Friends To The Last

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

Her name was Pudders.  Why, I don’t know.  It is a terrible name to inflict upon a self-respecting cat, but we got her as a rescue cat when she was about five and she’d already been named.  It wasn’t in our hearts to make her learn a new one.

Her name wasn’t the only bad thing her prior hosts did.  When they left her at the shelter, they gave a long list of complaints about this and that as their reasons for doing so.  The worst thing they could say was that she tended to bite whenever their grandchildren pulled her tail.  The irony of this explanation was lost on them.  The rest was all fluff and nonsense, expressed in the way of someone who never should have had a cat come to live with them in the first place.  We came to suspect that they had disciplined her severely for every single feline thing she ever did.

It took us years to overcome their treatment of her and to earn her trust so that she didn’t cower whenever we petted her.  But we overcame it all – all except the name.  She slowly grew into a proud cat, complete with a long bushy tail held happily erect and an extremely loud purr that even Peter could hear despite having to wear hearing aids.  She came to seek and adore attention, in contrast to hiding from us as she did during the entirety of the first two days after she joined our family.  She even learned that she was welcome on our bed with our other cats – but only after years of flattening her ears, jumping down, and running away whenever I placed her there in hope she would learn it wasn’t taboo in our household.

Pudders was part Maine Coon – everything but the legs.  She had the personality, ears, tail and body of a Maine Coon, but her legs were ridiculously short for such a large animal.  They didn’t take away from her beauty in any material way.  She was  black and tan with a richly patterned coat, the first and only thing strangers ever noticed.  Somewhere amid their admiration for her beautiful coat, they always overlooked the legs.  Or, perhaps, it was the strangeness of a name needing to be repeated upon first introduction to ensure correct pronunciation that made them fail to notice.

But what’s in a name, especially if you’re a cat?  T. S. Eliot would have said that she had her own secret name in any event.  If she did, we never learned that secret; she took it to the grave last night when she finally left us after seven years of close companionship.  Her passage was a reprieve from the inoperable cancer diagnosed two months ago; a cancer that slowly ground her to a halt over the past few weeks.  But she died here in the place that had come to be as much her home as ours.

Friendship is one of the great mysteries, as much so as death.  Interspecies friendship is even stranger, but it exists notwithstanding the naysaying of the skeptics who see only a symbiotic dependency instead.  The skeptics seem to forget that we humans are animals too, and that our interest in a relationship with other animals is not due to a desire to be fed but for companionship.  Pudders sought the same thing, coming, as she did, from a background of neglect and erratically applied discipline.

Pudders and I were close friends.  She was a friend to Helen as well, but, as seems to be the case with all cats, she had a preference.  She hung around with me whenever we were in the same part of the house, and when she got lost outside a month ago, it was me she came to when she recognized my voice as I called to her from across a wide wooden deck.  She greeted me every morning as I was getting ready for the day by jumping onto the counter and interrupting as much of my morning routine as she possibly could.  In fact, her persistent curious interference with my routine became a welcome, shared part of it.  She made me laugh. Our mutual morning ritual often ended in head bumps and nose touches that were every bit as meaningful to the two of us as the perfect fist bump or a victorious high-five would be to younger human pairings.

We kept our friendship to the last.  She purred yesterday afternoon when I last petted her, the sound almost lost in the profound silence of impending death.

I  miss her already.  Mornings will never be quite the same.

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Pesky Crows

Posted on June 26, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

Every time I interact with crows, I come away with the same conclusion: they have an alert intelligence and try hard to communicate across species about things that are important to them.  Unfortunately, I don’t speak their language.

I walked to our mailbox yesterday afternoon, as is my wont on nice days.  It was a sunny, but cool, day with the temperature in the high 60s.  As I reached a point under the pines about one hundred feet from the house, I heard a crow call and turned to see it fly out of the woods across the field on my left, headed in my general direction.  I didn’t give it much thought at first, other than to wonder what it might be yelling at.  It continued to caw as it flew.

It landed slightly ahead of me in one of the pines that line our driveway.  It was then that I first sensed I might be the subject of its call, but I couldn’t understand why, if so.  I couldn’t see a nest of any kind, crow or otherwise.  So I dismissed the thought, and continued on my way.

The first crow was soon joined by a second, more silent, one, and the two of them began leapfrogging to pines in front of me as I continued my walk.  The supposition that I was the object of their attention grew the farther I walked.  The lead crow became increasingly insistent, only stopping his calling when I emerged from under the pines into the open space at the end of our driveway in which our mailbox resides.  He quit calling then, content to watch me from the top of the last pine.

I retrieved the mail and our newspapers.  Giving the crows no further thought, I began walking back toward the house.  But as I neared what had since become, courtesy of my U-turn, the first pine, the lead crow began calling again.  Both of them reversed their progress and followed me back up the driveway.  It was now beyond doubt that I was the sole subject of their interest and calls.

There seemed to be more menace to them on my return.  On my way to the mailbox, the lead crow would fly to a pine two or three ahead of me as soon as I had passed underneath his current perch, and call out as I approached.  But on my way back, he always stayed immediately above me or to my rear, scolding the entire time.  I could hear his wings flapping whenever he approached and wondered if I might be dive bombed.  But he never got nearer than the tops of pines, content to tell me whatever he was trying to say from a lofty perch.  The second crow remained silent the entire way, always staying in the second farthest pine from the one in which the lead crow perched.

My initial conclusion was probably the right one – that I was being warned away from something that the crows held dear.  The fact that there were two of them added gravitas to this notion, given the assumption of parenthood.  But why, I wondered, would they have come from so far away – 40 yards at least – to warn me about a nest in the tall cedar from which they’d originated?  Certainly I was no threat to anything from that distance, especially when my direction was away from whatever it was they were protecting and my top speed is just slightly greater than lumbering.

I began to consider other reasons for their behavior.  Maybe they’d just woken up and were feeling querulous in the absence of whatever it is that serves as caffeine for crows, or perhaps they hadn’t yet had an opportunity that day to annoy a larger animal and were desperate for the opportunity.

But then I began to wonder if they were trying to entice me toward the cedar from whence they’d come.  Maybe they were asking for assistance of some kind; maybe an as-yet-unfledged newborn had fallen from their nest and they expected me to return it.  Perhaps Marco, our black-as-a-crow cat who spends most of his time coming in and out of the house in order to provide Helen with as much exercise as possible as she opens and closes our side door at his demand, had decided to investigate their neighborhood and they wanted me to chase him away.  Or perhaps the resident deer had somehow annoyed them and I was meant to restore peace between species.  The latter seemed particularly unlikely since the crows and deer coexist in the same woods and have differing spheres of influence, but I have seen them yelling raucously at Marco in the past.  But they were at least sixty feet in the air when they first noticed me, and Marco couldn’t have seemed much of a threat from such a distance; and, if they did consider him a threat, surely they would fly at him, not me.

Nothing made sense then, and I still haven’t any answer to offer on this morning after – either to them or to my curiosity.  As I walked up and down our driveway yesterday, I tried talking to them in English and in badly approximated crow, but it did no good whatsoever.  It neither encouraged nor discouraged them; they remained content to follow their down-driveway or up-driveway routines with near-religious fervor, only quitting whenever I reached either the open space at the end of the driveway or the 100 foot mark from the house – the territory in between being their active strike zone.  I only know that while I was in that zone I was the object of their interest, and they were trying their best to give me a piece of whatever was on their minds.

Helen would tell you that I am an indifferent communicator at best on the human level, and I am as certain as I can be that I have no facility whatsoever for communication with crows.  Yesterday’s failure was ample evidence of the fact.  When I tried to speak to them, my attitude fluctuated between curiosity and outright disdain, but they stoutly ignored me, caring nothing at all about my thoughts and feelings and staying tightly focused on their own – whatever they might have been.

It’s Sunday now. There is no mail, but our three Sunday-sized newspapers await me in their appropriate boxes on the post that holds our mailbox.  My Sunday ventures to the mailbox are usually made in late morning, since I don’t need to wait until the afternoon in order to retrieve the mail as well.  I wonder if they’ll be waiting for me this sunny morning.  If they are, I won’t have any more clues than I did yesterday about how to respond.  But I wish I did.  How wonderful it would be to understand something about the world from a crow’s perspective!.

You’ll have to forgive me if I end this piece here without any further musings and without any hint of a thesis or conclusion, but I’ve just now remembered that we own a copy of Tony Angell’s and John Marzluff’s In the Company of Crows and Ravens and maybe – just maybe – it might teach me something more about crows than the fact that they are a pesky bunch.

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Passion, Ruthlessness, Dedication, Courage, And The Novel

Posted on June 24, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

                                              Beautiful Thing!

the flame’s lover –

                                        The pitiful dead
cry back to us from the fire, cold in
the fire, crying out – wanting to be chaffed
and cherished

                         those that have written books

We read: not the flames
but the ruin left
by the conflagration

William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Book Three, Part II

Since the date of my retirement, my principal activity has been an attempt to write a novel.  I’ve long wanted to do so, and when presented with the twin gifts of time and the advice that retirement is best enjoyed in the pursuit of a passion, I began writing what has come to be entitled Fortunate Son.

I am now at a place where the work is largely done, although there is still one new scene added during my last pass through which is calling out to me with the possibility that I could have made it so much more than it now is.  I will go back to that scene as soon as I feel there is enough distance between when and the moment of its creation for me to have acquired enough perspective to see it both as an entirety and as an integral piece of a finished work.

Perhaps the first thing I learned from my attempt is that writing is a stream flowing from a faucet that will not end until the author sees fit to turn it off.  As Yogi Berra once famously said, “it ain’t over till it’s over.”  You can keep writing as long as you like; there is no one to tell you to stop, except yourself.  There is always something to be edited – entire scenes to be added, deleted, or reworked; a single word to be tossed aside for another that is more pointed, more appropriate to the desired mood or action; some phrase or other that is far too prevalent throughout your work, and needs to be trimmed away ruthlessly; a reconsideration of every single word and scene in appraisal and reappraisal of whether or not it serves your goal for the finished piece; constant checking on dates and facts, both those that are unique to the novel’s timeline and those that are historical and real.

Writing a novel requires imagination, dedication, discipline, ruthlessness, and hard work.  Oh, and courage too!  Nothing is more important than the courage to edit your own work, and there is nothing that requires more courage  than deleting those three thousand words you wrote over a year ago and believed in so ardently at the time of their creation when you’ve finally arrived at the realization that they don’t advance your purpose in any material way.  You hit the delete button, and bandage the resulting wound by imagining that the deleted scene might become a short story in its own right or an entry in a blog dedicated to the novel filed under the category of “Scenes That Failed To Make The Final Cut.”  But you leave that decision for some later date, because you still have a lot more work to do.

My goal has always been to see if I could write something in which I could take personal pride.  I am a hard taskmaster when it comes to anyone’s effort, never wanting anything less than the best anyone is capable of.  The mother of a mother/daughter team who once worked for me complained, after I had urged her daughter to far greater effort than she had been displaying, that my chief character flaw was that I always expected everyone else to do their best work at all times, and wasn’t I aware that some people are mere mortals?

I plead guilty to the charge, especially when it comes to myself.  That is why I am now in the twelfth draft of Fortunate Son, and somewhere around the thirtieth complete read through of the draft (both silent and aloud), each one prompting more tinkering, large and small.  Even the title is new, only coming after a suggestion from my editor, and only after he and I argued about it through several email exchanges and on the phone.  I started with Son, fascinated with its simplicity and the way it compelled the story’s organization.  I finally bowed to his suggestion after discovering how I could put to good use, in the concluding scene of the novel, the irony suggested by the revised title in order to provoke the kind of curiosity that I hope a reader will have about its characters in the aftermath of a turned-off tap.

Having exacting standards for myself is also the reason I hired two separate professional editors, each of whom helped improve the work.  I sought out the first editor by reviewing an on-line list of professional editors working in the Northwest; the second appeared in my life by magical serendipity and offered himself as  editor.  While the first was beneficial and gave me the lens I needed for a good concluding chapter, I found the second to be the real deal, the kind of teacher I always remember with great pleasure: tough, critical teachers who believe in you and whose goal is to improve your work rather than belittle your efforts, who teach you the basics, who give you the necessary tools to build upon their lessons through the dint of your own hard work and imagination.  So when I finished making Dan Pope’s specific edits last month and re-read his extensive hand-written critical comments again for the second, third, and fourth  times, I began making my own additional changes that fit the rhythm he helped me establish.  After all, his remarks came as a result of a first read; he didn’t have the luxury of a thirtieth when he wrote his commentary there on my draft.

A good editor/mentor is like an experienced farm worker who can teach you how to use a two-handed scythe properly.  When you first pick up the tool, its use seems obvious and you believe you will master it easily.  What could be so difficult about using something so primitive?  But the secret is in the swing of the thing, and only the right rhythm makes its use effortless.  Pedestrian users struggle and sweat to achieve half of the results of a master; they no doubt put the implement away in disgust after one or two ham-handed attempts, not believing in the merits of practice.  But gracefulness in the use of anything never comes without repetition.

I am not certain I’ve yet become as graceful as I would like to be, but, in comparison to its predecessors, the twelfth draft of Fortunate Son feels much tighter, more rhythmic, and complete.  I may well yet tinker a bit more after critical input from others, but if I were forced to lay down my pen at this moment I would feel that my original goal has been achieved.  I have a credible product, over which I have labored for almost three years.  But, who knows?  Perhaps the twentieth draft will prove to be the one.

The pleasure in the act of writing comes from seeing your imagination take form on the page.  The creative fire that William Carlos Williams wrote about in Paterson, Book Three is the true joy for an author, and the product of that creative spark is, indeed, nothing more than its left over ashes.  Novel-writing is different from other forms of artistic creation in that it is a marathon rather than a sprint; its final result can only be glimpsed through the fog of the future by means of dogged determination.  The act of writing this blog entry will take up to three hours, but that is a mere sprint when compared to the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours that have gone into Fortunate Son.

And like any marathon effort spread over long years, you approach the same material differently each and every day – you might be tired or well rested; you might be depressed or effervescent; you might be angry or thrilled; you might be clueless or on fire.  So you keep at it like a sculptor working at a block of marble, reviewing and editing and polishing and honing until enough bulk, enough rough edges and ragged bits or burrs have been smoothed away and something approaching a polished piece is achieved.  And even then there is a temptation to niggle and jiggle just a little bit more.

Now what?  I don’t know.  The publication process is an unenjoyable chore at best.  The question is whether I need a third party to validate my own sense of satisfaction, and I’m not at all convinced that I do.  Or is that just fear speaking?  As hard as I am on myself, will others – those in the know – be even harder?

Stay tuned.

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Man and His Obsessions

Posted on June 13, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

Mankind has an obsession with order, so much so that we insist upon trying to impose our notion of order upon nature even while we know that time dooms each attempt we make, and we will need to try again, and again.  In our zealous dedication to this cause, we seem no different from the ants that scurry across the driveway bringing a constant stream of food to their anthills, or the hummingbirds feeding from Helen’s homemade nectar so that they can return to their nests and feed their young.

I suspect it was my own dedication to this ideal that brought me to our pastures yesterday for the purpose of mowing them.  The grass was high, but not overly so; but tall, spindly dandelions had sprung up throughout the pasture and cried out for mowing before they could reseed themselves.  Stark white daisies lined the fences in complimentary contrast to the dandelions’ rich yellow; grass flowers in hues of dun, red, pink, and crimson spread in patches scattered across the upper pasture, waving in the light breezes of a conflicted day.  Since the forecast said this was the last non-rainy day until at least mid-week, it seemed the best time to reset the pastures to their null state.

I began my first pass along the outer edge of the upper pasture, and soon wondered if I was doing the right thing.  The pasture’s underlying greens seemed as if they were a palette wielded by a master oil painter working en plein air.  But this palette was alive; it had assembled itself into a striking abstract painting without the aid of man, and I was in the midst of destroying it for no reason other than the sake of order.

Despite my feelings, I could not bring myself to stop.  I consoled myself with the fact that the grass was already high, and, if I waited four more days to mow, it might well require two separate passes to tame the field and lengthen the job from two hours to four.  And given Humptulips County’s weather, there were no assurances that my next attempt might even be made after the four days were up.  So I continued on despite my misgivings, knowing that if I did not take this opportunity to impose my own order, the palette would soon destroy itself by means of unchecked growth.  I reasoned that mowing now would give us our best opportunity to enjoy yet another iteration of the pastures’ spring beauty before the summer treats them to an evenly applied tan

I worried whether or not my logic was nothing more than an excuse to impose order.  Did  it make sense to do so?  I worried at this conundrum constantly, still doing so as the tractor tore through the last patch of crimson in the center of the field and it was finally tamed to human standards.

I sat there for several moments on the idling tractor looking over the results of my efforts.  I found a redemption of sorts in the long lines left by the large back wheels of the tractor as it spiraled inward from the fence line to the point where I’d begun, of necessity, to square off rows due to its turning radius and my consequent inability to react quickly enough to lengthen the spiral; in the serial knots of the ankh-topped shapes descending to the corner where I’d navigated the last right angle in already mown grass in order to mow the final side of the square which had prevailed so fleetingly in midfield.

At first, I found satisfaction in my replacement art, but soon realized I was simply reveling in the order I’d created.  I tried to resolve the conundrum for awhile, wondering whether I had acted out of free will or was just another worker bee persisting at a never-ending task.  The ants and the hummingbirds had reasons for their actions.  What was mine?

I was still worrying this over as I turned the tractor toward the opening in the fence which leads to our lower pasture.

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Fields of Fleece

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, William Wordsworth

Wild daisies grow everywhere on the Farm in spring, their seeming ubiquity assisted by gravity, the wind, the birds, and our head gardener, Helen.  Each year, whenever their stalks first rise above the grass, Helen issues an edict that they shall not be mowed.  At first, I honor her edict with reluctance whenever I drive the big tractor, since I love a well-mown field and it seems a waste of time and diesel not to trim each field to a uniform height in order that morning and evening shadows might be displayed to their best effect.  But I have learned patience because Helen is an artist, and the flowerbeds and fields are her outdoor media; because all outdoor art takes its own sweet time in development.

So it is that bright-white lines of daisies come to line our driveway, our pastures, and our side of the two lanes bordering the Farm.  Long rows sparkle in warm sunlight and sway in light spring breezes  like choruses of synchronized, high-kicking dancers linked arm-in-arm across a tinseled stage.

But it is the clumps of daisies that grow in random serendipity in our fields that delight me the most.  Some are twenty feet across and some only inches, but all of them, whether big or small, cling to the fields like fleece.  While nature decrees their locations, we edit their shapes so that most are circular due to size of our fields and the nature of the mechanical beasts we must employ in our constant attempts to bring our fields to heel.

Helen’s edict is applied clump-by-clump, lasting until all constituent daisies have gone to seed and only stalks remain.  She lifts her edict only when the winds and the birds have eaten their fill of  the daisies’ blessings and their final white amen has fallen to the ground.

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Last Light

Posted on May 22, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

Sometimes of an evening, when all that remains of a perfect day is a sense of warmth and remembrance, a clear sky, and the sun hanging just above the western horizon, the trunks of our pines are striped by the sun’s last great sigh of satisfaction.

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The Final Journey, Part Two

Posted on May 10, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

Bob Weiss was never consciously late for any appointment, so it was no surprise to discover that he’d arrived in Washington, DC months in advance of his funeral party.  His ashes had been sent on ahead to a historical funeral parlor north of the city, and his son, Charlie, picked them up and brought them to our hotel on the day before Bob was scheduled to be interred in Arlington National Cemetery due to the Silver Star he was awarded for his valor on Hill 314 above the village of Mortain, France during World War II.

Charlie had rented a large bus for the trip to the cemetery, and 50 or so civilians climbed on board at the hotel.  Each of us was either a member of Bob’s family, a friend of a member of Bob’s family, or, like Helen and me, one of Bob’s friends.  Charlie was the last to board, carrying a back pack.  He announced the details of the bus ride, telling us that we would stop first at the Arlington National Cemetery administration building.  He had some important business to conduct before the services could begin, he said, but he was purposely vague about the nature of his errand.  I connected the dots between an earlier conversation in which he’d told me about the funeral home and his announcement, and realized Bob was riding on the bus with us.  His ashes were in the backpack slung insouciantly over Charlie’s right shoulder.  I took immediate comfort from this, as I was once again traveling along with Bob on his final journey.

Bob’s sister, Mary Ann, was on board.  She looks remarkably like Bob and shares his sardonic sense of humor.  Her husband, Tom, and her two sons and two daughters were also there.  One of her sons, Danny, is even more like Bob than his mother. His similarity isn’t limited to appearance; it extends to demeanor, stance, hairline, and mannerisms of speech.  Because of all the strong family resemblances present on the bus, it seemed as if Bob was present too, not just his ashes.  The bus seemed to become a lava lamp of swirling ashes, speech cadence, and mingled similarities of personality, stature, and appearance.  I felt that if I squinted just hard enough through the mix I might be able to see Bob watching us with approval for joining him on such a day.  A day he’d long anticipated.

At the Arlington National Cemetery administration building, Charlie and his daughter, Julia, walked hand-in-hand across the grass and up the front steps, Bob dangling from Charlie’s shoulder.  The bus passengers could see them through the windshield.  It was the last we were to see of Bob for a while, but he would soon reappear.

We waited for Charlie’s return for several minutes, long enough for me to be reunited with another of Bob’s law partners.  As the two of us chatted on the asphalt in front of the bus, Charlie and Julia finally reappeared, this time followed by a troop of 30 soldiers from the 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team, the designated successor to the 30th Division in which Bob had served during World War II.  The soldiers were members of the 30th Brigade’s Honor Guard, and would accompany us civilians on the bus ride to what the cemetery official termed the “transfer point” – the spot among the endless graves where Bob’s ashes would be put into the caisson that was to be his final means of transportation.

Civilians and soldiers alike exited the bus at the transfer point and gathered to watch the transfer.  A black Cadillac was parked next to a caisson drawn by six horses and led by a mounted officer, and surrounded by a U.S. Army honor guard in full dress blues.  A seven member rifle squad and a full military band stood in the grass alongside the caisson, and the band played God Bless America before the transfer began.  We, civilians and Honor Guard alike, watched as the intricacies of the transfer were performed in the slow motion of ritual military respect.

When the transfer was complete, the cemetery official gave us the option of riding to the gravesite in the bus or walking behind the caisson.  It was a quarter-mile to the gravesite, he said, and all of it was uphill.  No one accepted his offer of a bus ride, not even those who found the walking difficult due to age or infirmity.  To walk was to show respect, and respect was the order of the day.

The procession started up a paved road winding among the endless headstones that adorn Arlington National Cemetery and give it an aura of peace and depth of meaning.  We were led by the band.  Behind them were a squad of soldiers carrying rifles, the caisson, and the civilians.  The 30th Brigade Honor Guard brought up the rear, making certain to watch over both Bob’s remains and those civilians who moved the slowest.  Its members were of all color, gender, and rank (from a two star general to sergeants), each spit polished, bemedaled, and somber in dress uniform.  The videographer Bob’s nephew, Danny, had hired to film the service was heard to say that he’d never seen a unit to which a World War II veteran had been attached send an honor guard to his funeral.  Unprecedented, was his succinct summary.  I wasn’t surprised; Bob had that effect on everyone.

The service at the gravesite was again performed in the slow motion of ritual respect.  An American flag was first unfolded and held over the box containing Bob’s ashes, now sitting on a rug laid on the ground underneath a tent.  The family sat in two rows of chairs while the rest of us, including the 30th Brigade Honor Guard, encircled the tent.  The band stood 100 yards away and, on signal, played My Country Tis of Thee.  Twenty-one shots were fired by the rifle squad in a traditional volley, and a lone bugler played Taps.  Then the flag was refolded and presented to Charlie by the kneeling officer who commanded the Army’s honor guard.

The sky was grey, but the rain held even if my tears didn’t.  Planes arriving and departing from nearby Reagan National Airport were the only disturbance.

We adjourned to the gravesite itself, a few feet away.  The gravesite is nestled on a grassy knoll in a treeless field, and was surrounded by the dirt left over from the work of digging Bob’s grave.  The box containing his ashes was placed on a rug of artificial turf overlying what appeared to be a steel plate covering the grave itself.  A front loader waited far down the road to complete the work of Bob’s interment, honoring his service by means of the distance it kept from the mourners.

Charlie had chosen not to have a chaplain preside over the final affair, so the 30th Brigade Honor Guard began things by marching one-by-one to the gravesite, each kneeling and laying 30th Brigade badges next to Bob’s casket in turn.  They saluted before turning to walk away through the raw earth to stand behind Helen and me.  The two star General led the way, followed by the colonel in command of the Brigade, the other officers, and the sergeants until all had given their respect.  No one spoke; only the jets disturbed what would otherwise have been a profound silence.  When the Honor Guard finished, Charlie spoke for several minutes about how proud his father had been to serve his country.

When Charlie finished, I turned to shake the hand of as many members of the Honor Guard as I could in order to thank them for their attendance.  I ended up next to the Brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Vernon Simpson.  The Colonel had met Bob by chance on top of Hill 314 in Mortain during the week of ceremonies celebrating the 70th anniversary of D Day.  He’d gone there to see the site where Old Hickory had turned back a German counterattack that might have broken the Allies had it been successful.  He told me about finding Bob there on the hilltop, and of their subsequent discussions and friendship; he told me about his profound respect for Bob and of having an autographed copy of Bob’s book about the Battle of Mortain, Fire Mission.

And then it was over.  Helen and I had to hustle to get back on board the bus.

This time, Bob stayed behind.  He seemed to say goodbye as Helen and I walked away. He’d finally arrived at the place among his fellow warriors for which he’d seemed destined, and he was content to stay behind and let us go.

For those interested, pictures of the service may be found here:  https://www.flickr.com/photos/ncngpao/sets/72157667832098791/with/26855168585/

Posted in Friendship, Our Place in the Firmament | Comments Off on The Final Journey, Part Two

Pastures As Art

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

There is something mesmerizing about open pastures, perhaps their malleability as an artistic medium.

At any time of year, unmown pastures are rough, green canvases painted with oils variously applied; thickened knots of lush grass growing in hollows or well fertilized areas appear to have been rendered by palette knife, while broad strokes of  a wide brush seem to have been used to define all else.  In spring, their green monopoly is relieved by a multi-hued patchwork of dandelions, clover, tansy, yarrow, wild flowers, and waving sprigs of tall, feathered grass indiscriminately added by  a tiny pointed brush; the rest of the year, they are dominated by single color schemes – tan in summer, emerald in fall, sage in winter.

Newly mown, pastures morph into imperfect, canvas-backed tapestries woven from the lines and circles remaining from the tractor operator’s attempt to  impose order and routine on an uneven landscape.  Here and there slubs appear in the weaving where the grass was too thick to be wholly tamed by blunt mechanical means or where it grew in unguessed hollows; they serve as God’s promise that the now-hidden oil painting will be resurrected as soon as the tapestry falls into inevitable disrepair.

In early morning, pastures are mist-drenched watercolors rendered on archival paper, with shadows painted by the rising sun as perspective on the day at hand; at twilight they become fantasy-themed movies as bordering trees and shrubs combine with their own dips and swells to cast the shadowy yarns that God will use to knit the blessings of night.

All grasslands are living, nearly sentient beings.  They give up their freedom so that we might derive pleasure, in exchange for the symbiotic near-ubiquity they enjoy when in our company.  The prairies are their wild herds, and well-tended pastures their barely domesticated cousins – cousins always ready to reassert their wild-waving freedom should we fail to nurture their artistic nature.

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Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

The past few days have been difficult ones here at the Farm.  High winds have blasted Humptulips County causing several extensive power failures across the grid.  Last Friday morning, I watched the power flicker on and off four times before it finally crashed for the remainder of the day.  We were without power until the middle of Saturday morning.

At noon on Monday, the power grid once again conceded failure in the teeth of 60 mph gusts, but the power came back by 5:00 PM.  Our quicker recovery was helped by the fact that our immediate area was the first to succumb to the high winds, and the PUD power trucks were already headed our way by the time the rest of the outages in the county began to occur.  At one time that Monday as many as 200,000 customers were without power throughout Humptulips County.  Sometimes it actually pays to be the first to fail.

Whenever the power goes out, I find myself simultaneously irritable and reflective.  Since we live in the country, I often imagine powerless nights to be the nearest thing I will ever experience to having been alive in the mid-1800s or earlier.  I spend long minutes – especially those comprised of unrelieved darkness – imagining what my predecessors would have done to make the evening hours productive rather than crawling under the duvet in misery as I am wont to do.

While we are reasonably prepared for outages in the way of propane stoves for heating at least portions of the house, the emergency lighting equipment we have at hand is not nearly as durable or as utilitarian as that which I imagine our predecessors must have had.  All of our various mass-plasticized, battery-powered lights work erratically in accordance with their own terms, not ours, and seem give out only an anemic, well-washed sort of light altogether insufficient for accomplishing anything other than finding one’s way to the facilities in the dark; and they never cast a wide enough beam to keep me from tripping over the fiendish, attention-seeking cat who inevitably appears from out of the darkened nowhere whenever I take such a trek.  It is only when Helen lights a candle or our single oil-powered brass lamp that we are assured of a continuous source of light to pierce the darkness of an outage.

During any blackout, a small part of me always wants to be as hardy as our ancestors seem to have been, but mostly I just sit and howl for the power’s immediate restoration.  My only real utility seems to be calling the PUD outage line to report in.  After that, I sit and wait impatiently.  I don’t mean to suggest that I resent the time it takes the PUD crews to fix whatever is wrong, since they are known to work long, difficult hours during system-wide outages.  You have to appreciate and admire their work ethic and dedication, even while you wish that fixing the outage were as simple as finding a triggered circuit breaker on your own power panel and clicking it back into service.  No, the problem is simply that I don’t function well during outages; I manage well enough during daylight hours, but the nights are long and uncomfortable, and in March they’re damned cold.

Because our home is all electric (except for two propane stoves), any outage is at least a minor problem, and the longer it lasts it may well approach disaster status insofar as refrigerated or frozen food is concerned.  We used to have a gas-powered generator for such emergencies, but gave it up some time ago for reasons I have long since forgotten.  I suppose we could wire one back in (self-starting this time, please, instead of the hand pulled, gas engine version we had before), but, in truth, outages come less frequently than they used to and the size of generator we really need is expensive enough for me to wonder whether it has sufficient value given the relative infrequency of outages.  We do seem to have a higher incidence of outages this year than last, possibly due to the fact that the PUD hasn’t trimmed the trees along its rights of way in our area for three or four years.  We are probably due for their attention sometime soon in accordance with their usual rotation – which will undoubtedly be accompanied by the normal compendium of complaints about having trimmed someone’s favorite tree or interfered with the flow of traffic for the few hours it takes them to tame the area.

In short, compared to our ancestors we are sissies.  If they were able to hear us bemoan the terrible strictures we perceive to result from an outage (dark nights, run down cell phone and laptop batteries, and the like), they would undoubtedly shake their heads in disgust and dismay over our inability to navigate what, after all, was for them a normal day.  Take, for example, the signal pastime that we still share with our predecessors: reading.  They were much better equipped to read in the evenings than we are; candles and lamps may seem quaint and arcane to us, but they still disperse the darkness sufficiently for the purpose.  If we only maintained enough of these items on hand, we might match our predecessor’s hardiness and continue to enjoy a good book well into a darkened evening. Instead, I possess two worn out book lights that no longer give sufficient light to read by, a battery operated plastic lantern that only works whenever Helen slams it on the table in just the right way (but never when I try to emulate her), and a large, heavy Maglight that is much too awkward to hold in one hand and attempt to read a book being held in the other.  Accordingly, during an outage I usually give up any attempt to read in bed after the first two paragraphs or the first two pages (whichever comes first), and feign sleep instead.

Our society has aligned its stars to the power grid.  Our mid-19th century ancestors, being hardy individualists, wouldn’t have had a clue about what a power grid is, or, perhaps, even appreciated the concept.  Our new fangled way of dealing with the dark is much more efficient in driving back the dark (among other things) than their methodology was – but only when it works.  And it works well enough most of the time; for just as long as humanity exercises its combined will and a sustained collective effort to see to its ongoing maintenance and repair.  The massiveness and enormous expense of the effort required to keep the power grid going at any time is both admirable and worrying; the more extensive the power grid becomes, the more vulnerabilities it exposes to attack and the greater the magnitude of the disaster that will follow if it fails altogether.  Becoming bigger means being more vulnerable and, thus, more fragile – a condition which the dinosaurs might well have something important to tell us about.

So perhaps we should reconsider our ancestor’s individualistic approach to keeping the dark at bay.  As solar panel and battery storage technology improves and becomes more efficient and cost-effective, we might well wish to learn to live again as hardily as they once did.  And if we do decide to emulate their courage, I can well imagine myself growling at the dark with the same confident manner they displayed while simultaneously thumbing my nose at them.  After all, I would be armed with certain essential improvements they never enjoyed and would be able to do what they were never could – face down the dark singlehandedly with the assistance of fully powered cell phones and laptops (along with their constituent apps), fearless in the prospect of being able to repower these essential tools by my own hand and content with my ability to solve, on-line, the day’s New York Times crossword puzzle whenever I wished.

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The Uncertain Rhythms of February, 2016

Posted on February 28, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

1             To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2             a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3             a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4             a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5             a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6             a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7             a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8             a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

The King James Version of the Bible, Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, Verses 1-8

Spring has come early to Humptulips County, and as much as I enjoy spring I wish it hadn’t done so; for spring is supposed to be a creature of late March, of all of April, and of early May – not February.

In normal years, February is the trickster month: first, it drowns us in a tincture of greyish perversity to suggest the strong likelihood that winter has permanently triumphed; then, just when we have come to believe that the sensual world may never rise again, it amuses itself by tantalizing us with timid snowdrops and bursts of crocus in order to add just a smidgen of doubt to our increasing conviction.

But not this year.  Spring is already in the air and on the ground this February.  Tree and bush are in bud, and have sent their initial clouds of pollen aloft.  Forsythia are swelling with pride, nearly to the bursting point, while azaleas and rhododendrons proudly display the hardened nubs of incipient bloom.  Migrating birds have returned early to the Farm in droves to rejoin their over-wintering cousins in filling the air with choruses of song.  Their work of nest-building has begun deep within the sheltering pines; they are already celebrating the season of life-affirming renewal by putting the potholes in our gravel driveway to joyous use as bathing pools, while denigrating its impecunious youth by emptying our bird feeders every other day with an almost religious fervor.

Is this year simply a fluke?  If not, what does this sea change mean for the month of April? What implications does it have for Chaucer?  For Eliot?  For mankind in general?  I don’t know for certain; I only know that as much as I detest February’s pranks, I would gladly welcome them back if it meant a return to the usual rhythm of life as we have known it.  Better the tired jokes and worn out tricks of a dull grey month, than the uncertain vagaries of the unknown and the unknowable.

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