The Land Of The Ends And Beginnings

Squalls coming through hard: rain beating down on the mud and bouncing back towards the sky,  then slumping into puddles to reflect some sunshine.  Halloween has come and gone with the sugar buzz and the kids walking down the middle of the street with their buckets of candy.

This is the second blog about my California trip.  I have been reading The Guns Of August  about the beginning of World War I and there is something about the author's famous and beautiful first paragraph that keeps coming back to me as I think about California.  Here is the opening of the Guns of August, 

"So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of  1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration.  In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun.  After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highness's, seven queens-- four dowager and three regnants--- and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries.  Together they represented seventy nations in the great assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and of its kind the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace,but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again."

The paragraph captures the beginning of the end of the era of royal imperialism.  The world of interconnected families which controlled the world financial holdings was about to come mired down in the trenches of Flanders, then into the ridiculous looting of the German economy and the revolutions of the east and west rolling into the greatest world wide killing events of the twentieth century.

Such a beautiful paragraph. The splendor of the age of Royalty and the hint of sentimentality over its coming to an end.  So, what in the heck does this have to do with Los Angeles?  Well... I told you I this was about the light of the world I saw down there, and so it is.  I was lucky to see the beautiful world of Hollywood, and some of the beautiful people.  And they are beautiful, and smart.  My country mouse family were comped night in a beautiful Spa in Santa Barbara.  Everywhere the eye fell were flowers in bloom: Bougainvillea, and Hyacinth. Lovely birds which have long since disappeared from Alaska.  Even in time of drought sounds of water running though limestone run ways. This part of my family makes television shows and they are quite successful.  They are some of the  women in the business of creating our national dream worlds.  Our national secrete companions, and I was lucky to see them at their charming ease. 

My niece who is a dear, smart woman and incredibly savvy writes about sex and dread in the modern world, and quite well as far as I can see.  She also writes about pop culture which is often the subtext of everything in Hollywood.  On her birthday evening  wore an incredible gown and had undergone some sort of skin scrub at the spa.  When I hugged her her cheek was a firm and soft as an athletic baby.  Her phone buzzed and her assistant hovered.  She was off to the airport early in the morning after her birthday for the wrap party for only one of her TV series.  

Is it just me or is Popular American Culture always at the end of an era?  The conservatives always believe we are at the end of the liberal disastrous experiment begun by FDR.  The liberals believe we are at the end of the disastrous, profligate lifestyle as evidence by, you name it: ...  global warming, cheap oil, ocean acidification. "This is the END, my only friend... the end." The Doors sang..   and someday they will be right.

 And Hollywood is ready.  Hollywood writes all the dreams, produced from every ounce of anxiety created from the certainty of this.  Dream makers, love the kings and they love royalty and have a secrete sentimentality in which they try to recreate it.  For as Shakespeare knew, Kings and Queens were responsible in the drama of their country's plight.  They fell on the sword in the final act. The story teller needed them to do that  and they also need the war. 

In our national literature Huck Finn went west. Nick Carraway went west, even the actual man Wavonka the creator of the Medicine Shirt Dance, sparked the uprising at Wounded Knee ended up as an actor in Hollywood silent films.  Faulkner, Hammet, Fitzgerald, Chandler, all worked here.  When old worlds end you come to Hollywood, to create the apocalyptic songs of warning and live the life of the lotus eaters.  "If it be the one place that we, the inconstant ones are consistently homesick for it is chiefly because it dissolves in water," as Auden said of the dissolute ruins of Capri.  

Not that Hollywood is a ruin.  Far from it, it is vibrant and energetic where hard working people get paid with more work.

So, what am I saying?  I'm saying if I were a different man, younger and more attuned to the stories of dialogue, and character development.  I would do what ever it took to be a television writer right now.  We are teetering on the brink of something, this is a feeling I came away with from being in LA, there is very little water and there are so many, many people and cars that it feels like some kind of change is in the wind... and all the dark clouds and lives tearing asunder on television seem to be warning us of something.

And that little box is reaching people right now and people are telling amazing stories through it:   The Wire, Treme, Orange is the New Black,  Girlfriends Guide to Divorce,,,, (perhaps though I haven't seen it.)  Anyway... If I were a young man or woman I would try and get get into that racket.  There are smart people there, who are moving hearts and minds, they capturing the fears of the era,  and by doing so they give us the only warning signs to what may lay ahead, which is all The Guns Of August ever tried to do, there was the end of kings... we are living in our own end of kings and queens and these writers and story makers are recreating the dreams that will tell us something about our fears.... and in payment these makers get to live by the sea where, apparently the flowers bloom all year round, and the birds sing by your door forever. 

Hollywood.  A person could do worse at the end of the world. 

Slick, silver clouds

spraying the hard rain to earth

like tears, like snow.... almost. 

jhs...Sitka

What Comes To This Tree?

It's a beautiful Fall day in Sitka.  Distinct puffy clouds as if they were drawn by cartoonists in a blue, blue sky.  The wind off the ocean is not menacing, but gentle.  Yesterday people were working on their costumes for the big dance and there was a run on fabric tape and cheap hair dye at the five and dime store.  How could the air smell like apples if there are no apples on the trees?  It must be my imagination.  

Yesterday was Pablo Picasso's birthday but no one went as him to the Stardust Ball.  I have a favorite quote of his;  once, someone asked him why Paris was the center of the art world back in the early twentieth Century and he said, rather obscurely, "The Orange naturally comes to the Orange tree,  never the Apple."   I love that.  I don't know why.  

Last weekend Jan and I made a trip to Los Angeles to visit young Finn Straley.  This was Jan's birthday wish for herself, to see her son and watch him perform and to go to a health spa and get out of town for a bit.  My gift to her was to calmly, and uncomplainingly, go along and do the driving.

Living in Alaska, it is easy to get haughty about places like L.A.  People get damn near snobbish and rude about it, when Finn is back here and he tells people he lives there he is met with distain and sour faces.  More than that, what is irksome to him now, he has told me, is a sense of outright moral superiority of some Alaskans who feel that just because they have gutted a few fish and have slept out twice in a tent, they have been anointed by the nature Gods to look down now on all urban people who drive cars.  I have to say that was his father off and on during his growing up I'm sure.

So, I'd like to write a bit of a cautious apology to Los Angeles here.  I'm going to do it in two parts, because I felt like I really did see two parts of the city: the light and the dark.  I'll start with the dark, of course, because that's what always draws me and it's what I love best, or at least what I'm used to. 

Dumped at the airport... and we pick up a brand new rental car.  This I always like: some sparkling new Japanese marvel full size that costs us only $140. for five days.  It is nicer than any car we have ever owned.  Jan sits with her iphone and navigates.  I have taken a half a dose more of my anxiety medication on the plane and I am mellow but sharp,  No alcohol, only caffeine drinks on board.  I have the perfect blend running through my bloodstream.  The first thing I always notice about diving in LA as opposed to Seattle is... they really thought about this road design...  It is a car culture from the ground up.  Okay, there are things not to like about that but if you have to drive.... which you do... it's nice that streets flow into one another and most of them have signs that tell you ahead of time..   Driving.  First thing to remember, keep the fuck up and make up your mind or don't.  Speed Limits are apparently advisory for a time in the distant past... unless there is a police car in the area.  If you miss the exit don't get in a snit.  You are on an adventure.  On this trip particularly... the birthday girl is to be happy at all times, and that it the prime directive.  That's easy enough for me.   The chemical balance is cool.  The mock orange smell in the air mixes with exhaust is tonic, fried food, and salt air,  I don't miss any exits.  No one honks.  I'm driving like a pro.  Towards our first destination my dyslexic brain has trouble sorting out the separation from 110 and 101.  Totally my fault and not the navigator's.  She is an angel and when I miss the exit she doesn't get mad and start one of those domestic blaming whisper tension explosion fights.   We just pull off into Chinatown and she resets the iPhone.  (yeah I love that now too) and I wander through the fried fat dark streets to find a way to double back. I cut back up and under.

We look to the left and there,as if a hallucination, in the middle of Chinatown is a Coyote. Not running but standing on a piece of dusty ground surrounded by concrete.  It is panting.  Looking very scruffy.  It may be injured.  I cannot tell.  Panting and looking straight ahead.  I make my signal and turn right, and leave the wild animal there in the dark.  Then I turn onto Sunset.  

Later I learn that because of the severe drought the coyotes are being drawn closer and closer into the City, looking for water and food.  More are getting hit by cars.  More are eating small dogs and pet cats.

When we get to the bed and breakfast we have rented Finn and his sweetheart Emily are there and they have made dinner for us:  Chicken and humus and flatbread.  It is a sweet homecoming.  

My sister, Mary who has lived in LA more than fifty years has always said that LA is a much nicer place to live than it is to visit and I'm beginning to see how that can be.  Finn and Emily have a wonderful little apartment built in the thirties: walk up to the second floor on black and white old tile floors, a tiny studio, in an old Armenian section of town.  They sometimes take public transportation, sometimes they take these internet "Lifts" I don't quite understand. They walk a lot and they drive.  Their food bill is about a quarter of what Jan and mine is here in Sitka and they eat better food, except for our seafood.  They have an extraordinary coterie of talented friends.  

Finn's first gig we saw was in a converted garage turned bakery in Pasadena.  The audience was largely suburban looking college folks and their families.  Seven comics on the bill.  Two black, Three woman, one other white man,  Finn was the only straight white man on the bill,  which he said he enjoyed because there "are so many straight white men in comedy, my material had a chance to stand out a little bit tonight."  Which, in itself I thought was kind of funny. One of the women was a Christian High School teacher and I thought she had an outstanding set.  

The other gig was in the "Corner Bar" in Burbank which was classic booths and round tables bar with lurid David Lynch red lighting on the stage and hipsters in the audience and three Armenian gangsters sitting at the bar in leather jackets not laughing at a word.  It was wild and hysterical with the last, more seasoned comic of the night hectoring the gangsters until she finally got them to laugh by resorting to direct confrontation and dick jokes.    I learned a tremendous amount about getting people to laugh by watching Finn and his cohorts last weekend.  

Mostly what I learned was diversity isn't something that you can just talk about.  You have to go out and find it.  Finn has found it.  What he wanted when he left Sitka, was the Orange he tasted in his comedy albums, in the TV shows and in the books he read in Sitka.  He wanted to meet these people and he wanted to see it for himself.  Just as Picasso knew when he went to Paris and saw Manet's paintings, and Gauguin's.  

After the late night gig with the Armenian Gangsters we went to an all night Pizzeria on Sunset, near a rock and roll club.  The Pizza was exquisite.  Jan and I had two pieces.  It was one thirty in the morning and way later than we were used to being up but we were all happy from all the laughing we had done.  A guy walked in with a pompadour and a leather jacket, looking to me like a character out of a Tom Waits song, and he nods at Finn, "Hey man."  and he nods back, and a couple of minutes later it happens again with a skinny guy in a thrift store plaid coat.  "Who are these guys?"  I ask Finn, and he says,  "Comics,  I've seen their sets around town." 

Coyotes naturally come in from the dessert.   Tricksters, looking for Oranges I suppose.  It's a beautiful and fragrant town, if you can avoid getting hit by a car.  Our son has found another place where he belongs. I sat up and noticed when he said to the audience,  "I'm from Alaska...originally,"  it was the first time I had heard him say that,  "Originally"...    That's what people from Los Angeles say, and it came naturally to him.  It stabbed my heart a little. 

Halloween Party

is over now, your costume

has a hangover.                            

jhs..... Sitka

The Path Of Light

High Clouds in Chatham Straits, calm seas.  On board the State ferry Taku, Jan and my favorite form of transportation.  We have traveled on it so many times the Purser asks me for 500 words of my next book before he will give me a key to a stateroom, and Mary, the bartender will embrace us on the street if she sees us.  If I were an eccentric billionaire I would travel by no other means than horse, ship and train.  I would never leave the surface of the earth.  

I will save my love of terrestrial travel, specifically the Taku for another entry. I’m returning home, the round about way from Fairbanks.  

I volunteer as a board member for the University of Alaska Press and we meet once a year, always in Fairbanks where the press is headquartered.  Fairbanks can give a lot of impressions to a casual visitor.  I first visited there in the eighties in the wintertime working on a case.  In the nineties we lived there for a year when Jan was going to graduate school.  Just dropping in and working cases, I had no ties to the University community or to any real functional community.  I went into my first crack house in Fairbanks: broken pipes, a barely functioning electric heater, no furniture, people laid out on the floor in blankets,  I remember the large burn marks on the rugs.  I had a subpoena to deliver.  I dropped it on a heap of blankets with a person underneath and left.  Ice fog: the frozen exhaust of cars hanging in the lowest parts of town.  I remember a stabbing of a homeless man on 4th Avenue in front of a bar, and how the blood spatter lay like ribbon dry on the sidewalk in the photographs taken in the sub zero cold.  I remember driving my rental and spilling my notes and making the rookie mistake of putting the keys in my mouth before bending down and picking them up and the pain of them sticking to my skin.  

But when we lived there we saw the side of a community life.  We had a toddler and everyone offered help with whatever we needed.  When going to parties if Jan was carrying the baby more than a block in the winter a stranger would stop and ask if she needed a ride.  This is a place where people look out for one another. 

Then there is the extraordinary beauty.  I’m sixty one years old and it keeps knocking me out.  I love southeastern, but I do feel claustrophobic at times: crowded in by mountains, and clouds, rainfall like a curtain pulled in front of the seascape for weeks on end.   Walking out of a building on the ridge of the University of Alaska this weekend I had that sensation akin to that first time I walked through the tunnel in Yankee stadium and out into the field and felt the exhilaration of space… but expanded to the dimensions of the planet.  Great battle cruiser clouds casting shadows on the flat plane of the earth,  meandering rivers,  and a distant horizon that seemed to hold layers of clouds and weather to come.  Then there are the subtleties of birch trees and the black pine, and the rolling hills that appear to welcome you to walk or ski upon their backs, as opposed to our mountains that stand like jagged challenges.   

The Institution of the University in Fairbanks is also remarkable.  Not enough is said about what a gathering of great minds and generous souls are gathered in all the campuses of the UA system.  Sure.  I know.  We can complain.  But when we complain mostly we complain because we want more of it.  We want more and we want it now.   Every time I walk into the University and visit with the people there I learn something, from the other people on the Press board, from the staff. from the friends I know in the community.  There is a wind that blows in popular culture that is afraid of the University community, thinking that it is “elite” and somehow “against the populous” .   This could not be further from the truth…. and I’m saying this as a writer who did not come from a writing program.  The University is a place where “the populous” comes to find and take joy in exploring the deeper complexities of the truth.  And in the case of Fairbanks: take saunas and watch their body hair freeze, river raft in the summer, watch incredible aurora, while gliding along on skis.  discover remarkable painters of birch trees, and poets of the rolling hills,  delve into the actual data of global warming,  witness a rocket launch, and now be a part of remarkable northern press that publishes valuable northern science and literature.  

When I arrived in Fairbanks on this trip it was almost one in the morning.  I got a cab ride from a man who had been born in Trinidad.  He was dark skinned black and his accent was lilting and musical.  His cab was a late model pick up truck and I sat in the front seat.  I talked a bit about Sitka and I asked him when he arrived in Fairbanks,  and he said fourteen years ago.  He said he never intended to stay but..  “you know, how it goes,  sometimes things, they just happen that way.”  

“Yes,”  I said,  “I do know,”  and we drove toward the hotel where I would spend two nights.  We drove through the huge black subarctic night, with the thin, pointy trees jabbing up at the stars.  I asked the driver questions just so I could hear his lovely voice as we drove onward chasing the cones of light his headlights threw and I wished we could have driven on, through the snow and the night, straight on to the morning when the top of the world would begin to shine. 

One fat Merganser 

flapping hard from wave to wave 

finally finds the air. 

                    jhs—-M.V. Taku

Ah, The Drug Life!

The storm has moved through and leaves are scattered on the lawn.  The apple tree is a bit more ragged and the berry patch with the fireweed stems looked as if it has had its hair mussed up a bit.  Water has pooled up under the eves and will dry up eventually.  Our son is flying up from Los Angeles to do a 20 minute comedy set for an old friend running for reelection to the State House and Jan is upstairs putting sheets on his bed and dusting his room. Happy.  Happy, thinking of him back among his books, cds, toys and records.  

There have been a series of drug arrests and I've been thinking a lot about the drug life here in our little town.  Marijuana has always been around and probably always will, perhaps legally depending on a upcoming vote.  Flake cocaine was quite popular in the fishing fleet back in the eighties and nineties, and I'm sure it can still be had.  But now it appears to be methamphetamine and heroin that is all the rage in the criminal "underworld".  Why?  I'm not sure.  Some folks used to manufacture it locally and maybe some still do.  I don't know.  But once the government  regulated some of the makings, and manufacturers of things like, strike pads on matchboxes got hip to the fact that they didn't have to use easily rendered potassium on those boxes...and pharmacists started reporting any time anyone bought more than one package of cold medicine at a time, it became more difficult to make meth in on the back deck of your boat or in your trailer house.  So the Mexican Drug cartels stepped up and started supplying as much ready made product as anyone wanted. 

Now I consider myself open minded, so lets do the pros and cons of using methamphetamine:  

Pros:  an exhilarating high, that can often lift you out of your depressed and lethargic state to an energized kind of euphoria,  if taken while having sex it can heighten the experience of orgasm. It's relatively cheap which is good because it's almost instantly addictive, Like... "wow... that was interesting sensation... Gee, I think I want some more of that... RIGHT FUCKING NOW!"  

Cons: It's essentially an caustic acid that produces that high by eating your brain and turning you into a  scab-encrusted zombie.

Ok... Maybe I'm not so open minded about meth. I don't know any hipster meth users.  The people I see, don't have any brain cells to spare in the first place.  They don't have any money or any more strikes left or probation time to spare fucking around with this chemical. They are going to forever jail and their kids are going to strangers. Their trailers turn into junk yard slums of over flowing ash tray, beer bottle dirty cereal bowl trash heaps, where little boys cower in dark rooms to play video game where they walk through dungeons and shoot people and the little girls sit in front of TV's and sing the songs to Frozen over and over and over, while grown men they don't know slap their mothers and pass out in heaps of Pizza boxes.

 In our town there are old posters in every store with the photo of a of a woman who went missing two Octobers ago, and there is a ten thousand dollar reward for any news of her where a bouts.  I still have a picture of her on my phone.  I was with her in jail once asking  if she wanted to try to go into treatment.  She said she didn't need treatment.  I took her picture and showed it to her, "Look at yourself, you are a skeleton. When you get better.  I'm going to show this to you and you won't believe you ever let yourself sink this far down." and she laughed at me.  Soon after she was out of jail and the permanent fund checks had come out.  She had about $3000. in cash to spend and she disappeared without a trace.  She never got better.  There has been a lot of talk about what happened to her.  Most of it that has come to me is drug talk from snitches who want something bad... for the worst thing about the drug culture is that everybody lies so much, and so often, that the truth has nothing to stand out against. 

And the Ocean around Sitka is deep.  

The drug life in our island town is small and crowded. The junkies can't get far enough away from their children.  Generations of users stay in the same trailer, and the rain rattles down all day and all night.  After a day of smoking Meth, the adults will sometimes inject each other with heroin, after they turn off the movies and tell the kids to go to sleep. So, the last one nods off with a belt or rubber tubing still around her arm, and the the chaos of thee day gives way finally to the steady sound of the rain on the trailer roof.

I am not normally an anti-drug crusader. Nancy Regan's "Just Say No" campaign as well intended as it may have been was as ineffective as the War On Drugs.  There are no easy answers that fits all people but somehow reality, the clear eyed reality of life for a sober person of limited means in our town has to be better than the narcotized life.  Making that happen, maintaing that clarity, is not so easy as any slogan or threat would have you believe. 

The mildew smell of the wet carpets creeps all around the sleeping bodies and the acrid smell of the cigarettes, and the junk, mixed with, spilled coffee and dirty socks wafting through the trailer, and the boys wake up to turn on their violent games to grab their controllers, and the girls flip on "Frozen" one more time and start singing,  "Let It Go.... Let It Go" very softly from their rooms. 

The storm passes through

with lingering, fat sunsets

as red as lipstick.

jhs---Sitka

A Poet of Pain And Noise

A walloping storm from the southwest this Sunday.  Actually wind seemed to come from every direction at once but the waves rolled from the southwest. Strange blasts of warm air were followed by cool air and leaves swirled in cyclonic funnels across the road.  In the grocery store alder leaves scattered across the floor by the big front doors even though there are no alders within about a hundred yards.  Twenty foot seas off-shore building up maybe bigger and Jan is planning a trip to Prince William Sound to find Humpback Whales and the little fish they are feeding on.  Luckily she tells me she is on a big boat that will seek out the calmer seas. 

Fall time coming and lots of guys are getting their jail time done.  Lots of sad stories this time of year.  I’ve heard some of them before and some of them make me feel hard hearted.  Some men use their imagination and their ability to tell stories to slide along in life.  They play on peoples sympathy.  We’ve all run into the type.  But then there are some people that have such genuinely hard stories in life, such genuine pain that it is almost impossible not to wince when listening.  I spoke with a man  whose family “gave him away” when he was ten years old when his eleven year old brother died.  He bounced from foster home to foster home until he was thirteen then he took to the road. When he was 19 he took a gun and put it to his chest and pulled the trigger and somehow he survived.  I was able to confirm most of this through records and the rest from the scar when he lifted his shirt. He is not a bad man, not in the way that you would imagine,  not Cormac McCarthy material.  He’s lost in this world.  He tells me that he doesn't want extraordinary things: he wants a steady job, the love of a woman, freedom to smell the turn of the seasons, and to be outside when he wants.  But those things elude him, because he drinks and fights, and can’t save the little money he makes.  He is not smart about things, in the way of civilized men.  As an old boat skipper I know would say, “He’s a neck down unit,”  Born to a world of pain, until he finds someone to lead him in a new direction.

Meeting him made me think of an amazing book I read recently by John Darnielle, called Wolf in a White Van .  I’ve written a regular review of the book and I’ve tried to place it in several papers without any luck.  Maybe I set my sights to high.  Maybe they didn't publish my review because he is a rock star and I’m a fan of his band.  Or maybe they didn't publish my review because he blurbed my novel Cold Storage, Alaska  and they thought it was too much of a prid pro quo deal.  But I don’t think that’s it either.  As far as the prid pro quo… It’s not like we are friends or anything.  I’ve never even met the guy.  I kind of stalked him on line and I used my secrete powers to find his address and I sent the manuscript cold and he read it and blurbed it out of the goodness of his heart.  He got nothing out of it.  Hell,  Wolf In A White Van  has already been shortlisted for a National Book award so there is nothing I can do for HIM.   And as far as being a fan of his band…. It was made clear to me when Jan and I went to his San Francisco gig that we really didn't cut the mustard with the real Mountain Goats fans  (that’s his band, did I mention that?)  when one of his thirty-something fans who had followed him down the entire west coast asked me what songs we were hoping to hear that night, and when Jan and I mentioned only recent songs that had been released in the last five years and not his older catalog that had been released and passed hand to hand on cassette tape by the faithful.. it was made clear to us by body language and actually moving away from us in the seats,  that we were not truly worthy of the Mountain Goat Tee shirt and bag I had so recently purchased.   (In Grateful Dead parlance Jan and I would have been called out as “Touchheads” for being new to the band after “Touch of Gray” came out… very uncool to a true Deadhead)

Truth is the papers  probably didn't publish my review because it wasn't particularly coherent and it it was too enthusiastically positive. 

 But I greatly digress...  it turns out John Darnielle is not only a great songwriter.  But as it turns out an amazing novelist.  This guy can do almost anything and it wouldn’t surprise me if he isn’t living in a remote volcano that is shaped like a scull and flys an invisible jet.

The Wolf in The White Van is a strange and fascinating book about a young man who has been horribly disfigured in an accident.  Living in isolation the boy develops a role playing game in which people play their roles created for them and given through the mail. It’s a wonderfully complex novel, in that it is about pain and escape from pain, where Darnielle wisely doesn’t choose sides between the two but lets the physical reality at the end have its powerful say.

Darnielle understands the suffering of others without pity or melodrama..  He also does so many other things in this book that at times reading this novel feels like you are playing the game he is describing.  You are experiencing lives within lives.   He understands disenfranchised youth of today better, I think than J.D. Salinger understood the youth of his time.  Like Salinger,  Darnielle understands the suffering and frustrations of the young, and he understands that it is how we survive these early traumas which will dictate how our souls are  bent. But unlike Salinger’s post war children, whose lives were tempered in the cool water of Zen and Bee bop,  Darnielle’s  youth  gather in the fire  where the Book of Revelation meets,  H.G. Lovecraft,  and the anvil strike of Norse heavy metal.  Darnielle has a genius for evoking the mood of pop culture without any obvious allusions.   He feels as the outsider kids feels,  without the obvious whine  because he knows what the outsider is feeling is real and justifiable.   Just reading some of these pages you feel the mood of heavy metal, and the frantic thrum of young buskers around the corners from the rehab centers and the missions and I haven’t felt that in much of today's serious literature and, like it or not it’s vibrant with real emotion, of people who should not be ignored. Their voices reach out to you and your life,  they want to blend into mine, and sometimes they do.  

I love this book.  I think if the guys in the jail would give it a chance they would love it too.   

The ripping of tarps

and the pounding of breakers

rattling in the dark.

Jhs—Sitka

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.