Hodgepodge 343/365 - The Porches

In 2014, David headed to Maryland for a year of top-secret work in cryptography, leaving me home to take care of Milo. It was the first time I had ever lived by myself. I enjoyed the experience, though of course there was constant contact with David: it's not like I was really alone. And I knew he'd be coming back. I also took the opportunity of having a place to stay back East and flew out for a couple of extended visits. As part of one, that September, I took the train down to Richmond, where my old UC Berkeley I House roommate, Jenny, picked me up, and off we drove to the tiny town of Norwood and the Porches writing retreat, run by Trudy Dean Hale in an 1856 farmhouse. I'd heard about the Porches from a writer friend, Mel Walsh Jones: she is lucky enough to live not far from Norwood and takes herself to the Porches with some regularity. Her descriptions and photos mesmerized me, and I knew a few days there would give Jenny and me a good chance for some work and some catching up.

We spent six days at the Porches, working in the mornings (we were the only guests until the end, and I was able to enforce a "no talking" rule during that time), then at about three we'd knock off and head out for long walks 'n' talks.

It was perfect.

I wrote some haiku while I was there. Here are a few:

James River, dusk falls—
I sit: squeak of wicker, burr
of insect voices.

No rules.
Only to breathe,
as raindrops nudge the world alive.

Old house creaks to life
fog shrouds the river bottom
monarch teeters by.

ruby-throats have fled
stink beetles repose, feet up:
first day of autumn


And here are some photos. I'd love to go back.

The Porches

Second-floor porch (photo by Donna Migliaccio)

Second-floor bathroom: I loved the floor

The garden is full of lovely little details

 

An old lamp in the downstairs sitting room

Little lanterns to make evening time sparkle

Fabulous little knickknacks everywhere

A country road

The James River: The Porches is the house farthest on the right

Hodgepodge 342/365 - Davy Crockett vs. Daniel Boone

Last night we went out to dinner and ordered a bottle of Fess Parker chardonnay. It was the only chardonnay on offer, at a little Indian restaurant on Lighthouse in New Monterey. That reminded me that Fess Parker used to play Davy Crockett on TV. Or was it Daniel Boone? They both wore a coonskin hat, didn't they?

Turns out, he played both of them: Crockett in a 1955–56 Disney miniseries (which I wouldn't have known about, being only two years old) and Daniel Boone in a regular TV show from 1964 to 1970 (that's the one I was thinking of).

But . . . who were they? And what was the difference between them?

Davy Crockett by
J. G. Chapman (c. 1839)

Crockett (1786–1836), "King of the Wild Frontier," was—in addition to being a frontiersman—a soldier and a politician, representing Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives. He vehemently objected to President Andrew Jackson's policies, especially the Indian Removal Act, which led to an on-again, off-again political career, and ultimately he quit politics to go fight in the Texas Revolution, where he was killed at the Battle of the Alamo. As a young man he gained a reputation for hunting and storytelling, and his larger-than-life exploits earned him a place in the almanacs that were popular at the time, solidifying his status as an American folk hero. One of his sayings was, "Always be sure you are right, then go ahead." He has been portrayed by actors such as John Wayne, Brian Keith, Johnny Cash, and Billy Bob Thornton in at least twenty-six movies.

Here's "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" (1955) for your listening . . . pleasure? (Curiously, I know not why, it's a pop American ear worm, for people of a certain age. I may have been too young for the TV show, but I sure am familiar with the song. Maybe some show at Disneyland?)

The only portrait painted in
his lifetime, at the age of 85
and shortly before his death,
by Chester Harding

Boone (1734–1820), meanwhile, was also an American pioneer, explorer, woods-man, and frontiersman—and folk hero. He's best known for his exploration and settlement of what is now Kentucky (back then it was still part of Virginia). He, too, was a trapper and hunter as a young man, fought in the Revolutionary War, and served in the Virginia General Assembly. After the war he worked as a surveyor and merchant, but fell into debt owing to failed land speculation schemes. To escape legal problems, he left for eastern Missouri in 1799, where he remained the rest of his life.

His legend was established in part by a 1784 account by historian John Tilson in the book The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke, which made him famous in Europe as the typical all-American frontiersman and found popularity in the United States as well. After his death he was the frequent subject of tall tales. 

Illustration of Boone's
ritual adoption by the Shawnee,
from Life & Times of
Col. Daniel Boone,
by Cecil B. Hartley (1859)

According to the theme song of the TV show, Boone was a "big man" in a "coonskin cap," and the "rippin'est, roarin'est, fightin'est man the frontier ever knew!" In fact, he was not all that big (though Fess Parker was: 6 foot 6!), and he did not wear a coonskin cap (Parker was apparently instrumental in that detail creeping into the TV show as well). I will spare you the song.

And there you go: more than you, or I really, ever wanted to know about Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone.

Hodgepodge 341/365 - Poetry (Maggie Smith)

I have shared this poem on FB: I find it moving, sad. A friend of mine just posted it again, which reminded me that I can keep it here, in my archive—an easy entry for the day. I'll take it.

That said, I continue to cling to the optimistic, or at least hopeful (if misguided, given all the facts), notion that this place still does have plenty of beauty, and beautiful people too. It does. I'm just not quite sure where it all balances out anymore . . .

That said: life is short, and I wish all the haters and self-righteous and greedmongers could grasp that and be just a little more loving, accepting, and giving . . .

Good Bones

by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Hodgepodge 340/365 - Horned Lizards

I mentioned the other day that I was fortunate enough to spot a small horned lizard while out on a search for a missing person. Today I ran across a photo I took a few years ago of one, up close. They are amazing-looking creatures!

It turns out there are fifteen species (with about the same number of subspecies), all in the genus Phrynosoma, meaning "toad-bodied." Of those, eight are native to the United States. The ones we likely see around here are (I'm pretty sure) the coast horned lizard, P. coro-natum. It is a large species, reaching 4 inches in length (not including the tail), and is less rounded than other horned lizards.

I will quote a few interesting factoids from Wikipedia (since I'm tired* and don't have the energy to digest and regurgitate—apologies):

"The spines on the lizard's back and sides are made from modified reptile scales, which prevent water loss through the skin, whereas the horns on the head are true horns (i.e., they have a bony core)."

"Horned lizards use a wide variety of means to avoid predation. Their coloration generally serves as camouflage. When threatened, their first defense is to remain still to avoid detection. If approached too closely, they generally run in short bursts and stop abruptly to confuse the predator's visual acuity. If this fails, they puff up their bodies to cause them to appear more horned and larger, so that they are more difficult to swallow."

"At least eight species [including ours] are also able to squirt an aimed stream of blood from the corners of the eyes for a distance of up to 5 feet. They do this by restricting the blood flow leaving the head, thereby increasing blood pressure and rupturing tiny vessels around the eyelids. Not only does this confuse predators, but the blood also tastes foul to canine and feline predators. It appears to have no effect against predatory birds."

Horned lizard populations have been seriously declining. When I was a child, I remember finding horned lizards quite often in the chaparral-covered hills around a home we lived in briefly. Nowadays, as I said, I feel very fortunate to see one. 

"A University of Texas publication notes that horned lizard populations continue to disappear throughout the Southwest despite protective legislation. The Texas horned lizard has disappeared from almost half of its geographic range. Population declines are attributed to loss of habitat, human eradication of the ant populations upon which the lizards prey, displacement of native ant populations by invading fire ants [and, in California, by Argentine ants] (aided by synergistic effects of native ant eradication), and predation by domestic dogs and cats."

The horned lizard is the state reptile of Wyoming, and the Texas horned lizard (P. cornutum) is that of, you guessed it, Texas. Texas Christian University has the distinction of being the only school anywhere to have the horned lizard—or as they call it, the TCU Horned Frog—as its mascot. Go Frogs!

Here are a few more photos. All three of these are found in Arizona, in case you want a field trip.

Texas horned lizard, P. cornutum

Regal horned lizard, P. solare

Flat-tailed horned lizard, P. mccallii

* So tired that I seriously considered posting something to the effect of "Too tired to do anything but watch Easy Rider tonight, so that's what I'm going to do." Instead, you got to learn about horned lizards. Aren't you glad? And now I'm off to watch Easy Rider!

Hodgepodge 339/365 - Guns

I wasn't going to write about this, but this is what's on my mind today—and then a poem came through my FB feed that hit me, that I want to share. So: yeah, guns.

The Las Vegas shooting (this after the Pulse nightclub, after Sandy Hook, after Virginia Tech, after Aurora and Columbine, after Fort Hood, and on and on) has left me numb: 59 killed on this single occasion, some 515 wounded. I want to know why nobody even noticed this guy carting ten rifles through the lobby of the Mandalay Hotel (and of course they wouldn't have seen the dozen-plus handguns). Did they look like golf clubs? Does no one pay attention anymore? Is it "none of our business"?

There's a line of reasoning that the arms industry-slash-its mouthpiece the NRA uses relentlessly: The hundred or so daily deaths in this country by firearm (mostly murders and suicides, some accidents) are "inevitable"—which means the world is a dangerous place, and so we should be afraid . . . and so we should protect ourselves. With what? With guns! It's a circular (il)logic, but the NRA repeats it endlessly. And I find even friends of mine—who use their guns to hunt with, or maybe do target practice; who have never come close to encountering a home intruder or someone they needed to "defend" themselves from—spouting this nonsense. "If only the victims at the [you name it nightclub] had had weapons, they could have saved themselves." As if.

The more I think about it, the more discouraged I get. There's the absolutely meaningless 2nd Amendment (especially as it's currently interpreted—why in God's name should there be an individual right to bear arms, if a "well-regulated militia" was the point?), which in the past forty or so years has become sacrosanct to the gun owners of this nation, thanks in large part to the NRA. There's the estimate of 300 million guns in this country (or up to 600 million, as one gun site gleefully crows), owned by about a third of the population—which is itself just over 300 million, so do the math. There is the fact that there are too many of us, and we're very diverse, and some of us are pissed off about that (even though it's been happening for a couple hundred years now), and others are a little angry for other, perhaps more reasonable reasons (like being targeted for their race), and . . . I think the white gun owners just wish they were still in their isolated little valleys in the Alps or the Pennines or the Harz or the Dolomites or wherever, where they could shoot their evening meal and not be bothered by . . . discomfort, I guess. Resentment.

[10/5 addition to this post: A recent survey concludes that just 3 percent of gun owners in this country own a full half of the national arsenal. Which the study reckons amounts to seventeen guns apiece, on average. The survey also concludes that 78 percent of Americans do not own guns, and that there are "only" 265 million firearms in this country—the first number higher, the second lower, than other surveys have found. The number of handguns, intended for self-defense, has risen, with "fear" being a big reason. The study is based on 4,000 responses.] 

I don't own a gun, and I never will. I go out into the world (granted, my corner of California isn't too fraught, but there are shootings hereabouts not all that infrequently) without fear. All those beautiful people who went to the concert on Sunday in Las Vegas went without fear. And a gun, or even hundreds of guns, wouldn't have saved them.

Guns are made for killing. The bullcrap that "guns don't kill people, people do" is belied by Sunday's tragedy: a man in a room at the Mandalay with just a knife, or even twenty, couldn't have hurt, never mind killed, more than a few souls.

One comment on a blog post I saw today suggested that, although the 2nd Amendment touts the right to bear arms, it says nothing about ammunition. What about registering all ammunition purchases and setting up a 1000 percent federal sales tax on all ammunition and making some calibers and types of bullet (e.g. armor piercing) illegal? That could be a start, if any politicians (i.e., Democrats) in Congress were courageous enough.

I am sick of the mass killings, and I feel so helpless against them. I honestly don't expect to see any progress made on this issue in my lifetime. More lives will be lost in mass shootings. Probably tomorrow, or next week. It is a tragedy for our society.

And on that note: here's the poem I promised. I'm sorry for the downer post. But dammit. This is real. (I intended to keep this short. Sorry, too, that I went on. But dammit.)

Okay. Take a breath (iiiiiiiiiiin . . . ooooouuuut). This poem is worth reading slowly.

The Gun Joke

by Jamaal May (originally published in the Indiana Review, 2013)

It’s funny, she says, how many people are shocked
by this shooting and the next and next and the next.
She doesn’t mean funny as in funny, but funny
as in blood soup tastes funny when you stir in soil.
Stop me if you haven’t heard this one:
A young man/old man/teenage boy walks into
an office/theater/daycare/club and empties
a magazine into a crowd of strangers/family/students.

Ever hear the one about the shotgun? What do you call it
when a shotgun tests a liquor store’s bulletproof glass?
What’s the difference between a teenager
with hands in the air and a paper target charging at a cop?
What do you call it when a man sets his own house on fire,
takes up a sniper position, and waits for firefighters?

Stop me if you haven’t heard this one:
The first man to pull a gun on me said it was only a joke,
but never so much as smiled. The second said
this is definitely not a joke, and then his laughter crackled
through me like electrostatic—funny how that works.
When she says it’s funny she means funny
as in crazy and crazy as in this shouldn’t happen.
This shouldn’t happen as in something is off. Funny as in
off—as in, ever since a small caliber bullet chipped his spine,
your small friend walks kinda’ funny and his smile is off.

Hodgepodge 338/365 - Poetry (Jim Harrison)

Jim Harrison may be better known for his fiction, including a number of novella trilogies (such as Legends of the Fall, from 1979), but he considered poetry his "bones." Here he is discussing his writing in the Paris Review in 1988, and here he is in the Atlantic in 2014. I find reading his thoughts instructive.

Here are a couple of poems from his last book, Dead Man's Float, published in 2016, shortly before he died at age 78. I enjoy his crustiness, and his gratefulness.

Seven in the Woods

Am I as old as I am?
Maybe not. Time is a mystery
that can tip us upside down.
Yesterday I was seven in the woods,
a bandage covering my blind eye,
in a bedroll Mother made me
so I could sleep out in the woods
far from people. A garter snake glided by
without noticing me. A chickadee
landed on my bare toe, so light
she wasn’t believable. The night
had been long and the treetops
thick with a trillion stars. Who
was I, half-blind on the forest floor
who was I at age seven? Sixty-eight
years later I can still inhabit that boy’s
body without thinking of the time between.
It is the burden of life to be many ages
without seeing the end of time.

Bridge

Most of my life was spent
building a bridge out over the sea
though the sea was too wide.
I’m proud of the bridge
hanging in the pure sea air. Machado
came for a visit and we sat on the
end of the bridge, which was his idea.
Now that I’m old the work goes slowly.
Ever nearer death, I like it out here
high above the sea bundled
up for the arctic storms of late fall,
the resounding crash and moan of the sea,
the hundred-foot depth of the green troughs.
Sometimes the sea roars and howls like
the animal it is, a continent wide and alive.
What beauty in this the darkest music
over which you can hear the lightest music of human
behavior, the tender connection between men and galaxies.
So I sit on the edge, wagging my feet above
the abyss. Tonight the moon will be in my lap.
This is my job, to study the universe
from my bridge. I have the sky, the sea, the faint
green streak of Canadian forest on the far shore.

Hodgepodge 337/365 - Countdown

I did four photo-a-day projects on Flickr, and on three of them I did a "countdown" at the end. Because oh man, was I out of ideas—or rather, oh man, was I ready just to let numbers lead me to the finish line.

As I feel now, though I'm far from the final ten days, I'm ready to let numbers step in and do a little disco dance.

So here's a hopeful countdown, a selection from those three Project 365s. Totally out of sync with what I'm doing here, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. In the meantime, maybe tomorrow I'll find more inspiration.

If not, I can always resort to politics. No shortage of subject matter there.

But really, I'd rather not. I've enjoyed focusing on the positive here. The beautiful. The inspiring. I'll try to keep it up. Only a little over a month to go . . .