One Of A Kind

High clouds, no rain. The grass is long and wet. Pink salmon are pushing up the rivers and dying along the banks.  The alder trees are beginning to turn, and a few leafs are falling across the lawn.  The paving project in town continues and seems to be coming to an end for the season.  People making those Davis-Bacon Wages are penciling out their vacation plans.  Jan and I took a trip to Seattle to go to a surprise birthday party for my Sister Jane in Seattle. 

Surprise parties can be a dicy deal but this one worked out perfectly.  My sister was whole heartedly surprised and delighted.  It was a beautiful evening with a gorgeous sunset overlooking the city.  There was a lit lawn for lawn bowling as the sun set and the full moon rose.  We all dressed in white, and laughed, played the game and visited and shared stories about my sister.  It was a lovely time and I thought of the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The line perfectly launches that novel but too many people hang on to that line as some kind of truism, when it quite obviously is not. 

That all happiness is chipped from a monolithic block of sameness does have some superficial believability at first, particularly in the twentieth century American mind: the Cleavers and the Brady Bunch come rushing to mind: the American Velveeta family.  But going back to Leo Tolstoy for a moment, he was beginning a thousand page novel not only about the interconnecting relationships of family members, he had his sights set on the realistic description of class, gender, religion and society of his teetering Mother Russia.  His country was an unhappy family and it had better be interesting in it's own special way or he was in big trouble right there at the beginning of that fat boy. 

But going back even further, unhappiness is more interesting than happiness.  Satan beats out God as a character every time.  The character of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost helps to form the mold for the modern detective hero.  The fallen angel...and the tarnished knight.  Without the fallen angel... without Satan falling from heaven and brooding at his fall from grace, there would be no McNulty in The Wire, no Cecil Younger.  

Anyway... all our interest in unhappiness tells us really, is that most of us start out happy.  Happiness begins as our default setting no matter how screwed up our family life was, we came out of the womb and somebody held us and we weren't eaten by wolves.  

When we were held we first looked up and we were happy.  We couldn't differentiate between ourselves and the person holding us.  We couldn't differentiate between ourselves and the food that came into our bodies.  As long as we didn't starve, the food was good.  When it came into our mouths and we weren't in pain everything was good. Then we developed a little more and and everything goes to shit... but there for a good long developmental moment it's just us, the world, everything: Good.  That's why unhappiness seems so interesting.  Unhappiness is the first spice. 

And it is, don't get me wrong.  But happiness is interesting too.  (Of course you are free here to comment that only a depressive would take time out of his day to make a big deal that happiness is interesting... duly noted)  But I was thinking about this fact .... the fact of interesting happiness while at my sister Jane's seventieth birthday party.  Not all of my family could make it.  My oldest sister from California could not make it because of preparations for her granddaughters bat mitzvah which is happening this weekend.  

I am the youngest if five, if my sister, her children and spouses had attended, just in my family you would find, people of various income levels from the unemployed and living with their parents to the multi millionaires.  There are gay people and straight people.  There is a Filipino woman, and people of Irish, Welsh, German, French and many many other Heritages. There are Jews, and Buddhists, Christians, agnostics and the youthful undeclared.  There are engineers, and a great many teachers, lawyers, a Doctor, TV producers, scriptwriters, poets, novelist, one person who was in this years Time Magazine as one of the Top 100, there is a boy who is 6' 1" at 14 , and a girl who loves candy.  I believe all of them are either Democrats or Independents.

The one thing that I think makes them interesting to me is that they love to laugh and they are all kind and generous.  Not just kind to each other, but kind to others.  They unfailingly raise money for good causes, but more than that they give things to people in need.  Nephews have given houses over to friends in need. Children have bought houses for parents.  Siblings, open their house to troubled youth who need a place to live and finish the school year.  Or they sponsor refuges and have them into their home and find them places to live and keep a watch on them.  And no... these are people with trouble of there own as well... you can look at this family of mine and see hardship.  The sister we were celebrating had almost died of a stroke  40 years ago, and we all bless this day we cam be with her now.  Two of the others at this full moon party have cancer now, yet they joke and bicker and fight over politics and family.  One nephew works for a public interest law firm and is beating his head against the wall on a class action law suit representing prisoners who are mistreated in jail.  He sufferers depression that runs in our clan and he rolls in the gloom when the judge decides against "his prisoners."  While my other nephew works is an executive of a multi billion dollar a year corporation that gives free health care and education to all  it's employees and talks of working side by side with the servers in the stores and seeing how hard they work.

Not all happy families are alike, I can't imagine another one quite like mine.  Yes, they are easy to reduce to cultural stereotype.  My father was a clerk in Des Moines, Iowa and he worked for the Phone Company for 48 years, back when people did that.  I asked him in 1970, if we were rich, and he said, "I will always work for wages. In America you'll never get rich working for wages, but if you work hard, you have everything you need."  He believed that.  It's not true anymore.  Not for everyone.   A lot of the energy my good and interesting family has goes back into realizing that modest principle he expressed. 

My sister's kids had arranged the surprise party, and we were told to wear white.  Jan and I went to Goodwill and I bought some white pants that afternoon. As the bone white moon rose over the Cascade Mountains I watched all the children and old people dance across the close cropped lawn I was still amazed at how happy and loving my family was.  There was not an ounce of nervous undercurrent or worry,  Not a whisper of "what will she say" or "My God...what is he going to do this time?"  There was only laughter and hugging and joking.  

No, we are not perfect by any means,  we have mental illness, and alcoholism, and deeply different opinions on things, and maybe the party didn't last long enough for the bad behavior to come out, I'll grant you that. But allow me this near perfect memory tonight:  That  we are rich because we love each other, and this... for the time being keeps us out from under the wheels of any Russian locomotive coming our way. 

Silver evening sky

the beginning of autumn.

I reach out for you.  

jhs---Sitka 

The Rhythm of My Days

A fine sunny day of the weekend and then a wet one.  The Fireweed have gone to seed, so on the sunny day their down drifted in the gin-clear air like a sortie of fairies.  Today the rain and fog have moved in and the clouds have come down hard to the waterline.  The cruise ship disappears into the mist within seconds of  leaving the dock.

I have a trial to prepare for, witness travel to arrange, last minute interviews to take care of for work.  This will be taking up the first priority at the days move closer to the first week of September.  If I have time, at night I will work on several book reviews that need to be done.  Most of my career I've written behind my day job as an investigator.  One five year stretch I was lucky enough to stay home and take care of Finn and "Just Write".  It seems so indulgent now, sitting at a desk and typing out my opinion of a book, or writing out my own tale.  

When trials come now, I usually vomit on the morning of the first and second day. That's the tension level.  Now I get rejection letters, I may be disappointed but I'm not all that worried.  With cases, I have other peoples lives in my hands.  This is the problem.  This is what brings on the sleepless nights.  The man sitting in jail who says,  "I have put my faith in you."  

Oh Lord.  Just thinking about it makes my stomach hurt.  When young writers come to me and are angst-y about their careers and their manuscripts I am understanding... there was a time in my life that I thought I was absolutely going to die if I didn't get published, but... time passed... and I didn't.  Then I threw a hail Mary pass and spent seven years writing a book and it did get published and it won some awards and got good reviews.  In other words, I stuck it out and got lucky.  Like with most things, relationships, jobs, you find the one you have a good feeling about... you stick with it and hope you get lucky.  Hope your education gave you good judgement.    Anyway... angst comes with the territory but its like my Native friends say writers problems are White People problems.  With young writers I often ask... have you been arrested?  Do you need bail money?  Anybody dead, or disfigured?  No... you are good to go.

This week I read Willy Vlautin's  Lean On Pete  which is a beautiful book written in the first person from the point of view of a fifteen year old boy named Charley, who moves with his father to Portland, Oregon and gets a job working on the "backside" of the rundown racetrack there.  He befriends a broken-down race horse named Lean on Pete.  If this sounds like the set up for a Disney feel-good-triumph-over-adversity tale then prepare for a hard road before you get there.  Such sad things happen to Charlie that, at one point I thought,  "This Willy Vlautin is one hard hearted son of a bitch. He is likely to do anything before I finish this book."  I like that quality in a writer.  He really might do anything.  

The language is spare, and precise.  It never gets artful or preachy because of the choices Charley makes, only because of the choices fate makes. The rides that Charley gets when he is hitch hiking, are crazy in only the way that certain rides can be crazy.  This makes sense in the book and becomes beautiful, and cannot be laid at the feet of the kid.  The Characters are indelible and real because Vlautin knows how to pull the telling detail out and put it front and center into his main characters vision.  Some have compared his style to Raymond Carver but Carver had a alcoholic's dread at the center of his world. Here, at least Vlautin is much bigger hearted.  Charley knows how to love, and he has a compass.  

Of course it is not all about the style or lit for me.  What is it about horses?  I still dream of them.  The heft of them and their gate underneath me.  Of course D.H. Lawrence and every freshman paper talks about their sexual imagery... and I get that...domination of the animal urge and all that.  But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and a horse is just an animal companion. What I first liked about horses was their size relative to mine and their heart beat right at my ear level.  Without any gear at all and without too much trouble I could swing up on their back and bounce around on them until they didn't want me there and I pretty much would plop off,  There was a natural communication.  Then with some gear the communication became more complex and direct, knee pressure, hand pressure, voice and hands on the reins.   We became partners working together, chasing cows, or horses.  Pulling a pack string up a mountain.  It was the rhythm of my days and months of summer and fall, until I came to Alaska.  So I won't pretend that some of my appreciation for this book wasn't sentimental.  But truth be told there wasn't much riding or horse handling in this book.  It's not a book about horsemanship.  It's more about the abuse of horses on these two bit tracks, in an interesting nether world that most of us never see.  

Dell,  the "trainer" is a Bill Sykes character straight out of Dickens, mistreating the orphans under his care and sending those who don't produce down the road to Mexico.  He is lurid, but not to the point of caricature because we've all come close to meeting one of his kind in bars or in Tow yards or junk yards.  Anywhere men are looking to make something out of nothing.  He's there with a spit cup and a six pack.  A good old boy, with a good idea and a proposition for you.   I love these characters in books too.  

Lean on Pete is a wonderful book, but it's probably not for everybody.  It's hell for sad almost three quarters of the way through and even the happy ending isn't all that happy by Hollywood standards but it satisfied me completely.

This wasn't a review by the way.  I just let my thoughts get away from me.  I better get back to it and to the dishes.  

Autumn... 

George Jones on the radio

and a rusty spring 

on the screen door.

jhs---Sitka

After The Death of A Funny Man

A break in the two weeks of rain, but the clouds remain. If the grass dries out I will cut it. A few yellow dandelions have spouted in the meadow our yard has become and the fireweed blossoms are retreating back down their stems, by next week they will have started to go to seed. 

Our son,who  is a stand up comedian in Los Angeles called several times this week and we talked about the death of the funny man.  Most of his friends were shaken up as was he.  He has inherited the unipolar depression from me and he is aware of its effects and outriders.  About the suicide of the comedian he said, "It came home to everyone that no amount of fame can keep the darkness at bay.  I mean, just imagine, everywhere he went almost everyone must have smiled,"  

We talked about his depression, he exercises and he takes great comfort in his friends and performing.  He knows, that when the darkness comes the smiles of others, and the laughter and compliments cannot reach you, or worse, they can feel like fuel for a self loathing flame.  "How do you suppose it happened for him, Pop?" he asked me,  "I don't know, they said he had addiction problems, maybe he had been drinking and got far away from his sensible self, his wise and protective self."  This is what we do when we gossip about others, we talk about ourselves.  This is what the tabloids are all about.  I asked about Finn's drinking, and he asked about mine.  "I'm good," I told him which was true,  I'm at my usual two ounces a week.  "but I'm lucky, you know, I ruined by guts when I was young I can't drink like I used to without getting sick.  You young guys have more stamina, and more options."  He knows what I'm talking about: L.A.  drugs.  When he was child I was always telling him not to smoke crack.  Mostly as a joke.  Now... he's a comedian in LA. But I don't say anything. 

"I'm good, Dad,"  he says, and I believe him. He's much smarter than I was at his age. Much more wise.

One of my favorite William Stafford Poems is: A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep. 

I've always been glad that Stafford included "maybe" in his list of declarative statements at the end of the poem, for that is right where I most often live. My son and I also live in the shade often times, the shade of that great darkness, and although I don't know for sure, I bet the funny man did too, that is what drew people to him, his ability to break both ways and go to his extremes.  It was his occupational hazard.  

Today the occupation of making people read your thoughts, or laugh seems worth it, the darkness and the light are in balance as the sun shines and the dandelions  bloom on the long green grass.  A friend sent me a cd of a fantastic band from Portland called Richmond Fontaine,  their singer song writer is Willy Vlautin who has written some novels and I'm half way through one called Lean On Pete .  I love the songs  and I love the novel about a boy and a broke down race horse on  the small time circuit.  I wrote a friend down south that this was the band and the writer I had been waiting for all my life and to check him out.  He did and he wrote me back,  he said,  "yeah... they are good, they make me feel like I've been sitting in the rain for a couple of weeks.  I think you should get out of town."  

Yes... the darkness around us is deep.  But... I have not let go of the tail of the elephant in front of me: My son, my buddy, Willy Valutin, William Stafford, Robbin Williams are all still, part of the parade of our mutual life... while we still get to have it. 

A murder of crows

on the morning low tide beach

laughing, right out loud. 

jhs--- Sitka, Ak 

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