Available Light

Cameras are magic devices.  They can “look” at a scene, and “remember” it in detail, absorbing an exact copy of the scene it was “looking” at.   Me, I write down the scenes I want to remember, hunting for the best words or descriptions. But a camera merely blinks its “eye” and the scene is put inside on film, into “memory”.  How can this magic thing happen?  How can a camera do this clever trick? I’m sitting at the river when someone happened by…

Oh, you caught me. I feel silly now with this cracker box. It’s not what you might think. It is a cracker box, yeah, but it’s also a camera obscura. A what? What’s that? A camera obscura. Well, here, take a look.  It’s empty, but I’ve taped a piece of wax paper about an inch from one end.  The wax paper goes all the way across the box, like a screen or a divider. See? Then I taped the box closed at that end and sealed off the seams from light. There’s a pinhole at that end of the box, see?  Right here.  It lets in a tiny bit of light, which hits the wax paper like a screen.  If you look in the other end, making it as dark as you can around your eyes, you can see the river projected onto the screen.  It’s like a movie of the world.  Whatever’s out there goes inside the box. Really? Really.   Let me see that. Give your eyes a chance to adjust. Whoa, that is too cool!  I can see the river going by, trees, everything. It’s like magic, isn’t it?  The river’s the same, but the river’s changed at the same time. There’s no lens. That’s why the image is upside down.  Modern film cameras reverse that image, but they work essentially the same way.  They substitute film for your eye, too. But how does this work?  I mean it’s just a cardboard box, and a pinhole, and a screen.   That’s the interesting part. In a way, you aren’t really seeing the world, you’re seeing the light radiation from it. The information of the world is contained in the light, not in the objects we think we see.  Everything is once removed.  It’s interesting that we don’t see the world, just the light that bounces from it, isn’t it? Light from the sun falls on everything, of course, and reflects and bounces back everywhere. Into your eye, for example, which collects that light, upside-down, and reverses it in your brain. Light bounces into the little pinhole, too, from every direction. Light travels in a straight line, so light bouncing off, say, the top of that tree would travel into the pinhole and arrive at the bottom, and, likewise, the light from the river bounces upwards, into the pinhole to the top, which is why the image is upside down.  With lenses, you could reverse the image, or even magnify it.  But this cracker box, this camera obscura, this toy, was really easy to make, and clever, and astonishing. Camera obscurae have been around for many thousand years.  There’s some evidence that Aristotle (384-322 BC) was the first to make one of these, not out of a cracker box, of course, when he noticed a ragged hole in a window shade made a round image of the sun on the floor.  Later, the Dutch artist Jan Vermeer used one to make his elegant paintings. So they say. Hmmm. In San Francisco, there’s a big camera obscura on the beach, a building that looks like a camera. You pay a bit and go inside, where it’s dark. There’s a pinhole in the wall, equivalently bigger of course, and a prism that directs the light down to a screen on a table.  Inside the dark room there, is the beach, the waves rolling in, just like a silent movie.  It seems like magic. Will this work in a room?  I mean, could you see the room? Yeah, if it’s bright enough.  I end up looking at the light bulbs, or out the windows.  That works.  Camera obscura in Latin means “dark chamber” so you need to have a pretty dark place, the cracker box in this case, and a fairly bright light source.  A better hole would give a better image.  This one’s probably fuzzy around the edges from cardboard fibers. That’s really amazing.  I’m glad I stopped to talk to you. I’m glad you stopped too.  I spend a lot of time here at the river, trying to write it down and understand the life of it.  Every day it changes with the seasons.  I know that I see only a tiny part of it, and that what I write down is even less. The camera obscura was just a fun thing to bring this time.  It kind of reminds me how little I do see, just what comes though the pinhole, so to speak.

The Birds of Spring

Spring is music. Naked trees fill with bird song. They're every kind of chirp and caw and rattle and prattle and brrrrr and whistle and song you can imagine, that and the quick flutter of wings going by, long absent. Even though there are no leaves as yet, those birds are remarkably hard to see. A yellow flash and gone. A red flutter, gone. A blue Stellar's Jay makes its brave arrogant appearance; been around all winter this one. Primary color birds here, yellow, red, blue. Juncos, chickadees, goldfinches, grosbeaks, towhees, flickers, the occasional quail, a rare bobwhite, woodpeckers rat-a-tat-tat. All these have appeared with Spring. I'm in danger of becoming a birder. This is a subspecies with binoculars around the neck, who might be listening to you talk and suddenly get a vacant look because now they're listening to a distant bird and will re-enter your conversation in a moment. A practical hat with a sun brim. A jacket with pockets. They keep life lists. They know more birds by songs than by seeing them. They're nice people.  Birds are a dawn chorus. It makes you think that individual birds might practice songs and sing them with all their hearts, making the sun rise in the same way roosters sing the sun up. Do birds work out phrases, do birds practice, like I do my piano? And when dawn arrives, do they give it their best? How wonderful, wonder full, is that? Is this really a concert, a performance, to which we mostly don't listen? How sad, for us! Snow, now melting, falling into street grates makes another melody underfoot as you pass. Soprano and alto ploinks and plops, a continuous rain of melting snow with a slight resonance, the sound great cathedrals make, a kind of celestial echo, falling into the dark tunnels below the streets to be carried away. Snow falling from a tall roof taps out a rainy rhythm of its own. There are a lot of rhythms if you put your attention here, listened to carefully and for a while. I cock my head like a Spring Robin, listening hard. Rhythm is everywhere about us, all the time, when you listen for it. Spring breezes rush about, here, there, ruffling the branches of a bush, a tall tree, lifting last year's leaves in another fluttering sound. Leaves do-si-do. Even the clouds move opposite ways on some days, different layers at the same time, the sighing of winds its own kind of music. We went to Bickleton recently. It's the bluebird capitol of Washington. Bickleton is east of Goldendale, a few miles north of the Columbia river, 35 miles away from just about anything else around it. Locals there have put out around 2000 bluebird houses in about 150 square miles. In Spring Bickleton attracts lots of bluebirds. Bickleton has a brochure. Our son Daniel, 22, who has Down syndrome, has made close to 1000 bluebird houses himself which he sells and uses the income to buy more lumber and materials. It was a great project for him; our own local bluebird population has increased. It has brought the involvement of the Audubon Society, the USFS, the IRMS Roots and Shoots Club, Sunshine Lumber in Cashmere, and dozens if not hundreds of people who've bought them and put them out. And he loves doing this and is proud of his work. Everybody wins including the birds, with this project. We started the winter with 30 completed houses. By March, we had one left, selling them even in the wintertime. We took that one to Bickleton. We found the postmistress, in a post office even smaller than Peshastin's, and introduced Daniel and explained our bluebird project, and made a donation. She was glad to accept. Now, one of Daniel's bluebird houses is somewhere in the bluebird capitol of Washington. Thank you to the Postmistress there, and to Bickleton. The irony here is that we spent a couple hours there, driving one country road and another, even stopping and getting out of the car and just watching, as birders do, and we didn't see even one bluebird. We had Spring, when they're there, good weather, and not even one. Ah, well. It's a reason to go back. Spring is music, and it rushes past us pell-mell, every day changing and changing, even that another rhythm hidden in the seasons, the rhythm of years, of life.

Christmas Eve, Sunday

It is 18 degrees. All four of us are going to see the Baby Jesus, a Christmas tradition we have done for many years. It's a Living Nativity put on by the Nazarene Church two blocks away.

Prepping for this cold walk, then standing for a half hour, then walking back means we started a half hour ahead. Daniel is 32. We will dress him.  But we dress ourselves first, because when he's ready, we can just go. It's like dressing a 5-year-old. Baby Jesus is what he calls this, part of what we always do, a checklist on a routine for him.

The magic of Christmas is alive for us. He will always believe in Santa. We would never tell him otherwise. I will go out in a few moments to shake some jingle bells outside his window. He's sleeping in Nick's room tonight, mostly to keep him contained in the morning until we're ready. I will hear them talking about Santa. Outside at 7 PM it is snowing, a light feathery drifting that might come from a pillow fight in heaven on this one particular night. The world sparkles and glitters under streetlights as if it was made of magic. A new inch of snow is diamond- strewn.

We crunch along, warm as toast inside many layers

The Nativity plays every half hour, for two hours. It plays from a recorded script, the simple story of no room at the inn, the stable, the manger, the star, the wise men. There are live animals. This year there was a donkey accompanying Joseph and Mary, and a goat in the stable.

We have heard this story since childhood. Matt, who has Downs, is always in it, as a shepherd. There's always a live baby in it. This year, Mary was played by a friend who is single, and has no children.

There she was in robes, the Madonna for a miracle baby, a virgin birth, looking down at this baby. I wondered if there was love in this small look. I wondered if she was thinking about a missed opportunity. She's 53. She looked lovely, her robes falling over her face.

There are a bunch of angels always played by females. No male angels here. There are always 4 wise men, despite the 3 wise men of the tale. This year one of them was a woman. They turn up wearing clothes Aladdin's idea of Persia might be, a child's Bible version of the Middle East. They bring gifts of gold, incense, and myrrh, inside ornate containers. Not frankincense, in this version.

For this performance, they struggled with opening one of them, Joseph handing it back to the Wise Man, who handed it back to Joseph unopened. They gave up. It's amateur theater. A passion play put on by locals, with the Nazarene Church behind it, because the people do not know how to read.

There are two spotlights (borrowed from HS theater) mounted in a truck bed behind us. They light the scene, but looking up at the path they take, it was snowing meteors, little bright trails incandescent, and thousands of them. I could hardly take my eyes away. That was magic as well.

A small crowd stands quietly for all of it. Many people believe this story as fact; others as parable. All over the world, in many different cultures and even faiths, Christmas is a world-wide event.

We head home, the four of us, a holiday tradition now checked off the list for Daniel. I can't imagine what he gets out of this, the story of Baby Jesus. It's a play where no one speaks, and it's not about something bigger, though I'm not even sure of that. He gets something from it. We might not go if we didn't have him. We always go.

And it's good to be reminded that Christmas is a faith holiday, not a presents and Christmas Dinner holiday. Though presents loom large and Daniel is like any 5-year-old, impatient.

Daniel made us all layer up and head out, and as he often does, we were all glad we went. Besides, it had its magic and its wonder, into the diamond-strewn night.

Fall, 2017

 The sky bursts with blue, the shade it is only in Fall when the sun is halfway toward its winter destination.  Even the sun goes south in winter.

Orchards are a tapestry of straight lines, the colors like some paint-by-number diagram, red here, green on both sides of it, yellow one square over. Yet this geometric precision of Fall colors weaves a delicate and overwhelmingly beautiful scene.

I watch yellow leaves fall, each one, some tumbling front back front, some gliding. It seems melancholy in some way, more of an end than a beginning. In my retirement years now, I watch this with my companion thoughts, things falling away. Not dying, but wintering over.

Do trees have souls? I like to think so. They understand in a long-view way the turn of seasons and what’s in it for them. I like this very long view; daily life and its issues start to seem miniscule.

I watch leaves rise up under cars, twirl, seem to chase each other, a merry dance. In dying, they’re a last celebration. It’s as lovely as a ballet, and brief. A semi comes along and overwhelms them, ballerinas running for cover everywhere.

Leaves are pointillist dots, like a Seurat painting that’s dissembling, while the background turns a uniform shade of winter, whites, grays, blacks.

Leaves accumulate in our bicycle lane. I ride through them six inches deep, mostly for Daniel’s sake. I watch guys with leaf blowers scooting leaves out of motel parking lots into the bike lane.

In my back yard I stand in the sun, slowly turning. It’s warm on one side. I look very carefully at each thing, trying to create a word picture that I can remember. This golden week is so fleeting that it will soon be lost to darkness and snow and then rain and more dark.

We drove up Icicle Canyon. We stopped at a campground, 16 miles up. We brought firewood and snacks and beer and wine. We were the only ones at Ida Creek.

We wanted to spend this glorious Fall day here. The sun is low now, and the canyon is steep and narrow. Sun hits the bottom one week only from 11:30 until about 1:30, two hours. We’re here in this little patch of sun. We were there three hours, the last in mountain shadow, tending our small fire.

Across Icicle Creek, there are big patches of yellow in the green, larches or maples gone golden. It’s Golden Week in the Icicle. We’re in Fall 2.0 on this day

The canyon is grand on a Yosemite scale. It can be remote there, silent, the tumbling Icicle River the only sound. Grand, silent, river, for 10,000 years, long before humans. You could add another zero.

We had a campfire, millennia deep in human memory, present still. We were perhaps the only humans in the canyon, wilderness, remote.

Today is as perfect as a Fall day could be.

Into the Dark

Daylight Savings Time was the invention of Benjamin Franklin, who we also have to thank for bifocal glasses and the first lending library in America. Hooray for public libraries! I can’t imagine why we don’t have a Benjamin Franklin three-day-weekend-holiday.

It should probably be thought of as daylight saving time, without the s, because the intent was to save daylight for use later in the day, when most people were awake, at a time when everyone had to burn candles for light at night.

It did not become a law until 1918, around WWI, in an effort to conserve energy.

Then one day daylight saving time ends and normal time appears, and something like a glitch in time travel occurs. It’s dark an hour earlier. It’s hard to adjust.  

It’s not only into the night in individual days, it’s also into the night for the season. School is out at 3:00, and an hour and a half later it is night, when winter arrives. In Fall we start to see that, to enter the tunnel of winter. We should sell some of this night off, to poorer countries who don’t have this much of it. This is an unexplored revenue source, if you ask me.

We walk downtown. My son Daniel brings a headlight. He has Down syndrome and is autistic. Now he’s an adult, he’s 25.

The star we call the sun has gone behind the Cascades. It’s twilight now, daytime diminishing into night.

The moon appears as a half-lidded eye, gaining in brilliance as the day fades. Fluffy white clouds slowly turn yellow, then orange, then little girl pink, then a brilliant red, rhubarb perhaps, then into little boy blue, and then fade away, dissipate into the vast sky, even the tiny part we can see. Sunset in steep mountains can be brief.

A hundred crows gather in a loose flock, converse and head toward the Ski Hill, toward perhaps a place called Crowlandia, where crows speak to each other in English and have their own civilization going on. Crows are very smart birds and I suspect if they got together they could take over, like the movie The Birds.

Mountains become black holes in the sky, eventually, black silhouettes with jagged edges, as if torn from black paper. You can still make out individual trees at the top, and think of them as an inch tall, but in fact they might be a hundred feet tall. It’s hard to say. Mountains distort distance.

It’s even hard to grasp how far away they are in the daytime. Do mountains move? Absolutely. Sometimes they fill up half the sky, and other times they don’t. The crystal clear light of Fall makes them move closer, I think.

Harvest begins, school starts, and downtown becomes the small town it is again, certainly during mid-week. Lots of parking available, only a few of the stores open at night. Some nights there’s not the tourist population to justify this.

Still, night falls and watching it fall, walking slowly with my adult child, is a lovely time of day. And Fall falls as well, it’s corollary.

Every day ends with this beautiful little hymn turning day into night, but summer ends with a long symphonic work also turning day into night. It’s a lovely time of day and it’s a lovely season, Fall.

Fall smolders.

Every day is a beauty contest to beat out the other days, and every day wins.

Fall is loquacious, eloquent, introspective, languorous, elegiac. Hmm, I’m getting lexiphanic (not to mention prolix) in my dotage.

Autumn is full of longing, and somehow wistful.

It’s full of colors. My spouse, being a woman, sees aubergine, sangria, cardinal, watermelon; honey, daffodil, maize, buttercup; apricot, peach, persimmon, terracotta; eggplant, Bordeaux, amethyst, hyacinth, and probably dozens of other colors. I’m at a loss, here. Red, yellow, orange and purple stop me in my tracks, anyway.

Dying leaves become animated this time of year.  They fall off trees and then run across the street without looking both ways first. Sometimes they chase your car, leaping up to try and catch it. Don’t let them. They’re little monsters, the living dead leaves congregating on street corners. You picture them tattooed and pierced with pants hanging low and smoking little cigarettes. The living dead don’t get cancer. That’s ridiculous. Is that cannibalism in a way?

The quality of light is flatter now, the sun further south every day. Somehow this is magical light, the light of Fall, a dream light, and in it the world turns in some way enchanted.

A covey of quail appear. They’re clowns of the bird world. Quail are painted birds, mostly flightless, have petty feuds and chase each other off, but not very far, and live as a group, like on MTV. They eat seeds, pecking at them, then standing up to look off in the distance to scratch at the grass, then bending to peck again. It makes them look thoughtful, perhaps scheduling what to do with whom on Saturday night or working out why they’re here, when you know they’re acting on instinct and haven’t a thought like that in those little brains.

           Finally, one day a soft rain comes. Rain is a key that unlocks all those delicious scents, the ones you remember from childhood. Memories are held in scents. Wet concrete, now shiny and polished. A wet dog. Asphalt, a black mirror, a plate glass puddle. The rush of a bush you just passed.  Something menthol from somewhere. The very air itself has a scent that comes alive after a rain in the Fall.

It’s a warm rain you could be out in, that quietly hisses on the streets and falls on a billion rainbow leaves, a tropical rain that seems calm like a meditation, and stirs up clouds that float and drift low in the mountains, a misty moisty rain that makes those mountains seem like they belong in Middle Earth, where they rise much further into the sky.

The way the clouds move about the mountains, down low, high up, hiding this, revealing that, is nature’s poetry. You’d think Mother Nature was out to entertain us, like the head of a television network. Nature’s programming. Film at eleven!

It’s a lovely thing to watch, though, this gossamer drifting and changing and hiding the peaks to make them seem impossibly tall. I love the idea that water vapor can make Middle Earth mountains vanish, abracadabra.

The color orange appears first as a school bus, which some would say is yellow. It could be either. It’s the first sign of Fall, appearing the first week of September. A month later it’s the piles of pumpkins at every fruit and vegetable stand down the highways. They’re faceless scarecrows until someone takes them home and adopts them.

Poor Jack, whose story originated this, is doomed to wander the earth every Fall, because he was a bad man and not wanted in heaven, and once tricked the devil and is not wanted in hell, either. He’s forever doomed to wander the night with a coal inside a pumpkin for light.

The Harvest Moon appears late in the month, filling the night with its bright blue light. It’s called that because it allowed farmers to work into the night. It’s so bright I wonder why streetlights don’t have a sensor that tells them to turn off when so much natural light is available. It would be an ecological step to make. It’s like day viewed as a photographic negative; it makes the world silvery.

The moon appears enormous against the horizon when it first appears, as if you might throw rocks at it and hit it. Later in the night it’s high in the sky and much smaller. This size illusion is attributed to the fact that you can’t help but compare the early moon with things on earth, in your vision at the time, and later on lose the comparisons when it’s high in the sky.

And through it all, every day, Fall smolders. Orchards rust away.

It’s a beauty contest, and every day wins.

Twilight

The hot day descends now into night, and slowly into Fall, taking the first celestial step, the sun going behind Icicle Ridge. Slowly this shadow creeps along the valley. Not so slowly, really. The planet is spinning around 750 mph at this latitude, which makes it seem odd that this ridge-shadow moves so slowly.

You can watch this shadow move, if you mark it with chalk or something. And in watching that slow steady progression you can feel the great planet moving under you.

We’re mostly not aware of this, though.

The searing heat of a July day cools when the sun is gone, as if the sun has been driving photons at you all day long and now it can’t, and it took a large mountain range to do that.

Things begin to settle.

A hayfield at the edge of town releases its country-smell, looking very green and soon tall enough to mow.

Many people take an after-dinner stroll. Some still hold hands, and don’t stroll, but amble, wander, mosey, meander. There are kids on bikes, on skateboards. There are people with little dogs, on wind-up leashes, like fish on a line.

The sky-blue sky loses its brilliance.

A robin on a wire, only one, nesting season done, this one an exhausted mom, happy now to be alone. Pigeons together, on another wire, herd birds. Swallows dart at the evening population of tiny insects. Just about everything either eats another or is eaten by another, a grim war of lunch.

The sky has turned a grey in its blue.

The river has gone quiet now, no more rafters or tubers or swimmers or others. For a few hours through the night, it can just be a quiet river in a silent valley, somewhere in the mountains.

An osprey takes a last search, no luck, and makes its one chirp. A hidden heron looks up at the sound, then back down and into its thoughts. Herons might think great things, eternal things. They seem so contemplative when you find them.

Its dim now, a few lights have come on. It doesn’t seem dark, but from inside a room looking out, night has fallen. Outside, our eyes have adjusted.

It’s never completely dark. Even on cloudy nights with no moon, there still is enough ambient light.

The dark is light enough.

The first star has come out, and it twinkles. That’s the shifting heat waves from the hot planet. Twinkle does not sound like an appropriate word for an adult to say. This is a child-word.

Night falls in its serene quiet eternal way, most of us not taking any notice. In day, we’re busy with something, then it is night, and we’re still busy with something, and didn’t notice the in-between, twilight.

The eternal happens around us every day, but we have more important things to do.

The sky fills with stars, the magic of tiny lights spill overhead. The Romans called it Via Lactaea, because it looked like spilled milk. We call it the same thing, the Milky Way. It’s an arm of a galaxy. We live in a small town in the mountains, in the galaxy called Milky Way.

Twilight falls. The planet moves, the vast universe spreads out, full of dark and tiny lights, the stars.

The silent river, now black between its banks, moves through the quiet dark.

The day, billions of days, full of celestial motions, orbits, planetary spins, a moon, and twilight, ends

Night.

Vulture Domestic Issues

 It’s evening in the vulture household. Despite days of circling and more circling, they arrive back at the nest to care for young ones. It’s hard to imagine them caring for vulture children. Yet they do, through generations, centuries, eons. Birds have been around long before humans.

Vultures have a finely developed sense of smell, unusual in birds, and even have taste buds.

They migrate of course, circling the entire time, like they’re lazy, floating and drifting as if they cared less. I can picture a tramp stamp tattoo on some teen vulture reading “Screw migration” and annoyed at her family for migrating anyway.

They do the grim work of eating the dead, important work to be sure, but grim nonetheless. Yet they are parents and raise little ones and care for them, and even one day teach them to fly.

That they have taste buds and a sense of smell just begs for a description. The little ones asked dad for a bedtime story and for the 187th time.  He said

“Once upon a time there was a human family that got lost in the desert and couldn’t find their way for a week. That was when a vulture dad, like me, found them and circled back to get his family.

“He said eat the eyeballs first um-um-um-um-um while they’re still almost fresh. They’re the best part. And that rare smell between the toes, yeah, I love that. That’s as good as life gets.

“That was when a human family saved the lives of many vultures. The End. It’s a great story, I love that story,” he said for the 187th time, shedding a vulture tear.

Then one night he comes home late to find the Mrs. waiting up for him. His face is all red from a feeding frenzy with his male friends and he’s muttering in vulture.

“Out with the boys?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says dreamily, blood all over his face.

“Have a good time?” she says.

“Yeah,” he says, warily this time, wondering where this is heading.  Trying to head that off, he says, “I was at the lodge.”

“The lodge?! Eagles?!? Are you insane?” she shrieks as only a mad vulture can. “You’re a vulture, you can’t get respect from eagles by joining a silly fraternity. Eagles are not your friends in any way. They hunt, you eat dead things. Can’t you see that? What’s wrong with you? Shoulda joined the Moose, that’d be more like you.  Moooose, duuuhhh. You got nothing in common with those Lions either. Don’t get me started!”

 The “Screw Migration” teen finds him one day and they circle off into Death Valley together. He liked that her sense of smell was better than his, better at finding carrion. Vultures mate for one season, anyway. He left the ex home with the kids.

This is why I like vultures. The single bird soaring side of them overshadows the dad-and-mom family side of them.

One day the ex hopes she picks his carcass clean.

Tiny Walk

“Pique” says the word. It’s under the other words “Today’s Word” on the sign at the Peshastin  Community Library. The word changes every day. Sometimes people know what words mean, sometimes not.

Torque is the next word, the next day. Followed by rhetoric, platonic, the four words for that week. Words by chance ending in c or in a hard-c sound. It’s a half-time library.

Seasons change, and winter finds it hard to make a place for this sign. I dig my way out the sidewalk, twenty five steps, this tiny walk, and dig my way back in, twenty five steps.  I improve it, twenty five steps, widening, and then working a little on the bus shelter as well, and making a new place for the sign. Tardigrade, rotifer, amoeba, all invisible tiny animals, and the word that describes tiny invisible animals, microfauna.

Spring turns up. Words I find in reading, words I take from unusual dictionaries I have, because a writer has those. The sign has little words of one syllable that people might not know, wan, veer, eke, adz.  

Summer arrives. A power pole has a shadow that crosses the sidewalk. Every hour I head out with a piece of chalk and mark the edge of this shadow and write the time of day. It’s a giant sundial for the people who wait for the bus, but is gone the next day because of lawn sprinklers. I do it again.  All summer, I write it again and again, taking sun time from mechanical time.

The sign has room for a ten-letter word. Bigger words are hyphenated. Omphaloskepsis, it says one day, followed by dithyrambic, eleemosynary, and a word we all know, bureaucratic.

The sign goes back and forth, from the library to the street, which is what we say in English, but in fact the sign goes forth and back, doesn’t it?

Once, someone called the library from the moving bus to ask what the word meant. That day the word was pomology. This is the scientific study of apples.  Pomologists passing by that day knew this word. Who knew there’s a scientific study of apples? They’re just apples, right? Nah, we all knew this word; this is apple country. Everybody around here knows pomology. Must’ve been a tourist, on the bus.

Inveigh, frivolous, chastise, percolate, it can be a mix of words, like a Scrabble game, or a crossword puzzle.  Scrabble is a game I play regularly, often losing to my wife, who also does crossword puzzles, which I do not.  I’m an annoyed but graceful loser, who continues to play, knowing I will lose, despite the J, the X, and the Z and the Q and U falling into my hands.

Words focusing on those letters, ozone, exhume, jejune, oxymoron.

One week it was Q words. Quagmire, quagga, exquisite, quarry.  Words have no explanation on the sign. You have to call or come in the library. Meanings are $5 each, I tell people, grinning. What’s a library for, I ask?  

Adagio, derivation, exacerbate, cotillion.

Summer turns into Fall, the power pole sundial is increasingly wrong, the words continue.  Twenty five steps out with the word, prestige, twenty five steps back. The tiny walk out with conjuring, tiny walk back. Tiny walk out, prestidigitation, tiny walk back. Magic, the last word.

The sign goes out every day, saying the library is open, look at me, almoner, cranium, aesthetic, discourse.

A library of course is nothing but words.

July 15, 2010

 Once around the block

Next door is a house nobody lives in. Next door the other way is an empty lot.  We have quiet neighbors. Let’s go the direction of the house nobody lives in.

In places, the pavement radiating heat is cracked and patched numerous times. It looks like a map of Africa.

A grey tabby cat crosses the street. Cats live secret lives and if you ask me are in touch with an invisible world. It comes our way and wants to rub against us, but we keep moving. We’re dog people. Its purr fades behind.

A woman is hand-watering flowers, a green hose in hand. She’s intent on her work, absorbed would be a better word, and doesn’t hear us coming, nor realize us passing her, only a few feet away. We might be part of the cat’s invisible world, to her. Flowers also live secret lives, growing blooming reproducing and passing on without a sound and thousands of them exist on hillsides so distant no human will ever see them. They’re beautiful, because.

A house, another house. On this block, every house is an individual, located on different parts of its property. It’s an older part of Leavenworth, without the rule of lining up houses the same distance in. The rrrrrr of a lawnmower begins to fade in, the nearly constant cosmic sound of summer. They’re like the vuvuzela horns of the World Cup, a plastic horn that has one note B flat that sounded through every entire soccer game.

The lawnmower appears, a guy in Bermuda shorts pacing like a worried Dad at the hospital birthing room. Close enough, I realize he’s wearing white headphones inside his ears, so he can’t hear the lawnmower we all must listen to. Instead, I imagine he’s listening to some self-help weight-loss audio and walking behind his lawnmower on purpose, imagining losing weight.

I idly wonder if they wear Bermuda shorts, in Bermuda. Or use venetian blinds, in Venice, for that matter. Or have manila envelopes, in Manila. But I digress.

We’re on the other side of the block now, in a neighborhood we don’t really know. You’d think you’d need to travel far for this to happen, but you don’t. Still, these neighbors speak English, mostly. They might speak other languages at home.

The smell of an apple pie drifts by, just made. If one smell could identify summer, this one would be close. Late summer, maybe. Watermelon would be the other one. Or maybe the aroma that hot makes, whatever exactly that is. Pavement, grass, swimming pools.

Laundry hanging on a line. That’s so 2035, the future arriving early, turning off the drying machine and letting the sun do all the work. Are those future clothes? Why do they look like 2010 clothes? Jeans?

Happy people in a backyard by a barbecue, glimpsed as we pass by. If happiness is the goal of life—why are you alive? To be happy—then a backyard barbecue with friends will do. An eruption of laughter, many voices, a chorus of love.

The eternal is in many of these little moments, the lady watering her flowers in Japan in 1375 or in Bavaria in 1624, a backyard barbecue by Vikings in the 700s perhaps, laundry hanging on a line in Istanbul when it was called Byzantium, an apple pie in Medieval London, gray tabby cats who see the invisible in Egypt when the pyramids are new.

We’ve come back to the empty lot next door. There’s much to be said for a fifteen minute once around the block.

April 16, 2017

 I went outside, because as John Muir said long ago, “going out is going in” and even that was purpose-less, trying to figure out how to spend my time. I stood on the deck for a timeless while, still as a statue and unaware as a statue, listening. Much of the world is in sound, and most of the time we’re unaware of it. Movies know this and amp up sound to add to the images, and put you in surround sound as well. Some movies could as well be on the radio.

In the back yard, birds were chirping. A breeze was drifting, branches sighing. I tried to list for Terry yesterday a dozen birds I could identify by sound alone. Ornithologists depend on calls. I said chickens, she laughed, owls, grosbeaks, ospreys, quail, crows, having to think about each one before I said it. Flickers, and their much bigger cousins Pileated woodpeckers. That’s 8. Oh, robins. They chatter from 4 in the morning until late night, 9-ish. Robins burn daylight. Nine. Mourning doves. Ten. Sandhill Cranes. Eleven.

I was working pretty hard by then, trying to figure out local birds. Toucans and flamingoes and penguins and parrots don’t count.

Standing in late morning’s weak daylight, the chatter of birds and many calls, as if everyone was talking at once, in different languages, I couldn’t sort them out. I didn’t want to. It was a bird sonata, a symphony composed by birds that runs through the centuries, which I listened to in a timeless moment. Lovely.

I decided to rake the aspen grove. It’s a small grove in a corner of the yard. The grass grows long here, but now it just needs attention. I’m seldom inside this aspen grove, because of the tall grass, but today I was. It has a voice, which I’m pretty sure I heard, but not with my ears.

There are dozens of aspens, most of them tiny spindly up-shoots. They are all one-tree, in the sense they share DNA, all of them coming from an underground root system. The famous aspen grove in Colorado is called Pardo, and is 80,000 years old, estimated, thousands of trees spread over acres, one tree, a single being who is very old.

I think about that inside this being, raking away. Raking is a Zen thing, paying attention to your breathing, the world around you, the clouds, where you are, and tending to the simple work at hand. Is this work simple? That’s a question. Where does meaning lie? On the other hand, where does meaning (lie)? That’s a Zen question, since meaning has two meanings here.

It’s coming here tonight to pay attention to this that I work out my thoughts, or think them anew. Paying attention to the day, and writing helps me to sort that out.  

Going out is going in.

February 21, 2017

 Silence

 I stepped out tonight to come here, the place where I write. It was snowing. It had been snowing all day. Six new inches are on the ground. It is about 48” deep everywhere, 4’, an awful lot of snow. I stopped to listen. It was as if I had gone deaf. Silence often has tiny sounds in it, but this time it didn’t. I listened harder. Still nothing. I held my breath.

All this snow can muffle sounds. It’s quiet here all the time anyway, but this was winter quiet.

            Listen and silent are anagrams of each other.

            Silence is a presence.

 In Wenatchee, we came upon hundreds of crows gathered as if in a rookery, black shapes sitting at the very tops of bare trees, all talking at once, cawing. Everyone has something to say and everyone says it at once, and everyone hears the news. It’s un-beautiful, for birds. It’s a grating sound, rasping, mechanical like parts that need oil. It’s crow gossip.

Hundreds of crows like that don’t appear where we live. It’s surprising. They took to the air, all at once, just black shapes, and moved to a different tree.

We walked past them fifteen minutes, turned around to walk back. They weren’t there by then, gone off on other duties. I like to think there’s a Crowlandia, and it’s just over there, just beyond. That’s where they go.

There were other birds, ducks, mallards. 600’ lower in elevation here can make a difference for birds.

Back in Leavenworth, it was silent. No crows, no ducks, no geese. Little gray birds made streaks in the sky to the feeders, and are instantly gone. I am indulgent of them.

I listened as carefully as I could, standing in the weak sun in 50 degrees. It felt warm in the early afternoon. It’s a hint of Spring. Sounds appeared one by one, far away.  There are few birds and no bird sounds.

Silence is a presence.

 I went skiing by myself. The day was blue-sky-blue and in the mid-40s.

I could put on my skate skis, to go very fast and be exhausted, but I chose to go, as they say, “classic”. Even so I can move along and pass people, while only skaters pass me. I don’t speak to anyone.

The woods in winter are lovely. Here and there the grand view of Sleeping Lady and its high wilderness opens up, and yet again I think I am so glad to live here, and to have lived here for so long. Skiing along I think that an awful lot of people would pay to have this experience, from east coast states, from around the world, skiing in the Pacific Northwest, under grand mountains and a blue sky. This has got to be an ultimate life experience,

The trail moves behind me and the trail ahead changes and changes. Beyond the canal, by the old riverbed, I stop. If I am going to hear birds, by the river is where they will be. I listen and listen. Distant skiers laugh, and no other sound. Little birds, ducks, nothing moves, not a breath of sound. When my breathing calms, I can hear my heartbeat in my ears.

We are quite a ways removed from roads, an untended area most of the year. It’s a kind of a small wilderness, where an enormous variety of small size life goes on, and humans seldom interfere.

Here’s an entry in a bird journal that contains no birds at all. It’s about the absence of birds. It’s about the presence of silence.

May 18, 2005

  Late Spring Rain

 It comes up suddenly. In the space of an hour, hot sun becomes dark rain.

Rain kisses the street with a sound like bacon frying. Rain sizzles. Good word, sizzles. From where I sit, or a porch, just a foot away, it seems to bounce in tiny white specks on the pavement. It has turned the street from gray asphalt to polished ebony, a mirror that reflects everything above it. Headlights become stripes, taillights exclamation points, and bicyclists and passers-by become their own upside down reflections. They are butterflies for a brief moment, unaware.

Let’s walk. I’ll grab my umbrella.

Rain’s rhythm makes different sounds on everything. Rain on the umbrella where it thuds, on a metal roof where it polishes and drops like pearls, on the roof of a car where it drums.

Rain on a flowerbed where thirsty flowers accept single drops, holy rain, as if on the velvet of old violin cases. Tulips are deep magnets for colors. Reds or yellows so bright and deep you can fall into them. This one has a single raindrop on it whose surface tension refuses to let it break, a lens floating on the petals of this flower.

There’s wonder in everything.

Rain has polished every leaf on a maple, weighing it down, dripping, dropping.

It collects along the street, making straight-edged concrete rivers that disappear into black grates. That has the sound of pouring water, changing in Doppler pitch as I pass.

The clouds are every shade of gray, coiling like friendly smoke in the mountains, drifting here and there full of silence and majesty. I love the idea that billions of tons of Cascade mountains can be made to vanish by water vapor. The clouds are like the cotton put beside delicate and valuable things to protect them.

Yes to that.

Further, it’s dry under this huge pine. This is the biggest tree in town, with its picture on the front page of local news recently. It’s a celebrity tree. It’s official. There’s even a sign next to it. Fifteen feet in circumference, nearly 5 feet in diameter. Big trees mean old trees and that means many rains and many winters. I’m humbled.

There are many large trees around town. I like their company and their longevity. I like being among such long-living community members. It reminds me of how short my time is, and how little I am.

I pay my respects.

Rain falls off the warehouse roof opposite the Festhalle. It drills in a block-long straight line, making different sounds and rhythms the whole way. Ploinks and bloinks, sklunks and plunks, rat-a-tat-tats, and hisses and shushes. Listening carefully, I catch myself smiling.

The river at Barn Beach is roughed-up by the rain, circles inside circles inside circles until finally circles arrive at the beach in a cacophony of wavelets. It’s funny that rain polishes the streets, but un-polishes the mirror river’s surfaces and makes them grow dull.

Rain disappears into the sand without a sound, like a sponge, trickling between grains as far as it can reach.

Rain splish-splashes into puddles. Each one is an eye reflecting back the crowded clouded sky, an indifferent clatter clutter of splashes and sploshes, which invites wading. Rain gives them an existence, but the hot day will return and they will disappear.

Sometimes I think there is wonder in the most commonplace of things. I should be more aware of it. Writing this helps me to look more carefully, though describing something clearly is an opinion.

Walking in a late spring rain. I took down my umbrella nearing home. The rain was slowing, drip, drop, drip, stop.

The End of Nano

It was a struggle to write this novel for some reason this year. I ended up with 20,305 words, or 35 pages single spaced 12 pt type. I was working with two true events this time, a non-fiction novel, in which I invented characters and conversations to fit real events. In one of them, I was a participant, when the Argonaut mine headquarters building burned down. I had lived there about six months by then and it was destroyed in two hours. I've been a journal keeper all most of my life, so I found that journal and worked from the details I kept then. But creating the 1922 fire deep in the mine below proved challenging. A nonfiction book about that tragedy I ordered from Amazon hasn't arrived a month later. I wrote a letter to the Amador County Library in Jackson, California, explaining who I was and the project I'm working on, and asking for reference help. I'm sure that response when it comes will be an interesting one. I wrote a chapter describing the measures the trapped crew took to stay alive and imagined conversations that they might've had in the pitch dark there, but didn't identify them. Then I invented a Serbian couple in a happy scene at a real bar, fifty years earlier from the time I was in that same bar. I think I'll trap this fictional man with that crew and make that scene more personal. I can think of other ways to go with this story, and I'll keep pursuing it until it seems to arrive at an end. I wrote a scene at St. Sava's Serbian Orthodox Church, a lovely white church surrounded by a cemetery in Jackson. They have a website. I went to a service there once, in 1977, just to see how that went. The congregation had pews but stood for two hours or more. This obscure tragedy is on its way to becoming an obscure novel with those parts. I'll keep going.

Nano Again

November is National Novel Writing Month, Nano, to me. The object is to put 50,000 words on paper in 30 days, whether or not they make sense. So I'm 6000 words along the way to doing that. This is my fourth attempt. I'm writing about two real disasters, in fiction form. The first tragedy was the fire at the Argonaut Goldmine in Jackson, California. In 1922, a fire began at the 4000' deep level trapping 47 miners even deeper. The mine is over a mile deep, at one time the deepest and richest gold mine in America. Mine rescue experts rushed to the scene. For three weeks there was hope that the men would be rescued. They did have water; it was thought they had air, too. But they didn't and none survived. There's a lot to write about here. The mine was abandoned for various reasons around 1945-50. The headquarters building became an unusual restaurant around 1970, where I worked for a few months in 1977, when it burned to the ground. It seemed to me two fires at the same mine could be woven together somehow. In fiction, anyway. 6000 words on the 10th of November is pretty far behind the word count. To do that many words in one month is 1600/day give or take. But 6000 words is better than zero words, and I'll keep going.

Meeting Chuck Palahniuk

My son has a radio program on WNUR in Evanston, Ill. It's a university radio station at Northwestern University. His show is called "The Lit Show". He and his partner interview numerous writers from the Chicago area, all of whom read a work aloud. Then they talk about the nature and process of writing. It's a 30-minute show, weekly. When my son learned Chuck Palahniuk would be at Bumbershoot, a huge arts festival in Seattle, for a reading and autographs, he arranged with his agent to put him on The Lit Show, and then with Chuck himself via email to explain how The Lit Show worked. He also arranged with Bumbershoot for a press pass and a quiet room to record the interview in. We missed the reading because we got stuck in traffic from the airport. By the time we got there, the line for autographs stretched a very long ways. Chuck Palahniuk sat at the head of it, patiently signing. A clean cut friendly guy in a white shirt. We were escorted to his dressing room, nobody around, and then when it was evident he was going to sign autographs for a long while, we left our escort and wandered around the festival for a half hour. Bumbershoot takes over the Seattle Center, directly under the Space Needle. There are half-a-dozen stages, and bands play from noon until sometime around 10:30 at night. For three days. It's an arts festival, so there are short films to see, and comedians, and paintings and posters and sculpture, and numerous literary events. This year Chuck Palahniuk was the name draw. His reading and talk drew 900 people, and they had to turn others away. By the time we got back, his autograph line was just as long as before. People had severed limbs, arms and legs, to autograph. Many copies of his books were for sale on the table next to him; someone else was handling that. We sat with an escort from the Press room for another hour, during which the line moved and never grew shorter. Our escort, with a headset and mike, left and came back several times. Finally the end of the line appeared, and we got in it. Our press escort introduced us to him and him to us, and then Chuck escorted us to his dressing room...which now had someone else's name on it. We ran into a shocked stage manager who asked how the interview went, but we explained, and she rushed away to re-place his name on the door. She sent us to the Green Room, where there was free snack foods and water. We waited 5 minutes then Chuck came to get us and we went back to his small room. It was quiet there. Nick, my son, re-introduced us, pulled out his silver laptop, explained again how this was to go. It was quickly evident that Chuck Palahniuk has done numerous interviews. I sat quietly and listened for the next 30 minutes. Chuck read aloud a new unpublished story; he's a comfortable reader. Nick asked several interesting questions. Chuck Palahniuk's answers were to the point, and he thought before he answered them. And that was it. Chuck shook our hands. I mentioned that I wrote a column and occasional fiction, and that I work in a small rural public library where Spanish is spoken. He asked if I'd like some Spanish editions of his books for the library. I said sure, that'd be great, and he got out a self-addressed envelope with a note card inside. He said, write "Spanish-language books" and send it to him. I did that a couple weeks later, and I included a column, for fun and no other reason.

It's thanks to National Novel Writing Month and its focus on word count that I have my three novels on paper. Word count is a silly and indifferent aspect of writing a novel, but by putting the focus there instead, it dragged a novel kicking and screaming, as they say, out. Writing novels was going to happen towards the end of life otherwise, after I retired from work. That discipline created the personal rule of a thousand-words-a-night, which I adhere to no matter what. After my nightly responsibilities end, somewhere around ten or on weekends, eleven, I sit here and stare at the screen. But life goes on. Our production of 'Peter Pan" with people with disabilities is about to start; the behind-the-scenes background stuff directors and producers talk about began a month ago, at least. There will be around 70 people involved in this year's production. Theater is where all the arts come together at once; it'll take all those people to make the play happen. Our other project, the lifetime home for our son with a disability, is now 16 moths along. We have an architect's floor plan, a lot to put it on, a grant from HUD is under way, the support of a community, letters of endorsement from mayors and county commisioners and others relevant to this project. Even though it's an empty lot, it now has a street address, and a name, Cornerstone Community Home. It'll have a website pretty soon, where updates will be kept. I'm keeping a journal about the progress of this project. I keep journals about various things: right now I'm taking piano lessons late in life, for six months, so I'm keeping that journal, too. That one's up to about 35 pages, single spaced. I also keep a 'normal' journal, into which I recently added a pop-up. Pop-ups often appear in childrens books, but seldom in books for adults. That's odd. They're an artform that deserves wider display. There are a lot of volumes of this journal on a shelf. Then there's this blog that gets neglected too often. Who has time?