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.