An Autumn Drive Along The River Road

Posted on November 6, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

The name — of it — is “Autumn” —
The hue — of it — is Blood —
An Artery — upon the Hill —
A Vein — along the Road —

Great Globules — in the Alleys —
And Oh, the Shower of Stain —
When Winds — upset the Basin —
And spill the Scarlet Rain —

It sprinkles Bonnets — far below —
It gathers ruddy Pools —
Then — eddies like a Rose — away —
Upon Vermilion Wheels —

Emily Dickinson, The Name – of it – is “Autumn”

Yesterday, I drove along the river road by myself, on my way to lunch with a friend in a pub located in a nearby town.  I drove there through a soft, mistily-insistent rainfall – the sort of early autumn rain that amiably seeks to warn of the more dense, determined rains which will prevail at November’s end; the more dense, determined, relentless rains that will seek to strip the last of the stubborn leaves from the nearly denuded trees that this, their more gentle cousin, could not convince to fall.  However frail this rain may prove to have been by comparison, it was strong enough to make my tires hiss along in time with the windshield wipers and to cause occasional percussive taps on my roof whenever I drove under one of the giant maples that line much of the road.

The ground was saturated, so much so that pools had formed along the wayside as if to threaten the road’s very existence.  I saw at least one yellow-diamond sign warning of water over the roadway ahead, only to discover that the water’s incursion was minimal – nothing more than a small, smiling curve hesitantly emerging from the verge, looking as if it, too, was laughing at a bad joke played by a county road worker with too little to do and too much time in which to do it.

But some of the pools lying alongside the roadway were substantial – large enough to reflect hazy upside-down horizons distorted by ripples from the falling rain.  They weren’t yet large enough to join together in flood, but big enough to remind us that Nature plays by its own rules, not ours; big enough to be things of beauty despite their inherent threat.  They lay along the valley floor like pearls, casting a collective charm by means of which they hoped to appear as antonymic lily pads on an earthen pond rather than the fertile seeds of future flooding.

The road itself gleamed from an ongoing application of daylight and rain which made it as much a thing of beauty as utility.  It arrowed through the heart of the day, pointing the way to my destination as if lit from within.  And while I knew my way there by heart – having made the same trip so many times by myself or in the company of my family – its tar-shine facilitated my travels as well as my mood, for, whether you are coming or going, nothing is more evocative of home than a ribbon of wet highway connecting you to it.

Any gloom the day might have had was dispersed by the intense colors of autumn.  While some of the trees along the way were nearly bare, most were still covered in the yellows and russets common to the season in Humptulips County. Bright, translucent reds would occasionally reveal themselves in all of their glory, but only after first having danced seductively behind screens of hedge or tree in order to heighten and titillate expectations as if fan dancers at a burlesque show.  The ubiquity of fall’s colors erased whatever chill the day possessed, granting to everyone enjoying the day the first seasonal joy of a cherished item of fall clothing – in my case, a light, supple, hip-length jacket given to me by Helen as a birthday present many years ago, beloved because of the contrast between the cool hand of its silk lining and the warmth of its sueded leather.

Even in those places where the trees were already bare, color lurked.  A dusty red paste ground from leaves of all colors by the alchemy of decay, traffic, time, and rain lined the road, its depth and breadth dependent upon the amount of traffic borne by the portion of the road I was then traveling, the particular topography of that stretch of road, the churn and spill of the fallen rains, and the breath and reach of the prevailing winds.  My pleasure was taken from the day’s details.

After such a trip – a trip through memories as well as present time – my luncheon was bound to be a success.  And so it was.  It featured two old companions in arms, one already retired from the legal wars and the other soon to be, both full of shared and unshared memories and possessing enough wit and wisdom to know whether to relate or withhold those that weren’t.  And when we emerged from the fog of our conversation and the comfort of the pub, the rain stopped just long enough for each of us to find our way to our respective vehicles.

Then it began again  in order to grace my way home.

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The Harvest Dew

Posted on October 22, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

When fall comes to New England
The sun slants in so fine
And the air’s so clear
You can almost hear the grapes grow on the vine

The nights are sharp with starlight
And the days are cool and clean
And in the blue sky overhead
The northern geese fly south instead
And leaves are Irish Setter red
When fall comes to New England

Cheryl Wheeler, When Fall Comes to New England

I am late in getting to my library to write today, having had an early morning breakfast meeting at a nearby café.  When I got to the café, it was pitch dark due to the fact that we are still on daylight savings time and it is October.  But by the time breakfast was over, I found myself driving home under a newly risen sun hanging serenely in a lightly cloud-dappled sky, passing by the commencement of a fall workday at a neighboring equestrian farm.

There was much to see this morning, even through the windows of a car.  Sunlight was splashed lavishly across the fields lining our lane, leaving long shadows in its wake – long lines of parallel shadow which somehow managed to stitch, staple, and meld all that was visible into an emotional whole, into the sort of territorial conglomeration which Tolkien termed ‘The Shire’, which Cheryl Wheeler comprehends as New England, or what I imagine as Humptulips County.  The particular name which anyone chooses  to use to describe the land where he or she resides is not nearly as important as the love inherent in its usage;  any name will suffice, if its use is intended as a demonstration of our respect for, and homage to, the land which sustains us.

This morning’s shadows were at play in the sort of heavy dew common to a Humptulips County autumn: the sort of dense, compact dew just this side of frost which is the corpse of an early morning fog brought to earth by the very sunshine which sent the shadows out to play; the sort of heavily layered, lush dew that is nature’s initial hint about the impending hibernation and spare rigidity of winter, but which is still supple enough, despite the lateness of the season, to remind us of the summer just ended; the sort of dew that seems to arise from the labored exhalations of a land engaged in the last triumphant throes of hard physical labor.  In short, a harvest dew.

On the equestrian farm itself, men were grooming and leading horses to pasture, while other horses were already grazing there, consuming grass and dew in single emulsified mouthfuls.  All – horses and men alike – looked content; all – horses and men alike – seemed as if one with the land, as if long since wedded to it or as if constituent biological components of the concept.  And as I passed by, the nearest horses looked up at me in unison through the fence and the morning’s sun-dazzle as if to ask: “Do you understand?”  Or, perhaps: “Are you capable of understanding?”

What I understood in that moment is that I was not only sharing a peaceful morning with the horses, I was as much a part of the morning’s composition as they were – even though I was in a car and, therefore, somewhat isolated from full involvement.  But even as the fact of my isolation occurred to me, I chanced to wonder if it was simply time for a car – any car – to pass by in order to assure the integrity of the moment.

Whichever it was, it came to me in a moment of epiphany that I was serving as witness to a display of the sort of peace and grace that is only possible on a late fall morning when mankind and the land, having worked in concert for so long, near the culmination of their yearly work;  that I was being treated to a vision of the moments just prior to apogee, when all of the things necessary to the final moment of balance were approaching their respective peaks.  And, at least to me, that comprehension seemed sufficient to satisfy both the spirit of the day and all of my needs for its navigation.

 

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The Blessings Of The Rural Mailbox

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“Derek watched her car vanish into the mist, then set off to finish his trek.  He listened to the rain gush, listened as it turned into a steady patter, into muttered tinklings, into occasional drops, and, finally, into the quiet dripping of aftermath.  The night was pregnant with moisture.  Crickets came alive and renewed their songs of enticement; earthworms oozed onto the sidewalk to escape newly drowned burrows.  He was soaked to the core, both with the wet and the evening’s magic.  Life was good – or as good as it could get in Sahaptin on a hot August night when all that was needed was a little rain to make the day effervesce; when all that was needed was a good cleansing of the soul.”

Stephen C. Ellis, Son

“Even when you look for it, you’re never prepared for it.

Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: It’s a Magical World.

There are plenty of advantages to a rural life.  One of them is the morning walk to the mailbox to pick up the mail and the newspapers.  You can’t do that in the city for the simple reason that urban mailboxes snuggle close by, refusing to make you take any significant effort to discover how the day has chosen to deal with you.  Rural mailboxes serve to prolong your expectations of what the day might have in store, often spicing your hopes and desires with bits of magic designed to dampen the inevitable disappointments brought on by the dreary succession of bills to pay or advertising circulars destined for the recycle bin without benefit of having been read.

Sundays are especially blessed: they are not only devoid of the dreary discoveries common to the postman’s work week, but are bright with the twin promises of The New York Times Book Review and the Sunday comics.  So imagine my distress yesterday when, standing within the shelter of our covered porch in my shirtsleeves, I discovered that I was inappropriately dressed for the morning’s venture because it was raining.  My initial reaction was to consider delaying my walk or making the trip by automobile, but I abandoned both notions when I realized that the rainfall was so wimpy that it failed to qualify even as a drizzle.  What was, after all, only a mist on steroids called out for fortitude, a windbreaker, and a hat – not for my best impersonation of the Gorton Fish Sticks guy.  So, I went back inside, regrouped, and began again.

The day was drenched in enough moisture to dampen the distant sounds of the nearby freeway and the more outlandish songs of the usually raucous birds.  Accordingly, I walked into a somewhat hushed and cloistered world where magic was afoot.   It was so quiet that the sound of intermittent raindrops falling onto Gor-Tex™ became the incantations of a magic spell by means of which I soon found myself walking on a dirt road plowed through a small, man-made clearing among the wind-screwed pines on the forested ridge that overlooks the Pacific near Iron Springs on the Washington coast rather than navigating a humble rural driveway composed of asphalt and gravel.  The pines that line our driveway had somehow conspired to close in around me to form that clearing – a clearing across the road from where Helen and I had once stayed with our friends Tom and Carrie, a clearing as real to me in the moment as it was the last time we actually walked there with them several years ago.

In both of my shared worlds, raindrops clung to the underside of tree limbs or withered blackberries as yet undisturbed by the birds: I had to search for them in the real world as the day was not yet wet enough for saturation; but in my magic clearing raindrops dangled from every branch, twig, needle, and leaf and the sound of their constant dripping commingled with a pervasive piney scent to produce an aphrodisiac designed to enhance memory with imagination.  By this means I was transported back in time to a long ago walk in the woods with close friends, my walking shoes transformed into laced boots and my footfalls silenced by a layer of pine needles covering a dirt road bulldozed through the well-remembered clearing.  Muted conversations murmured in the background, hushed as much by the kind of silence only possible among close friends gathered in the presence of natural majesty as by the tranquility demanded by forests everywhere and the reaches of time, distance, and memory.

My memories flickered in and out of existence, scattered at the farthest reaches of my walk by the indisputable realities of mailbox and covered front porch.  In between these extremities, a forest reigned: nurse logs slumbered while giving birth, stones and boulders lurked in the gloom in hopes of tripping the unwary walker, tree roots slunk across the forest path as if mighty snakes lying in wait, clumps of ferns watered the underbrush with the leftover rain they could not use for themselves, fallen twigs and limbs rested upon the path’s verge where they had been piled up by those who preceded us, and the air was perfumed with pine scent and suffused with a mist composed of equal parts rain, imagination, and memory.  But it was no less real to me for having been imagined.

God knows what I may discover during today’s walk to the mailbox.  I never know.  Some days I walk alone down my driveway through the infinite reaches of Humptulips County; other days I walk with Helen, with various members of my family, or with good friends along distant shores shrouded in the limited fog of memory or in the unrestricted mists of imagination.  When all is said and done it doesn’t really matter which it might be, because it all springs from the same wellhead of memory, good companionship, and love.

 

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The Simple Gifts Are Best

Posted on October 12, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

We went to our best friends’ home for dinner last night and had a wonderful time.  Due to all of the things that begin happening at our age, we hadn’t gotten together for several months and all of us were eager to catch up.  We even had a birthday present to deliver in respect of an August birthday, a fact which will give you some idea of how delinquent we all have been in managing our get-togethers.

The evening was replete with the joy that we usually share whenever we meet, joy which stems from copious laughter, good food, and the exchange of personal news and the news of mutual friends and respective families.  We received an unexpected gift inspired by something I had previously written on this blog – the beauty of which far outshines that of the piece which inspired it.  We even had the unparalleled joy of a reading of a Bill Bryson passage, in which the act of the reading was much funnier than the passage being read.  What more could anyone want or ask?

Well, to my surprise there was a bonus to this exceptional evening.  None of us usually talk about subjects that contain even a whiff of political substance because we are all aware that, as couples, our politics are divergent.  Accordingly, we have always been careful to avoid such subjects for the sake of our friendship.  I won’t characterize the politics of anyone other than myself, but I admit to being quite far to the left on the political spectrum and to likely having the most extreme positions of the four of us.  If I am correct in this belief, my positioning allows me the privilege of saying that being of such views has never lessened the respect I have for those of my friends who disagree with my opinions.  If things were otherwise, I might well be very lonely indeed.

But I am always curious why others believe the way they do, hoping to learn something new from their take on the world or to discover the logic they used to arrive at their vantage point.  My curiosity causes me to enter dangerous waters from time to time – dangerous in the sense that if one is not careful in the conduct of a political discussion among friends occupying positions on the political spectrum that are on opposite sides of dead center, one risks losing the respect and trust inherent in the status of “best friends” by being strident or obnoxious or  by employing unreasoning zealotry in the conduct of the conversation.  Having said this, I never believe these waters to be dangerous as long as they are navigated with mutual respect, good intentions, and with the purpose of  trying to better understand one another; In fact, I strongly believe that such discussions, when properly conducted, can only deepen a friendship rather than causing a rift.

It was the subject of guns that got us into the realm of politics last night.  It is not a subject that can be easily ignored in this digital age of all-day, every-day newscasts conducted by broadcasters seeking to be the first and the loudest to bring all the bad news they possibly can to the table in relentless pursuit of market share.  Gone are the days of considered news broadcasts presented by the likes of Chet Huntley, David Brinkley, or Walter Cronkite.  Those days are as lost to time as the gentle family sitcoms of the 1950s, replaced by a constant digital vomiting of gossipy drivel presented as news by wanna-be actors of various political stripes attempting – mostly unsuccessfully – to pass themselves off as uninterested observers of the human condition.

My friend and I have things in common when it comes to guns, even while having differences as to their employment.  He has been a hunter; I have never hunted.  I once owned a 22 rifle given to me as a long ago birthday gift in the late 1950s, but gave it up when my hometown police force held a gun turn-in drive several decades ago; my friend still owns the 22 rifle he was given in his youth.  I once worked in a sporting goods store as a clerk where guns were openly sold, and, while I never personally sold any of them due to being underage, I did show them to potential customers whenever my boss was away, accompanied by the admonition that if the customer wanted to buy I would have to fetch another clerk of a more appropriate age in order to close the deal; my friend has never sold a gun to anyone.  I used my 22 to target shoot, but not hunt; my friend has fond memories of target shooting.

We are both products of the place and time of our youth.  Both of us still want to believe that guns can be owned and used responsibly, despite the digital onslaught of shootings that greets us every morning when we check the internet for the first time (this morning’s gun news is of an off-duty policeman shot to death somewhere in the Midwest, apparently by a neighbor).  However, my friend believes that guns have a more useful place in society than that of hunting, while I have grave doubts about the merits of his position.  But, as previously noted, I am the likely extremist of our group – that is, if extremism is to be measured by the shortness of the distance of each of us from his or her chosen end of the political spectrum.

But as far to the left as I am on the subject, I do not occupy a position at the extreme end of the spectrum.  So last night’s discussion quickly devolved into trying to determine where we had common interests, rather than an attempt to convince each other of the errors inherent in our respective beliefs.  I never find the latter sort of discussion to be of much use among friends; such discussions are usually doomed from inception, since all of my friends have come to their beliefs as a result of intellectual contemplation rather than blind zealotry.  I know this to be true because I make it a habit to avoid zealots like the plague.  So, if a friend is the holder of a well-considered belief arrived at by thoughtful means, changing that belief by means of an over dinner discussion is simply not a fruitful goal, while achieving a better understanding the nature of the friend’s belief and trying to find shared common ground is.   Not only is the latter an attainable goal, I believe that the achievement of it usually enhances mutual respect.

Without going into the nitty-gritty details of our discussion (a discussion which lasted longer than the tolerances of our respective spouses who soon left us to it), we found that we each believe that guns are inherently dangerous and should only be used by responsible people who have had proper training in their use.  This is not to say that each of us, if magically appointed the Great Gun Guru of the United States with unlimited authority to make decisions about the manner in which guns are to be owned and used in our society, would apply those principles in the same way.  In fact, it was quickly clear to each of us that we would not.  But we were able to find common ground of the sort that allows for intelligent dialogue between persons of good will possessed with differing opinions; the kind of discussion that, if it were held in Congress or a state legislature by legislators who not only understand that compromise is necessary but a desired goal, might lead to legislation about a sensitive subject that could find its way into law – the kind of law where those of all political persuasions achieve some, but not all, of their wished-for goals; the kind of legislation that everyone can say is a success from their vantage point, despite causing some disappointment when compared to personal core beliefs; the kind of laws once produced in this country by political centrists of good will who understood that good governance arises from mastering the art of compromise through the art of listening.

In short, neither of us shouted or ranted.  Our friendship means too much to each of us, and neither of us believes that all of our friends must think exactly as we do.  What a boring world that would be!  That sort of rigid thinking would never have brought us together in the first place, since if I, a lawyer by training and logic, had been so narrow-minded, I would not likely have made friends with an artist known for seeing the beauty of the world from a vantage point beyond my comprehension.  In fact, it is my belief that our friendship is actually rooted in our innate differences: I am as fascinated by the workings and mysteries of his talent for producing beautiful paintings derived from a vantage point utterly foreign to my basic constitution, as he must be in his consideration of all of the aspects of a material world governed by laws fashioned of the rigid logic so beloved by heartless lawyers.

My friend undoubtedly has the better of me when it comes to this difference between us.  Neurological science suggests that creativity principally resides in the right brain, while logic principally resides in the left.  Therefore, as the left-handed Boston pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee once famously said in a Sports Illustrated interview published on April 7, 1980:

“You have two hemispheres in your brain – a left and a right side. The left side controls the right side of our body and right controls the left half.  It’s a fact.  Therefore, left-handers are the only people in their right minds.”

So I am very grateful to Tom and Carrie for the gift of last evening – for the wonderful dinner, for the laughter, for the great art on display in their home, for the thoughtfulness of a unique gift, for their caring and concern for ourselves, for our family, and for our mutual acquaintances, for the deepening of an already deep relationship, for the simple, but truly rare, gift of their friendship, trust, and regard.

 

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The Pines Are Alive With The Sound Of Music

Posted on August 30, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

The Wind took up the Northern Things
And piled them in the south –
Then gave the East unto the West
And opening his mouth

The four Divisions of the Earth
Did make as to devour
While everything to corners slunk
Behind the awful power –

The Wind – unto his Chambers went
And nature ventured out –
Her subjects scattered into place
Her systems ranged about

Again the smoke from Dwellings rose
The Day abroad was heard –
How intimate, a Tempest past
The Transport of the Bird –

Emily Dickinson, The Wind Took Up The Northern Things  

It’s been an endless summer in Humptulips County.  The hot, dry, searing days began in June, not in late July or August as usual, and they have ruled over the Farm ever since.  Because hot summer afternoons are renowned for a thirsty silence prevailing under cloudless skies, we’ve missed the soughing of the pines.  We last heard their song in May.

But yesterday was different.  While it is still summer by the calendar, the day appeared in costume as if it were autumn.  Perhaps this was appropriate: if, after all, June appeared in drag as August, why shouldn’t August masquerade as November?  However right or wrong its impersonation was, the costume the day employed for the purpose was most appropriate to its pretense.

Before the wind gusts got so strong that venturing outside for a walk down a pine-lined driveway would have been an exercise in stupidity, I walked down to our mailbox to get the mail and the morning papers.  My walk wasn’t intentionally timed to avoid the storm; I had little inkling about what was to come other than the forecast promised rain.  I only thought to make the journey in a dry state.  No, the timing of my walk was determined by serendipity, as evidenced by the fact that just as I got to the mailbox the post office jeep drew up to deliver our mail.  As the driver handed our mail to me through the passenger window, she greeted me with an observation about our need for the impending rain.  Not even she anticipated the ferocity of the approaching storm.

As I was walking down to the mailbox, I thought I heard running water.  I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention, lost in thoughts about a recently departed friend as I was, and didn’t give the mistaken notion the attention it deserved.  But my reverie was disrupted by the brief conversation with the mail lady, and on my way back to the house I finally awoke to the fact that what I was hearing was the soughing of our pines, not running water.  They’d been so silent all summer, standing thirsty and sere under a relentless sun lodged stubbornly in a wide-awake sky, that I’d forgotten they had a voice and had misplaced their song.  But now they were nearing a full-throated aria, lustily belting out a song of welcome and thanksgiving as the wind blew by, the promise of rain held tightly in its grip.

And the rains came – but only after their harbinger, the wind, first announced their pending arrival by knocking down a myriad of trees all over Humptulips County; deciduous trees especially, for this Novemberish wind came in late summer, in August when the leaves remain to catch the wind and serve as sails.  But these sails were not those of tall ships, and something had to give; so once it achieved a full-throated howl, yesterday’s wind brought down weakened, thirsty trees by the dozens, and as they fell, they crashed through enough power lines and knocked over enough telephone poles that some 175,000 customers, including us, had no electricity.  We went without for more than 12 hours.

But our pines never fell.  They still stand tall.  And by evening, the promised rain was falling heavily, filling our gutters to overflowing and allowing our pines to drink their fill of the day.

And so it is that we live in a different world this morning than we did yesterday.  It is still summer, but our decks are littered with pine needles, the tarmac in front of the house is studded with miniature lakes glorifying its unevenness, water drips from the eaves and lingers on window panes, the grass is wet and straining to turn green again so that it might be mowed yet again before the onset of Winter’s dormancy, the rain falls steadily on our roof, its intermittent finger-rolls readily audible in the silence of the library where I write.  For the heralds of fall have been heard from; the pines have risen from their torpor and sing again.

Summer is on the wane.

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Goodbye, But Not Farewell

Posted on August 29, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

The old man smiled.  “I shall not die of a cold, my son.  I shall die of having lived.”

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  

“They’re certainly entitled to think that, and they’re entitled to full respect for their opinions,” said Atticus, “but before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself.  The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

I lost an old friend on Thursday evening; lost in the sense that death has placed a veil between us that living mortals do not know how to penetrate.  He died as he lived – head high, gaze forward, ready to take on yet another challenge and moving on without fear of process or consequence.  A good death, as some would say.

He was as shocked as either you or I would be upon first learning of the medical condition that would eventually bring about his death, but his shock only lasted a matter of hours.  I could hear the shock in his voice when he called me the day after his diagnosis to tell me about the findings.  But, two days later when I sent him a joking email about some inane thing or other, he responded with a joke of his own, and I knew then that he had processed his shock and moved on.  I ceased to worry about his mental condition at that moment, never to have even a momentary concern about it thereafter.  Why I’d had any concern whatsoever at that beginning is something I now question.  I should have known better, given his courage, his indomitable willpower, his curiosity – especially his curiosity.

He was always asking questions – of himself and of others.  I was talking to a mutual colleague yesterday, and we were wondering what it was about him that so many people cherished and found comforting.  Having thought about it during the long night just ended, I think it was his curiosity.  You could never take anything for granted when you were around him, not only what he might do since he always thought outside of any box you might think him in, but even your own cherished assumptions.  For he always challenged your assumptions either by his behavior or by his words; not to cause you discomfort or to call you names, but to make you think harder about yourself and how you might better assist others.  There is comfort in this sort of challenge, seeking, as it does, to enhance, rather than denigrate, your character.

And I suspect that is why each of us – each of us who had the great good fortune to be his friend – believed ourselves to be nearest the heart of his caring and concern.  He had the ability to react positively to anyone who was his friend and make you feel special – if only you first succeeded in achieving his friendship by demonstrating some personal characteristic that he held dear.  I recognized this reality only yesterday, listening to my friend trying to explain, in his own words, Bob’s importance to him.  Bob’s was a kind of caring that was universal, and there can be no jealousy of another who shared it with you; he gave equally of himself to everyone, but in ways personalized – specialized, if you will – to each person’s needs or desires.  And the army of his friends was legion.

When I finally awoke this morning after troubled dreams, I realized that while the veil of death is now firmly in place, his lessons – and his voice suggesting that you learn a lesson (since he never preached) – live on.  I can hear him now: “What do you think about my having died?  Think we’ll never talk again?”  Of course we will.

Goodbye Bob, but not farewell.  May I find the courage within me to live and die as you did.  I know you will be there to help me find it.

Posted in Friendship, Humptulips County, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | Comments Off on Goodbye, But Not Farewell

The Smell of Woodsmoke

Posted on August 23, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

I shall build me a house where the larkspur blooms
In a narrow glade in an alder wood,
Where the sunset shadows make violet glooms,
And a whip-poor-will calls in eerie mood.

I shall lie on a bed of river sedge,
And listen to the glassy dark,
With a guttered light on my window ledge,
While an owl stares in at me white and stark.

I shall burn my house with the rising dawn,
And leave but the ashes and smoke behind,
And again give the glade to the owl and the fawn,
When the grey wood smoke drifts away with the wind.

Robert Penn Warren, Vision

“When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.”

Dylan Thomas

Mankind has long been fascinated by the smell of wood smoke, most likely because it indicates to us that human habitation is near at hand.  Once upon a time, in the vast forests that used to cover America, that must have been true.  I can easily imagine Hawkeye and Chingachgook wandering through that wilderness and becoming aware of wood smoke by sight or smell, instantly knowing that some form of humanity was nearby – maybe a family at rest in a tent or a snug log cabin, or perhaps another group of wanderers enjoying an evening meal around a blazing campfire.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” has long been a favorite maxim, one suggesting that something nefarious is going on whenever there is too much talk and rumor about someone or something.  This maxim could easily be amended to read: “Where’s there’s smoke, there’s humanity,” rumor and talk being peculiarly human endeavors.  Such an amendment would also serve to reflect the fact that the smell of wood smoke occupies a place in the most primal levels of the human psyche, associated, as it is, with homeliness, sanctuary, and food.

This morning – this Sunday morning – all of Humptulips County is suffused with the smell of wood smoke, but it is not the sort of smoke that speaks of home, of safety from the dark or the storm.  This smoke smells of rapine, plunder, destruction, and despair.  The entire state of Washington is infused with this smell on this Sunday morning, as if the devil, worshipping at his altars, has had much more effect than mankind has, worshipping at his.

The smell of this wood smoke is so pervasive that eastern and western Washington have been bound together in a show of rare unanimity crossing political, geographical and cultural boundaries.  All of Washington is aghast at the scope of the destruction which has hit our state; we are all amazed at the effort and human cost required to bring it under control.

Despite this sense of common purpose in the face of shared disaster, I strongly suspect our unanimity will not last long; when the current fires are under control and we come to a consideration of their causes, differing opinions will shatter our current unanimity.  Given this inevitability, I might as well jump the gun and say what I believe to be true.

Not all wood smoke is the product of human activity.  Nature is capable of starting its own fires, as the facts of lightning and volcanos attest.  But if there is any truth to my revised aphorism, where there’s an abundance of smoke it’s certain that humanity is nearby.  We have given nature a helping hand in its efforts to spread fires, made it much easier whether the fires began by dint of lightning, lava, or human hand.  Drought leads inevitably to an exponentially increased risk of fire, and drought is a by-product of global warming; if humanity has contributed significantly to the circumstances creating global warming as our most talented, bias-free scientists suggest, then surely each of us shares in the culpability that the current drought exists – and for the ubiquitous smell of wood smoke on this Sunday morning, a smell more suggestive of fires born of sulfur than of wood.

Vincent van Gogh once wrote: “There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke.”  Perhaps the time has arrived when we can now warm ourselves at Vincent’s fires; perhaps those fires have become so hot, so ubiquitous, so damned that they have manifested themselves in the reality of our existence and are burning out of control.  Perhaps we’ll heed the warning.

Or, perhaps not.  For as Don MacLean once sang to the essence of Vincent’s shadow:

Now, I think I know what you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free
They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will

Is it possible that we have let things go on for so long that all the hope we have left is embodied in Robert Penn Warren’s vision of a land given back to nature when the fires have exhausted their fuel?  Or have we taken things so far as to leave nothing for nature – nature, as we have known it anyway – to enjoy when our lingering traces finally fade away?  That these questions can be asked with even the merest hint of verisimilitude says volumes about humanity and the narrow extent of its sense-limited horizons.

Chingachgook and Hawkeye would have been wary of any wood smoke they saw or smelled in that wilderness until they determined the nature of the fire at its heart.  We should be equally and especially wary of the sort of wood smoke we smell on this Sunday morning – for there is no joy and no beauty to be found in the burning of these bridges.

Posted in Humptulips County, Our Place in the Firmament | Comments Off on The Smell of Woodsmoke

Dear Bob:

Posted on August 17, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

There is a song by Rodney Crowell entitled “Things I Wish I’d Said” that ends with this couplet:

No, I don’t have to live in dread
Over things I wish I’d said

You probably never heard of Rodney Crowell, or, if you have, it was likely due to something I wrote that undoubtedly puzzled you, since our tastes in music differ.  But Rodney is a wordsmith as well as a tunesmith, and this song was written for his father on the occasion of his death.  Rodney is giving thanks that he had enough time to say things to his father before it was too late.  This piece is written in that spirit, both because I want to write it while you have the time to read it and because I hold you in the same sort of affection and esteem.

You and I have lived different lives over different eras, but have enjoyed a common overlap these past 40 years or so.  I no longer can recall the exact moment when we first met, but it was sometime during my first decade of practice at a firm-to-firm meeting.  It was undoubtedly a casual beginning, since you were much closer to my then senior partner, Dick Reed, and I was a young, but eager, pup in comparison to your status as grizzled veteran and firm leader.  Nevertheless, something clicked between us even then, because I remember coming away impressed and wishing our two firms were one.  I suspect it was your calm leadership and firmly held focus on your practice and its future.  You’ve always been innovative and entrepreneurial, and that would have seemed unusual to me at the time, given my limited experience and the traditional atmosphere in which I toiled.

Whatever energy that first meeting sparked took awhile to blossom into something beyond mere admiration.  When I finally realized a change was in order after 17 years of toiling in an unfertile field and had given notice to the firm I’d once led, my first call was to John.  Since he and I are closer in age, it seemed more appropriate to me that I call him, but, in the back of my mind, your image hovered due to the homeliness and warmth of the firm you’d created.  I did not know you then as I came to know you after we became partners, and you moved in a much more rarefied atmosphere than I did – an atmosphere so rarefied that it allowed you to tell John, after he’d reported the gist of my call, to call me back and tell me to “get your butt down here.”

And I did.  I suppose I could pause here and say the rest was history, but even that call and the subsequent meeting in Portland two days later where we hammered out the terms of a partnership in which I became responsible for starting a new office of the firm in Seattle were not the true beginnings of our friendship.  That moment had to wait.

It finally came on the plane to Calgary where we were headed to meet for the first time with some of the folks who would later become our Canadian allies.  The theme of the trip was vintage ‘Bob’ – a venture into the unknown undertaken with curiosity, hope, and uncommon energy.  It was perhaps the novelty of it all that caused me to ask, somewhere over eastern British Columbia, whether our divergent military backgrounds were going to be a problem.  You see, I once had the head of a Portland-based firm tell me to get lost when he found out about my own history.  He, a World War II veteran like you, hadn’t appreciated my public nose-thumbing at authority, caring nothing for the dread and angst it caused me, only the fact of its occurrence.  So I was worried whether you might have the same reaction.  As I said, I didn’t truly know you then.

So I was uneasy when I told you my personal history and asked if it was of any appreciable concern.  Your response was immediate and unhesitant.  You not only said that it wasn’t a problem, you said that you understood my actions and respected them.  It was then that I asked you about the circumstances that earned you a Silver Star and received your then-standard 30 second response – the one that reduced 6 days and nights of encirclement and constant bombardment to a seeming hiccup.  Even without any military experience, I recognized your statement for an evasion, instantly realizing you were still trying to put a terrible, evil experience behind you.  While I didn’t yet realize how awful the experience had been, the paucity of your words spoke volumes.

I’ve always been stubborn.  Whatever grades I earned in school, whatever success I’ve had at various endeavors, whatever understanding I’ve reached of the deeper things of life have all come because I worried at things until they made sense, like a bulldog with its favorite dead tennis ball.  So I began worrying at your story, hoping to elicit more detail – both because I wanted to know, secondhand, more about something of which I had denied myself firsthand knowledge, and because I felt you would be much better off, much happier, if you were able to express yourself more fulsomely than you did on that plane ride to Calgary.  The truth is that the latter thread was my principal reason for persistence, but I doubt I would have had the stamina to become the pest I became without exercising my innate curiosity.

But all of that is part of our shared history, and not worth further repetition here.  We both know what came to pass – both in our own way, that is.  I have no doubt that our own points of view about this story are as similar as they are different, as is so often the case in true friendships.  And it doesn’t really matter how each of us tells the story, because, beyond any doubt, our respective tales always end in the same place – in friendship.

I suspect it was the trust we gained in one another by sharing our backgrounds in greater depth – very similar backgrounds in terms of our manner of growing up in times now lost to America, and so vastly different when it came to the subject of military service or the lack thereof.  Without trust, there can be no friendship; without friendship, there can be no mentorship; without mentorship, there can be no commingling, no intermarriage, of thought and action.  And we found all of that.

I think of us as a team.  We haven’t always agreed, we haven’t always thought alike, both of us have had profound formative experiences that the other never had and can never really fully comprehend, and we’ve each lead separate lives in different, but similar, locations – but through it all there has always been an umbilical cord of shared thought, of common interest and goals, of friendship and respect, of mutual admiration and liking.  That others were as much a part of our team as we were doesn’t much matter at this moment; this is my piece, my own attempt to make sense of our friendship and mutual respect.  I have utter confidence that each of the others will try to do the same thing in their own way when the time comes for them to do so.

There is a poem by Dylan Thomas that sums up my feelings – no, not the one you are likely thinking of, though that one has much to say as well at this particular moment and sums your life up well.  The one I am thinking of is entitled “Being But Men.”  It goes like this:

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks,
For fear of coming
Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.

If we were children we might climb,
Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
And, after the soft ascent,
Thrust out our heads above the branches
To wonder at the unfailing stars.

Out of confusion, as the way is,
And the wonder, that man knows,
Out of the chaos would come bliss.

That, then, is loveliness, we said,
Children in wonder watching the stars,
Is the aim and the end.

Being but men, we walked into the trees.

I’d like to think that we did a bit of both together.  God knows, you and I have felt the bark of trees on our shins often enough, surely more often than each of us liked; but each of us found and took the time to look around and wonder, as well.  And we dreamed together for a time.

All things are possible in dreams, especially friendship.  And I am thankful for ours; we both know how rare such a thing is and value it highly – beyond rubies, as the Proverb says.  There is a vast gulf between acquaintanceship and friendship, and I am thankful that we explored and plumbed those depths.  The journey to those depths has made my life so much more interesting, so much more rewarding, than it would otherwise have been.  It was the leavening agent that allowed me to prosper in my profession.

With all the sincerity and love I am able to muster, I am – and will always remain – your friend,

Steve

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The Beauty and Allure of Far Horizons

Posted on July 24, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“Sometimes, looking in the windows of art-dealers south of Piccadilly, I find myself wondering how it is that a painter has stopped just here.  I could no more paint that sunset or that beetling cliff, that moorland with the clump of sheep, than I could draw a recognizable human face; but with that amount of enviable skill what has made the painter stop?  Perhaps the answer is that if he had ever possessed the capacity to enlarge his skill he would never have begun on that sunset, that cliff, that moorland.”

Graham Greene, Collected Essays, “Edgar Wallace”

It has often seemed to me that people are satisfied with too little, that they settle for the attainment of their nearest dream and do not think they can attain, or think that it is too hard to attain, the next dream in their dreamland hierarchy.  Or, worse yet from my point of view, they haven’t any other dreams.

I can easily understand getting tired.  Attaining any dream of any size or consequence is hard work, both mentally and physically.  But while I can understand taking a rest between bouts of dream chasing, I cannot understand a total abandonment of the effort.  To abandon dreams is to settle for less than what you are due, to compromise on what you are capable of becoming.  Upon attainment of a certain age, we all become exempt from making yet another attempt, but the best of us keep on even then, even when the likelihood of attaining the next dream is surely dismal at best.

Chasing dreams is the essence of what sets humanity apart from other species.  For the most part, other species accept the hand they are dealt and seek only to occupy the niche in the hierarchy of survival to which they were assigned by birth.  A desire for something more, a certain striving, is what drove the first organism in the chain that evolved into humanity from the sea, and learning to strive is the first step in learning to dream.  Desire is the energy that spurs the development of intelligence, and it is intelligence which fuels dreams.  To quit dreaming at any stage of life is to settle for what you have at the cost of losing the spark of your humanity.

In making this argument, I don’t question the existence of animal intelligence.  Most animals with whom I’ve had interaction have intelligence and emotions, and are quite capable of resolving the problems which accompany their niche in life.  To say this is to say nothing more than the obvious; no species would survive for long if the truth were otherwise.

But human intelligence is of another order.  At each moment in the chain of human existence, we have not only been aware there was something far greater than we presently understood, but we were endowed with the tools and, most importantly, the imagination to attempt to discover something more about its shape, size, and workings.  And in order to be a significant player in this continual human voyage of discovery, we not only must dream in order to separate ourselves from the beasts of the field, we must dream as big a dream as we can in order to achieve any success whatsoever during the moment in which we dream.

For it is not only the leading scientists, philosophers, or theoreticians that take us on our voyage of discovery.  While they may be our leaders, they cannot do everything by themselves.  They are as dependent as anyone else upon the basic services and goods necessary for human survival in any age – the services and goods the rest of the crew supplies.  For humanity’s ship to sail to the farthest possible horizon, everyone aboard must improve the skills necessary for the position they hold or for the position to which they aspire.

To think we are not all onboard the same ship is to deny the truth of the most recent photograph of the earth taken from deep space, the first such picture to be taken since 1972.  Of course there are deniers; there are always deniers, there are always those members of our own species who are incapable of dreaming or too afraid to try.  We cannot leave them behind any more than we can leave behind the other species, for they share the same fragile vessel with us – but we must remember that they have no place in the structure of command.

I accept the fact that some are endowed with differing abilities at birth and that not everyone is capable of dreaming as big as someone else.  But saying that we all should chase yet one more dream than the last one we caught does nothing to belittle any single one of us.  If your dream is bigger than mine, so be it; that fact says nothing about our need for the chase, only about its direction and purpose.  To be human is to take part in what is, after all, a steeplechase rather than a race to a distant goal line, and if only the politicians of every age could understand this basic difference, think of how many more horizons we might conquer.

Perhaps I suffer from having been raised in a remote valley, one isolated in so many ways that no member of the millennial generation could possibly understand how alone I felt.  The fact of its utter isolation meant that when I became old enough to peek over the valley’s rim, I discovered there were even more and bigger horizons yet to be conquered – not digital game horizons, but real, intimidating, physical horizons that could just as easily become a barrier as something capable of being conquered.  These farther horizons were alluring; these farther horizons taught me to pull myself up by my own bootstraps and get going, just as the immense overarching sky under which I was raised was filled with the panoply of opportunities necessary to teach me that big dreams are far better than small ones and much easier to dream.

But that was just my own particular motivation.  It is not offered as the only way forward; it is offered in recognition that motivation can be found equally well in the harsher lessons of life as in silver spoons.  It is offered in recognition of the fact that we each must find our own motivation to seek the farthest horizon, to dream the biggest dream of which we are capable.

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The Zealot’s Song

Posted on June 21, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

A zealot’s song is neither pretty nor fine.  It is a sustained shriek into the teeth of the winds of change which seeks to challenge and interrupt an evolving chain of reasoned logic.  It is a one note howl of defiance and rage; it is the song of a bully.

Once upon a time in America, we knew how to deal with bullies.  We learned the lesson the hard way on our playgrounds and on the battlefields of World Wars I and II and Korea; we gathered all the courage we could find within our quaking souls, and faced up to the bullies as best we could.  There is only one way to do it, after all, no matter the bully’s size: you must spit in his or her eye and invite their wrath.  The weaker ones will run if you do, but the bigger ones will fight back using the dirtiest, most unethical, most brutal tactics they are capable of imagining.  The fight will have no rules, and no tactics or holds will be barred.  But there is no other alternative for those who wish to stop a bully than to make the attempt.

The NRA is the epitome of such a one-note bully.  According to them, the only way to stop someone with a gun is by using another gun.  Given their illogic, it appears that peace and equilibrium will only be achieved when we are all armed to the fullest.  No matter that such behavior, when engaged in by nation states, has too often led to all-out war; no matter that the notion of two gunfighters fighting for supremacy in the dusty street of a western American cow-town is nothing more than a myth, and not an iconic image of personal courage and honor.  Their goal is to turn back the clock to a time of a collective fantasy in which they might discover how many notches can be carved in the handgrips of their respective Colt 45s.

In order for the NRA to be happiest – in order for them to be able to carve the most notches – all of us, whether or not we live in their delusional world, must be armed so that the maximum number of gunfights can be fought.  It is not enough for them to fight among themselves in a single corral; they demand that the rest of us follow suit and arm ourselves so that the battles can be fought in any street in America, whether it be paved or dusty, urban or rural, deserted or jam-packed with humanity.  They can only imagine personal triumph by means of domination; they lack the imagination, the logic, the words, and the perception necessary for honest debate.  They are deaf to reason and devoid of empathy.

Not all gun owners used to be this way.  In the small, isolated town where I was raised, there were once responsible gun owners.  In high school, I worked in the sporting goods department of a local store – a kind of store which no longer exists in America; a store dedicated to fulfilling all of the needs that farming families might have, from sheet steel and iron pipe and the tools to use them, to furniture and household goods that might soothe the aches of their toils.  My boss was the son of the owner and a dedicated sportsman.  We sold guns, the type of guns a hunter or a farmer would need.  We sold rifles and pistols, both in adult and juvenile versions – but never an assault rifle, never a fully automatic weapon.  Johnny, my boss, had a firm set of rules: if he knew you and was aware that you already knew how to use a weapon responsibly, you could take delivery of your desired weapon without delay; if he didn’t know you or if he believed you hadn’t the requisite training to use the weapon safely and responsibly, its delivery had to wait until you’d completed his free evening course in gun safety (he was a licensed trainer); and, if you were patently irresponsible and likely to use the weapon for evil, he would refuse to sell it to you no matter how much you offered to pay or how loudly you yelled.

Johnny didn’t do these things because of any law; he did them because they were the right thing to do in his estimation.  He didn’t value guns for their ability to stop another person in a dusty street; he valued guns and bows because he loved to hunt – and hunting for him was primarily a way to enjoy the outdoors in the company of others, since companionship in the form of good stories told around a campfire (and perhaps food, but never trophies) was his true goal.  I can understand the place of guns in this ideology; they make a sort of sense to me despite the fact that it is not a way of life that I prefer or would enjoy.  Within the confines of this ethos, I have no problem with another’s ownership and use of a gun – but only if the user is trained in the way that Johnny demanded, only if the user is responsible, only if the user makes safety his or her primary goal.  This was how gun use was generally understood in the 1950s.

Johnny didn’t own guns because of a fear of others.  He wouldn’t have understood the concept.  He would have considered the use of a gun against another human being to be murder.  He kept his guns locked up; he kept his guns unloaded; he taught us never to point a weapon at another person, even when you thought it unloaded for the simple reason that you might be mistaken in your belief.  If he had a beef with you, he would argue it out face to face – no weapons in hand.  He was a fearless man.  He disliked bullies; he always spit in their eye whenever they came around.

The post-Charlton Heston NRA is the biggest and ugliest of bullies, always ready, and ever inclined, to fight.  They are long past singing into the teeth of the wind; they would rather piss into it instead, no matter the personal consequences.  But we already know their tactics, we’ve already heard their song.  We have memorized it by now, because it never varies by as much as a single note.  Their song is a sustained shriek of insanity, the howl of individual madness.  It is not a grace note to the collective symphony of shared American life: at its minimum, it is a profound dissonance and ugly discordance; at its worst, it is the cry of an evil banshee.  Whichever way you hear it, it is long past time for the rest of us to shut it up, to spit in the eye of this gang of ignorant bullies.

In fairness to the reader, I should disclose that I own nothing more than an air rifle, which I use to scare coyotes away from our houseful of cats or to keep the deer away from Helen’s roses.  Its BBs might sting – if I could hit anything other than the side of our barn.  It is most effective in my hands because of the sound it makes when being fired or that made by the resulting pellet if it manages to hit somewhere in the general vicinity of the animal involved.  If I were ever to hit an animal – be it coyote or deer or whatever – I would feel dreadful.  I could never take any pride in such a success; the life of a hunter is not for me, even if I am able to comprehend the lure of its ethos.

Yesterday, a Facebook friend who still lives in my home town posted a picture of a page of the local newspaper – a single page which contained (a) two articles about the recent mass murders in the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Atlanta and the effects of such attacks in the African-American community, and (b) a paid advertisement for a “conceal carry permit class” containing a graphic image of a pistol.  Undoubtedly, the copy editor was, at least, insensitive as hell; more likely in my estimation, he or she was simply howling the one note song of the NRA.  If my suspicion is true, his or her logic was somewhere on a scale between: “If I place the ad here, more people might read it and learn how to defend themselves against mass murderers” to the more likely: “That will show the bastards; no one can take my guns from me.”  Whatever the reason, the ad placement was an insult to the memories of those murdered and offensive to the sensibilities of civilized society.

The fact that I can imagine this small town copy editor having either notion suggests that it is time for the rest of us to gather our courage and act in unison.  After all, all we have to lose is the irresponsible sale of guns to people who, while using them, are far more likely to hurt themselves, their children, or other innocent persons than they are to prevail in a dusty street.  So join the fight, and get ready by limbering up those salivary glands.

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