guest among many; this land is our god, and each living thing resident here is merely a single subject lost within an entire host of supplicants.

It is the small gods resident here who taught me my place in the order of being present upon this land I define as ‘my farm’.  Each resident small god has a distinctive voice to use in offering its prayers and lessons: the mutterings of the small, intermittent brooks; the raucous cries of crows and blue jays and the joyous melodies of songbirds; the subtle rustlings of long grasses; the patient soughing of pines in any breeze and the urgent whispers of maples and alders and other trees in a storm; the choruses of frogs soon to break out in anticipation of spring; the muted mysterious whisperings from unknown and unknowable sources lying deep within the alders carpeting the hillside behind our house; the nearly muted tympani of deer cautiously stepping through fields and forest or the loud flash of white tails as they bound from perceived danger.  Only in the relative quietude that a space as large as this farm can provide are the voices of such small gods likely to be heard.  Within this space, each of them insists upon speaking out in the perennial hope that we dominant humans might yet learn to listen, might yet learn to recognize that their message is holy and spiritual, might yet come to understand and acknowledge their message while there is still time.

And the most potent lessons I have learned from these small gods is that humanity also possesses a form of godhood just as they do, one that it can use for good or for ill.  For humanity affects those living things which surround us just as they affect us, but our effect is much more noticeable because of the enormous power of our collective voice,  a collective human voice which is so loud that it not only masks all of the myriad voices the small gods are capable of mustering, but also muddles and interferes with humanity’s ability to appreciate and understand the importance of, and the means of nurturing and caring for, the blessings granted to us by this land, by this planet Earth.

Small rural places like this farm give humanity an opportunity to remember, to acknowledge and to ponder, to recover somewhat from the inebriation suffered when we drink far too long from the fountain of our own, collective voice and only sparingly of the voices of our comrades in life.  For these are places where the small gods can still be heard, places where we can learn that we are incapable of owning anything to the exclusion of all other living things than humanity, places where we can find the grace of a silence which allows important quieter voices to be heard.

For some reason, I have been well and truly blessed and I know not why.

Posted in Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | 1 Comment

Moonlight and Snowfall

Posted on February 9, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

It is 4:00 AM.  Despite my usual practice of turning on one downstairs light to help guide my way to the stairs which lead to our library, I left it off this morning.   Accordingly, the house is completely dark except for the light I am using to type.  For we have newly fallen snow for the first time this winter, and, despite the clouds, the ambient moonlight has caressed our fields sufficiently for them to glow ethereally.  Interior lights would only serve to disrupt my view of them.  I would rather grope about blindly  than lose sight of this magical combination of snow and moonlight.

To the east, our fields are covered in white – a thin blanket of white of no more than an inch or two in depth, a blanket which stops abruptly at the edge of the dense grove of alders lining the hillside above the meadow where deer will make nests in the forthcoming summer’s grass.  At the moment, the deer are probably taking their winter’s rest somewhere within the alders, safe among the leafless branches interwoven thickly about them.  The alder grove is small, wild, dense and unmaintained, allowed to grow at will to prevent erosion and hold the hillside intact.  Its interior is dark even in summer daylight, and tonight it has swallowed the moonlight whole to become more an impression than a reality.

To the north, below me at the bottom of the hillside where the alders grow, two bright yellow spotlights shine atop the posterns supporting my neighbor’s gate.  They imply a welcoming which would likely prove ephemeral were I to try to take advantage of it at this time of morning.  They are pinpricks in the dark: incandescent flames highlighting a small  portion of the deckled edges of the surrounding snow-covered fields; lonely sparks against a vast, virgin whiteness which awaits the inevitable scribblings of day; mere screams in the dark, violent in aspect yet insufficient of enough intensity to reveal the tracks of foraging coyotes and other nocturnal predators which most certainly have already been written there – there in the snow.

To the west, another neighbor’s horse barn leaks a fuzzy penumbra of light upon the newly fallen snow, as if the focal point in a landscape by Claude Monet.  No coyotes will have ventured near, for this is a working barn on a working farm.  But for all of the comfort, for all of the effort, implied by the very fact of this barn, it seems impotent within its snowy setting, powerless to resist further advances to be made by the snow were it to give us more than the fluttering kiss on the cheek it has graced us with this morning.

But the power is on and I am safe within, safe from the snow and from all of its suggestions of storm and cold, safe from all of its implications of withheld ferocity, safe within its sheltering magic.  For our home, too, undoubtedly appears lonely here within its fields.  For such is the singular power of each first snowfall of the season, a power at its peak when its snow is freshly fallen and virginal: the power to isolate each living thing within a chrysalis of its own needs and desires; the power to keep each of us warm within a swaddling blanket woven from skeins of unutterable magical charms and of the dream-like prospects of that which is yet to be written.

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Pete Seeger (1919 – 2014)

Posted on January 28, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Well I got a hammer and I got a bell
And I got a song to sing all over this land
It’s the hammer of Justice, it’s the bell of Freedom
It’s the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters
All over this land

Pete Seeger, If I had a Hammer

“This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender.”

Words inscribed on Pete Seeger’s banjo

There is a shrinkage that comes with age, as if the horizons are drawing in physically closer to wherever you stand, as if your mind is no longer good enough to imagine or appreciate what lies beyond the power of your sight.  And because of that shrinkage, things that lie beyond the horizon become less and less interesting, while things within the valley you occupy acquire more and more focus.  This is a gradual process which begins at some unknown time in a long life, a time that may well differ for each of us, but which arrives relentlessly nonetheless.  But the results of its operations become increasingly apparent the older you get.

As your focus narrows, you realize that the worth of a few who shared the valley during your time is far greater than that of the rest.  These scarce few stand out as markers of place and time, a place and time now consigned to the past or, in the case of these few, to history.  For me, one of those few was Pete Seeger.

I was not privileged to know Mr. Seeger in the sense that verb is usually employed, but, like many of my generation, I came to know him well even if I never met him face to face.  He seemed a modest man, always apparently surprised by the power of his own voice.  It was this inherent modesty that made him stand out, for he always seemed to be about the needs of others rather than his own.  His empathy was enormous, and he always put action to words even when old age, disability, and a fading voice would have silenced a lesser man.

The power in his voice sprang from the simplicity of his message and the strength of his belief that music could prevail over evil.  He constantly lectured us to wield the hammer of justice, to ring the bell of freedom, and to treat everyone else as a brother or a sister.  He never wavered from this message.  He always lived up to his own standards, speaking out to the point of emasculation of his own commercial success.  Consider the commercial wisdom of the following lyric aimed directly at President Lyndon Johnson during the build up of the disaster that was the Vietnam War (Waist Deep in the Big Muddy):

Well, I’m not going to point any moral;
I’ll leave that for yourself
Maybe you’re still walking, you’re still talking
You’d like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We’re waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Mr. Seeger not only had the courage of his convictions, he had the courage to ignore his own needs in favor of greater truths; he not only had the courage to stand up for what he believed, he had the courage to do so in the heat of the spotlight while on center stage.  He had the courage to speak out when what he regarded as evil was all about him; he always sang best when he sang his songs into the teeth of what he believed to be an ill wind.

When William Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, his acceptance speech concluded as follows:

“I decline to accept the end of man.  It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.  I refuse to accept this.  I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.  He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

If Mr. Faulkner was wrong, Pete Seeger’s voice would have been the last puny inexhaustible voice on that last red and dying evening, but he would have been singing, not talking; if Mr. Faulkner was right, Pete Seeger’s courage and songs are ample evidence of the compassion and sacrifice and endurance of which Mr. Faulkner spoke.

Somehow or other, unlike the rest of us, Mr. Seeger’s horizons never shrank; his world was always wide and ever welcoming.

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Winter Hangs Heavy

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

There’s a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
‘Tis the Seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

Emily Dickinson, no. 258

Humptulips County is heavily draped in winter.  It is as if we are trapped in the very late stages of pregnancy: the time when everything feels bloated, when every move is ponderous and must be carefully contemplated and planned, when promises lie always beyond the reach of our abilities.  Heaviness pervades each day, dripping from the low hanging cloud cover stretching uninterrupted from horizon to horizon; dripping from tree limbs, from utility lines, from fence rails and fence posts, from each bush and shrub, from each boulder, rock and pebble.  Heaviness is king; moisture its court jester.

No living thing moves easily through this landscape.  Instead, each pushes through, using effort and willpower both as engine and as motivation.

Winter’s heaviness is a paradox: both moist and readily apparent on the one hand, and invisible and nearly indescribable on the other.  It is a state of being or a state of mind; it is an essential condition of the season or a side effect of too many clouds hanging too close to the earth; it is an emotional response to our constant consideration of the length of time remaining until spring or it is a psychological reaction to lowered light levels; it is a quietness derived from the reduced population of the season or it is the acoustics of a more cloistered aspect.  It is the essence of the season; it is the mood of the season.  Or, it is all of these things and more.

Whatever it is, whatever its source, heaviness permeates each winter’s day.  Because snow flakes drift casually through the winter’s heaviness with only modest regard for the laws of gravity, only a fresh fall of snow can alleviate its oppression.  But there is no snow in our forecast.  Our forecast calls only for more of the same well-moistened days that brought us to this condition in the first place.

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A Winter’s Sunset

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Gavin Stevens

Sunset comes early to Humptulips County this time of year.  By dinnertime, our sky has darkened and night is truly upon us.   If you’ve been distracted by some other pursuit during a late afternoon – reading or watching television, perhaps – the all too brief passage of day  into the darkest depths of a winter’s night often goes unnoticed until the distraction has come to an end.  This is especially true on those days when our sky is heavily overcast, the daylight dim throughout – which, in our climate, are most of them.

But yesterday’s afternoon sky was free of overcast, graced only by an occasional cirrus cloud.  It was the first day of its kind: a mid-winter day alive with false promises of spring; a day of sunlight and a plenitude of birds, with a soupçon of warmth suffusing its hours.  While such days aren’t truly spring, they seem almost as if they could be given a good healthy stretching of our imagination.  Such a day offers a brief respite from the repetitive tedium of the snowless, gloomy days which dominate Humptulips County’s winter, and, as time passes, we expect such days to accumulate into spring’s real promise, an expectation that makes the first appearance of such a day into a promise unto itself.

Reeking of promises real and imagined, such winter afternoons invite celebration.  And since Helen and I often operate at that level of mutual subliminal understanding which comes from years of having lived together (the kind where suggestions are not only anticipated, but replies have been formulated prior to their having been made), when she asked if I wanted to go out for dinner at our favorite local Italian restaurant, I immediately agreed.

And so it was that we drove west into an evening of blood-red clouds set among the indigo of deepening night, the depth of their color fading into the rose of horizon, all dominated by the headlight brightness of a golden full moon.  It was a magical trip, as if  we were sailing to Byzantium on the deck of a many-oared ship adrift in Homer’s wine dark sea, the laboring oars at rest as the ship heeled into the music of its sails and of the endless waves.  We said nothing for the length of time it took us to negotiate our private lane out to the main road servicing our neighborhood, too engrossed in the sunset’s beauty to denigrate it by comment.

The sunset lasted as long as our trip to the restaurant, long enough to make an otherwise routine evening memorable, long enough to add the necessary magic to our meal of ordinary, regularly chosen Italian dishes so that each tasted of the spice of sunset, tasted the best it ever had.

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Of The Nature And Timing of Anniversaries

Posted on December 31, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

So different, this man
And this woman:
A stream flowing
In a field.

William Carlos Williams, Marriage

My brother Mike was feted this week by our home town YMCA for 60 years of continuous employment.  It’s difficult to imagine both the string of years and the resoluteness of will necessary to attempt a single endeavor over such a time.  Mike played many roles at the Y during that period, and, at times, was its de facto manager without portfolio, title, or compensation appropriate to the task.  And all the while, he engaged in personal activities without breathing a word of them to his siblings: reading to and helping older men at the local Veteran’s Hospital simply because it seemed to him the right thing to do and he enjoyed their company and stories; mentoring kids who worked for him at the Y and giving them whatever hand he could as they started their lives because it gave him joy; helping our mother without fail during her declining, lonely years without a word of complaint to the rest of us because of his sense of duty.

But Mike’s is not the only anniversary of the moment.  My wedding anniversary is tomorrow – January 1st.  Helen and I chose that day as a symbol of new beginnings, for both of us came to the marriage after prior attempts with others.  I’ve found no reason over the years (33 tomorrow) to question our choice of wedding date – other than to note there is something about being married on the first day of a new year which makes me always want to follow my computation of our years together with a question mark – a question mark such as in ‘(33? tomorrow)’.  In fact, as I write this, I wonder whether Helen will agree with my computation when she sees this piece.  She may not, but she will understand my confusion if she doesn’t.

Her understanding will come from the knowledge that while I might not be able to count properly, it is not due to meanness or any personal hesitancy about the state of our union.  In fact, on each anniversary we acknowledge this confusion and discuss the length of our marriage; a discussion which is essential to our ritual of shared remembrance, for at its core are our shared memories.  Sooner or later, one of us will refer to some shared event, some event which will assist us in pinning down the correct number of years we’ve been together. And mention of one event always invokes recollections of a myriad of others.

We could, of course, read our marriage certificate instead for I know exactly where it is, but that would be cheating.

At the heart of any anniversary lie memories; they are the yardstick simultaneously used to measure the length of a relationship, the variety of and variations in its attributes, and its overall quality and depth.  Because some portions of a relationship work poorly and others work well, some memories are not as enjoyable as others.  But when the fact of failures is combined with the fact of a steadily lengthening marriage (as evidenced by the attainment of yet another moment for application of the yardstick of memory) we rest assured that our marriage has worked – does work – at some fundamental level in spite of whatever faults we each bring to it.

I’ve spent a good deal of my time writing a novel during this first year of retirement.  In my novel (Son), the protagonist marries at age 25 and his marriage endures for 40 years until the death of his spouse from cancer.  He looks back on his marriage with complete satisfaction and without memory of faults or discord, his only unhappiness stemming from the fact of her death and the enormity of his loss.  I chose not to disclose the quotidian aspects of their marriage because of the novel’s construction, a choice which renders their marriage as seemingly ideal within its pages.  But while I chose not to disclose the  arguments, the cracks, the heartaches, the hurts, and the differing recollections of shared events which must have occurred to my characters, I know they happened even if I chose not to write about them.  For how else could their marriage seem so rich on the page if it hadn’t outlasted such things; if it was not found wanting after being tested in the fires of a shared life and by the periodic strangulations attempted by fate?

And so it is with our marriage: it is and it goes, and in the going is its measure.

Congratulations, Mike.   Happy anniversary, Helen.

Posted in Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | 3 Comments

The Joy of Christmas

Posted on December 26, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

Despite all of the common complaints about the commercialization of Christmas, complaints which have become the stuff of conventional wisdom; despite the flood of email inducements (during what has proven to be a greatly extended holiday season by my standards) to spend my hard-earned money on everything from foods guaranteed to add 50 pounds to my already extensive waist by merely glancing at their name on a written page to email offers from strangers to provide various unnecessary, unsavory, and distinctly unusual services one could only vaguely imagine if one were inclined to do so in the first place; despite the increasing flood of newsletter inserts in holiday cards from friends I don’t know well enough to have been privileged to be apprised that their Uncle Sid died miserably, alone, penniless, and friendless, in a flop house in Upper Moosehead, Maine; despite the ads on television attempting to sell me everything from high-end luxury cars which apparently are the gift of choice at Christmas for discerning Americans to medicines with side effects that would quickly eliminate any need I might have had for those high-end luxury cars if I were to convince my doctor to allow me to partake of them; despite those of you who may be offended that I have used the word ‘Christmas’ and who have mistakenly decided, based solely upon that usage and the meanness of your own heart, that I have no respect for the customs, culture, or religious beliefs of others who are strangers to me or my culture; despite all of this (and some other things too unsavory to mention), I still find Christmas my favorite time of year.

I hereby confess: to spending more than I should at Christmas; some of the email inducements I receive are in direct response to my own activities on the Internet; some of my family and friends are close enough to inform me of tragedy at what should otherwise be a time of joy, and do so tactfully and respectfully of the season; I already own a Lexus, one of a string of five or six (but who’s counting?); and I not only respect the winter solstice customs of others, but find it fascinating that so many different cultures find such singular warmth at the coldest time of year, and often wonder what this phenomenon says about all of us as a species.

What I think it says about all of us is this:  all cultures work hard throughout the year to sow, tend, water, guard, and raise the crops necessary to sustain it, those foods that are essential to its survival, and because of the prevailing weather at this time of year (at least in the northern hemisphere), each must make serious invasion into its stores of such foodstuffs, depleting them to a level where the culture must begin the planting-to-harvest cycle anew when the weather is finally permitting in order to survive the coming year. Because of this annual cycle, each culture wishes not only to celebrate the combined,  sustained effort of its members which ensured survival during the just concluded long, hard year, it also wishes to: celebrate its collective survival over the many long hard years now lost to history, but whose essence is embedded in those of recent, collective memory; contemplated the combined, sustained efforts necessary to survive the many long, hard years to come; search for that one constant of meaning which might serve to ensure the collective willpower necessary to endure.

Each culture does this by calling scattered family members together: calling family members home to common shelter; inviting them to share their stories of, and the lessons they learned from, the efforts expended by them during the past year in hopes of spreading, widening, and deepening the core of collective, cultural knowledge and wisdom; adjuring them to the collective worship of whatever being or whichever belief the culture holds dear, holds essential – both in gratitude for having successfully endured yet one more long, hard year, and in a culture-wide plea to the unknowable for all of the food, safety, peace, effort, and wisdom necessary to keep matters going into the unknown.

And for all of that, I find great comfort in Christmas, despite the commercialization, despite the unwanted inducements, despite Uncle Sid’s death, despite the fear of others who can find comfort only in the efforts of their own culture, and not in the efforts of others.  For I am with my family and friends (some of them through the miracles of the digital age) and celebrating our shared successes and pondering our own future, however or whenever it may evolve.

My plea to each of you – regardless of culture, regardless of belief, regardless of age or status – is to just try to get along, to try to understand that strangers are simply trying to do the same things you are trying to do.  For in such a simple, basic understanding lies the wellhead of the universal peace for which we all search.

And now, it’s on to the post-Christmas sales and the new flood of emails in their support that began at precisely 12:01 this morning, the morning of the day after Christmas.  Thus it all began anew last night while I was sleeping in this digital age.

Merry Christmas, everyone.  And a happy New Year.

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A Massacre of Crows

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Robert Frost, Dust of Snow

We have been watching blue jays, flickers, chickadees, nuthatches, downy woodpeckers, and a single pileated woodpecker visit our feeders and suet box.  There are undoubtedly other species foraging there as well, but I do not recognize them yet.  I am proving to be a slow learner when it comes to things avian.

We have watched ours invited guests long enough to recognize individual birds by their habits.  We haven’t given them names, for I am certain they have their own secret names to which we humans are not privy.  It would be arrogant to call them by anything other than their own secret names, and we haven’t yet developed the level of trust between us necessary for the sharing of something so tightly held, so personal.

Just as there are differing feeding habits among the species, there are differences among the feeding habits of birds of a single species.  Most of the blue jays, for example, love to land on the roof edge to scope out which peanut they are desirous of having, heads atilt first one way and then another as they judge distance, desirability, risk, and timing.  They hold this position for several seconds, and then swoop in to steal their chosen target, landing upon the feeder’s edge just long enough to grab it and to cause a scattering of seeds against our window panes, only to immediately escape to a nearby pine bough to smugly eat their prize and preen at meal’s end.  Their chosen bough becomes both dining table and the staging area for yet another sneak attack upon the sanctity of our feeder.  They are natural thieves, always certain, there on their bough of choice, that they have once again outwitted the feeder gods.

One of them, however, prefers to land sedately on the edge of the smaller feeder, and then, with body hanging vertically, tail thrust far underneath the feeder pan, neck craned impossibly over the feeder’s edge, to eat daintily of the seeds within.  This bird always appears to be hanging onto the feeder for dear life.  It’s as if the concept of perching upright on a rolled plastic edge is so impossibly foreign as to be incapable of achievement, and, therefore, unworthy of attempt.

Our visitors are endlessly entertaining in a way that television never is.  They have a purpose that television might do well to imitate.  In order to indulge in watching their behavior, I go outside into the cold of each winter’s morning to fill the feeders hanging above the deck outside our living room windows, standing precariously on a picnic bench to fill the large feeder and the suet box and on tiptoes to fill the smaller feeder.  In doing so, I must appear to the oddball blue jay as awkward in my fear of heights as he appears to me when feeding so ingloriously.   This mission accomplished, Helen and I will be brought together at unplanned, unscheduled moments during the day by the magic of the frenzied avian activity we have wrought.

Yesterday, we were decorating the house for Christmas (I say ‘we’ for narrative purposes only, for the truth is that Helen is the decorator and I am merely a hindrance; but I am technically expert in my duties) when I heard Helen exclaim from the kitchen that our fields were covered in crows.  I joined her at the kitchen window to discover an impossible number of crows strung like black freckles across the green of our winter fields.  There were several hundred – big and little, raucous and quiet, hopping and flapping, flying and resting – but all of a single, collective pack.  A murder of crows so large, it approached a massacre.

As I went outside to take a picture of the phenomenon, they took flight as if a single being, becoming as one gentle susurration of wings disappearing into the west.  They moved so rapidly that I was unable in my technical inexpertise to capture a single image.

Crows are common on our Farm; we see, hear, and suffer them daily.  They dominate all other creatures frequently from afar, and sometimes by means of dive bombing.  They are mischievous in their protection of their presumed turf, to the point of dropping nuts and pinecones at times upon the heads of unwary intruders.  Marco, our black cat, is often the target of raining, ringing corvid insults if he dares appear upon open ground when they are in residence.

In fact, crows are so common to the Farm that I thought I understood them in their entirety, that nothing new about them was left for discovery. How wrong I was in my arrogance!   Yesterday’s behavior proved me mistaken in my belief, leaving me astonished and amazed, in awe of their collective beauty and of the shared expertise, care, and wisdom necessary to accomplish the patterns,the rhythms, and the path of such unified flight. It was if strangely dressed, miniature Rockettes had come to Humptulips County from their New York stage to grace our fields, to form and reform in optically pleasing patterns, to kick in unison with their trademark precision – doing so while airborne, as if twisting from unseen cords dangling from the grids strung in the theater top.

It was if strangely dressed, miniature Rockettes had come to Humptulips County from their New York stage to grace our fields, to form and reform in optically pleasing patterns, to kick in unison with their trademark precision – doing so while airborne, as if twisting from unseen cords dangling from the grids strung in the theater top.

The sight of such a large flock – several hundred birds; perhaps as many as a thousand – caused me to go to my favorite bird website and discover that large congregations of crows are common in winter.  If only I had known, I might have been able to plan, to lay in wait, to capture the photographic image that escaped me!

But I proved to be, instead, just another sad human observer of their logic and wit; as outsmarted as we humans always seem be when in their presence, but as delighted as I could possibly be while enveloped in their mystery.

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A Fool’s Thanksgiving Notions

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Eliot Mentor

Most often thoughts of the Thanksgiving holiday are forward-looking, anticipating what may come.  Mention the word “Thanksgiving” and visions immediately come to mind of juicy slices of turkey, candied yams, dressing doused with savory turkey gravy, hot rolls dripping butter, cranberry relish and, of course, the pies – pumpkin, mince and pecan.  We stuff ourselves with these gifts beyond normal limits, sometimes to the edge of exploding.  We do that as a ritual which oddly is meant to express “thanks” to the Creator – or to Nature’s God – for the fullness of our lives.  The more one gorges, the more thankful one is?  Is that the message eaters send to their Creator as the fats and carbohydrates slide down their gullets?  Probably, not.  Probably, no message accompanies such gluttony.  Just more gluttony.

But, other visions or ideas occasionally spring from time and place at Thanksgiving.

The long stretch of highway that ascends for some miles from the Columbia River toward Goldendale in the State of Washington, is mostly hemmed in by steeply rising grasslands, outcroppings of basalt showing here and there.  In late fall, the outlook can be bleak and unpromising.  One drives upward cruising around one curve after another, a never-ending sequence of turns and bends, seemingly tighter and tighter, as if the loops and twists are winding you up into some kind of a sphere, maybe even an outsize, bloated pea – yes, pea – from which you feel you may never escape.

You do, of course.  The moment of escape comes when you reach the plateau that tops the end of that long grinding rise and which stretches north into central Washington.  On our way to that part of the world for a Thanksgiving get-away, suddenly and without forewarning, we popped out of the winding confinement of the upward journey into a moment that was surrealistic.  As if sketched by hand with an indelible marker, the crown of the plateau stretched across bright, blue sky broken here and there – on all sides and straight ahead, too – with the upward thrust of wind turbines. Where had they come from?  Who had planted them?  Why were they there?

Of course I knew the answers.  Nonetheless, their unexpected appearance produced a gasp.  Somehow they didn’t belong on that landscape, as if they were alien monsters from some far off universe.  Would they attack and devour us?  Or fly away?  Stand silently aloof while the blades turned slowly doing cartwheels in the air?  Continue for all eternity, changing the energy of passing breezes into electrical pulses that were no longer going anywhere – because mankind had disappeared from the earth?  Turning, turning, slowly turning.  The vision passed, a transient moment that disappeared as we speeded onto the plateau to our Thanksgiving destination.

There, an idea – not really a vision – took shape, just a probing thought, yet somehow and somewhat distantly related to that surrealistic moment a day or two before when the sudden emergence of the wind turbines had caused my mind to flit to an imagined, future time.  This time a backward look, an enduring presence from a time long past, prompted me to speculate about the future.  The thought that tickled my mind was random, the kind that sometimes floats into your head when distracted or stimulated – take your pick – over a glass or two of a really good wine.  In fact, that was what I was doing, raising a glass to my lips to sip wine after wine – all good stuff – in a tasting room.  It wasn’t the wine, however, that brought the new outlook to mind.  It was the place, the tasting room itself, although wine no doubt aided the process.

What was special about the tasting room?  It resembled a cave.  “Yes,” you say, there are many tasting rooms that resemble caves.  True.  But, one wall of this room exposed the face of massive pillars of Columbia River basalt.  It was not a reconstruction, a plaster facsimile, but the real thing.  The basalt had overflowed the landscape as hot lava some 15 million years ago, and then congealed into huge, enduring rock faces.  It was as if the winery had burrowed into time past when it uncovered their over-awing bulk.  The cave’s dim light displayed a designer’s clever imagination and craft.  It also put on view – close up – 15 million years gone by.  Measured by the time scale which embraced these rugged pillars, we who sat casually sipping Sauvignon Blanc and Merlot were just a dot, an incremental nothing.

The basalt had rested in this place for millions of years before man began to wander the planet.  It would not move unless upset by some remote cataclysm for millions more.  That was clear.  For how long, I speculated, would man roam about, sampling wine here and there?  As long as these basalt pillars would stand, confronting the cosmos?  Which would have the longer life span?  Would you care to bet?

I drifted from distant time to future moments, back and forth.  Wine and basalt, in juxtaposition, had a way of inducing such thoughts, of leading one to senseless speculation about the unknowable.  Unlike the view of wind turbines, no fleeting vision sprang into my head.  It was a foolish, disjointed notion that had momentarily thrown me off the main chance.

So, it was back to the main chance.  First, a bit more wine.  Then, on to the turkey, the dressing, the gravy… the things that mattered, that were measurable and about which I could really rack up a score… if that is the right word.

 

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The Songs of God and Dragonflies

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Gavin Stevens

And though nature can sing such beautiful wings
Did you think of this?
That each of us know in our hearts we must go
That’s what beauty is
And just like the dream you were in
Dissolved in the morning sky
As soon as we’re here we disappear like dragonflies
As soon as we’re here we disappear like dragonflies

Boo Hewerdine, Dragonflies

I was awakened early this morning by my mental jukebox – specifically, by Eddi Reader’s version of Dragonflies.  If you don’t know the song, you should, for it is wonderfully lilting as if a child’s song adorned with adult lyrics.  I am often awakened by music playing in my subconscious.  Music seems to me to be an aural expression of the stuff of life.

As I pondered Boo Hewerdine’s lyrics, I began to consider the interconnectivity of all living things.  All living things enjoy the common condition of animation, a gift bestowed by some unknown, mysterious force we humans choose to label as ‘God’.  All humanity is obsessed by the concept of God, by the need to comprehend  the origins of our blessing and to discover and give the proper form of responsive acknowledgement required by our gods; all other living things simply seem to revel in the moments granted to them, their pleasure in their moments seemingly thanks enough for having been so blessed.

And because the concept of God is so ephemeral, so mystical, so all-encompassing, so difficult of comprehension, so isolating of human spirit, I didn’t give it much thought as I lay there listening.  I focused, instead, upon the fact of a shared life force and wondered what it must sound like if it could be heard entire.  It must sound like something, for it exerts an immense amount of energy.  And if we could hear it in its entirety, might we finally understand?

Does it sound like a train?  Probably not, for that is far too human a conceit.  Does it sound like an avalanche?  Probably not, for it must be more than warning if it is a universal driver.   Does it sound like a river rushing through a stretch of rapids?  Probably not, although such a sound must be part of the whole for, if it were not, there could be no imaginable whole.  Maybe it sounds like the hum of an enormous turbine at work within the belly of a giant dam – perhaps the Grand Coulee Dam in the eastern reaches of Humptulips County.  Turbines like these produce electricity for millions, so even if their hum is manmade it may well constitute a close approximation of the sound of the life force at work.  But maybe I am only saying so in a typical human effort to comprehend the unknowable, to hear the song of God.

I listened awhile to my own heartbeat as I lay there in the blessed silence of the dark, thinking that it, too, must be somewhere near the core of the life force’s sound – perhaps its percussion.  But then I began to wonder if plants have a heartbeat, and with that conundrum becoming evident I decided to get up and face this page for I knew it was inevitable that I should do so in such a state.

It is the blankness of this page that made me realize that it doesn’t matter what the sound of the life force’s complete symphony must be; that we ought to simply take our pleasure in the songs of the moment as dragonflies must – in the raspy chorus of lusty frogs in the early Spring; in the squawk of the blue jays and the screech of the pileated woodpeckers that visit our bird feeders and nest in our pines; in the susurration of the ripened stalks in the tan and sere Summer wheat fields of my youth; in the lonely call of a distant, receding train whistle at any time of night or of a chevron of south-flying geese in the light of a late Fall day; in the rustling of leaves in a dense forest grove; in the high-pitched, rapid beating of a dragonfly’s wings; in the roar of an agitated surf; in the cry of a gull, the coo of a dove, or the hoot of an owl; in the soft, tentative footfalls of deer creeping near our house to make a meal of the flowers Helen so lovingly planted as adornment, not food; in the customarily unheard beating of our own hearts, a sound to which we’ve become so accustomed that we can no longer hear it without reminder.

For music is more than just an expression of the stuff of life; it is the essence of each life.  And as Mr. Hewerdine suggests in Dragonflies, each moment of a life is oh so precious:

How can something so fragile leave us helpless
We all feel helpless once in a while
How can something so fragile leave us humble
We all need humble once in a while

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