A lovely stranger

The other day our friend Brian was visiting from LA, and our friend Geoff came down from Santa Cruz, and as part of our general hanging out, we decided to go for a walk. I chose (channeled by Milo) an easy hike in Fort Ord, the former army base (1917–94), to the grave of Comanche, the last ceremonial horse there (d. 1993). Brian was especially pleased to discover this locals-only sort of place (though he was perhaps even more especially impressed by the copious amounts of vibrant poison oak round about). 

As we pulled up near the grave, we saw a couple of horses—which explained the horse trailer in the parking area. We said hello to the two women, and then set about taking pictures of ourselves at the gravesite. But then, I don't remember how now, it came up that one of the women was the daughter of the man—Sgt. Allan MacDonald—who had owned and eventually buried Comanche (who, btw, was a mare). And we set about having a really nice conversation. 

Her name was Jane, and her horse's, Wizard. We didn't catch (ask) the name of the second woman, but her horse was Sophie, and Sophie was very interested in our Milo—kept inching ever closer. Jane told us her story as an "army brat," living in various places around the US (Oklahoma, Virginia) and in Japan, but eventually ending up in Monterey when her dad retired. She comes regularly to tend Comanche's grave. Most recently, she put up some new American flags, and she stained the little wooden headstone. 

After all these years of coming out to visit Comanche, it was such a treat to just run into Jane with all her stories. I love it when history comes alive.

The Bridge

I was reminded today of this essay that I got published last year in the online journal Persimmon Tree. And I thought I'd include it here, for posterity.

The Bridge

February 1965

I am ten, flying with my parents from Singapore to Hong Kong. We land in Saigon to refuel, are instructed to deplane. A fellow passenger mutters about a firefight at this very airport the week before. I know about the war from watching the CBS Evening News with my parents, Walter Cronkite intoning about student protests, flag-draped coffins, highland skirmishes. Saigon? War zone? Firefight? Uh uh. No thanks.

But then everyone, including—alarmingly—my parents, rises and starts shuffling down the blue-carpeted aisle. I press my face to the small round window and see picnic tables ranged beneath brown netting, a corrugated Quonset hut out of which a woman emerges carrying a tray laden with curvy soft-drink bottles. Out beyond—empty runways, neglected grass medians, a small prop plane taking off. No sign of a firefight, of burned aircraft, of any kind of conflict. It looks tropical, sultry. Palm trees shift lazily in the breeze.

With all the seats around me empty, I finally get up and follow the last of the passengers down the ramp stairs. If I am going to die, I don’t want to die alone in this metal cylinder.

We spend an hour underneath the camouflage netting, the adults chatting lightly. No food, just Coca-Cola, the real thing—even if the words are in a foreign script. I hold the chilled bottle to my cheeks, my forehead. I watch the beads of sweat course slowly down the glass. I gaze up at the blue sky through the checkerboard of hemp, searching for enemy aircraft. And wait, jittery, until we are allowed to reboard and take flight.

March 2018

I am back, this time flying into Hanoi. On a birding trip.

I am not, in fact, a birder. And my tour contact tried hard to convince me I wasn’t a good fit for this trip. I’d be spending much of my time, he warned, standing stock-still, peering through binoculars into dark jungle, waiting for the faintest flit of movement.

He was not wrong. Turns out, Vietnam is one of the more challenging countries to bird in. It seems that centuries of local people roasting birds on skewers or sticking them in cages to enjoy their melodious song has made the local avian population a tad skittish.

The first evening in Hanoi when we all meet over dinner, I, too, am skittish. A dozen strangers, split between the U.S. and the U.K., with one Romanian and Susan, our Aussie trip leader, thrown in. Retirees mostly: a physician and his wife-assistant, an Episcopalian priest, a bridge-building civil engineer. Sally from Tucson has been on over sixty birding trips, while Dixie, from New Hampshire and Florida, is, I later learn, reckoned to be among the top ten women life-listers. (Of the top fifty life-listers ever, only three have been women.) I don’t even have a life list. But I sure am glad my binoculars are Zeiss, and not merely Nikon.

On our three-week trip we visit various national parks—Cuc Phuong, Phong Nha-Ke Bang, Bach Ma; the hill towns of Tam Dao and Da Lat; cultural stops in Hue and Saigon (as the locals still call it). We eat delicious food, dress up as emperor and empress in imperial Hue, even sing karaoke, something I swore I’d never, ever do. But I have a good time, joined by my fellow warblers in a shaky rendition of “It’s a Wonderful World.”

And we do see birds. If I’d had a life list, it would no doubt have doubled, maybe even tripled. I love their names—ratchet-tailed treepie and paddyfield pipit; white-crested laughingthrush and scarlet-backed flowerpecker. Hemixos, Megalaima, Cutia. Two hundred twenty-two species we saw in all, most of which I will not remember, except for their fabulous names: fulvetta! yuhina! prinia! pitta!

In the end, standing on the side of a road gazing through glass into dark jungle, hoping for a flicker of movement, of color, of song, is a bit of heaven. Before I headed off on this trip, I joked to friends that it would be three weeks of walking meditation. In fact, that turns out to be true.

Doug, the priest, is from Richmond, Virginia. Tall, white-bearded, handsome, soft-spoken. We meet on the second full day, waiting on our next search for the next elusive rare bird hiding in the jungle. To make small talk, I ask if he’s been to Vietnam before. He slides his penetrating blue glance my way. “Yes. Fifty years ago.”

We bond on the bus. He doesn’t mind talking about those days. He was a captain in the infantry, arriving straight into Pleiku in the central highlands. He describes the bombing of Hanoi and the Ho Chi Minh Trail—actually a road, mostly through Laos, on which guerrillas, mostly women, shielded themselves from air surveillance by bearing large bundles of foliage. The U.S. dropped tons of Agent Orange to denude the jungles, and yet the Viet Cong continued to slip by them. He talks about being essentially ordered to send soldiers to their deaths, a mere cog in the vast U.S. propaganda machine declaring that everything was going fine, that we were fighting our mightiest.

On the road, we see the occasional nod to the war: a Soviet-style statue celebrating a November 1972 North Vietnamese victory, an open-front temple packed with veterans holding a service, banners commemorating the forty-third anniversary of the liberation of Hue. But mostly, evidence of the conflict is scarce. Vietnam today is a young, vibrant nation. We feel no animosity from our hosts. As Susan puts it, they never hated the American people; just the American government.

Our transition from the northern part of the country to the south involves the airport at Pleiku. The highway takes a turn in the town of Kon Tum, heading south. Out the bus window is the usual jumble of shops: a scrap metal place next to a shop full of big bags of something—fertilizer? concrete? rice? A barber shop, a motorcycle repair shop, and a dress shop. A public swimming pool, a post office, a temple, a school. A paint store.

Our coach pulls over by the river. We all get out, happy to stretch our legs.

Fifty years ago, for fourteen days, Doug was sandbagged in with his company across the river from where we stand, sending rockets into what was then a hamlet of thatch-roofed wooden buildings. The dirt streets then would have been deserted, the people hunkered down in their homes, praying or hating or both.

I watch as Doug strides onto the bridge over the Dak Bla River. He pauses a moment, gazing down at the flowing water. Then he draws out of his shirt pocket a short stack of pastel index cards. He reads one and flicks it into the air, tracking it as it twirls and floats and spins down, soon to land in the water and be carried away. Then the next, and the next—a dozen, dozen and a half cards in all. Prayers for his comrades, for all the dead. Fluttering birds of redemption.

Author's Comment

Some moments stick with you. My brief experience of Vietnam as a child has remained so vivid all these years. And when I met Doug, with his own fifty-year-old memories of that place—yet so very different—I finally had something to balance it against. The birds, hidden, requiring patience to discern, brought us together and seemed, somehow, an apt metaphor for all those memories.

Three books: The Last Taxi Driver, The Last Thing He Told Me, True Grit

I have fallen off my book report wagon. So here's a mention, at least, of the last three books I've finished, over the last three or so weeks (nos. 14–16 in my annual accounting).

Lee Durkee's The Last Taxi Driver (2020)—which George Saunders, on the cover, calls "a wild, funny, poetic fever dream that will change the way you think about America." Well, I don't know about the last part, but the first: yes. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, often poetic, and toward the end bordering on hallucinogenic, as our brave taxi driver, Lou, ferries all sorts of misfits around Mississippi and beyond. We hear his own story of failed dreams along the way. Though maybe, at the end, his luck is turning? One can only hope. I really enjoyed this book. 

Laura Dave's The Last Thing He Told Me (2021) is about a man who suddenly disappears and his wife and daughter's search for him, ranging from a houseboat in Sausalito to Austin, Texas. Turns out, he got involved in bad goings-on back in the before time—before the wife, that is, whom he really does love—and he hoped he'd managed to leave all that behind him. Tsk. I worried through the whole read that this would turn into another unreliable narrator novel, but thankfully, that didn't happen. It was good enough. It certainly kept me turning the pages. 

Charles Portis's True Grit  (1968)—great book! Narrated by a now older (maybe even elderly) Mattie Ross, it tells the story of her effort, in the 1870s or 80s, when she was just fourteen, to bring to justice the killer of her father, with the help of US Marshal Rooster Cogburn and a Texas ranger, LaBoeuf. We all know the story: it was told in a 1969 film version starring Kim Darby as Mattie, John Wayne as Rooster, and Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf, and more recently in 2010 in the Coen Brothers' version, with Hailee Steinfeld, Jeff Bridges, and Matt Damon. But the book! Its plain no-nonsense telling of the events creates a real character, strong, principled, unforgiving, and utterly determined. The penultimate scene is breathtaking. (And now that I've scanned the back covers of these books, I see that Durkee's is described as "equal parts Bukowski and Portis"—which I do believe is why I picked up True Grit in the first place: if Durkee can be compared to Portis, then Portis must be good... and oh look! he wrote True Grit!)

Gratitudes 9: turtles, music, etc.

I missed a few days, but today I was paying attention. 

1. For the first time in the 30-plus years we've lived here and walked, not daily, but at least several times a week, around our local Frog Pond—today, for the very first time, we saw a little turtle swimming in the pond! I think it was a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans). It's a popular pet, so we wondered if it was released by someone tired of their pet... It's also on the list of the 100 worst invasive alien species. But if this one was released alone (and isn't a female with fertilized eggs, which—what are the chances?), we're probably safe from being overrun by turtles. I dunno: I was rather charmed and thrilled to see this little guy periscoping through the water. Maybe I shouldn't be? Or maybe it's a different kind of turtle entirely, and they've been here all these years? Alas, I will never know. But you can bet I'll be looking for him/her/it (but hopefully not them) the next time we take our regular stroll around the Frog Pond.

2. Another Carmel Bach Festival concert tonight, this one a collaboration of a couple of favorites, violinist Edwin Huizinga and guitarist William Coulter, with the beautiful participation of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, a baritone, and a small chamber ensemble. The music ranged from the first piece of notated music from 1400 BC to Procul Harem's "Whiter Shade of Pale," Paul Simon's "American Tune," and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," via Bach, Gounod, and Josquin des Prez, among others. It was thoroughly delightful, the eclecticism and performances both. 

Here's a lyre rendition of the Hurrian Hymn, as the ancient piece is called (tonight's was all voices):

And here's Paul himself a few years ago singing "American Tune"—which every time I hear it, it feels ever more on point, sadly.

I am really grateful that Paul Simon has been part of my whole life. What a musician.

And I'm always grateful for Edwin and William, aka Fire and Grace. Here they are with a little duet they performed this evening.

No #3 today per se, though I'd throw into a general glad-to-be-alive stewpot having finished True Grit (book report of sorts t/k), and running into Laura and Russell at the concert, and sitting next to June, a soprano in David's chorus whom I hadn't yet met, and having a nice conversation with her, and at intermission running into Doug, the drummer in David's defunct band Sidelobe, who made me laugh, and being treated to all sorts of delectable Persian aromas throughout the afternoon as David started cooking an elaborate meal, to be served up tomorrow. Plenty to be grateful for. For sure.

Gratitudes 8: Sunday, reading, and coffee with a friend

1. Even though I've (almost) never marched to the Monday-to-Friday drumbeat, I still enjoy Sundays, when much of the rest of the world is off work and doing whatever people do in their leisure time. The roads tend to be emptier too.

I enjoyed both movie versions
(1969 and 2010), but I'd say
the book is the best.

2. I spent much of the morning reading: True Grit by Charles Portis. I will write a book report maybe—though I'm already backlogged by two books. I just haven't felt like writing reports. Maybe I'm done? But this book is a real delight, so it might get me back into the practice. Merely to have a record. 

3. At around 1 I got a text from my friend Nina: Want to meet for coffee today? We haven't been seeing much of each other lately, for various reasons, so of course I jumped at the chance. We had a nice hour (in the I wish I could say sun) over an iced mocha (N) and a hot chai (me), catching up. Milo accepted much love from many passersby, both human and canine. The three of us felt grateful for the time together.

Gratitudes 7: a gift in the mail, wind in the trees, and short lines at Safeway

I might just take this little project to ten and call it done. While remembering to look around and appreciate things every day. For today:

1. An actual piece of personal mail in the mailbox: a small surprise package from Anahola, HI—my Howler friend Kim. I know I've written about my tiny writing group, the Howlers, before:* three of us who meet every day, virtually, for at least 90 minutes, on weekends for multiple 90-minute sessions. Kim and Sherilyn are good and actually write (I believe!), but I tend to use the time to get work done. Though soon, that will end, when I kick my final job out the door and hang up my spurs. (As I've threatened to do many, many times, so go ahead and laugh, I can take it.) But then? Yes, I intend to be much more conscious about using the time for creative pursuits.
     In any case, the package: it's a little hand-made journal, covered in luscious velvety paper decorated with butterflies. It arrives at a perfect time, really. I can devote it to making notes and catching thoughts about this new phase of my existence, or use it for my morning list, inserting a little much-needed structure into the day. Thank you, Kim!

2. Watching and listening to the wind rustle the oak leaves and the ivy that has crawled up and taken over some dead pines, on our afternoon walk. Grateful for the cool, fresh air here, as so much of the country (and Europe) roasts in extreme heat.

3. David is out for the evening, so I'm on my own for dinner. And I felt like pad thai. So I went to Safeway (because I also felt like some wine) and got some P. F. Chang frozen chicken pad thai. Perhaps not the healthiest approach—ordering takeout from our favorite Thai restaurant would have been better—but quick and easy. The best part, though, was: short lines at the checkstands! The other day, there were so few checkers—and the quickcheck line was closed—that the lines were snaking in two directions down the broad approach aisle. I just dropped what I'd intended to buy on an empty conveyor belt and skedaddled. I do not suffer lines gladly.... So today: I'm grateful even for Lery, a checker who usually annoys me because, if I'm buying wine, he puts on a jocular tone and says, "It says here check ID. Are you over 21, young lady?" Wink wink. I do not find it amusing. But today, okay, I gave him a smile. What the heck.

*Yes, I knew I had: here, for one, and not so long ago.

Gratitudes 6: M*A*S*H, sockeye, and ice plant

1. We watched the final episode of M*A*S*H tonight. It's been our go-to last show of the evening for something like a year now. (Usually, David falls asleep.) I've enjoyed the humor, the characters, some good moral lessons, and the setting in the Santa Monica Mountains (i.e., somewhere in Korea). It aired for eleven years, from 1972 to 1983—back in the days when you were tied to the broadcast schedule. I imagine it was an emotional experience to say goodbye then, after eleven years. For us, it's just been something like eleven months—and still my eyes were leaking a bit at the farewells. It was a good show, and the finale had good surprises. So... what'll we watch now?

2. Fresh sockeye salmon for dinner. I still remember the first time I ever had sockeye, years ago in Seattle after a weeklong writing retreat on Whidbey Island. That was really fresh salmon. I may have said somewhere in this blog before that if I ever get thrown onto death row for some heinous crime and am offered one last meal, I'd choose sockeye. But I trust it won't come to that. Tonight, we partnered the fish with Lundberg wild rice medley and asparagus.

3. We went for a long-ish walk today around a local lake, and on the way Milo rolled in the ice plant—twice. It always makes me laugh, the pleasure he gets, legs flailing in the air, tongue lolling. So here's to ice plant, although it's an undesirable invasive, because it scratches his back and gives him joy. (This picture is from ten years ago. Some things never change!)

Oh and, I ran across this little talk by Ethan Hawk (I am a fan, I do not deny it), about giving yourself permission to be creative, so I'll include it here as an addendum. I am almost 70, and I'm still learning this.