Adventures Continue

As fond as I am of adventures that leave blisters on my feet, sunburns on my nose, and callouses on my hands, my adventure this last month was not one of those. On this sojourn I discovered and re-discovered, as usual. I mapped terrain I had not anticipated, and solved problems with tools that were only tangentially equipped for the task (such as using cell phones as lights for unexpected night boating, because it's not an adventure until something unplanned happens). I dedicated time and preparation, ventured forth aware of the risks and equipped with adequate armor (this time it was a pen and notebook instead of bear spray or spare bike tubes). I experienced a spectrum of emotions, from doubt to elation. November was a sincere adventure, and so was my exploration with novel-writing. Now, I get to write the rest of the story and plan the next adventures, within and outside of the written word.

Word Count: 53,291

Each Day, Each Word

As I whittle away at the words I haven't written, I find a curiously familiar phenomenon developing. As I click each letter down, or scribble it in my knuckle-wearing longhand, as my spelling errors and plot variables increase, as this story begins to say something, I find that I am asking what I loved about it in the first place.

And the answer is nuance, essence, the joy of using words to mean something vague and specific, probably not really to anyone else but myself. But, most good things are slaughtered in their making, art included, and writing included in that. We are bound to read only the hilarious ghost of the original idea. And then, of course, to re-translate it into our minds into another fully fleshed idea maybe capable of existing on the same plane as the first.

So, while my word count increases, I must confess to a sin - the sin of losing sight of the journey.

I understand that this writing challenge exists almost expressly for that purpose – to whip a bunch of pansy day dreamers into shape and stop them from griping about how haaard it is to walk the trail (are we there yet??). I certainly am not going to drop my daily word count just so I can sip tea and visualize one scene for three hours before meticulously crafting a few paragraphs that I am really happy with.

But what I have written I already look forward to revising. When? When I have time. When I have time to bravely type or delete what I am in too much of a hurry for now. Ah. Of course. That time. The revision.

In writing more so than in life we can count on editing. Maybe that makes it addictive. And maybe, as in life, that is neither true nor false, vice or virtue. I believe that each word, each day, each step are remarkably similar. It is not content or form. It is not journey or destination. It is all, and it is all art.

So far, writing this month has improved my opinion of all books, and of all of us.

Word Count: 22,533

From the Sky to the Soil

I know it's full of thought verbs and telling not showing and it will love to be edited, but I loved every minute of writing it and it deepened my understanding of this story. It's nice to focus on this, and remember my creative and competitive streak ;)  Also, I donated!

Word Count: 17,128

Cowboys & Computer Mechanics

This back story is coming along nicely. So is the side plot. Now, if I can just get to the main plot...

Word Count: 10,602 (!!)

NaNo

Yep, that's right - I don't have time to write out "N-A-N-O-W-R-I-M-O" so I'll just share this informative link... In other news, that Old Testament class from four years ago is coming in quite handy. At least the part of it that was not lost to the kind of note taking I do when I am asleep, which looks kind of like: ~~~~~~

Word Count: 8,602

The Merriest Vigil

      Each knobby elbow and knee of the trees converged together, like friends leaning on each other as they strolled down a road. The trees made door frames for her, which she stepped through. She stooped her shoulders low and she lifted her feet high. From ahead through the forest she heard nothing but laughter. Their happiness sang out to her, and with it the flickering of fire light. Through the frames of the trees they grew closer, until at last she saw who they were and what was their task.
     She was confused, for they were dressed in black. They seemed to have many definitions of black and a preference for color, so here and there were streamers of purple and green, pink feathers and patterned hats. They were assembled around a central platform, and from the solemnity of their joy she knew at once who lay upon it.
     One face turned towards her, his eyes crinkled with laughter. He had a round nose like the top of a mushroom, and round ruddy cheeks, his woolen hat streaked with colors and hung with many pendants of dry leaves and needles. He slanted his curious shoulders and inquired as to her arrival.
     "I would quite know why I am here," she said, "except I don't know where I am."
     "Ah! Well, you are in luck; you have arrived at the merriest vigil."

Word Count: 6,802

Eat Your Veggies

Fancy a zucchini?

Psyche yanked herself to her feet and spun to the sound of the voice, apologies already on her lips. I am so sorry, I did not mean to intrude... But there was no one there. To her right a tousle of wide leaves began to shake, and a large vegetable raised itself from their depths. It floated on the path in front of her, tilted slightly as if held in someone's arms. Mouth slack, the princess stared in disbelief.

I do not mean to frighten you, child. But it's almost time for breakfast and you are dreadfully late.

Word Count: 5,076

Study In Trepidation

Nothing can match the shock of the first sentence. It's like the first time you realize a good friend is crazy and you'll love them for it forever. After the first paragraph, all else is determined, all else is familiarity, and repetition.

Word count: 3,403

Today I pondered the exertion of emotional and mental energy on something which will quite likely be deleted. Pertinent to writers, lovers, and grown-ups in general, this particular contemplation concerned a plot (said plot lies in question marks and open doorways, hanging from the rafters of my right brain. I look up at the options from an uncomfortable vantage, neck pinched backward, eyes squinted, mouth open to allow extra slack for gazing upward -you know the look- and I try to see the paths that the doors lead to and try to assemble the question marks into an enjoyable pattern of goal-conflict-disaster). As more time passes I have more experience to draw from and less surety of how to employ it. Today, at least, my hesitancy was stymied.

National Novel Writing Month!

Day One: 1,710 words

www.nanowrimo.org

Trusty Companions

Late Season Haiku

Cedars and moss breathe

Sunlight speckles after fog

While mushrooms cuddle

Run the Yellow

A coffee mug click and a kiss goodbye. From the mountains to the stoplight, from the north to the south, along the lake, the valley, the bouldered pass. The light, the green beacon to ease, the blood red of caution. When did you place your tires on the white line? When will you go, and what light next? A random appearance is translated, shaded green, yellow, red, until the door opens at a predicted second, a determined image, a figure configured by the arms of the city hanging over the street, multicolor talons directing traffic as it arrives from the wilderness.  

Mountain Eyes

Half of living in mountains has nothing to do with traversing them, with huckleberry identification, tent assembly, propane-heater maintenance, or proper clothes layering. The major duty of mountain life lies in our observation of the horizon. Rocky parapets call up a certain look; eyes that do not see what lies between or within, see only the border detail in dark uniform. We can go into the mountains, we can nestle in their skirts, we can clamber to the top and with them listen to the sky, but the best of a human's understanding of her mountains is done from afar. A mountain is a symbol. A big symbol, many of them crouched together on the periphery of our lives, a thousand definitions, callous and nurturing. So many symbols require sympathetic synapses to receive them. They awaken in us all the many definitions of being human, and recall our compassion for complexity, dredged from each iris and trained on the mountains beyond. 

Refinished

 Time is less like an hourglass and more like sandpaper. A flank of wood, hidden under the carpet, or under varnish and the polish of many steps. Under the ferocious foot of my sander, it looks for seconds like it doesn't change, as the machine wriggles its way across the floor, my grip on the handles. It looks like it might never change. The same floor we have seen or kept hidden for many years, until, there it is, that rawness emerges at the crest of the board where it is several grains taller, a difference invisible except to the scouring teeth of the sandpaper. This naked board spreads, contagious, across the floor under my eyes, until I see that it is changing, in fact, it already has.

Last week we pried up the carpet in my room, hefted out the bed, and emptied out the furniture. We brought in noisy vacuums and hammers, sanders and webs of extension cord, and returned the room I grew up in to its outline. After we laid down the first layer of finish on the floor, we realized the closet light was still on. Perched across a moat of wet polyurethane, the light was left to shine as night fell and darkness moved in though the windows of my room.

As most of you probably recall, in the realm of monster defense the closet light is a highly prized tool. It dissipates mysterious shadows throughout the room, especially under the bed. With my room emptied and the lone light peering in, I was reminded of all the ghouls that had lingered in that room, drawn up by my imagination and evaporated with the flick of a switch. One night I was sure an alligator could be hiding under my bed. Mom assured me that I was agile enough to leap over it from atop the bed, and furthermore that an alligator's turning radius was such that it would be impossible for it to follow me down the stairs.

We left the old bedroom carpet on the packed-dirt of the dump, rolled up with cat hair and dog hair in the midst of the trundling tractors, rolled up with the imprints of many steps from one little girl, one teenager, one young woman, and maybe, just maybe, one very large reptile. Out there under the wide Montana sky and the heavy equipment wheels the carpet meant something else. Back home there is now a shiny hardwood floor, an exposed surface that felt those steps as well even when I couldn't see it.

Bare, carpeted, or finished, the floors and the shadows remind me that we are the sandpaper. The monsters lurking in our childhood have become the change looming in our future. As we run, and time stays, in the floors of our houses and the walls of our body, we realize that the truest source of our fear slumbers on the bed, not under it. Because they are so near, the closet shadows frighten, but they are not as close to us as our own mutability. Monsters are now fond memories of a time when our concerns were imaginary, and could not really stifle our dreams. The closet light reminds me of monsters forgotten and adopted, as it glows faint to where I stand at the bottom of the stairs. Before I leave I pause for one more second, checking for an alligator tail disappearing around the banister.  

Selamat Jalan

  Now I am sitting in Lombok's airport, watching daylight seep out of the fields and forest beyond the glass walls. The landscape is like a towel wrung out, still moist, dropped on the porch railing where it might eventually dry in the humidity. The sun has set and the colors fade, as we enter the realm of fading reality. Outside is the languid spiral of propellers and a pilot craning out the window to wipe his windshield. Beyond, green fields eventually tangle with trees where the coconut palm and bamboo and banana leaves unfurl. Dark shapes emerge above the clouds. "There's mountains out there," I say to Stanley.

  This is not where I expected to be at this time today, but I cannot say I don't like it. A surprise, like every other piece of this last month. Earlier, Barb and I leaned on the ticket counter and I basked in this surprise and the sunlight streaming in the windows. A clear glow filled the atrium with patience, even as the lines grew around us. Waiting and lines are always a part of change, punctuated with brief moments that really matter. They are the weird part, the suspension, the awkward moment we hoped would end quickly. But, I love these moments. The ticket agent prints our baggage stickers. Then reprints them- wrong date. Then reprints them again. This may be taking longer than the group of twenty Germans ahead of us. I might as well be outside watching the white sun set over the jungle. Perhaps it is this suspension that draws the authenticity out of an airport; how can a place be real if things are so sedate?

  The authenticity of the landscapes we are leaving was the subject of an art exhibit we saw in Ubud, titled "Irony in Paradise." Bali, it said, "has been read, narrated, and written very much from the foreigners point of view," bringing into question what the real culture is, how much is for sale, what can be trusted and where it can be found. These were exactly my questions when we first set out. Even more, the exhibit suggested that paradise may have a darker side, aiming an artistic wrist and a dramatic gasp in the direction of corrupt governments and their procrastinated infrastructure.

   In contrast to Bali, we have spent the last few days in Lombok. Here there are fewer tourists and Hindus, and many more mosques and pony-drawn buggys. The airport, where I now sit, has been farsightedly constructed in the middle of nowhere, on land too dry to farm. Shoulders are being considered for the highways (a nearly inconceivable concept for Bali's entertaining thoroughfares) and the new highways are wide and quiet, giving Lombok the feel of an old Western town just before the railroad comes in.

  One morning at our place in Mangsit I stood, hands on hips, looking from the grass roof cabins to the dark blue waves to the palm fronds and tropical almonds dappling the lawn with shade, with the words "So, this is paradise" trooping through my brain. This is another question that gnawed at me, as I left Montana to fulfill my role in an old man's hope. Why do we always have to place our happiness outside of ourselves? Why can it usually be found, swimsuit-clad and beachside in some distant country, distant enough to forget our troubles, a distance that doesn't exist because we carry them wherever we go. This too is the dark side of paradise- an imperialism fueled by want. The wealthy go where they were not born, and they leave pieces of their trouble behind.

  It is the ironies of this trip to paradise that have made it meaningful. Exultant, I was released from the halls of academia, crying "paradise is within!" only to hop on a jumbo jet and straight into the waiting arms of a world tourist destination. The contradiction is hopeless. I have made little of it, except to contemplate the empty pages of my passport. As usual, no questions have been answered, and only new ones crafted.

  The main question of authenticity I guess might be answered, or de-answered. The fingerprints of foreigners are all over Bali, but they are lost in the shadow of tall temple gates, in the abrasive seaside hawkers standing at your hip repeating "sarong?" like seagulls, in the tumult of a thousand smiles and mopeds and rice dishes all pouring off the sun-drenched leaves, steeped in the mud of the rice terraces, sitting on the steps where they meet the cracked sidewalk. Of course, it is real. It is not what it was, as Stanley laments, but maybe it too is a question, a place of change in the suspension between cultures.

  On the morning that I did not then know would be our last in Lombok, I found the moon making her escape from the day. She was ringed with mother of pearl and it glinted like the train of a dress on the waves, where turquoise hands kneaded the sand. Sunlight had begun to settle on the clouds bunched up over Bali.  I sat on the beach and watched the shy sand crabs work on their real estate, eyeing me the whole time, rarely bold enough to carry a bundle of grains out the door.  As the moon sank into the gray horizon I thought about the many other questions, contradictions, and ironies of this trip. How it is to be a reluctant resident of paradise, to travel all these miles just to look closer at where I already am, to learn to love unpredictability on a trip governed by a clockwork man, to be inspired by a woman who has many more years than I but many of the same questions.

  The same moon sat yellow to watch our departure to Singapore, a final surprise we had almost not realized was ours. Delighted and laughing over the runway lights, we reviewed the moment when Barb had thought to check our itinerary one more time. Now, I am sitting in dawn, which has become a place instead of a time, a region over the Atlantic which we will be passing through for hours. The moon has again left, after hovering over the wing this morning. It was full as well on our way to Bali- I remember pushing up the curtain in the dark of the cabin to watch the strange white face in the night.

  In Indonesian there is a phrase, selamat jalan. I have heard selamat used to mean thank you, good bye, or enjoy. Jalan means street, like Jalan Hanoman, named after the white monkey that helped Rama find Sita. It also means a road, a path, maybe an adventure. Together, I take the phrase to mean "enjoy the road."

  Our departure was sudden, surprising, leaving all my questions in mid-sentence, where they would have been anyway. I think that is why waiting in line can be tolerated, why sometimes it is "better to travel than to arrive." Change is a question suspended- travel is the gesture of a hand up, index finger lifted, the "hold on a second" in the face of many pressing ironies, the hound back on the trail when no answer has been caught. Now, we are most of the way home, but our farewell remains, and the memory of many unpredictables. Goodbye, hope you remember what you don't quite know about paradise, see you next time, and Selamat Jalan. That last, at least, I know I can do.

Buoyancy

   What a word, "snorkel." Should be said with a nerdy sniff and a finger to push one's spectacles back onto the bridge of one's nose. Wholly unrepresentative of the elegant activity it is. The first time I snorkeled I felt like a mermaid (snorkelmaid, excuse me). A graceful, heaven-hued world had opened beyond the curtain of waves, populated by creatures from the brightest part of the crayon box, attending spongey abodes and crunching on the marrow of the ocean. To this revelation our language has awarded a comical term reminiscent of "snout" and "snore." Fortunately it is unmistakable in conversation with a native Balinese speaker.
   Our first endeavor into Bali snorkel-maiding took us from Lovina to Manjangan Island, on the north coast. An hour long drive in the front of a van, complete with customary near misses from mopeds and small trucks going both directions, flanked by rising jungle hills, bright green rice fields, and the usual temples, stores, houses and warungs.
   On trips like these, Barbara and I joyfully realize that we have no idea what's next. We find ourselves standing with a group of Europeans, looking at a questionable wooden boat, thinking, is this what we're getting into? The demeanor and roof of a tour boat, the skin of a dinghy, and a taciturn captain guiding us across the water with one outboard motor. In other words, my kind of transportation. By afternoon the sunlight speared into the water, lacing the coral, disappearing into the depths, drawing a deep blue from our homeward wake.
   Returning with the buoyancy that only saltwater can bring, Barbara and I have been faithful to this gawkily-titled activity ever since. Here in Amed, as with Pemuteran, coral and fish are ready for exploration just at the other end of the beach. Today we trolled around a rocky point as clouds bunched up over Gili Island and wind chipped at big comfy rollers. We watched the sand stir beneath and the fish flick around in the high tide current.
   From below, the waves have an entirely different texture, a film of white sky constantly buckling. As I watched leaves float by in this bending firmament, I realized one was not a leaf but more like a walnut, and that attached to it was a crab. A small red crab, clinging with two legs, pincers tucked under its chin, upside down, reminding me of a hot air balloon as he bobbed in the waves. Not a bad way to travel.

Roosterful

   In Amed, I go for a walk. Complete with tennis shoes and DEET, I am tourist epitomizing. Luckily, the road is fairly quiet and I am tolerated with smiles as usual. Also helpful is that I am peeling and eating a snake fruit, which makes me, at least, feel more familiar. The shape of a very large bulb of garlic, this fruit is wrapped in a texture similar to those square headed desert vipers. It comes from an equally intimidating palm whose leaves are lined with finger-length spikes. Upon first taste I was reminded of Sour Patch Kids, second, an apple, and by the third they were a regular part of my diet. Not that eating anything is recommendable for a walk down a rural Bali road, which smells often of dirt, garbage, or something dead.
   On this walk I encounter many faces. Mandri is cutting tall grass in a field between the road and the beach. We talk a little while his kids play in a nearby tree. Wayan tries to sell me a guided tour up the mountain. I try to walk the trail by myself, but find that the way promptly forks at an outcropping of worn lava boulders. I am soon looking down at a pen of three black piglets, and at what I assume to be someone's backyard.
   Saving the tour for later, I follow the road up, out of this village, and around the point to the next. "Amed" refers to a series of rocky points like these, and the bays between them, some lined with beach. The faces of the houses mingle with a few restaurants and bungalows. Most homes are casual, leaning, with tin roofs. From a porch a couple of children smile and wave. A moped passing reveals a foreigner's smile, framed with reddish beard and pink John Lennon sunglasses.
   On the edge of an old stone wall I watch the waves fall on the rocks. A few large crabs perform their baffling formalities. The vegetation hovering above is framed by an old archway, the steps beneath it long ago collapsed.
   This island has required every bit of my observation. Differences are everywhere, and they are either obvious, so harder to see but easier to understand, or subtle and so disarming to realize. The natural environment is a reliable pattern of rice terraces, jungles, jumbled hills, with the occasional sea or volcano. The structure of the cities, the houses and stores and temples, are becoming familiar too, and the variations on statues and woodwork or stone decorations. The faces of people are also rewarding to look at- more often than not they smile back happily, especially at my unexpected stare out the open car window.
   The result of all this observation is that, for this entire trip, I have felt like the lens of a National Geographic camera. What is missing is the narration. No charming British accent saying "Here, you are looking at a roadside cockfight. These events were traditionally an important part of Balinese culture, with men betting on the outcome. While technically outlawed, these fights are an important part of many ceremonies on the island and are thus allowed occasionally. The roosters involved are armed with a knife on one foot, thus they fight to the death. This informal (illegal) fight we are seeing here appears to be practice, and not so gruesome."
   Instead of this informative narration (which you too would glean if subjected to the rampant rooster calls found everywhere on this island) the thoughts in my head, on the return walk home, go more like: "Holy shit, is that a cockfight?"
   Several men have gathered in a place between buildings, a couple smoking and looking serious. I stop and stare as the roosters are pulled apart. Three tourists passing by stop as well, and other men arrive. There is much milling around and talking. About a dozen roosters sit by the road in woven cages. They cheer and lambast each other with that unchanging "Ro-roo, ro-ro-rooo" and when really ready they jump up and down. The men pull out a couple and pet them. More talk, more milling, more stroking of the roosters. The tourists depart.
   Finally, a decision is made and the two competitors are set about ten feet apart, owners holding proud chests and tail feathers. Then, release, and the clear victor (I think) springs toward his foe, colored and flaming like a Chinese dragon, mane of yellow feathers extended, and drops on him in one bound. They call and claw and then the men pull them apart. Thats all there is to it.
    Smiling, I wander on down the road, thinking about patterns and unpredictability, and Bali.

Temple Dog

   There is a dog, on the beach here, who at several different times I thought belonged to several different people. Once, I saw him with a tall woman. Another time he trotted alongside a family of four. Today, on a walk down the beach, I have acquired him. He is a black lab with another wrinkly breed mixed in. He likes to chase chickens and prances cordially through the sand.
   My first acquisition this afternoon was a suggestion. A hint that there was a temple, down the beach and up a hill. In pursuit of this place, the dog and I walk the sand at low tide. Long ranks of coral angle into the waves, brown under the sun. I walk in the cool wet sand and rest under the shade of a few trees, watching the few people who wander in the tide pools, searching. This beach looks directly at the sea, not a bay, and so there are fewer houses than goats and cows, and quiet open spaces.
   The dog and I continue between fields and tide pools. He pauses to chase cows, with much clanging and yelping. We cross a field and turn up a path dappled with shade, and he knows where I am going although he is ahead. Far ahead. And then, he disappears, diving into the bushes. More cowbells and yelping.
   The temple is locked. A tree grows in the middle of it has dropped many red and orange and yellow fruit on the rock the temple is made of. A puddle remains from the morning rain, still in the hilltop calm. The cows chime and ponder my presence. The dog has vanished for safer shores. I sit on the steps and look through the leaves to the water as it stretches silver to the horizon. A small airplane motors by. The green mountains wrap around behind the temple, arms trailing into the waves where I can hear propellers and voices in the next bay.
   I look again past the gate. All is serene, punctuated by the calm fall of another fruit hitting the stone. Old offerings pile on the steps and shrine inside, the palm leaves they're made of bleached with sunlight. Offerings are usually woven plates or bowls, filled with flowers and an offering of food, like rice. Incense is placed on them and the whole item is sprinkled with holy water and prayer.
   In the midst of brambles, humidity, and bovines, the temple sits like a breath of breeze, pleasant and indifferent. Inside the air is patient. I wonder if a place is independent of what we do in it, I wonder if the prayers that have been said here linger with the colors on the floor, and if I can sense them.
   As I sit on the shady steps, a man and then a woman come by to check on the cows. They smile and say hello. On the walk back the sun is muffled with clouds. I follow a set of dog tracks, dug heavy into the dark sand, as they trot back down the beach.

Pemuteran

   Traditional Balinese fishing boats bore the faces of animals. The bow was split like a mouth, with wide eyes above to help the fisherman spot and catch his prey. I am currently in the midst of many Balinese boats, but the only faces I see are human. The sand is black, like the skin of the mountains above us. Pillars of eruptions past, they are robed in jungle and crowned with clouds. I take deliberate steps, over stones and coral pieces, over bow lines and stern lines, sometimes entering the surf and other times the dry sand at the top of the beach, as I work my way into the nest of boats drawn up on the shore.
   I am beginning to wonder if I should even be here. Most of the boats are unattended, at rest for the night. A field to my right reveals soft-skinned cows nuzzling the grass and mingling under the palms. Fishnets hang from the limbs of nearby trees, and men talk or linger by their boats. The houses that the vessels and men belong to are emerging from the trees, along with women's and children's voices and thick blue smoke from one fire. Still I pick my way along.
   In the distance I see a pair of pale skinned people in swimsuits, pulling the same high-kneed maneuvers as I. If these gawky people can cross the line between resort-beachfront-unreality and subsistence village life, I can too. Besides, in situations like this I think of myself as Dad, who often will walk anywhere he's not clearly prohibited, in search of a specific view, his chin upturned as if to say "Are you really going to stop my curiosity?"
   The tide of boats abates as I cross the front of a resort. I jump over a few streams as they enter the sea. They are reminders of what lies inland, carrying water from the tops of those mountains. Also brought with the water are the wrappers and lids and potato chip bags that, in the sunset, scatter the beach with colors.
   Again I submerge myself in a maze of prows. I am at the place between sea and land, the fish and the cows, what the men do on the waves and the women do in their home. These things are knit together by the worn lines, taut and then lax in the rolling waves, by the beached and faceless keels, by the children crouched at the water's edge. It is these kids, whose curiosity is carried through in their wide brown eyes, at whom I grin unabashedly, and the mothers who smile after them.
   One man is standing knee deep in the water, coiling a fresh blue line by his boat. He asks me where I am going. I gesture to a point of land on my right and say, "Over there." He asks where I am staying and I gesture back across the bay, saying "Over there." We stand near two large boats which look like pirate ships to me, complete with masts and ladders and proud attitudes. Initially they were my destination, where I intended to practice my observational skills with an upturned chin. But, the point beckons.
   Last night around the same time I had an entirely different conversation. I had walked the other direction, toward the setting sun, and sat near a tree on the sand while sparrows danced sporadically around me. While I waited to get hit in the face by a bird, two figures walking down the beach came up to me- Balinese girls, teenagers, the bolder of whom asked if they could sit. Of course. I wondered what they liked about this spot- maybe I had occupied their hangout.
   We asked the usual questions- names, age, how long have you been here, where are you from, if I am traveling with a "boyfriend?" Complete with giggles. What a novel concept- an unattended white woman. Hence the curiosity and sit-down. A good thing, since I was as curious about them as they were about me. We stalled and started again several times. I told them how beautiful and messy it is here and that I enjoy it.
   "I think," she said, "that America is beautiful," both a question and an opinion, an opinion of something distant and unattainable, an opinion on the Elysian Fields. I ask if she's seen it in pictures and movies. She likes the Twilight movies, and Harry Potter. She asks what movies I like, and I again stall, unable to think of anything but Pulp Fiction. We talk some more about the States and religion and appearances. The sunset is burning at our shoulders.
   "Now, I have to go," she said. Time for the six o'clock ceremony.
   As I stood I looked after them. The sky bled gold from a point not far away, where the line of the sea and the brunt of the sky ran into the shore. Leaning trees and the slope of the sand were silhouetted, and two girls running side by side, slowing down to look back, and then skipping again toward the sun.
   Now, I am at the point to the east of our rendezvous tree and the pirate ships, looking at the next sunset. The sand is soft, and the clouds too, shrouding the roof of the sky and a far mountain where it emerges from the sea. The pink light and the dark bulky land diffuse across the humid air. A desert wail rises from the village-a mosque calling to prayer the many Muslims who have moved here from Java. I begin my trek back across the boats, past the children and wives and sun-darkened men. The water is becoming pink and purple. Village sounds fade to the clink of silverware and the quiet beach, punctuated with lamps and lounge chairs.
   I learned several words from the two Balinese girls, but now I only remember one. Chanti. It means beautiful.

One Third & Seven

In these seconds we sit and think that we know. Thinking the crisp green would not be laced with snow, or that the flakes floating so slowly down that they seemed to hover, rethinking, inclining upward against the red shingles, would not be lanced by the reclining sun, the whole stratus afternoon uplifted, the shrouded valley, the glistening asphalt, the cold fat snow smacking my face, would not be lit by the maw in the west – a foolish photoshop of two different seasons, that is today. 

We have been time traveling, here in Missoula. Like the darkness before the movie begins, the addled seasons catch us between what we know and what we anticipate – between what is now out of our hands and what we continue to dream we can control. To understand is to control, and both are what tomorrow means to us. In the future that awaits us, in the sun or snow that hits our face. But in the darkness we realize all we are as mad scientists trespassing through time is not as we thought – all we sought in the film is not what we learned, and now the film, too, is gone. Each glance out the window is a different day.

Sunset Scouting

The old way west

No man is an island, nor any piece of land. It is with functions and externalities that we ponder lines across the map in our heads. You may ask where I am from: really you are asking what I believe. You are asking to see if mountains are reflected in my soul, before I can show you through speech or thought or movement. If you cannot tell through these ways, you are not the only one, for places are not so different as we think. We are drawn to what makes them different – we are obsessed with the striated and the smooth, with the structure, the intention, the origin – we take a big lens that makes smaller what is large and we hoist a big sun in the sky and we look at your practices in the realm where you exist, like the proverbial occupant of the glass house, we pick up the rocks you've thrown and touch them to our nose. We run a wrinkled hand through a widow's peak. We seek to make what is obvious invisible, and what is losing triumphant, for it is the subject of destruction that speaks most clearly to the heart of the created. We walk, but we do not know to where.

"A river the stature of Missoula's Clark Fork is far more than just water running. But what is it? Is it the sum total of a hundred things? Thats what I went walking to see." Kim Williams, 1982

Mommy's All Right, Daddy's All Right

"Mommy's all right, Daddy's all right,
they just seem a little weird..." -Cheap Trick

On the roof, I recline. Empty soup bowl and water bottle beside me. The sunset is in its final, bruised mutability. Something black soothes from west to east across my view - a heron. Higher than the trees and I, for a moment she is perfectly silhouetted. All of her long lines compact, neck into her shoulders, legs a perfect line behind her, elegant like the river she is scouting.

She leaves me, promptly. I consider why I would ever be thinking of somewhere else. Why would I want to be elsewhere now, if I could not be looking at those golden flanks easing to the south, and their evergreen brows, polished with a lazy, sultry sun. Incoherent, the clouds swill across the valley in many forms. Long white evening gowns, damp infantry, children's happy footprints. I think of the scientists who decided to catalog clouds, spent their days watching and drawing and came up with a handful of prefixes and suffixes [to similar scientists we can also attribute the concept of a black body, a form that absorbs all of the light that falls upon it. A concept which, like many scientific ones, is difficult to find in reality. The queen of all black bodies is that big pearl in the night sky].

Sign me up for the cloud job. I want to watch clouds all day. Each day can have its own classification.

The air still smells of rain. The birds like to remind each other all day that we've had some precipitation. And the colors. These cloudy Missoula sunsets never cease to draw the sinful pigment right out of the sky and leave a purity, of paleness, of blues yellows and pinks like secret shells trying to hide beneath the sand. A silence in color, to counter the raucous clouds.

I reach back and put my arms behind my head. Off my right elbow, the sun continues its descent. Off my left, the moon pulses, sporadic behind the dancing clouds.

Today, I have decided to surrender. It seems to me, that we are all demi-gods of some kind, walking between our god self and our pygmy self, as Gibran says. That which is made of stars and that which is made of earth. Between the sun and the moon, as I am now. For a while I have been striving to be as the moon – to reflect, to receive. Not like the sun, rampantly producing, mindlessly stimulating. It is requiring a lot of energy to be a black body, to draw in all that is incident upon me. But I am not the moon, nor the sun, and today I confess that, relinquish control. Today I throw in my lot with all of us, I surrender to the selfish glory of what we can make and how mad we can be, surrender to a nature perpetually off kilter, for if it were not how would anything continue. Cede to the waxing and waning of that chalice in the sky, and feel that it is alright. I am not the sun or moon. I am both.

A Zoo Sunset

Good Morning from Daytona

The patio is timeless. In the afternoon it is languorous with humidity. At night the constellations cast by nearby condos look into its wide view. Oma has kept it nearly immaculate, although she would never admit it – a war with this climate is never won. Across the yard the bushes sprawl along the fence, drooping color from their flowers. Between us the birds flit, cardinals and starlings and mockingbirds, and two doves building a nest in the eaves. Yesterday afternoon a warbler flashed his bright yellow tummy at me from the neighbor's yard. Today, thorough tropical rains have left the edges of the patio sprinkled. In a breeze the young oak shakes its throughfall to the grass. Through it all the patio is unperturbed, the russet tile and wicker chair embrace, a quiet stage for morning coffee.

The patio window looks into the kitchen. For the amount of life which has worn its way through that room, Oma has once again kept it strikingly preserved. Her battle is lost on the chair backs, however, pale with the prints of determined palms. Other subtle remnants linger, of laughter and conversations gone by, if only in the fullness of the air, of arms draped and eyebrows emphatic. In one such recent conversation, Oma puttered around the table recalling Opa's latest exploits.

"Drinking a beer with a straw! Can you believe it?" She often strikes me as the curious, determined child I think she was. An earnest giggle is all it takes to see it. Playfulness aside, she still has a strong sense of propriety.

"I had to explain to him that people don't usually drink beer with a straw." As if the fact that it was not done meant it should not be. Mom and I smile at her as she stands, arms spread. Opa, it was reported, elected to keep the straw.

Last night, on that round kitchen table, we spread a museum. A museum of our own history. As darkness pooled outside, we looked at envelopes stamped 1907 and 1941, at the penmanship of a brave age now returned to the earth, at sepia copies of large families with bright smiles and strong hands. Looking at the faces of family I will never meet, holding their names on my tongue and passing their pride under my fingertips, I felt the energy of a wave before it breaks. The purity, the potential, rolling constantly under each ocean swell as it turns from the gritty dark below to the frothing air above. The skim of a pelican's wingtip, the clear water at the edge of a curl, like the lip of a glass cup, before it shatters down in spray and fans across the sand.

In the photographs I see a new era ahead of them that is behind me. I see the vitality of an unpolished country. Their world was more dangerous than mine, their ambitions had faces they too did not know. In their smiles I see the courage with which they wrote the rules. In my Oma's voice I hear a woman who lived by those rules. In my mother and I, we are the wave that is breaking, the shattered rules, the periwinkles streaming through the sand.

This morning, I am on the patio, listening to the birds, and the memories of ancestors with farm houses and fields behind them, with generous moustaches or dresses with sailor collars, hair in a bun hands on hips. The rain has paused for now, and is a weight in the breath instead. Sunlight sinks through the clouds. I am thinking of my Opa sipping his drink with a straw, and Oma conflicted between joy and embarrassment. I guess it is in all of us, to do what we're not supposed to. To fiddle with the rules passed down to us. To feel that we live on the edge of a dream that is collapsing, and a new one that is coming to be.

Sunday Shoes

Early in the morning, I stumble into downtown. By that I mean I missed the last step out of Lael's apartment building. I am swinging a paper bag – inside, a soup pot that rings each time it is set down, an indignant sterling matron. On the sidewalk the birds are singing springtime. A finch balances on a bike rack as I stroll by. Saturday night crumbs litter the street. A broken phone case, cigarette butts and empty bottles outside the Union. The sunlight and snowflakes come from the same place in the sky, gazing over the edge of the canyon, equinox air smelling like friends skipping town. The air tries to clean it all with cold, a clarity gnawing on my exposed fingers.

Outside my building are a pair of empty shoes. Strangely, I am not surprised, as this has happened before. This autumn, one stood on the roof next door, and later another kicked around the front lawn, in a different place each morning, as if it had a drunken occupant with one cold foot. A mischievous breeze with a taste for black work shoes.

Now, an impeccable pair at the bottom of the back steps. Empty, spread like the feet of a breath-bated lover leaned on his car. A brick briar, the back of my building is a romantic perch for Juliet or more likely Stella. With shoes like that I expect a dress shirt rolled up at the elbows. But, whoever delivered them, he is gone now, and only the shoes remain.

The peaceful chill, the shadows of the weekend, the abandoned footwear. This morning fell together, like the shy snowflakes, like the disjointed merge of the seasons, and the finches and I smile on.

Good laundry company. Poor shoe investigator.

Exponential

He is holding two bags of cat food. I am holding chocolate and olive oil. With him, small talk is non-existent. He is a zany character from a class I took two years ago, earnest gaze colored like the gray at his temples.

"You've probably heard this story," he says, "it's used a lot and its about math." Seconds earlier he had been explaining nodes, algorithms, and how they caused his computer to crash. It must have been on his mind, as he had launched into the story with limited how-do-you-dos.

This was standard fare for our random run-ins. Our most recent conversation happened this autumn as I was going for band-aids at the grocery store. Whilst peeling beets I had cut myself. As you can imagine, the resulting pigments were something to see, and it showed on my hands. He had considered my make-shift bandages of paper towel and tape. "Being both a pessimist and a hypochondriac, I usually carry band-aids," he had said, grinning as he was wont to do.

Now, months later, we stand in the grocery store. On the way over from campus that evening I strolled through a thin layer of snow and falling flakes, peaceful as a satellite floating through the stars. I was hard at work on my current endeavor, which has something to do with awareness of the current moment. It is often a very unfamiliar task, not unlike computer algorithms.

To this end I stopped in the middle of the footbridge. It is a fragment of the old Higgins Bridge. I imagined women in bustled skirts and men with canes and long-tailed jackets sauntering home from a night at the theater. Overhead arched the steel bracings. With snow clinging to them they were the perfect contrast of black and white, a latticework of yin and yang climbing toward the half moon.

"The story goes, that a man did a brave deed for a king, and as a reward the king offered him anything he asked," my zany friend explains. The man asked for a chessboard worth of rice, filled so that each square had double the rice grains as the square before, starting with just two grains. Happily, the king agreed.

"But, by the sixty-fourth square the kingdom was bankrupt," he cheerfully concludes, "it seems like such a small thing at first... and that's why my computer crashed."

Another tangential tale ensued before we went on our separate ways. I returned to the dark outdoors. The snow pillowed on the ground but left the sidewalks dry. As I walked I fell even more in love with life, as snowfall has a way of making me do. It seems each day is a square on the chessboard, each day another vivacity, tranquility, opportunity, always increasing to the power of our own capacity. Except on this board there is no sixty-four limit. The bountiful, beautiful blue skies of life only grow, and our consciousness is the broke king trying to make sense of this splendid mess.

Two Good Eyes

February 8, 2013

Continental

I sip my free coffee and munch my free bagel and ponder the benefit of having a friend who works at a hotel. A benefit that is never more useful than when a certain clip on the inside of my door lock wiggles out of place. The end result of this wiggling is that a key inserted into the lock will spin candidly into infinity, oblivious to its initial purpose of engaging the bolt. Upon a midnight return home, this spinning at first baffles, and then frustrates, once the cat starts to mewl and I realize my highly anticipated pasta salad would have to wait.

The morning after this realization I am standing at the edge of the river, waiting to rendezvous with the maintenance man. The willow bushes have smooth, skinny branches, yellow like pencils, splashed against the steel water. Crows glide in to meet two Canadian geese on the bank. The morning is crisp - snow has just kissed the tops of the hills.

It seems to me that there is a sweetness, when the wiggle-able clips in life set free the cogs that keep us turning dependably. There is a pleasure in rolling out a blanket bed on a friend's floor, in waking to the song of a dove (instead of claws in the cat litter), of savoring coffee in an empty lobby. There is peace in idling time on the bike path because I have nothing on me but what I strolled out with last night, nothing to do because the nucleus of my world is shut, and I've realized I am separate from it, from everything but my brain and my hands in my pockets.

As the breeze wakes up the day, I turn and walk quickly homeward. I don't want to be late to have my broken lock repaired, if it was really wrong at all.

The Dancing River

I live on the river that flows to the east and back again. An old tide of hunger and bison, a new tide of semi-trucks and trains that bellow day and night. The river of footsteps and backpack straps, of coffee mugs and pen clicks. The sun streams down through logjammed clouds, the trees pour off the tops of the hills.

My Missoula is a river, forever biased and never still. A river of due dates and desktops, but also a river of light gleaming on the edge of Sentinel, of kingfishers perched on telephone lines, of pigeons chortling under the bridge. A river of day and night relaying the reins. A river of subwoofers and snares and cold gusts from the canyon. My Missoula is on the rocks – it is frothy like the top of a bitter pale ale. My Missoula is dredged up like Caras Park, dark and misplaced, with the water always flowing by. The bridges a parthenon, a girdle, a 100-year corset afraid of the emotion a river can bring.

The river is bound, but the streets are not. The sidewalks, the exhaust, the clicking lighters all overflow their banks, all eddy into the back stoops and corners. Each road is a stream, each house hyporheic, melding the sky and the curving horizon into the hit of our heels and our fervent gaze.

A Salish story goes that Coyote was one day walking when he heard singing women, and presently saw that these women were both naked and dancing, on the waters of a wide, strong river. Coyote was not one to pass up naked dancing women.

Now a city has spread where he dallied on the shining banks. Now the river is cinched with levees, and the floodplains are houses. We built a city here, an image traced from the river's reflection. The human system pacing the river system – the structure, function, and energy flows, just like we learned in our science classes. Its all here, all grown and attached, from the eves to the curbs, in the windows and dead bolts and flashing turn signals, in the cigarette butts that wash from the streets into the dancing water.

Like Coyote we are drawn to the pleasures of this city and this river, of the system we have grown around it. Like him we get caught. Caught by the current that happens the same every time but is never made of the same pieces.