Book Report: Stone Yard Devotional

14. Charlotte Wood, Stone Yard Devotional (2023) (6/22/25)

This quiet book is set somewhere in the countryside of New South Wales; the narrator, a woman of a certain age and an atheist, has left her husband and the big city to seek remove in a cloistered community near the town she grew up in. It begins as a few diary entries on the occasion of her first visit back, and part two becomes a series of observations and musings about life in the community upon her return and seemingly permanent residence (though she does not take vows) with the ten or so remaining sisters. 

A few events punctuate the otherwise quiet life there: a plague of mice, which becomes worse and worse, exacerbated by drought (climate change); and the return of the bones of a sister who left the community several decades before to work "in the world." The bones of Sister Jenny are accompanied by a social-activist sister, Helen Parry, not otherwise affiliated with the monastery, who also grew up in the neighboring town (and went to school with the narrator). The backdrop to all this is Covid, and the general shutdown—meaning Helen is obliged to stay on once she's returned the bones, and the community has few visitors. Helen mainly keeps to herself, but even that causes certain friction. Meanwhile, the sisters and our narrator do increasingly gruesome battle with the rodential hordes, as they wait (and wait) for permission to bury Sister Jenny. 

That's it! At the end, the mice have mostly disappeared, the interment takes place (without permission, but never mind), and Helen departs. 

Some readers might object that there's no story, but I enjoyed the slow pacing and the thoughtfulness as the narrator grapples with big questions: What is our purpose? Can we be forgiven for acts of callousness and neglect? Why are we here? We learn that the narrator was formerly an environmentalist, but she lost faith in the cause—indeed, upon the dissolution of her marriage, in everything. She may not find answers per se, but she begins to find some peace. 

Here is a sample chapter (in full), opening with a quote (a not too tediously frequent device):

'We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will . . . Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.' Simon Weil.    
     Our Simone [one of the sisters] once took me to task over my 'sneering' about prayer. My notion of prayer was juvenile: forget this telephone line to God bullshit, she snapped, hot with impatience. It wasn't even about God, she said, which I thought must surely be blasphemous. Praying was a way to interrupt your own habitual thinking, she told me. It's admitting yourself into otherness, cracking open your prejudices. It's not chitchat; it's hard labour. She spoke as if all this were obvious. I longed to understand her. It feels always that I am on the edge of some comprehension here but never breaking through to the other side.
     At night, just before sleep, is when I am closest to reaching it. In the morning, when the birds start, belief is as thin as the light.

And here's another quote, in a chapter that treats the idea that "if you don't life the life you are born for, it makes you ill," a remark made by Helen Parry at the breakfast table, to which one of the sisters, taking Helen's comment as condescending, responds quietly, "I was born for this life."

What I could not tolerate was the 'falling in love with Jesus' talk that I knew would come next, and it did. I find it nauseating; surely this life should be composed of something more sober than that. Something austere, and momentous, and powerful. Close attention, hard thinking. A wrestling, to subdue . . . what? Ego. The self. Hatred. Pride. But no, instead we have Sissy, and also Carmel, simpering that they are here because I fell in love with Jesus and want to live with him in heaven. As if they're talking about some teen idol crush. I have learned not to roll my eyes but there are times it is nearly impossible. Right at that moment, forcing myself to stay at the table, I was surprised to find myself meeting Helen Parry's glance, and more surprised still that both she and I held each other's gaze. Then she gave a tiny movement of her head in microscopic mimicry of Silly's and Carmel's simpering, and I had to turn away not to laugh, in the process most completely failing to subdue my ego, the self, pride. 

Wood has written seven works of fiction, three of non. I may seek her out again.  

 

30. Wind phone

Today on FB I ran across a mention of a "wind phone" that was recently installed in Joshua Tree, in memory of two teenagers, Ruby and Hart Campbell, 17 and 14, killed in 2019 in a car crash. The memorial was created by their parents, who were also in the accident but survived. Unimaginable.  

As it appears, it is a telephone, but unattached to any wires, so unworkable in the strict sense. As the parents, Gail Lerner and Colin Campbell, explain, the original wind phone "was created in Japan [in 2010] by Itaru Sasaki while he was grieving his cousin who died of cancer. He bought an old-fashioned phone booth, set it up in his garden, and installed an obsolete rotary phone that was not connected to . . . any 'earthly system.' He called it Kaze no Denwa (風の電話), which translates as the Wind Phone. Using it, Itaru felt a continued connection to his cousin and found comfort and solace amid his grief." Here is Sasaki's original:

"Because my thoughts couldn't be relayed over a regular phone line," Sasaki said, "I wanted them to be carried on the wind." After the Fukushima earthquake, Sasaki opened the wind phone to the general public, and it saw regular use. The original booth was replaced with a sturdier aluminum one in 2018. 

The concept has been re-created in various places over the years. And now, in Joshua Tree. I'd love to go visit it next time I'm down there. The coordinates may be 34° 07'22.4"N 116° 15'58.8"W (or try 34.122889, –116.266333). As Colin puts it in his Instagram post on the new installation, "Anyone in grief can visit, sit down in the privacy of the vast desert, pick up the rotary phone and call their loved one via the cosmic connection."

What a service.

29. Another day

I seem to get the idea to make an entry about "my day" once a month, because its been just four weeks since my last such—four weeks to the day, and another four weeks to the one before that. I also seem to get that idea on Fridays, when I've met with my Oaxacan friend for a bit of English practice.

Today she showed up with a children's book she'd picked up from the Free shelf at the library entrance, about the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620. She seemed tickled that there were a bunch of free books (last week it wasn't books on the Free shelf, but a case of half-pint milks; another time, it was flaky pastries) just for the taking. And so we learned a little bit about the Pilgrims (Peregrinos) and their ship (barco), though before we got to the Mayflower we learned about the Speedwell, which was too small to take the 102 Pilgrims from Holland, so they had to make a deal with some businessmen (hombres de negocios) in England, who said they could provide a ship in exchange for seven years' worth of goods such as furs (pieles) and lumber (maderas). I happen to know a few descendants of one (or perhaps two) of those 102 migrants, so it tickled me to learn something about the Mayflower. And we talked a bit about Columbus, coming 128 years before, and about Henry the Navigator and the Portuguese going to Brazil, and Cortés got mentioned, and colonialism. And I wondered if my friend has Spanish blood, or if talking about "when we came" to this hemisphere has a very different meaning for her. 

When I got home, David and I headed to downtown Monterey and the Wells Fargo bank branch there—our goal: to pay off our mortgage! But when we got there, there was a line. And a single teller. And although there were at least three other people doing something at screens throughout the bank, no one raised their head to notice: oh, a line; we should attend to our clients. After waiting ten minutes, with one person getting their business taken care of in that time, I said I was going for a walk. (I am not the most patient person. I don't know if it's a fault. It's just a fact.) And David headed out after me—which turned out to be a good thing, because we had planned to stop by Paris Bakery downtown for a couple of overpriced pastries, and when we got there there was only one left of the kind I like (cinnamon raison roll, aka pain aux raisins). Just imagine if we'd stood in line another thirty minutes! I would have been mad at the wait and sad because someone, I'm sure, would have snapped up that last pastry. Win! So with pastries in hand, we drove to the Wells Fargo branch near our house, and okay, there, too, there was a line (just two people), but immediately a fellow came to talk to each of us, and shortly thereafter, another teller arrived. Now, that's customer service. So snick-snack, we paid off our mortgage, and within ten minutes were on our way home, to fresh coffee and our coveted flaky pastries. All that shaggy dogginess to say, our house is now our own. No more mortgage!

It's almost miraculous, after thirty-plus years. And it essentially means an extra few thousand dollars a month. In these uncertain times, that makes me feel a bit easier.

In the afternoon, I alternated reading a novel, set in Australia, and editing a book of essays translated from Bengali. Not always so easy to follow: like, "Another person will employ his everything in this work whose company has remained steady amidst my sorrows and defeats for many days." Huh? There were quite a few queries asking the translator to "double-check and make sure the text is as clear as can be." My editing magic goes only so far.

And just as David and I were about to set out on a longish walk with the dog, followed by a stop at the market for ingredients for saumon en papillotte, I checked my email—and was reminded of a jigsaw puzzle competition I'd said I'd participate in, with pickup at 5:15. Good thing I checked! 

The competition was fun. It was at a local library, and the conference room was packed with eager contestants: five (maybe six, maybe four) to a team, some fourteen teams. We all got the same 5,000-piece puzzle, with a cartoonish image of a carnival food court. Our team started out with three—Lynn (my walk-across-England friend) and Beth (a fellow wilderness ranger) and me—and then just before we got started we acquired two young women, Maddy and Nicole. Now we had some fighting power. We never talked strategy, we just got going: edge pieces, of course; pieces with stripes; pieces with orange or green leaves; pieces with words; pieces with pavement. Et cetera. It flowed organically. We didn't come first, not even close, but I think we all enjoyed the synergy. And it was lovely to be in a room with so many people so focused on something so lighthearted. (The photo here is from a puzzle I finished the other week, which took me months, and so I still have it on my drawing table so I can continue to admire all the hard work I put in. Maybe, though, now it's time to box it, and start another... I could even resolve to spend less than a year on it.)

In the evening, David and I watched the movie Mountainhead (meh), then a couple of episodes of the final season of The Righteous Gemstones—which I'm still hoping will have some redeeming value by the time it's done. 

Oh, and I should mention that before I went to the library to see my Oaxacan friend, I bade farewell to our great-nephew Nicola, who spent the night. We all had a sweet couple of hours yesterday evening catching up, chatting, reminiscing (he was on our recent far-northern Norwegian adventure). Nick graduated from Prescott College this spring in rocket science (or something similar!), and is now off to Torrance to start work as an engineer at Robinson Helicopter Company. It's heartening to see a talented, ambitious young man start off on his path. All the very best to him!

And there we go: another day in the life. This was a good one.

Book Report: Real Tigers

13. Mick Herron, Real Tigers (2016) (6/18/25)

The third in the Slow Horses series. Much of what I said in April about the second installment still holds: impossible to summarize, Herron's style—fast-paced, wryly humorous, great detail and characterization—super enjoyable, and I'm already eager to move on to the next in the series! Though I think I'll wait and try to fit in some more serious reading for at least a little while.

I had seen the TV version of this one and vaguely remembered how it went, including the kidnapping of a central Slough House denizen in order to stimulate a break-in into first one archives, then another—both of which, of course, went awry. I was actually kind of glad to have a visual memory of the final scenes; it made it less claustrophobic, gave more a sense of space, of physicality. And of course, to envision Gary Oldman as the curmudgeon Jackson Lamb: perfect.

But I had forgotten all the political machinations that ended up being behind the kidnapping and break-ins, and although at one point in the book I despaired of getting it straight (it doesn't help that the two main MI5 rivals have somewhat similar names—Diana Taverner and Ingrid Tearney, Taverner and Tearney), with enough deft retelling of various bits of backstory, in various contexts, I think I understand what was at stake. And just who, in the end—by handing over a coveted file that ends up containing nothing but a copy of the Angling Times—wins. At least for the moment. The Slow Horses may be screw-ups, but when called upon to fight for what's right, they deliver.

As usual with my reports on mysteries, I'm sure this report is more mysterious than anything else. But consider it a record for myself. Who knows, it's possible I'll be able to make sense of this in a few months' time. But not guaranteed.

I did flag one passage, the start of a chapter near the end. Again, it doesn't give much insight into the story per se, but it's a decent example of Herron's style:

The pub was off Great Portland Street, and she remembered being here once before, a wake for a dead agent, Dieter Hess. The usual pious utterances, when the truth was, like most doubles, you could trust the man as far as you could chuck a ten-pound note: where it fell, he'd be waiting. But that was the nature of the beast. A spook threw shadows like a monkey puzzle tree's; you could catch whiplash hearing one describe yesterday's weather.
     Diana Taverner was drinking Johnny Walker Black Label—a special occasion tipple—and trying to work out how special the occasion was.
     That Dame Ingrid had heard the sound of one big penny dropping was beyond dispute. Whether she'd heard it in time to catch the penny on the bounce was another matter. If she had, Taverner's career would probably not see out the week. It was one thing to plot and seethe in corners: that was what office life was about. But to actually set wheels in motion was a declaration of war, and the only war you could win against an enemy like Dame Ingrid was one that was over before the starting gun was fired.
     But it had been too good to miss, this opportunity . . . 

(A "double" being, no doubt, a double agent, and a spook being any kind of agent, double or no, but one adept at obfuscation.) 

Spook Street next. Though sadly, none of the local libraries have it. But I'm pretty sure I spotted it the other day at BookWorks in Pacfic Grove. I never complain about having to visit a bookstore. 

28. Covid and No Kings

David tested positive for Covid this morning, and as he turned in to bed tonight he had a 103° temperature. He says it needs to get to 104° before it's time to seek medical help. I hope he sleeps well, and that the fever begins to come down—or better, breaks. In the meantime, I feel like I'm living on borrowed time: will I succumb too? If so, when?

Sadly, this illness meant he couldn't participate in our town's No Kings demonstration, which was really well attended—they figure there were four or five thousand people. Lots of signs and applause and honking, crowds lining both sides of Del Monte Boulevard. I ran into various friends—David's oncology nurse, whom I know from wilderness rangering; my town's former mayor; another Del Rey Oaks neighbor; whale-watching captain Kate and her partner; and finally I found the people I was hoping to find, more wilderness rangers, and we hung out. It was inspiring. It felt like we were doing something. Though I know it won't have any immediate or real effect, the solidarity of so many voices was uplifting. Meanwhile, Trump apparently dozed off at his big expensive military parade. What a jerk. 

Here are a few photos from all over the country (thanks to the NYT and WaPo), with perhaps up to 11 million people showing up for our nation and our people:

Philadelphia: 100,000 strong!

Glendale, CA

Austin, TX

Atlanta

Houston

San Francisco

Midtown Manhattan

Sierra right here in Monterey

P.S. As of June 17, I have a cold—a stuffy nose; the scratchy throat from yesterday seems to have gone away. That's been my experience of Covid the only time(s) I've had it: cold symptoms. I'll take it. 

27. June 13

Some photos from my Flickr archive—which, as I've explained elsewhere, I stopped adding to years ago. I always say I should start posting there again, but do I? Anyway, here are a few photos from June 13s long past.

2008, St. Croix River, Minnesota
Every evening, I have to chase this rascal off
my bird feeder. Well, "have to": I do, but to no avail—
in the morning the feeder is pretty much cleaned out.
It's our little "game." Ha ha. He invariably wins. This evening
I decided to catch him in the act. The glowing red eyes
seem pretty darn appropriate.

2009, SAR training
Only about seven of us showed up, but that was enough
to rerig the litters and respool the cable. The latter
involved hauling my 4Runner around the parking lot (as a load).
Very challenging. We also talked maps and compass.
Sort of an impromptu training, because the original plan
(to rappel off the local REI) fell through at the last minute.

2009, SAR training
June 13: Training this morning. Setting up a belay
is about the only thing I do know how to do,
thanks to all the practice in the snow this winter...
but I became clearer on rigging the litter,
both at Thursday's body recovery and again
this morning. It's the old "use it or lose it" thing...

2010
Spent a little time with my Search & Rescue team
in Pine Valley this weekend, celebrating birthdays and
enjoying some hiking. I got flown in in one of our
helicopters—which is always a huge treat. That meant
the only hiking I did was uphill—on the way out—
but the wildflowers were so spectacular I hardly noticed.
And despite the fire damage from the big burns
a couple of years ago, the land is lush and full of color.
So beautiful!

2007
The bank across the river from our campsite.
Beautiful form and texture—and sound too:
the river was high and running strong.

2011
Working at my dining room table this morning,
I can look out and see my poppies and the
birds at the feeders—house finches, chickadees, and,
my favorites, oak tits, like this guy. 

A collage of my photos from June 2013

26. Ada Limón, poet

Most every morning, I start the day by doing the Wordle (today, got it in four: risky, crave, hoard, board), and eventually during the day I check in on Facebook and a little group I belong to, Today's Wordle, where we share our results. The practice is for someone to kick things off with a quotation—a snatch of a song or poem, usually. I enjoy looking up the phrase to find the fuller context. Today, it was this:

The Last Thing

by Ada Limón

First there was the blue wing
of a scraggly loud jay tucked
into the shrubs. Then the bluish-
black moth drunkenly tripping
from blade to blade. Then
the quiet that came roaring
in like the R. J. Corman over
Broadway near the RV shop.
These are the last three things
that happened. Not in the universe,
but here, in the basin of my mind,
where I’m always making a list
for you, recording the day’s minor
urchins: silvery dust mote, pistachio
shell, the dog eating a sugar
snap pea. It’s going to rain soon,
close clouds bloated above us,
the air like a net about to release
all the caught fishes, a storm
siren in the distance. I know
you don’t always understand,
but let me point to the first
wet drops landing on the stones,
the noise like fingers drumming
the skin. I can’t help it. I will
never get over making everything
such a big deal.
 

P.S. And once again I have to wonder why I continue numbering these, since I fell out of any "habit" of posting daily weeks ago. Maybe it's just to reach a goal, any goal. One hundred, here I come! Slowly but surely!

Book Report: Whale Fall

12. Elizabeth O'Connor, Whale Fall (2024) (6/4/25)

This is a quiet gem of a book, set in the last few months of 1938 on a small (three miles long) island off the coast of Wales, inhabited by twelve families—fifteen men, twenty women, twelve children. They make their livelihoods from fishing, raise what they need otherwise. The mainland is a five-hour row, on a fair day, so these people do not just "pop down to the village" to provision up. Young people have begun leaving the island, to find a life with more opportunity. Our protagonist, Manod, is eighteen, and she, too, is eyeing the mainland with curiosity.

The book begins (I've abbreviated):

Here is an island year. First the sun, and first the spring growing fat with birds. They leave the island to its grey winter and return when shoots appear in the ground. Auks come as dark shapes under the water. Kittiwakes and gannets fall from the skies. We not notice them at first. . . . In summer, the women of the island repaint the houses white. They go into the limestone cave at the west of the island and chip the rock into powder. . . . After summer, the cold circles, the drops like a stone. The birds disappear one by one. They leave their nests on the cliffs with eggs still inside. In autumn, the sea boils like a bot on the fire. The birds pass and the summer is gone. Winter: we stay near the hearth, sleep in the same bed. The sea sidles up to the door, laps at the edge of the island. . . . At Christmas we cook a catch of fish, then butcher a sheep, and throw it into the water. The waves push it back onto the beach again by spring, and the birds arrive to devour it. The sheep are rotated around the island, after they've grazed their field to nothing.

So we have the circle of life. The next chapter begins, "The whale became stranded in the shallows of the island overnight, appearing from the water like a cat slinking under a door." And thus the overarching metaphor of the book arrives: the whale, which fascinates the locals as it dies, disappears into the water, then reappears on the other side of the island and slowly decomposes, but not before, eventually, it is salvaged—oil and blubber for fuel, skin and organs for dog meat and fertilizer. It also draws a pair of outsiders, university students, Edward and Joan—English—who wish to study the islanders. Manod, who has taught herself English, is hired on to help, writing and translating. 

The book is written in short segments, some narrative about Manod's life in Rose Cottage with her father and younger sister (the mother is a ghostly thread in the telling); some ethnographic—Joan or Edward's diary entries, or collected folk tales or songs. The evocation of nature is splendid, and of the hard life that the islanders live. 

Edward and Joan, of course, have their own take on what they encounter, both romanticized and intellectualized. A conversation between Joan and Manon exemplifies this:

The clouds at the edge of the water had begun to turn a dark grey. The boats were on the main stretch of water below the cliffs, coming in.
     'I think there is a storm coming,' I said. 'We should head back.'
     She looked out. 'How do you know? The water is still.'
     I heard a curlew wheel in the grass behind us.
     'Some of the older generations believe the curlews cry when a storm is coming. It's an omen that someone will die at sea.'
     Joan studied the grass.
     'Probably a change in air pressure makes them call. A change in their territory. Wouldn't you say?'
     I didn't reply. Often my conversations with Joan went that way: me telling her something she did not know before, her arguing with it.

The book ends with a festival, Mari Lwyd, which involves horse-head skeletons—and as things turn out, that whale's head as well. Joan and Edward leave before the event—though Manod had, naively, understood that she would be going with them, to the mainland, to university to study. Even though they abandon her, their visit has, we believe, changed her life. 

When I typed in simply "whale fall," looking for an image of the book cover, I came up instead with articles on "the process where a dead whale sinks to the deep-sea floor, providing a concentrated food source and creating a unique ecosystem for years." Also part of the book's metaphor—because eventually that ecosystem becomes played out, just as this island seems to be losing its ability to provide. In an appendix, O'Connor mentions four islands, off of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, that she in part based her fictional island on, all of which have, "over the last two centuries, seen declining populations, increasingly harsh weather, the sale of land to private owners, and younger generations moving to the mainland." It reminded me of a community in the far north of Norway that we visited two years ago, which was evacuated by the government some decades ago. Too harsh, too expensive to maintain services. It makes "sense," but imagine all the broken hearts.

P.S. Two days after I finished this book, we were walking near a big field that's the staging area for the Big Sur Marathon and other events, and it was full of studio trucks and trailers. We asked one fellow what they were working on. "A feature named Whale Fall" came the response. What?!? It must be the same story—it's such an unusual title. It will be interesting to see how they transform central California into a windswept Welsh island. They're shooting the whale scene on Monday at a local beach. We might just have to go for an early dog walk on Monday, see what we see. I love coincidences like this! 

P.P.S. Ha ha ha, the joke was on me! Yes, they are shooting a movie called Whalefall (one word), but no, it's not about an isolated fishing community as war approaches. Starring Elisabeth Shue and Josh Brolin, it "follows a scuba diver who, while looking for his father's remains, is swallowed by an 80-foot, 60-ton sperm whale and has just one hour to get out before his oxygen runs out." We might have to go check it out anyway. Just for the fun of it. 

25. Dan Friday, glass artist

Another FB find, a glass artist, Dan Friday/Kwul Kwul Tw, whose beautiful sculptures evoke his heritage as a member of the Lummi Nation (Washington State). Here, before I share a sampling of his work, is a brief video made by the Seattle Aquarium about Dan:

Here are some of his pieces:

An sxwo'le reefnet anchor

Two hands cedar braiding vase

Glass feather

Salmon

Bear necklace

Basket vase

Amber owl

Another sxwo'le anchor

Dan is represented at the Corning Museum of Glass, and a number of years ago he did a demonstration as he created a woven basket:

And finally, he does bears—beautiful glass bears. Here is a sampling:

When I find artists like him, I wish I were filthy rich; I would love to have a collection of his art. But at several thousand dollars a pop, I'll have to rest content just seeing his work online (including Instagram).