Richard Nelson

Years ago I had the adventure of hanging out with James Crumley in Omaha Nebraska.  Mr. Crumley was at the time the author of The Dancing Bear  and several other great mysteries.  He was the King of Western Alcoholic Detective Writers and he was my idol.  I had just won an award that night and I was trying to drink with him.  Late in the evening we were talking about writers we liked and I mentioned a native american writer whose last book I had been "disappointed in" (I was trying to impress him with how discriminating and hip I was)  and Crumley said,  "Stop talking kid.  She owns me."  

"Sorry?"  

"I kind of know what you mean about the last book but fuck it. Stop talking. She owns me. I've been through so much great shit with that woman that I don't  ever think a bad thoughts about her.  You understand?  You got friends like that? " 

Then he went on and told stories about things that he and this writer in question had been through that were astonishing to me, not only in the breadth of their comradeship but their willingness to break most social conventions as well as many state and federal laws.  I'm not saying they were all true, but they were great stories. 

In fact I do have a friend like that.  Richard Nelson is someone I met more than thirty years ago. He moved to Sitka, from Tennakee, with his partner Nita, and her son Eathan.  Nels, was looking for Surf.  By that time he had written his northern books.  Hunters of the Northern Ice,  Hunters of the Northern Forest,  Shadow of the Hunter, and I think he was finishing up Make Prayers to the Raven. When we first met we didn't talk about writing or anthropology, but talked about berry picking spots, outboard motors, surfing, salmon recipes. Soon Nita and I worked in the same office, and we were all apart of the same group of friends that was like a family.

We camped together and put up fish, venison and berries together.  We told outrageous jokes and ate tremendous meals.  Loosely this group included about 12 of us in the late eighties. We lived together in Hawaii one winter, where Nels worked on The Island Within and I wrote, The Woman Who Married a Bear in a spiral notebook in pencil.  We surfed every morning getting to the break at Queens Pond or Majors Bay before dawn so that we could be at our desk during the heat of the day. 

Nels and I rarely talk about writing, but we talk about the day to day adventures.  I love to hear the stories from his travels and always ask him about poisenous snakes and about his youth when he was a full on skinny nature geek and in exchange I will tell him stories about lurid crimes that happen just down the street from his house that shock and amaze him.  

But we are very different people.  Once many years ago, I was waiting out some tests from the doctor and he took me out in his skiff, and we passed by a dozen gulls circiling some prey on a calm patch of water.  It was a fine sight.  Nels put his hand on my shoulder and said,  "No matter what happens, this natural world will always be here for you."  I remember thinking at that second , "You dumb Bastard, this natural world is trying to kill me every second of every day!  AND are you suggesting that by "here for me" means "to feed me to the gulls!!" 

That about sums up the difference between us.  

But that's why I'm glad that he is around. Nels is oriented towards the light. Me?  I'm a flashlight that casts shadows most of the time.  There are times.... more and more where I switch over and feel the spark of pure energy move through my field of vision, and I have to suspect it has to do with Nelsons continued influence.  

In all of his writing, the images he creates are lit from within by the most genuine passion and respect for the wild..  His writings are well crafted love letters, and still, he is the least self conscious writer, the least professionally ambitious I have ever heard of.  The only other contemporary person who could compare was Nanao Sakaki who was a wandering zen poet, in the tradition of the Chinese Wilderness Poets of the Tang Dynasty.  Nels is that kind of mad-man-saint-nature-freak  except he's from Wisconsin and he eats jam and bread with every meal. 

Every once in a while I'll bump into someone who will criticize Nels for not being modern enough in his style, or for being naive or for not giving a fully rounded view of his subject.  I think of Crumley.  But first I offer this...  To criticize Nelson for being naive is like picking on Mark Twain for being funny.  Being naive is Nelsons thing.  The bumbler getting off the plane in Wainwright, that's the story, or weren't you paying attention?   Nelson is old fashioned, in that he never criticizes a friend, and he won't criticize anyone who showed him generosity.  So... he can't be a modern journalist.  His manners are too good.  But there are other people who are more qualified for those assignments; those who have lived in the difficult circumstances and can tell the more difficult stories.  

But that's not to say he is perfect.  He's not.  Neither am I, I have not been a perfect friend and he has forgiven me and thats a fine old trait as well. So when the few and far between start to carp, I lean back and say,  "Stop talking Kids... he owns me." 

Fog in the morning

the new sticky apple leafs

are jewel encrusted. 

jhs---Sitka, Ak

Dandelions: the model anarchists

High clouds with a cool wind.  Jan is packing for a field trip on another boat to find Humpback whales and help one of her graduate students get set up to do her field work, which apparently involves long poles, a ridged hull inflatable and about one jillion waterproof cases full of stuff.  Another Mother's day.  I did get her a weed whacker for Mothers Day, and I'm not cheap.  It is  Industrial strength,  the kind with handlebars and even a brush cutting blade if the going gets really tough.  The best part of this gift is that it comes with an operator who will attack the underbrush and the weeds while she is out at sea.  It was quite a lavish Mother's day gift I thought and she's not even my mother.  All her actual son had to do was call her on the phone she was in a love swoon the rest of the day, and not a weed was whacked.  

Now, whacking weeds is something  to which I have given considerable thought.  Jan and I like our garden more or less wild.  We do have what we call a "lawn."  Some thirty years ago we took grass seed that the Forest Service threw on road cuts, and sprinkled  it down on D-1 gravel then called it good.  It sprouted up and became a lawn.  Very nice. We play bocci on it.  Dogs poop on it and we chase after them and throw the poop along the edges into the berry bushes.  We clear out spots in the berries and plant flowers sometimes and every spring we beat back the berries with a chain saw.  We have a flowering current that was given to us by Amy Johnson from our last rental house that does quiet well, and several rhododendron that refuse to die.    Most of our garden you could say is indistinguishable from weeds, it's lovely and wild.  The flat ground, the lawn, needs mowing and is a luxury you don't see in many yards in Sitka.  Particularly this close to the water.  

Thirty years ago an old boat building shed on the water was for sale with a chunk of rocky ground on the beach, for at the time of the unspeakable price of $50,000.  Jan and I bought it and lived in the shed, turned the shed into a cabin. Later we built a first story next to it and had a crane lift the cabin on top and to this day that cabin is the second story.  But anyway...

The lawn is the place where babies waddle around and dogs chase balls and friends can marvel at are most excellent crop of dandelions.   Which brings me to the point of this essay. 

After the Civil War in America and the Industrial Age began to take root so too did a nascent philosophical concept and social movement both here and in Europe first known as Anarchism.      (Early Anarchists in America have a fascinating history and I've touched on this history in several of my books,  The Big Both Ways, and Death and the Language of Happiness both were inspired by my readings of the early anarchists.)    

Quick and Dirty: There is a ton to say on the subject but suffice to say that the early Anarchists called themselves Anarcho-syndacalysts.  Or: easier than that, they did not believe in any organized economy.  They believed in leaderless communal trade organizations that would bargain for what ever they needed and share equally among the group.  

Impossibly idealistic?  Perhaps.  But remember many of these early anarchists were agricultural workers and some of them came from such communal farms.  Many farms in the upper midwest were organized by extended families of farmers from scandinavian countries and in effect they operated as family collectives.  This was a concept very familiar to them and very old.  Why not take it to the next level?

These early Acolytes of labor freedom: Baukaunin, Kropautkin, Big Bill Haywood, Hellen Flynn, Joe Hill, the Wobblies not only saw sense and beauty in the ideas but they believed in the inevitability  of a world wide adoption of their ideas. This is important, they believed that people would be convinced of the rightness of the ideas as long as the ideas could be expressed fully and allowed to be tried and practiced.  Yes violence came and sabotage,  (the clog in the machine) and there are endless arguments about who started it and who is ultimately responsible. But violence came on both sides, and the social movement for workers equality split off into Trade Unionism which the Anarchists said would be gobbled up by Capital and the organized Left (Socialism, Communism), which they said would become corrupted by their own leadership.  So, the Anarchist movement withered.  Later on, after Marx, Engels,  set the remaining principles into dogma and Lenin and Trotsky put it into action, the practice of Anarchy took an evil turn, just around the corner came the Gulags, the Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot.  

But for a time there were dandelions.  Those early Finn's,  may have seen the dandelions in their road cuts and yards as we see them.  Interlopers from Eurasia, leaderless and beautiful, pressing on, no matter how many times you cut them down.  Every part of them is edible and useful: leaf, flower and root.  Every part of them is tough and hardy.  Lovely survivors.  The model of a revolution if there ever was one.  

That's why I never poison them, or ever try to think I can defeat them.  Even when I cut them down, and I do, I know that they will come back ten fold.  The dandelions and I are part of one big Union.  

Spring clouds, Mothers day,

you are packing one more time.

Off shore, the whales wait. 

jhs--Sitka, AK

Sunshine, Sunshine

Whither the sun, its charms an elixir.  I can't remember who wrote that but today is was on display in Sitka, AK:  a full grown man with a nice sized pot belly skate boarding down the middle of the main street of town, taking sweeping turns across both lanes with a police car behind him, kicking his board up in front of the bar and walking in with a tip of his hat as if the cop were valet parking his rig... and the cop drives on without incident.  Men who drink to excess as their occupation down on a small beach near the science center with their pants rolled up and enjoying their drinks like proper picnickers in the sunshine.  Men and women with shorts and tank tops on, exposing skin that hasn't seen sun for probably ten months, now turning a shocking pink in some cases and in others a fine haze of red on of their brown skin.  Smiles on faces that haven't smiled in months. Even the drunks in the darkest bars have sunburns.  

A lovely mania comes with spring in Alaska.  At the Public Defender we will still have our share of crimes.  People will overdo.  Reckless people will be reckless.  But still, spring crimes usually have a different feel to them.  More outward and exuberant.  I saw and old friend walk out of the bar today and he was a bit unsteady, but he had a swagger and a bounce in his step, squared, shoulders like a boxer coming out of his corner and a slight bounce, even though he was having a hard time keeping his balance.  He had a fresh burn on his skin.  He looked like he had just finished winter King fishing, He had money in his pocket.  He had been drinking most of the night before and the day.  He had friends in town.  It was sunny and he could lay down to sleep almost anywhere and he would wake up in a lucky, beautiful world.    No one should argue with a man in such a mood, for such a man believes himself to be invincible, and at that moment he is. 

Such is the effect of sunshine in the spring.  Just as strong as the light gloss of a suntan on a small child after a winter of sniffles and colds of staying inside a trailer house watching cartoons.  Today her mom takes her to the beach and strips her diapers off and lets her walk for the first time naked in the sand,   Her sensitive skin exposed for the very first time to the sun.  The baby laughs and dabbles in the water and screams and laughs and pulls away and slaps at the strangeness of it all: through her mothers eyes she sees a world so new and vast and beautiful it almost makes it worth considering staying on in this town another year.   

And when we go to bed tonight we'll all feel the touch of heat the sun left on our skin and we'll wonder if, in this wet country, sunshine should be what we are baptized in.  

Spring day, mow the lawn

the dandelions won't mind

they will multiply!

JHS--Sitka, AK

Coming to Juneau April 26, and Ketchikan on the 28th

Looking forward to another book trip, and particularly looking forward to reading in the public libraries of Juneau and Ketchikan.  I love it that the great independent bookstores in each town will be selling books after each reading.  It should be a wonderful time.  I hope to see all my friends who can make it out in Juneau on Saturday night and Ketchikan on Monday.  In Juneau contact 49 writers if you are interested in the workshops I'll be teaching.

Watershed occasion this week for Jan and me; Finn Straley landed his first permanent job that he both likes and he is suited for.  A full time job that he can survive on, this is a big deal for a parent, particularly for the parent of a young man who is artistically inclined in this day and age.  

I was way more emotional when I got his text saying "I got the job" than I was at his college graduation.  This means he really is capable of taking care of himself.  My faith is confirmed.  It took me back to that first moment I held him in my arms and that paniciy  ice water ran through my veins...."my God he is so small and helpless...I have no business being a father... when is a real adult going to come and take over?"   Jan was way more confident.  She always was.  Even when Finn decided he was going to be a stand up comedian.... My Lord.  But we could not scold him. We had always done exactly what we wanted to do.  We always only did what we were passionate about.  Me... a poet, private investigator, novelist?  Are you kidding, who was I to lecture about security.  Jan as well, she was always an independent researcher who chose the field work and soft money over the security of tenure and the degree track.  She chose to be with the animals rather than in the lab during her building years.  We did what we loved and so has he.   

But it feels good... he's got a job working with another comic doing creative work he is suited for and he still does three or for stand up shows a night, he puts in his time... doing what he loves, building his chops.  

My last blog entry I was pulling out of a low period and I was wondering what my writing stood for... and this week I have been thinking about it.  Mostly I think it can be deadly if you over think it... or more accurately if you force this type of concern into the creation of a kind of credo.  I think of the lesson Finn has taught me.  Last time he was home he told me what he  thinks about before he goes on stage,  "I've worried and I've practiced... but in the end I just remember to look them in the eye and tell the truth.  Louie C.K. wrote that."  

Yep.  That's about it.  Or at least that's enough for now,  "just look them in the eye and tell the truth."

       NO SMARTER THAN BEFORE              

Two weeks ago a young girl I know

was flown off the island

after a horse threw her to the ground 

and the doctors didn’t know

how badly her brain was injured.

 The foolish old man that I am

had a headache in one particular spot in

my head so painful and hot that it closed my eyes

against my will and I thought I would die.

When I was better

I felt I had learned something

and I tried to summarize what it was: 

“There is a red chair 

laying sideways  

in a rocky field

and the sorrel pony 

rattles an iron bit in her mouth

as the plane lifts off in the rain.”

                                John Straley, Sitka Alaska 

Missing in Action

 “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”--- The opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

I was gone for a bit; nothing interesting, a cold, work, a bout of depression and I'm back.  Depression is, for me is like the psychological flu that comes around on a schedule.  It can be bad or worse and this bout was not so bad, but it is always uninteresting.

Today, as many people have been, I've been thinking of the passing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the great Colombian journalist and novelist.  There are many terrific things written about him since his death, and I have no great insights into his career or his body of work.  I always thought the first sentence of One Hundred Years Of Solitude was one of  the best opening lines of any novel.  How could a person read that sentence and not continue reading?

Greatness of a writer, I think is a collaboration of the writer and their times.  That is, the work finds a usefulness in the world and GGM's work found a use.  It seemed to help define a cultural imagination and an identity.  He didn't do this all on his own, it was a job that needed doing before he came along whether he knew it or not.  There was a culture of course, and there was imagination, but he gathered it together in narratives that captured the current conflicts and dramas and he gave dignity to the characters.

It really is a kind of miracle how a writer does this and avoids the pitfalls that surround the storyteller on all sides.  Particularly the storyteller with political skin in the game as GGM did.  He was a radical leftist  and yet he mostly avoided both narcissism and sanctimony, which, again I believe, drags down much contemporary political writing today.  Of course, the Latin American tradition in literature is influenced by indiginous and hybrid religious culture which have both a great respect for metaphor and a high tolerance for rational contradiction.  This is the fertile ground for writers like Isabelle Allende, Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Alfredo Vea Jr. who could/ can impart important contemporary commentary in their storytelling without sacrificing wit, passion, or the dream world of our souls.

Anyway... there are better writers writing about him... I've been thinking that, these writers stood for/ stand something. and I ask myself what do I stand for? What does my writing stand for?  This is what just thinking about great writers does.

Good Friday, light rain

and the sun breaks through the clouds

like a promise kept. 

jhs-- Sitka, AK 

Angoon

Snowing here today. Old, old, totems with moss growing off the top.  Clan poles for each of the houses.  Shark, Bear, Salmon, Killerwhale, Raven,  I walked around to all my interviews. Years ago I learned to take my time.  There was a woman I admired a great deal.  I still do.  She is the current Writer Laureate of the State of Alaska. Nora Marks Dauenhaurer. She is a linguist and a poet, a very dignified woman and a powerful intellectual.  I used to feel tongue-tied around her.  Whatever I said felt wrong and I'd tried to rephrase it and then that was wrong.... Augggg.  Once at a gathering, I decided to try just relaxing and not saying anything.  I sat down next to her and an agonizing ten minutes went by and not a word was said...then another ten.  Then Nora looked at a magazine on the table and it had a picture of the candidate running for president.  She said,  "What do you think of this guy?"  I said,  "I like him.  I think I'm going to vote for him."  She said, "Me too."  Then another ten minutes.  Silence.  And another fifteen.  I started to sweat.  Pretty soon she put her hand on my knee and moved to get up and she looked me in the eye and said,  "John, it was good talking to you," and left.  

What did I learn?  Absolutely nothing...except that she seemed happy, and more comfortable when I kept my mouth shut.  

Now I try and allot more time for interviews than I used to.  When I go to someone's house I try and sit if I can and if people will have me I just listen to whatever they want to say, without my tape recorder running.  I just sit and listen and say enough to let them know I'm interested.  Because I am.  I say,   "No way!"  "You are kidding me!"  "That's kind of like that in Sitka but in Sitka they...."   I watch their babies, and squeak their heads, and I just listen.... Women mostly....  I don't sit and talk with Native people who are drinking alcohol because it almost always gets ugly...  I've been in too many situations where racial tensions come to the surface easily and fights want to happen, guns want to come out, or knives. It's not usually personal...well it is but it doesn't matter...the information isn't worth much and I can't be where new crimes start,  I'm investigating old crimes.

But in late morning when the babies are fed and dressed.  Men come by selling fry bread...or with smoked fish for their Aunties.  It can be a delightful time to sit and listen.  People joke about "Indian Time" how Indians are always late...but you see it in white subsistence communities too.  You get on a different clock.  The house I sat in today was crowded with stuff,  toys and cooking tools, religious icons, then there are people coming in and out,  grabbing food out of the refrigerator.  The old Aunty sitting in her wheelchair presiding like a queen while a three-year-old races her trike around the kitchen table bumping into the table. The television on with only music.  The music from Frozen...is that it?  The three-year-old with no shirt on and a lioness backpack and glittery Princess slippers.  Her mother lying on the couch talking to a friend on her cell phone. The Aunty telling me about the times when she was a girl when the bears used to come right down into town and the girls could talk to the bears but the White Police Officers messed all that up with their guns by shooting at the bears.  I just listen and I don't take notes and I don't turn on my recorder.  I just watch the little girl in her Princess shoes go around and around and around the kitchen table and another uncle comes in and dishes himself some spaghetti and walks back outside with a paper plate dyed red and maybe tomorrow I'll get down to business.

Snow falls on totems.

Ravens on Satellite Dish.

I'm unstuck in time. 

jhs--Angoon 

Your Comments?

What?  I just discovered people were making comments!  Holy...um...Cow!  I thought they were little private notes to me...but no, they were meant to be posted.  I'm so sorry.  I'm a lunkhead.  I think they are posted now.  Thank you for taking the time to write.  Now we will all be famous to the fifteen people who read this blog...isn't that right?  That's the new Andy Warhol-ism everybody gets to be famous to fifteen people, for as long as they want? 

I'm off for a work trip to Angoon tomorrow and I will try and write a not work-related report if I can: weather, flying, general descriptions, maybe even some photos.  Angoon is pretty amazing on a lot of levels. The Salvation Army runs the Bed and Breakfast where I stay...it's the only game in town. They are damn nice folks and they make a hell of a good cookie. I'll keep you posted.

Anvils

Hard grey sky and north wind blowing. Spring wants to jump back to winter but the herring won't let it happen.  The fleet fished again today and there was some spawning out on the islands.  I haven't seen any branches come in yet but hoping they will soon. Whatever the temperature spring is here.  

Another month and another poem for the group.  Jan is headed to her doctor in Seattle. Her medication is losing its effectiveness and we don't know what the sawbones can pull out of his hat this time.  She is a beautiful soul and does not fret or worry but I am a big baby.  We used to travel through the country near the big mudslide in Washington State.  I can't imagine that kind of suffering.  I think of all the families and rescue workers down there and wish there was enough love to keep them safe from cruel and arbitrary bad news, but of course there isn't.  There is only enough love to dress the pain once it comes.  

ANVILS 

Down the road, curtains billow out

open windows, and the boys delivering eggs

have the collars of their coats turned up

waiting for tiny b.b.s to begin falling. 

I was sworn to protect her, for the rest of my life,

but this was a new kind of precipitation

we could not have expected:

nuts and bolts clattering and cracking the window casings,

yolks running yellow in the road where the boys have dropped

their cartons and run home, and the dented mailboxes are falling

over.

I cradle her in my arms and try to explain things

as hammers fall from the sky

whirling like scythes tearing the limbs from the trees,

and the eaves of the houses begin to shred away

 as the woodsheds become dented then tumble in,

dogs begin shrieking, scrambling under houses and digging

their way under stumps where desiccated

raccoons had gone to die.

Finally the anvils begin to fall,

as I’ve only imagined

they would someday.

The whomp,

whomp,

of their foot fall as the first few hit the ground scattering gravel

from the cratered ground

and the next go through the roofs

of the houses down the road, then all around

us, as we hold on to each other tighter 

and tighter, not knowing what

could be coming

next, 

or more accurately

not wanting to know.

                                             John Straley/ Sitka

When The Rules Get Hard: The Detective Parenting Guide

Yesterday it snowed in the morning, wet fat, postage stamp flakes, making paper mache on the porch until everything was white and then the sun melted it away. The gulls are singing their herring song and the fleet is in with all of its usual bustle.  Spring is shouldering its way into Sitka.

I suppose anyone who has raised a child to adulthood and that adult child is halfway presentable and out of prison, that parent thinks they are experts at child rearing.  Jan and I seem to have run in a crowd of great parents:  swim team parents and baseball parents,  chess team parents, they did it all. We did our share I suppose, and though we adore our son...sometimes I wonder,  I’m not sure I was really a great parent.  

First…my parents weren't all that great by modern standards.  I was horrified when I did research on FASD for my job recently, because I’m certain my mother never gave up her alcohol and cigarettes when she was pregnant with me.  She had lived through the Depression and World War II AND Prohibition,  she was not giving up cocktails for a her fifth pregnancy.  It hadn't hurt the other four.  My folks used to watch Jan and I discuss raising kids and shake their heads….“Jesus H. Christ,” my mom said a few years before she died,  “I don’t think I ever heard the word 'parenting' until you brought it up. You just feed ‘em and love ‘em and make sure they can read.  I mean really.”

I remember the first chores I had to perform were how to make a martini and how to build a fire in the fireplace. Also, my folks were sick of organizations by the time I came around.  I was told that the Boy Scouts of America were unacceptable because of the neckerchiefs and their close association with the Hitler Youth.  Neckerchiefs not Boy Scouts.  The truth was my other siblings had done scouting and my mom was done with it. So I didn’t start off with a great role model.  First, I’m not one for rules anyway.  I like discussions.  Finn Straley grew up in a swirl of language and discussions.  Of course there were rules when he was a baby…chewing…burping…peeing in the potty, that kind of thing.  But as he got older concepts got more complex.  Some things were “funny at home and not funny at school.”   It wasn’t always easy:  I remember walking downtown in Seattle where Finn’s Grandma lived and we came to a busy corner. He was a little cherub with golden curls and an impish smile.

“Remember what I told you about corners in the city?” I asked him.

He looked up at me with a furrowed brow,  “Stop, Drop, and Roll?” he said hopefully.

“No…,” I said, “Something else about coming to Seattle.”

“Don’t say ‘shit’ at Grandpa’s house, because he doesn’t think it’s funny.”

“All true, and good to remember, but corner-specific.”

He looked at me squinting as if he were trying to suck the answer right out of my brain.

“Stop…Look…and Listen,” I told him. 

“Oh Brother!” Finn said, looking exasperated and blowing air out his lips like a horse, as if there was just too much to remember in this life.

And there is, that’s the problem with rules.  Hard to remember, particularly if you have hardly ever had to walk across a busy intersection in your entire young life.  It’s way easier to remember not to say “shit” at Grandpa’s, because that’s something that could possibly happen. 

Later, Finn wasn’t all that crazy about having a father who was a private investigator as a teenager.  Whether it was true or not, Finn believed I knew what he did before he got home.  It so happened that I often did.  The police officers would sometimes call me, if they got hints of dopey teenage behavior.  Reports of car surfing or ghost riding the whip often made their way to me before Finn was off the hood of his car.  The worst for him was my punishment, which was often listening to my detailed description of cases I had worked on where young men had become quadriplegics.  

It was the Detective War stories that killed him, this really bothered the young Finn.  Every time I represented some young doofus who ended up doing something incredibly horrible that resulted in a long prison sentence it would invariably send me into a tizzy and I would rush home  to confront my otherwise perfectly angelic son.

“Hi Dad”

“Hi Buddy, How was school?”

“Good, How was work?”

“Good… except I met a kid who took too much LSD and had sex with three underage girls and now is being tried as an adult and is going to prison for seventy-five years.  Tell me that you are not doing anything, even remotely like that.”

“Good.  I’m going up to my room, until you are not crazy anymore.”

No, it was not easy being the teenage son of a private detective, and a natural-born worrier.  There is a Zen saying, “There are lots of ways to get lost in the world.”   I tried not being too hysterical as a parent.  Jan was pretty level-headed, though she did have her peculiarities, like her need to explain every biological detail in nature.  Like showing the Toddler Finn how mosquitoes suck blood from your body using a hand lens so that the little bugs grew into the size of killer pterodactyls in his mind and he ran screaming from the sound of one. 

In the end I settled on one golden rule for my parenting experience, the one inviolate principle I could find no exception to:  “Be kind to the dog and don’t do meth.” 

It really about covers it all, and I have to say so far it’s worked.  Finn Straley is a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles, California, who has so far stayed out of prison and has a phobia of mosquitoes, and most of the natural world.  

 I may be a crappy parent but he is still a good man.  One could do worse for a sampler on the wall.

 Be kind to the dog and don't do meth.

The herring gather

on the beach outside our house.

I miss you so much. 

 jhs---Sitka, AK

Seth Kantner and Doing the Hard Thing

Hard rain for a few minutes and then clearing, then downpours again.  I need more words for the different types of rain. 

For Humanities 120 this week Seth Kantner called in from Kotzebue.  He's the author of Shopping for Porcupine and Ordinary Wolves.  He is a natural talking to classes with his storyteller's tone, who is comfortable around a fire or a coffee pot, or on the phone with a friend.  He is self effacing but...I've learned, partly from self reflection, that self effacement often protects a healthy ego...which is what someone needs who pushes himself.  

Though his first book was fiction, I believe Seth Kantner is a truth teller down to his bones.  He is both more empathetic and tougher than almost anyone else I've ever met, which are both good qualities for a truth teller. (I hate the term "non-fiction writer")

You might already know this from his work...but he was born in a sod igloo some two hundred river miles from Kotzebue on the south side of the Brooks Range.  His parents were back-to-the-landers and he was raised wanting more than anything to be an Inupiat hunter but he was white. His books are almost romantic parables of the boy raised in the wild, if they weren't so honest and realistic about the harshness of the conditions.  He loved  the dogs that pulled his sled, he told us but a dog's life had no real meaning or value and was sacrificed at the first hint of slowing the progress of the team.  He admired nothing more than the old Native ways, but found hard times and ugly conditions along with the friendships in the village. The gift of his writing is that he says what he encountered and he doesn't color it up to fit anyone’s mythology or fashion, often it's brutal...and ugly.

Brutal on himself: he spoke to our class about his choices and why he made them after he left his home school environment in the wild, went to college in Fairbanks and Montana then came back to live near his old homestead, in the far north.  I asked him about the "sense of place" in his own writing, and he said characteristically,  "I don't really know about literary terms.  I just know that I don't really want to write about anything other than this place.  I've been to Sitka and it's beautiful.  I've been lots of places in the world now and they are interesting but they are not my country...they are not the place I can tell stories about...or write about I guess."  

I asked him to compare himself to his old homestead and what qualities did they share, he said,  "Wow...I don't know...disorganized, windblown, maybe...open to the elements.."   

"Remote?"  I suggested. 

"Yeah"  Remote...hard to get to, I suppose."  

Later we were talking about how he was raised and his life now.  He said,  "It was interesting,  I just remember that doing almost anything was hard...." (He mentioned there were no clocks and there wasn't the usual rush or time anxiety.)  "It was hard but I liked it that way and I still do.  I like doing things absolutely the hardest way."  He told the story of asking his wife if she wanted to go camping and she said,  "Yes, I want to go camping, but I don't want it to be hard,"  and Seth thought to himself,  "Why would I want to do that? You know, do it so it’s easy."    

We agreed that writing is hard.  I say that to Jan all the time when I'm working on something. Writing is hard.  Seth said he would much rather butcher a moose than write a paragraph for one of his columns for the Anchorage paper.  I don't feel that way...I'd rather write a paragraph than skin a moose....but I'd be happy to set aside any paragraph to have some good moose meat to eat. Yet, we are both dyslexic, and writing will always be hard.  Making the transition from the music we hear in a storyteller's voice to the little black marks on the page, is tortuous... particularly in the beginning.  It's hard to understand if you don’t have your brain wired this way, but for a dyslexic to spell correctly is like a blind person pretending to see. Certain things just don’t make it from the eyes to the brain correctly: words as collections of letters, faces into our memories, sometimes.  But the upside for the weirdly wired brains is that we hear music everywhere and we can remember it.  We can even see it sometimes.  But as I said...it's hard to explain.  

Seth is an extraordinary man with all of the talents and struggles of a dyslexic writer, and maybe his books are so great just because they were so frigging hard to write.  Why would he want to do something easy?  His books have gotten a lot of attention and they deserve it.  His photographs are stunning.  

He told our class how he loved it when visitors would come by the homestead: “It would be one thing if a bear came up and licked the window but if a visitor came by THAT was exciting.”  If you ever get a chance to visit with Seth Kantner you should take it, you can hear the tone of the visitor who has come by dog team to rest his bones and laugh. 

This is an extraordinary and authentic voice.  Find it in his two books and online.  He has surprises for you and he might challenge some of your assumptions about life in the north, but nothing good is ever easy I suppose. 

So much rain tonight

the gutters flow black as blood

under the street lamps. 

jhs--Sitka, AK