Changing Course

A weekend of hard rain.  The apple tree is a beautiful fountain: streams of water pearling from leaf to leaf. and the fireweed shake like wet horse tails in the wind.  But it doesn't make me want to go outside, and I can't mow the lawn for exercise which is both good and bad, I guess. 

I thought I'd write about a lovely woman I met this week who I learned had a lifetime of abuse so severe, with a self image so burned down, she cannot take a complement but from the devil himself..... but... not today... maybe soon I will write about her but I'm afraid if I do today the rain will crawl right inside of my head to settle in and threaten a flood.   

Crime is cruel all around.  One day you're a victim the next day you may be a perpetrator, and then back again. Better to watch how you talk about eternal damnation. 

But today, Jan and I went to the little farmers market in our island town. We were late and the hot house tomatoes were gone. The best of the smoked salmon too.  I think the rain kept Grace Larsen and her best-ever fry bread at home as well.  There was a good gathering of Sitkans in their rain gear buying up jellies and jams, root crops and beach greens.  I bought a beautiful spoon carved from red alder to send to a friend.  Jan ate a crab cake with a sliced tomato served on a bun made in the old Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall kitchen (Hall#1 where the market was being held)  The gathering place was the old basket ball floor which, if you follow the history of our town, is the stuff of legend.  Old friends walked through where the tables were set up. Young people had made this innovation, this Farmers Market,  years ago the old timers would have called them "Hippies".  but now many of the people selling baked goods and knit item at the tables were old timers themselves. 

An eminent historian, Robert DeArmond used to tell me about the gardens of Sitka during the depression.  He told me that if the economy softened too much in the future, and he was always predicting it would,  he'd say, "We're going to need those gardens back... I don't know if people today have enough grit to grow that much food anymore."   I suppose the old will always mistrust the young.  But today the old and the young seemed well mingled in purpose and interest.  Sharing recipes, gardening stories, canning stories.  Old people seemed happy to see the values not just passed on but practiced and celebrated, loved, even if the young seemed a bit smug thinking that they had discovered it themselves. The old ladies who had canned and pickled kelp during the war smiled sweetly and remembered when they were that young and naive, believing that they too were the first.  

Outside under a tent there was a young man playing an acoustic guitar.  The rain was beating down like a dozen cloggers on him.  He had a small amplifier for his guitar and his voice.  He was wearing a cheap hipster porkpie hat which I would have normally given him shit for, being the cruel bastard that I am.  But my heart went out to him today.  He was playing a Bob Marley song to no one in the rain  and he was doing it well. No one was standing around but the raindrops were bouncing on the black tar pavement.  And I thought,  maybe if I live long enough I could be as successful an artist as this: to play songs of praise for the little columns of rain trying to make their way back into the sky. 

Soft summer storm,

      beets, baby carrots, cabbage

waiting in the rain. 

jhs--Sitka, Ak

Wrong

Late summer, southeastern Alaska:  there is a pause in the rain.  In the morning, steam rises from the rocks and a few clams squirt up from the sand.  The hummingbirds do not swarm the flowers but single females seem to hover high above a group of blossoms  then dive down suddenly.  The fireweed have almost blossomed to the very top.  The apple leaves are at their darkest green.  Lettuce and kale are growing in the gardens, and the rhubarb is beginning to fade.   The salmon gather off the mouths of the streams and soon they will start their push upstream, while the bears get in trouble down town drawn inevitably by the smell of food from garbage cans, and open windows, barbeques, and campsites.  Omnivores will have their appetites, and those appetites will sometimes get them killed. 

I talk to my friend in jail every week day.  His hand is healing, he finished his nearly 800 page book of stories from his particular native tribe of which he is particularly proud.  An expert witness who testified in his legal proceeding sent him several books.  He was able to receive the books only after he agreed to donate them to either the Prison Library or the Native Culture Club.  He will give them to the Culture Club because he is currently the Secretary/ Treasurer.  He says it is warm where he is, in the upper seventies but he stayed inside because he has a hall inspection tomorrow.  He was enthusiastic about this because if his hall wins the inspection again everyone on the hall gets ten dollars of commissary food, which is apparently a very good thing because the food at this institution is not as good as some of the others, though my friend is not one to complain, ever.  He says the inspections are thorough but very fair.  He says his cellie  is a good man, very quiet and private, who does not like or allow other people to come into their room.  This is fine with my friend who likes it this way too.  My friend does not know what his cellie is in prison for or for how long and he does not intend to ask.  My friend intends to “do his own time”. 

Here is a question for the department of law: what percentage of native Alaskan males are under conditions of court ordered probation or under the direct supervision of the Department of Corrections?  I bet the number would be shocking.  My friend tells me that when men  are released into certain large bush communities they are given immunity from the provision from the law that says they are not to associate with felons because more than eighty percent of the men in these communities are already felons.  The emphasis is mine.  He was just mentioning it off handedly after talking to a man who had been given that immunity. 

I do not know what the answer is.   I think my friend will make it out of the system all right he will pay for his crime and he will be haunted by the consequences all his life but… so be it.  He is young and he is strong.  Others are not, and prison certainly does not help, and coming out into a community that may be close to one hundred percent convicts?  One hundred percent under the supervision of the State DOC?  One hundred percent of the fathers, brothers, cousins, role models, having to be searched, having to pee in a cup,  having to go back to jail for owning a gun, or texting the wrong person the wrong bit of information?    What is this world?  What does this teach the young people who we have worked so hard to just choose respect? I do not know what the answer is but something is not right in Alaska.

Just one hummingbird

            zigzagging above blossoms

diving….  

                        diving,       

                                                 down.

jhs---Sitka, Ak.

Player

I have a friend who calls every day from prison.  He tells me the weather.  He tells me where he is in the books that he is reading, and he tells me how the injuries he has gotten are healing.   He is Yupik, and he is now an officer of the Native Culture Club in his institution.  He is 20 years old.  His family cannot afford the cost of a phone card but he can call me at my office and I talk to him for less than ten minutes every day.  The rates for the private phone calls in and out of jail are extremely high, most families cannot afford them or if they can they ration the calls for special occasions.

I cannot talk about what led him here.  But he is a man of faith.  He is a happy man who also carries his sorrow in his heart.  Once two years ago I was with him at a time of extreme crisis, and I didn’t know what to do.  He had tried to kill himself by pounding his head against the wall of his cell, and he was hyperventilating in the tiny visiting cell where I was allowed to see him cuffed to the wall.  

He looked at me with almost inexpressible pain in his eyes.  “Will you say the Lord’s Prayer with me?” 

“Jesus.”  I said, not meaning to, and he scowled,  “I’m sorry… I mean… I’m not sure I… you know…I’m not really a church person…” I was a sputtering waste of space.

“That’s okay…”  and he put his head down as if all the energy in his body were passing out of him, and he started crying in a way that I could not bear.

“All right…”  I said,  “Yes… let’s say it together.”  I put my head down toward his.

“Our Father … who art in Heaven… “  I started out… hoping I could just follow him through the rest of it.

But he was breathing so hard and crying so hard,   that he wasn't picking up… I had a fierce brain freeze.. Holy Crap… what if he were depending on me?  Shit, shit, shit! 

“Hallowed be thy name”

I was not going to remember the next line.  What the hell is going to happen?  Not only is my guy freaking out, now I’m messing with sacred forces.  I’m on very thin ice here.

“Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.

On Earth as it is in Heaven.”

Jesus…. trespasses or debts… trespasses or debts… I don’t know… is there something else?  Water? Something…  I am going to blow this.

 “Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our ….

                                                                trespasses

As we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,"

and......and....and... what?  

I am done. That is it......

"Fuck...... A..... Duck......." I think, but thankfully do not say. 

The length of chain rattles on the bar bolted into the wall in utter and useless silence then he clears his voice so we can finish together.

"And Deliver us from evil 

For thine is the Kingdom

And the Power and the Glory

Forever, and ever.

Amen. “

A deep and pleasant silence eased like warm wax between us.

“Play Ball!”  I said softly: 

He smiled at me sweetly.  Energy back in his eyes, he reached his big hand out and cupped it around my head pulling my forehead next to his.  Why was I crying now?   “That’s the National Anthem,”  he said, his laughing breath on my face.  “You don’t say, ‘Play Ball’ after the Lord’s Prayer.”

“Oh,”  I said, wiping my eyes,  “of course,”  just as the guard came in, to separate us and to make sure I was safe from this monster.

Warm rain

      on a ripe berry

just across the wall.

jhs—Sitka Ak.

Summer

The green in the forest is so deep I feel I can walk two feet into it and disappear. The rhododendrons are faded and a few fireweed are starting to bloom.  The rain is warm.  The storms that blow through have no teeth and show no willingness to stay.  People who call Sitka their spiritual home but who cannot take the winter slink back into town and show up in the cafes in their white shirts and winter tans, shaking hands and talking about the berry crops hoping we won't notice they've been gone.  The sunsets linger for hours.  The drunks sleep in the bushes near the harbor and some of them have berry stains on their lips. The apple trees have rough leaves covering their limbs and the leaves hold pearls of water in the early morning, when the fog lingers and Thrushes sing back in the woods.  Fat Robins eat worms on the library lawn.  The mailman wears shorts.  Some sailboats will unfurl a colorful spinnaker for a downwind run,  and the trollers are vying for spots up on the grid.  There are tough looking women with tattoos and tank tops walking on the docks. who look too thin to be deck hands, and they smoke cigarettes like they just learned how, and some of their men are just getting out of jail. Small bears are getting into garbage cans on the edge of town, and out at the gun range a couple of guys are sighting in their rifles. The air is warm, even though the clouds are low, and anytime of  day or night there could be a few drops of rain.  College kids are home and looking for jobs.  Some are eating ice-cream on the corner and some are scratching their mosquito bites.  The humming birds are fighting beside the feeders and the lazy bees crowd the berry bushes.  You are beautiful while walking  slowly from the house to the car, and we drive carefully through the construction  to work and back home again, where we make dinner and go to bed so we can sleep in each others arms with the windows open to the bay where the gulls  wheel over the islands of our sweet, brief summer dreams. 

jhs... Sitka, Ak

The Big And The Small

We called it watching "Humming bird TV".   We drove home from work where our neighbor Susie came over for a glass of wine and we sat wrapped in blankets against the cool wind and the occasional rain, watching fifteen to twenty humming birds swooping and zig zagging in and out and away from the feeders of her house next door: frenetic match heads of red and metallic green.  We had binoculars straps around our necks and could watch the birds as they stuck their long curved bills into the red feeders to drink.  

Jan and Suzie drank wine.  I drank grape juice.  Just above the Spruce trees an Eagle soared slowly, ridiculously slow compared to the phrenetic buzzing and pulsing of her avian sisters at the plastic feeders .   Jan was looking through her binoculars at the hummers and was flipping through the Sibley's Guide trying to tweeze out the difference between the markings of the Rufus and the Anna's .  I sipped my grape juice and looked up at the drifting eagle and slipped into a memory/dream. 

Years ago Robert Hass, the poet from California (who would go on to become the Poet Laureate of the U.S.) gave a lecture on Haiku here in Sitka. He read many of the short poems and the one thing which I remember from his lecture (which may or may not have been in it) is this:  When the human mind attacks a problem, it constantly shifts it's view from the small... to the the large, like a variable zoom lens.  In the case of the mind, we zoom from the very very vast ramifications of a problem or a conflict, to the intensely minuscule details of the workings of its constituent parts.  The best of these little poems captures both ends of this spectrum.

Although I don't do his talk justice, I remember walking out of Robert Hass's  lecture feeling as if something had shifted in my chest, as if a frozen line in my thinking was becoming unthawed and was chunking its way clear. 

I know I'm not the first to imagine the workings of the solar system in the spider's web caught in morning light, or the heaving of class issues in the machinations of an ant hill.  But what we make out of some images that stick in our minds do not reveal themselves so easily.  The great and small often adhere to memory unconsciously, for reasons that at the time appear mysterious and then reveal themselves later when the lessons of life are ready to be learned.  This is why we remember things that don't seem to matter,  they are future lessons that we are not ready to learn.  At least that's what I believe. 

My mind is a "junk drawer"  full of such memories:  images that are the fusion of the big and the small: a Dall's Porpoise adult and calf breaking the wake of a boat I was steering in the moonlight off Cape Flattery,  a hawk holding half a rabbit in a tree in front of me as my saddle horse rounded a bend, the rabbit's guts bright white and blue, it's blood red as wine.  Then the hawk was gone in a flurry of feathers and spatter.  I remember these things because my mind wants me to come to some conclusion about them.  But what conclusion?  I have no idea.  What does the image of the hummingbirds and the eagle tell me about anything?  Why does it stick to my memory other than the strangeness of the two birds?  

I'm not sure...I only know that there was something frightening about the slowness of the eagle's flight... something unsettling, and something... exhilarating about the hummingbirds.  Also, I know that the Eagle was scanning for carrion and the hummingbirds were drinking sugar water, but that is about as far as I wish to deconstruct the image right now. The moments lesson, or conclusion will be revealed in it's own good time.  Or at least I can always hope.  

Perhaps someday, I will return to it.  Maybe when I am lying in a hospital bed and I will remember watching "hummingbird TV" and I will write a fine, short little poem, which will unlock the little lesson that my mind tried to capture on that cold spring evening, wrapped in a blanket drinking my grape juice.  

Until then I will have to be satisfied with this: 

After the rain

      a little bit of sun

and a spider

           repairing her web. 

jhs--- Sitka, AK 

The Mostly Myth of the Alaskan Vet

Years ago US News and World Report ran a story about a group of Alaskan Veterans living near Kenai.  The slant of the story was that these were men "living on the edge".  The photographs showed them standing next to their old outhouses, rather than showing their comfortable, modern houses that they had built and moved into, portraying the outhouse as their "rustic cabin".   The men had spoken to the magazine because they were having trouble receiving some of their promised services but not because they were anxious to be portrayed as gun tote'n mountain men.  

At one time, I wanted to write a novel that involved an encampment of these archetypal "wild men veterans"  I started my research and I was disappointed to find that in my experience almost all of the combat vets I found had no real interest in "living in the bush with a bunch of other guys" ever again.  Been there. Done that. No thank you.  All the combat vets I spoke with were either well adjusted, or were dealing with their problems with the courage and persistence that they had shown in their lives that took them on the path to serve their country. Yes they had PTSD and yes they had problems but they dealt with them with the same courage they showed in the field.  No sign of the crazy veteran.   I gave up on that novel, I was chasing an empty cliche and I took what I learned about the real people I had met and I folded it into my stories.   

More war's came.  I stayed working in crime.  I noticed another phenomenon.  Many of the men I came in contact with  (always men) usually homeless, usually with a history of PTSD, alcoholism, assaults, and incarcerations,  these men told me of proud histories as combat veterans.  But here is the sad part, at least fifty percent of the men I have done complete backgrounds on it turns out they have either never served in the military at all, or they served for a short time and never served in combat.  Simply put, it is better to be a homeless hero than simply homeless and mentally ill. It makes sense after I found the third or fourth man like this. 

But I never judge until I dig out the evidence for certain.  When an old man who was a well known "public inebriate" passed away couple of years ago, the Air Force sent a small metal coffin the same color and material as a file cabinet.  The color guard from the American Legion, a police officer came, a social worker, three friends.  I read a poem by Carl Sandberg.  The coffin seemed tiny, under the gray sky. Raindrops bounced off the top off the metal box.

This old man was a client he served in the Air Force during Viet Nam.  He was a ladies man and a bartender, a good storyteller.  He never complained, and he never blamed his troubles on anyone else.   

All of this is to say that the Alaska veteran, is no wilder or more messed up than anyone else.  Yes there are wild people in Alaska, shy people who like to keep to themselves and some of them may have served their country.  All that says is that Alaska is big enough for shy people to disappear into.

Alaskan Vets like others, served bravely, miss their friends, deal with their problems, and deserve our help when they need it.  They also deserve their privacy, for bravery sometimes comes with baggage.

Respect to them, always.

End the wars.  

Morning fog and smoke

wilting rhododendron buds:

lazy bees, buzzing. 

jhs---Sitka, AK 

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