Flight: a poem

I wrote this poem for my friends Miranda, a Search & Rescue dog handler, and Marcy, her search dog. I knew Marcy all of her fourteen years. She served well, with dedication and verve. They were a dream team.

Flight

Cadaver dog was her moniker. 

She sniffed out bones.

One sultry summer in the South Pacific
she searched for Amelia Earhart
on a desert island no bigger
than a Mack truck hubcap.

And she did find bones.

For the sake of the story, though,
let’s say she found just one:
long and pristine, the bulbous end
peeking out from the gleaming white sand
beneath a nodding palm.

But it was not Amelia’s.

People had actually lived on that tiny island,
scraped out gardens, existences.
A war had been fought there.

The bone could have been anyone’s. No one’s.
And Amelia remains nowhere to be found.

Some mysteries may be better left that way.

But Marcy was no mystery:
a black-and-white border collie
with a goofy grin and ears akimbo,
she lived to fetch, to chase after a tug-toy,
her reward for a job well done.

Off she would fly,
eyes bright with delight.
More! More!

                                                                 RIP 3/19/21

Geocaching while hiking—and vice versa

These are a couple of my favorite things to do: walk/hike and geocache. Yesterday three of us went out to Pacheco State Park, on the Santa Clara/Merced County border; today a somewhat different three of us went to Coyote Lake–Harvey Bear Ranch County Park, in a different part of Santa Clara County (it's a big county). In each place we hiked some 8–10 miles and did some geocaching.

The caches for the most part weren't especially remarkable. But the places were glorious in their springtime green, and wildflowers were (subtly) popping. The weather was perfect, and we could see vast distances—from Pacheco, all the way to the Sierra Nevada in the east and Mt. Umunhum in the west. Here are some photos I took.

First, Pacheco State Park, once a Mexican land grant and still used to graze cattle; it is also home to a pretty impressive wind farm and is bordered by a major reservoir (click to view larger):

There in the distance is San Luis Reservoir—
and even farther, the snowy peaks of the Sierra Nevada

Someone gave this cow skull some gussied-up antlers

And here is Coyote-Harvey:

The newly leafing oaks (not sure what kind)
were glorious!

Looking west

Happened to spot this nest hidden in the grass—
western meadowlark is our guess

And here is proof of the geocaching part of the adventure—David and Alastair (aka FifiBonacci and Mimring) going literally above and beyond:

Above

Chuckles

Beyond

Teamwork!

It was a couple of really nice days, in good company. And now: I will rest.

UNESCO World Heritage Sites

I love lists. That doesn't mean I'm especially good at making lists, and ticking off items on them. I try, but honestly, to-do lists don't seem to be in my DNA. I am finally learning to accept that.

But lists like Top Ten Books of the year—those, I need to dash out and buy. (I don't actually do so. I have some restraint.)

Or Top Twenty-One Roads to Road-Trip On—because I do love to road-trip.

Or bucket lists: mine includes seeing all the kingfishers of the world, though I seriously doubt that will happen.

But I continue to be intrigued by the 1,121 sites listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites—places of outstanding universal value to humanity. I've visited a few of them (knownst or unbeknownst): the Urnes Stave Church ➚ and Røros Mining Town in Norway, Tongariro National Park in New Zealand, the Netherlands' Waddenzee, Masada and the Old City of Acre in Israel, Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe . . .

The United States has a few such sites as well, mostly national park–like places:

Ones that I haven't ever been to? They are now on my radar: the Everglades, Independence Hall, Mammoth Cave, Cahokia Mounds (MO), the Statue of Liberty for crying out loud, Monticello, Carlsbad Caverns, the Monumental Earthworks of Poverty Point (lower Mississippi Valley), and the San Antonio Missions. Papahānaumokuākea ⬉ —never mind: I will never get there.

That's a simple list of nine sites. I could do that. But that stinking Papahānaumokuākea sort of throws off the possibility of a perfectly checked off list. Darn it.

Book Report: The Queen of Patpong

17. Timothy Hallinan, The Queen of Patpong (2010) (3/24/21)

I have been slowly working my way through Hallinan's Poke Rafferty novels, set in Bangkok (I reported on the third one here in 2017). This is his fourth, and it is rich, both in terms of story and in language: Hallinan is an excellent writer. 

The story is relatively simple: in an early chapter, Rafferty's wife, the Isaan-Thai former bar girl Rose, is shocked to encounter a man she had thought was dead. This man, Howard Horner, faintly military, proceeds to send menacing messages her way, and Rose is plainly rattled. Poke doesn't know what's going on, and so Rose must explain a part of her past that she has kept hidden: the story of how she came to Bangkok and became a hostess in the "leisure district" of Patpong—and how she came to be mixed up in such trouble. That revelation is sandwiched within the suspense of tracking down and dealing with the bad guy. 

Throughout this, too, Rafferty and Rose's adopted daughter, Miaow (or Mia, as she now wishes to be called), is rehearsing her role as Ariel in a school production of The Tempest—which provides a diversion from the tension and allows for some metaphorical riffs. 

In this scene from that subplot, the play's director,  the Korean Mrs. Shin, explains:

     "From a Korean perspective the Thais are a little . . . haphazard."
     "We are?" Miaow says.
     "From a Korean perspective." Mrs. Shin emphasizes the words. "Koreans tend to be highly organized. We're planners and list makers. Not particularly spontaneous. The Thais, on the other hand, sort of flow." She sees the confusion in Miao's face and laughs. "Don't worry, I'm not saying anything bad about Thais. It's actually about me, and it has to do with the play. . . . As a Korean, I didn't think that the Thais measured up to me," she says, sitting down on her heels in a posture Rafferty has never been able to attain. "And now here I am, twelve years later, slowly turning Thai and delighted about it. And it makes me think about Caliban."
     Rafferty says, "Ah," and Miaow says, "Why?"
     "We don't like Caliban. We're not supposed to. Shakespeare doesn't like him. Caliban is the only non-European on the island, except for Ariel, who's clearly an upper-class spirit, almost English. But Caliban . . . well, Caliban is definitely not English, and Prospero treats him like a dog."
     Miaow says, "And he's . . . " She falters and puts both hands on the table.
     "He's what?" Mrs. Shin asks. 
     Miaow shakes her head. "I'm not smart like you."
     "You're one of the smartest children I've ever known," Mrs. Shin says.
      Miaow's mouth opens at the praise and stays open. She looks as if she's just been hit on the head.
     "So what is it?" Mrs. Shin prompts. "What else is Caliban?"
     Miaow grabs a breath and plunges in. "He's the only one who doesn't get off."
     Rafferty says, "By 'get off,' you mean—"
     "Nobody forgives him. Prospero forgives everybody, even after they  tried to kill him and his daughter. He sets Ariel free. But nobody forgives Caliban."
     Rafferty and Mrs. Shin sit there looking at Miaow. Then Mrs. Shin says, "Miaow, I am so happy you're in this play."
     Miaow says, "Really?" She's blushing.
     "Really, totally, completely, one hundred percent, absolutely. But why doesn't Prospero forgive Caliban?"
     "He tried to fool around with Miranda," Miaow answers. "She says so herself." . . .
     " . . . You figured out, all by yourself, what the play is really about." Mrs. Shin sits back on her heels, looking pleased.
     "What?" Miaow asks, as though she suspects a quiz. "What's it about?"
     "Forgiveness. It's about the healing power of forgiveness. And do you know why I think Prospero doesn't forgive Caliban at the end of the play? Because Prospero doesn't understand Caliban."
     Howard Horner's face flashes into Rafferty's mind. "That's a very liberal attitude."
     "Well, I believe it. I believe it's impossible to hate anyone you understand. Don't you feel the same way?"
     Rafferty's pause is all the cue Mrs. Shin needs. "Well, perhaps not. But I'm the director and you're the condenser [of the written play to make it shorter], so you have to help me make this work."

Another Day on the Pine Ridge Trail

Yesterday I joined two fellow Volunteer Wilderness Rangers to cut three trees—one of them a gnarly, as in multiply split, redwood—on the main trail that leads from Big Sur into the Ventana Wilderness. We are hoping that trail, which is currently closed because of old damage from a fire a few years ago, will be reopened soon, but the US Forest Service mucky-mucks are dragging their heels. With every day that doesn't see boots on the trail, the more opportunity the plant life has to take over, despite our hard work these past few months. But hopefully in May?

In any event, trees keep falling, and we keep heading out there to remove them from the trail. These are some pictures I took yesterday while I wasn't on the saw.

The view from near the top of Terrace Creek Trail,
our entree into the Wilderness: Double Cone in the middle

Mt. Kandlbinder, from down on the Pine Ridge Trail

Barking that nasty redwood

It was a very, very long tree

The big saw was binding badly, so we had to
finish it off with a hand saw. But we got it!

You can see Dave and Lynn working on a
tan oak waaaaaay over on the right (they are tiny).
That's Double Cone Peak again in the middle.

New leafing of a California buckeye: like little jewels

See the moon?

Book Report: Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

16. Ben Fountain, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories (2006) (3/20/21)

These eight beautifully written and told stories set variously in Haiti, Colombia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, North Carolina, and fin-de-siècle Austria manage to capture emotions and, maybe especially, yearnings that are heart-breakingly believable.

I had read the first five stories many years ago, and although I didn't remember the details, once I got going again in each story, each situation, I found myself in a familiar place, with familiar people—for they do stick with you. (Unlike, say, mysteries, where so often I start rereading and it's as if I've never cracked the book open before.)

Fountain has spent a lot of time in Haiti, for research on a novel that never sold. The other places he visited in his imagination and through reading. But you'd never know it, because they all feel very authentic. Or perhaps it's because the people feel so authentic. I especially enjoyed the stories with a lot of dialogue, delineating colorful characters, usually at cross-purposes.

"Near Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera," which was sparked by a news report that the CEO of the New York Stock Exchange had invited some Colombian guerrillas for a tour of the floor, involves an ornithologist who is captured by rebels. I wrote a bit about "Rêve Haitien" here. "The Good Ones Are Already Taken" concerns the young wife of a Special Forces soldier who returns from Haiti married to a Voodoo goddess. "Asian Tiger" is about a second-tier golf champion who finds himself sucked into corrupt politics and business in Myanmar. "Bouki and the Cocaine," again in Haiti, tells the story of two brothers who stumble on large duffel bags full of cocaine. "The Lion's Mouth" concerns a worn-down aid worker in Sierra Leone confronted with an opportunity—though it involves blood diamonds. "Brief Encounters with Che Guevara" is just that. And "Fantasy for Eleven Fingers" tells the story of one, then sixty years later another piano prodigy, each with an extra ring finger on their right hand.

The story lines are lively in their difference and the imagination invoked, which I greatly enjoyed. 

Here is an excerpt from "Bouki and the Cocaine," involving the brothers Lulu and Syto and their nephew, a wheeler-and-dealer from the capital:

     "How much is it worth?" Lulu asked. His eyes shone like lacquer in the candlelight.
     "The going rate's four thousand," Nixon told him. "Four thousand dollars U.S."
     "For one sack?" Lulu cried, delighted, but Nixon frowned and glanced at his friends. Then he turned back to his uncles and spoke very slowly.
     "That's four thousand," he touched the kilo bag on the table, "for one of these."
     When Syto heard that, he assumed he was going to die. There was too much money involved, too many desperate people, but the next moment he was thinking: is this what a black man has to do to get a little respect? Risk your life, as Lulu had done when he denounced the government thieves? As Nixon had done running his contraband gasoline? . . . [Y]ou were either a chump or a thief, those were your choices in this world. Syto despaired, knowing he'd never be able to explain his sense that they were all, however improbably, on the same side.

Ellen Bass, poet

Yesterday I attended a (Zoom) poetry reading and discussion with two poets I admire, Ellen Bass and Barbara Ras. Here are two poems by Ellen, one of which (the second one here, written a few months before her dear dog Zeke died) she read to us. (I have featured Barbara before, but I will make a point of doing so again soon.)

Asking Directions in Paris

Où est le Boulevard Saint Michel?
You pronounce the question carefully.
And when the native stops,
shifting her small sack of groceries,
lifting her manicured hand,
you feel a flicker of accomplishment.
But beyond that, all clarity
dissolves, for the woman
in the expensive shoes and suit exactly the soft gray
of clouds above the cathedral, does not say
to the right, to the left, straight ahead,
phrases you memorized from tapes
as you drove around your home town
or mumbled into a pocket Berlitz on the plane,
but relays something wholly unintelligible,
some version of: On the corner
he is a shop of jewels in a fountain
and the hotel arrives on short feet.
You listen hard, nodding,
as though your pleasant
disposition, your willingness
to go wherever she tells you,
will make her next words pop up
from this ocean of sound, somewhat
the way a dog hears its name
and the coveted syllable walk.
If you're brave enough, or very nervous,
you may even admit you don't understand.
And though evening's coming on
and her family's waiting, her husband lighting
another Gauloise, the children setting the table,
she repeats it all again, with another
gesture of her lovely hand, from which you glean
no more than you did the first time.
And as you thank her profusely
and set off full of doubt and groundless hope,
you think this must be how it is
with destiny: God explaining
and explaining what you must do,
even willing to hold up dinner for it,
and all you can make out is a few
unconnected phrases, a word or two, a wave
in what you pray is the right direction.

Ode to Zeke

Ellen happened to mention
that this photo, alluded to
in the poem, is on Instagram.

O breathing drum, O cask of dark
waters, O decaying star, my
barking heart, my breaking brother,
what will seep into the space
your body leaves? O huge
eighteen-muscled ears, oscillating
ossicles and cochlea, your busy canals
now hollow caves of quiet. I have said
your fur is black, but you are
silvered, rimed with frost.
You are the new moon.
You are light in the dark house.
How long will I see your shadow?
O heavy hunk of existence, O great flank
I have rested my head upon
when I was too weak for human touch.
Sleek leading man, you debonair dog,
how people on the avenue stopped to swoon.
O splaying legs once faster than rabbits,
canines slashing flesh. Urgent thug,
unstoppable thrust. O happy snapping
at the wind. What do you remember
now that you are mud slide, glacier
melting, cliff collapsing into the sea?
I have memorized your milky breath,
your ballet leaps and whirly-gigging.
Your princely patience, as the children
dressed you—Soccer Zeke
in jersey and shorts, one paw on the ball.
Snorkel Zeke with mask and fins.
Bar Mitzvah Zeke in a yarmulke
and my father’s silk tallit. O my text
of decrepitude, my usher to death,
companion of ten thousand years,
I’ll fry you a fish. I’ll sit by your bowl.
Eat from my hand. I have nowhere to go.

Haitian Art

Today's post is inspired by the wonderful book Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain. It's short stories, some of which are about Haiti—including one about a nameless Haitian who wants to smuggle art, by way of a peacekeeper intermediary, Mason, out of the country to raise money for a rebellion. 

"This," he announced, stepping past Mason to the bed, "is the treasure of the Haitian people."
     Mason stood back as the mulatto began pulling rolls of canvas from the bags, stripping off the rag strings, and laying the canvases on the bed. "Hyppolite," he said crisply as a serpentine creature with the head of a man unfurled across the mattress. "Castera Bazile," he said next, "the crucifixion," and a blunt-angled painting of the nailed and bleeding Christ was laid over Hyppolite's mutant snake. "Philomé Obin. Bigaud. André Pierre. All of the Haitian masters are represented." At first glance the paintings had a wooden quality, and yet Mason, whose life trajectory had mostly skimmed him past art, felt confronted by something vital and real.
     "Préfète Duffaut." The mulatto kept unrolling canvases. "Lafortune Felix. Saint-Fleurant. Hyppolite, his famous painting of Erzulie. There is a million dollars' worth of art in this room."
     This was a lot, even allowing for the Haitian gift for puff. "How did you get it?" Mason felt obliged to ask.
     "We stole it." The mulatto gave him an imperious look.
     "You stole it?"
     "Shortly after the coup. Most of the paintings we took in a single night. It wasn't difficult, I know the houses where they have the art. A few pictures came later, but most of the items we took in the time of the coup."
     "Okay." Mason felt the soft approach was best. "You're an artist?"
     "I am a doctor," said the mulatto, and his arrogance seemed to bear this out.
     "But you like art."
     The mulatto paused, then went on as if Mason hadn't spoken.
     "Art is the only thing of value in my country—the national treasure, what Haiti has to offer to the world. We are going to use her treasure to free her."
     Mason had met his share of delusional Haitians, but here were the pictures, and here was a man with the bearing of a king.

And here are randomly chosen works by the artists mentioned, including the "mutant snake" (click on them to view large on black):

Wilson Bigaud, Feeding the Rooster (1960)

Castera Bazile, Cemetery Scene (1952)

Frantz Zephirin, L'aigle et le serpent

Hyppolite, Hector Limba Zaran (1946)

Félix LaFortune, no title (1988)

Louisiane Saint-Fleurant, no title

Stivenson Magloire, Allégorie Justice (1993)

Philomé Obin, Carnaval de 1954, rue du Pont

Préfète Duffaut, Paysage haïtien

André Pierre, Dambala Wedo, Erzulie Fréda Daromey
et Maître Ogou Fieraille (1984)

Hyppolite, Damballa, the Flame 

Walking

I love to walk. You could say, it's what I do best. 

Typically, I go walking in the woods--up in our local Jacks Peak park full of pines (and poison oak); over in Fort Ord with its live oaks; down Big Sur way in the redwoods. Or along the shore: the Asilomar boardwalk, the Marina dunes, to and then along Del Monte Beach, at the foot of our local thoroughfare.

Recently, though, I've decided to get out for a(n at least) weekly walk through local neighborhoods. Take a look at how people dress their houses and yards up, while listening to a podcast or two. Today was my first foray: from my house up through neighboring Seaside. Five miles. I took a few pictures. (Click to see large: they're better that way.)

The day's route started at the blue arrow and headed to the right (east), then into a nice loop.

And on the way back, our Frog Pond, just a half-mile from my home. 

Book Report: Having and Being Had

15. Eula Biss, Having and Being Had (2020) (3/16/21)

In this book, Biss explores the ways she internalizes, and also struggles against, capitalism, looking at her assumptions about class and property, money and time, art and sustenance, work, toil, and labor. She does so in four parts—"Consumption," "Work," "Investment," and "Accounting"—each containing very short chapters composed, generally, of discrete chunks of experience, thought, or anecdote. In that formal way, it reminded me of Jenny Offill's Dept. of Speculation, though that book is fiction, this is non. (Offill wrote one of the jacket blurbs.) The book includes—as one of Biss's "rules" of composition—conversations with friends of hers and quotes from books she is reading. Each chapter begins in a present-tense moment, and very often the end of a chapter provides a supple segue into the next chapter. Chapter titles may be repeated: there are many called "Work," "Art," and "Capitalism." Biss examines her own conflicted feelings about being an artist—a comfortable artist; about ownership as she purchases and furnishes her first home ("My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts: the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after"); about how to balance time and money; about giving and the pleasures of exchange, in an economy that asks much and offers back very little freely—and much more. It's a thoughtful and thought-provoking book. 

As usual with such a book, I flagged many passages, and could easily have flagged more, for the diversity and depth, and occasionally for sweet silliness. But what I will quote here is from an appendix, titled "Notes," in which she writes on various aspects of this book: the title, the names, the rules, the middle class, etc. 

From "On the Comforts"

I began keeping a new kind of diary shortly after I moved into my house in 2014. I had very little time to write then. But I had a garage where I kept my bike, so I no longer had to carry it up and down stairs. And I had a new sense of security, a feeling of solidity. I wasn't particularly liquid, but I didn't have to worry about my mortgage as long as I kept my job. I was highly aware, in those first years, of my comfort. And I was uncomfortable with that comfort. I knew from past experience that the discomfort would fade and that my extraordinary new life would become ordinary with time. To stave off that loss, I kept a diary in which I recorded moments of discomfort from my life, usually moments in which I was also enjoying some sort of comfort or pleasure. I wanted to hold on to the discomfort and I wanted to hold on to the comfort, too. This book is what came of that contradiction.
     At first, every moment I recorded was excrutiating to me, but it was also beautiful. I was sure that my discomfort had something to teach me, and that I would lose some essential knowledge if I let go of the discomfort. I wanted to "stay with the trouble." But I knew that my trouble didn't look like trouble. It looked like what is commonly called "success." This success was the result of having played a particular game, with all the advantages my position afforded. So I regarded my own success and accomplishment with new suspicion.
     As I wrote, every word I touched seemed to crumble. I no longer knew what good meant, or art or work or investment or ownership or capitalism. At some point early in my work on this book, my son asked me what luxury meant. I told him that it was something you didn't need. No, not like garbage. Something you wanted, that was very nice, but that wasn't necessary to your life. I looked around the room at my houseplants and books. These weren't necessities, but they didn't seem like good examples of luxuries either. The piano was a luxury, but I didn't want to suggest that music wasn't a necessity. "It's like dessert," I told him. "You don't need dessert to live, but it's nice to have. It's a luxury." 
     Really, the question was a luxury. As was my inability to answer it. "In the affluent society," John Kenneth Galbraith writes, "no useful distinction can be made between luxuries and necessities." All the small necessities of my life, my reading and my writing, were luxuries. And every moment I wrote about was a luxury, though the writing itself felt necessary. I could make no useful distinction between a necessity and a luxury, so I struggled with the word. Later, I looked it up: "The state of great comfort and extravagant living." Maybe I found it difficult to define luxury because I lived in a state of great comfort. This is the state that some people refer to as middle class. And a common euphemism for being upper-middle class or rich is comfortable. 

Danica Phelps, artist

Danica Phelps with
The Cost of Love (2012) (see below)

Another artist I learned about from Eula Biss's Having and Being Had: Danica Phelps. It is in the section "Accounting," in a chapter titled "Accounting," about worth, value, in art, in life. I quote from Biss:

Income's Outcome is a project that began when . . . Phelps made drawings of everything she did with the money in her bank account until that balance was spent down to zero. She drew her son putting a coin into a parking meter, her hands opening bills, boots on her feet, a scooter, her son pushing a grocery cart. When she sold each one of those drawings, she recorded the income and drew everything she did with that money. The drawings are full of bodies, rendered in long liquid lines, overlapping in embrace, and hands holding things, cookies and eggs and apples. . . .

Her art is an accounting. When a drawing sells, she records the income by painting a green stripe, a tally mark, for every dollar. Money spent is painted in red stripes. Credit is gray, as it occupies the gray area between earnings and expenses. . . .

Not all the drawings she made for Income's Outcome were good, in her opinion, but she had to keep them all because they were part of the financial record, which was also the body of work. And so she priced them according to how much she valued them as works of art. "When I started showing my work, I put the price right on the drawing," she said. "In my first exhibition, there were pieces ranging from $7 to $1,600, based on how much I liked the drawing." The determination of the price, as one gallery noted, was her "final aesthetic decision." . . .

The value of Phelps's art, as she sees it, is inscribed on the art itself, art that illustrates what is done with money paid for art. Her work is both a rebuke of the art market and an acquiescence to that market. Because, as one dealer puts it, "There would be no drawing without the collector act of buying."

That final statement itself is a question definitely open to interrogation, but we are talking about capitalism in this book—a topic that Biss neatly segues into in the next chapter, titled, yes, "Capitalism."

Here are some photos from a gallery installation of Income's Outcome: 

Phelps has done visually similar, but arguably intentionally dissimilar, projects, including The Gratitude Project (2016), the proceeds of which, $20,000, went as donations to 41 philanthropic organizations helping Syrian refugees.

Here's Biss again, describing another project, The Cost of Love (see above, portrait of artist):

In 2012, [Phelps] exhibited a series of twenty-five plywood panels covered in 350,000 red gouache stripes for the $350,000 she lost in the foreclosure of the home she had shared with another woman, her former lover. The Cost of Love . . .  included words drawn from a housing court ruling: "animosity," "eviction," "mortgage." When she bought the home, she hired assistants to help her paint the 627,000 gray stripes that represented the loan of $627,000. But when it foreclosed, she painted every red stripe herself, which took five months. "It's like letting go of the house, every single penny of it," she told a reporter. "And once I've painted it, it's gone."

Here is a detail from "paragraph 2" of The Cost of Love. I am so glad there are obsessive artists like Danica Phelps out there: they help to give visible meaning to life.