Blood Phones

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

The problem, of course, is we can do without diamonds, and with global protests against the mines in places like Botswana, conflicts which spilled over into warfare, and exposure with movies like Blood Diamond, we are more than aware of Conflict Diamonds as they are so casually called.

But try telling someone to go back to a landline and ditch the smartphone. It’s laughable despite the mining conditions for a phone’s essential cobalt-powered lithium battery being far worse than diamond-mine workers could ever imagine. But, geez, it’s my smartphone; not giving it up.

It is time to accept the fact you’re not going to give up your cell phone or the electric car you have your eye on, even though they are the result of a slavery system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Facts:

The DRC produces roughly eighty percent of the world’s cobalt supply, and has nearly half of the world’s reserves–more cobalt than the rest of the world combined. While the US gets most of its cobalt from Norway, Finland, and Japan, they are processors who take the supply of the metal mostly from the DRC.

So we understand each other, our smartphones and electric cars need cathodes for high-performance lithium batteries, and the primary component in cathodes is cobalt.

The Problem:

While some mines use heavy machines to do the work, about a third of the mines are so-called “artisanal” mines, where the work is done by hand by “freelance” workers. Roughly forty percent of the workers are children in unregulated pits, and most of those mines are owned by Chinese companies. The dust and grit from the mining gets in their lungs and kills them; and worse is that cobalt is toxic to touch and breathe. Hundreds of thousands of local people–mostly young women and children–mine the material for a few dollars a day, which they then must use to pay their way out of the mines to send home whatever money they have left, leaving them mostly in debt to the companies, much like share cropping or even slavery, and abuse is normal, including whippings and rape. This is from Siddharth Cara, a fellow at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He insists after two decades of research and investigation that there is “no such thing as a clean supply chain.”

Some twenty-thousand people work at just one artisanal mine in the Lualaba region of the DRC. Armed forces are assigned by the government which is being paid serious money to make sure the mining continues and so-called overseers oversee the production much like overseers of slavery.

I was in the Lualaba region, very briefly, forty years ago. None of this was going on then, and the hills remained green and tranquil. I wondered what it looked like now so I looked it up on my smartphone, whose innards are built with the cobalt from this region. Guilty.

We won’t buy so called blood diamonds because of how they are mined, but no one is suggesting we boycott the companies who support this system of slavery pillaging the earth so we can have electric cars to protect the environment, and so we can have cell phones made from material mined by mostly starving children to be able to call our kids to make sure they are safe.

These phones, these cars, are available to us because of the spilled blood of people overrun by government troops, gathered up and moved to the mining district. The only true solution other than not using cellphones or buying electric cars is to pay the workers a real salary; formulate true working conditions so they can work with dignity and have a normal life. But their current salary is not expected to rise anytime soon. Of course not. It’s the DRC, the southeastern region of the Congo, one of the most dangerous places on the planet mostly because of these cobalt mines.

Samsung remains the largest manufacturer of smartphones.

The executive in charge of devices is Roh Tae-moon who earned roughly $4.5 million dollars last year.

The average cellphone costs about $571.

The average worker in the mines makes about $1.55 a day.

The average price of milk in the DRC is between $1.25 and $2.09 per liter.

At this point you might as well go buy that diamond you had your eye on.

Shabara Artisanal Mine, DRC

Again with the Walking

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

Every time I go to the doctor’s, the first question they ask me when alone in the room is, “Have you been depressed?” It is a waste of their time–and mine–to consistently ask the question, and the next time I am there I am going to suggest they take that off of their “to do” list for patients. Because the last several times I have actually answered yes, said that I am in fact a little depressed, suggested perhaps it is the medicine, they say nothing, they do nothing, no follow up, no “Oh really, how bad is it?” no “Did you want to talk about it?” no “Perhaps we can recommend a counselor” no “How close to suicide do you think you get?” Nothing. They move on to my blood pressure, which because of the lack of follow-up to their thorough mental-condition question, rises exponentially, and when they say, “Oh, your BP is up! Is there anything you can think of that would cause that?” I answer, “The outrageous indifference of people to other people’s feelings.” They suggest I eat less salt.

Last year I actually saw my cardiologist for the first time in some years as I now have those consultations done at my GP unless he finds reason to refer me back, and when I saw him just for a check up, he asked the question and I said, “Yes, Dr, I am.” He looked at me for some time and asked, “Is there someone you can talk to? Maybe someone at work?” “She died.” “A best friend?” “Dead.” “A priest?” “Dead.” He stared at me a minute more. “So what do you think is depressing you.” Sigh. I hung my head like Charlie Brown and walked to the parking hot, a bubble of %##$%@@& symbols above my head.

The world is burning. Drought. Floods. Political leaders are absolutely out of their minds. The Israeli Prime Minister is trying to kill everyone in Gaza, Putin everyone in Ukraine, and Trump everyone in Canada. The most significant places I traveled as an adult were Mexico, Central Africa, and Russia, and between cartels, war, and invasion, they’re no longer favored destinations. I thought about Hemingway who lost his beloved Paris to World War Two, his beloved Cuba to the revolution, and his beloved life to disease followed by suicide. Depressed?

I planned trips which got cancelled; I have dealt with more than my share of impatient people, and the only salvation I’ve found in the past eighteen months has been in The Netherlands, the Uinta Mountains, and the Oregon Coast. This says a lot, but it also tells me I’m not depressed when I’m not sitting still.

This is all to say this: I started walking again. I had stopped–depression maybe, book deadlines perhaps, but I am walking again, a lot, and I noticed something significant when I’m out along the river or the bay, walking through the trails at the maritime museum or even down the hill at Aerie to the Rapp: I couldn’t care less about all of the news and the happenings in the world, and I just am. It reminds me of when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, and after a week of letting all the crap of life fall off of me along the trails crossing the Pyrenees, I was present, completely present in the moment, alive and at peace. Likewise, I recall how in college at retreats or just hanging out in someone’s room, we’d talk about how important it is to carry that peace with us, “bring the peace with you” as Fr Dan used to tell me. And we’d insist that we would, sometimes even making it a day or two before the weight of life settled back on our lives like a nuclear storm. So as I grew older I just assumed, as many people do, that the kind of peace I’m talking about is reserved for vacations and breaks, for mornings with coffee on the porch or watching the dolphins move up the bay.

That’s not true. Peace can be a constant, a presence we learn to accommodate. The Camino may change to hallways or market aisles, but the atmosphere is our call.

***

Listen, I know depressed people; I mean legitimate, clinically diagnosed depressed individuals doing their best. Their struggle is chemical and environmental and real and debilitating. Those of us who feel overwhelmed by the seemingly unbearable weight of existence, who feel alone because friends and family left the party early, who feel worried about the most minute details of otherwise irrelevant minutia, we are not depressed, we are distracted, focused on the question instead of the solution.

I walked today and found that creativity out there next to the soybean farm, and further down near the pasture with deer and rabbit I found the energy to manipulate the creativity how I wish. No wonder I have been depressed; I left most of my work down the hill on the way to the river.

But this casual depression is very real even for those of us who have not officially been diagnosed. There are days the clock is the size of the planet and the hands are spinning like a 78 record, and I wonder how I could have screwed up my life so much that I’m constantly asking what is the point, truly, and I mean this, what is the point to anything if we’re all going to be dismissed anyway.

And then I saw a rabbit at the river just sitting there, and last night the clouds covered the lunar eclipse but I was out there ready, and being out there ready at one am was enough to make me feel connected to everyone else out there ready.

I walked today and the sun turned pink, almost lavender, and it glowed across the river and out toward the bay, and even a heron stood and watched, and for that moment we all brought the peace with us.

Five Pm (and counting)

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

If life happened in a day, and Einstein is horrifically more accurate than we would like, then let’s make a 6 am sunrise birth and place death around a 9pm sunset. I’ve always preferred summers for the extended daylight hours.

And if we break a life of ninety years (I’m an optimist) into a day, we live about six years an hour, or a year every ten minutes. Goes fast doesn’t it? In fact, my clock reads 5 pm. School’s out, lunch has been made, eaten, and cleaned up, and the morning hours are so long ago I barely recall them anymore. I am just checking out the fridge to see what to make for dinner.

If life happened in a day, we’d make sure we didn’t miss much, no matter the weather or how tired we are. We’d call our closest companions and ask them to join us—we’d go through this together. It is too bad we can’t do this again, we’d admit. I don’t want to miss any of it, we’d say, suddenly aware of how fast time goes by, how many moments we let slip away. In fact, just talking about the fleeting morning might make us miss those hours of the day’s youth when discovery is ripe and exploration is new. Those hours of life when no one but us has yet discovered the forest out back, the rapids in the creek down the road, or the view from the bent branches of a birch. We would remember what it was like to not be afraid to take chances, before the midday sun sucked the optimism from our marrow.

Looking back at my own day, around 10 am I lived in Massachusetts in a yellow house next to a reservoir. It was a quaint village surrounded by a larger town, and across the street was a small post office and an antique store. Just up the winding road was an apple orchard where I bought bags of apples and where my neighbor the postmaster would buy me an apple pie for shoveling her driveway. I loved then, and I often talk about how I wish it was 10am again, and I again was leaving work to head to the mountain to hike to the summit to see kettles of hawks.

Just an hour later, I was gone, living in a different latitude and finding myself finding myself once again. Love was easier than it should be and shorter than I had hoped, and the lessons learned so late in the morning stole my energy for a while. Exhaustion isn’t always only because of age; sometimes it is a sudden lack of momentum. But time passes. I’d give the next six hours to have a few minutes back, but we can’t. We must look forward. If I spend too much time regretting what happened at 11 this morning I’ll blow right through the afternoon without noticing the way the light of the sun can bring everything to life no matter how late it is getting.

At noon I walked to the river with my son on my shoulders, and we laughed our way through the early afternoon, hiking through woods and eventually continents. It was just about three this afternoon we trained across Siberia, and ten minutes later hiked across Spain. If my clock battery broke between three and four, I’d consider myself a lucky man. Luckier than most, actually. Cole never had the chance to watch the five o’clock news, and Dave and Eddie hadn’t yet kicked off their shoes after work. At least Fr Dan was settling back for an after dinner drink before he left the party, but Letty never even got to pour that wine with dinner, so fast was her exit, so shortened her time. I am lucky that both my parents were headed to bed anyway, but too many people I’ve loved not nearly enough barely had a chance to finish dessert.

What a day it has been so far. I can’t recall a single hour of my life I’d not do again. From sunrise on I’ve had a great time trying to stay one clip in front of the bend, with golden moments I couldn’t have scripted myself. Maybe that’s why the day seems so fast—I’m really having a great time.

Did you ever stop and just recall a moment from years ago like it had just happened, just now? I mean so that you can taste the meal and smell where you were, feel it, so real like it just happened, just now–complete clarity. That happened to me today, over and over and over, and now it is five o’clock, and it is happening again. Thank God it happens to be five; I need a drink.

Tonight, from 6 to 9, I’m going to take my time and do the best I can. In fact, while I know the sun is well into it’s evening slant, I’m putting on my sunglasses and flip flops anyway and go see what else there is I can do before I pass under “sleep’s dark and silent gate.”

What time is it in your world?

sunrise 012

Finding The Way

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And I’ve never been sure what I have been chasing all this time. I’ve had good, even great, jobs most of my life, but none of them were the result of a particular pursuit. I honestly can’t recall either of my parents, let alone counselors, asking what I wanted to do when I grew up. I always wanted to write and I always wanted to travel, but that vague desire is no clearer now than it was when I was home sick in fourth grade and wrote a book called Flight about two astronauts traveling through the galaxy. (I didn’t think it was too bad. At some point they realize they didn’t bring food along so one of them reaches out to break off part of the Milky Way–hey, I was nine). 

And all of this stuff and belongings are a bizarre thought when I give it any thought at all. I have hundreds of books and I can’t figure out why. Certainly, some of them make sense–signed books, first editions, books which had an impact on me as a writer or as a person. But even them as well as the rest of the pulp do little more than take up space. I’m not likely to read them again, I don’t open photo albums, don’t open bins in the attic filled with my son’s artwork from first grade, don’t pull out the Rubbermaid with souvenirs from my own youth. This stuff is literally just there, existing, filling space, perhaps to say in the subtle way of items, that I did live, those places and moments were real, and I didn’t just imagine it. So many times so much of my life feels like just some television show I saw once which I more or less enjoyed but I’m starting to lose track of the plot, and I keep hoping for some Ghost in the Machine to show up and pick up the pace of my narrative. 

Meanwhile on a break from doing nothing I picked up my phone to make myself feel busy, and I noticed many of my contacts are dead, same in Facebook, and I was going to write about it but Sedaris did in his last book, even though I’ve wanted to do that piece for years, but now it will look just like the “Small Talk” piece I wrote four years before he released a piece about waiting in line at Starbucks, but people still said, “Oh! Just like Sedaris,” not knowing I was there first, way first. But I did notice the contacts of dead friends and wondered how long I’d let them sit there in my list like old books I really enjoyed but will never read again. Should I give them away? (the books, not the dead contacts). Should look at them once in a while and remember? (the contacts, not the books). There’s Laura, but she is too recent to delete. It feels blasphemous to delete Fr Dan, and Letty simply isn’t going anywhere. Not yet. 

My point is I’ve come to realize at this point in my life I more or less simply tumbled backwards to this point without any real direction or coaching. Everyone I know is relaxing and laughing with family and friends and talking–albeit mostly small talk–about their careers and their lives, and I never quite feel like I’m part of it. 

Drop in Jackson: I always feel like I’m just a day away from where I oughta be. 

There is one place though, one summer when the items in my life were never in my thoughts, my job a quick reference to strangers, my ambitions irrelevant, and my hopes alive and well and living in the next moment. It was in France and Spain on the Camino. Look up at the photo above. That’s me south of Pamplona looking out over what was next. My son took the shot and it stands as the main photo for this blog. See that backpack? I had everything I needed in there. 

My son is there now, so it is on my mind. Here’s the thing: I had an Osprey backpack with a few changes of clothes, water, necessary paper and funds, guide, map, and charger. Usually a loaf of bread stuck out from a side pocket. Flipping through my journals over the years and remembering it now, I don’t recall ever, not once, thinking I needed any more, wondering how I forgot this item or that. I was set and I was one hundred percent in the present, walking, meeting pilgrims, swapping stories. I didn’t feel the need to head home, I was there, and as a result, these dozen years later I can still recall nearly every village, every person we met, what I ate and the feel of the sun on my neck. Like it was earlier today. This is about as close to teleportation as I imagine is possible.

But still I flounder wondering if I can get to the end of my life without having to have major surgery on my teeth. 

I’ve come close to that–hiking up in the Uinta Mountains, walking on the beach along the Oregon Coast. Wandering the water buffalo saturated fields of Neunen, Netherlands. Looking for Sunflowers, searching for a Wheatfield with Crows. 

But most of our lives are involved in routines at home, at work, adding people to our cellphone and deleting them when they die. Few people in Spain exchanged numbers. We were friends, brothers and sisters, linked together forever because of the Camino, but not wondering about when we can call them after the trip; thinking only about sharing some wine, laughing at night while soaking our feet in a small pool, and watching the day like it was the only day ever invented. 

I deleted Cole some time ago, and Rachel, and Trish. I never had Billy in there or Richard. Mom stays. 

I can delete most of the boxes in the attic, most of the clothes I’ve not worn in several seasons. I can get rid of the tins and artwork leaning against the wall behind bureaus because the walls are already spoken for. 

I can delete the walls. I can delete the foundation and the subfloor and the addition, the bathrooms. I can dissolve my cellphone in some lithium-sucking formula and work my way to Paris, to Notre Dame, and head south toward Arles. 

Let Sedaris write about that. Punk. I think he has bad feet. 

The Lasso Way Returns

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When my brother suggested I watch “Ted Lasso,” I trusted his judgement. He had already nailed it with a few other shows, including “Eureka.” The first time through I enjoyed it immensely, the acting, the writing of course, the timing. It took a few episodes to understand this was not simply a series of set-up/punchline comedy, a method I despise. And it took a few times through the entire three seasons to recognize the primary overall theme at the heart of creator/producer/writer/star Jason Sudeikis’ efforts: This show is all about fathers and sons. And now it returns this week for an unexpected Season Four.

When I struggled with transitioning my book The Iron Scar from the “who gives a shit” stage to the essential-to-be-published “readable and relatable” stage, the answer came while in a writing seminar in Ireland where I had been formulating the final draft of a series of letters from myself to my dad while traveling with my son across Siberia. Writer Elizabeth Rosner, almost as an aside, asked me why the chapters are formulated as letters. “I don’t know,” I told her. “Bad bad answer” she said. I pulled together a response about wanting to have three generations on board, and the reality of my son becoming an adult and moving on in the world the same time my father was approaching his final days. But I still couldn’t answer so I came home from Connemara and chopped my manuscript to small pieces. A few weeks later in a conversation with a friend in Texas, I said, “Tim, I’m losing focus on the theme.” He responded, “I’m not. This is all about fathers and sons. About moving on while trying to hold on. And the metaphor of the train is nothing more than setting.” Between the time my son and I rode the train and the time I wrote the book, my father died. I heard once that the loss of a parent is the greatest loss of security we can face, even at fifty-five years old. Not because we aren’t able to handle the turmoil of life on our own but because that foundation has been rocked. 

So I rewrote the entire book as a narrative that takes place on the trans-Siberian railway, with all the characters and unknowns that trip entails, but that’s not what it is about. It’s about relationships, about being between two generations who are about to transition. 

Back to Ted.

Sudeikis masterfully weaves every possible father-son relationship into what on the surface is a comedy about an American football coach hired to the helm of a British premier league football club. 

Right away we have the estranged father as Ted Lasso separates from his wife, and his young son remains with his mother. We also soon learn the powerful impact his own father had on him and the fallout from his father’s suicide when Ted was just sixteen. In England we meet the team, including Jamie Tartt, whose father is physically and verbally abusive, Sam Obisanya, whose father is more of his best friend and mentor, Nathan Shelley, whose Dad is demanding of his son’s talents and seemingly never satisfied, Leslie (male) Higgins who is the proud and dotting father of five boys, Roy Kent, who becomes a surrogate father to his niece, and of course Ted himself, who moves into the father-role to the entire team, the individual players with which he has various degrees of parental conflicts and resolutions.

This is listed as a comedy, but it absolutely fits the bill as a drama as well, placing it in the same vein as shows like MASH which walks that thin line between laughter and tears. 

Both the Mother and Father figures in our lives have served to keep grounded the best efforts of humanity throughout history. We need either to recognize the example or play the part. Almost all aspects of society rely upon those roles to set the strong example with seemingly unconditional love as we push through difficult moments. When hope seems fleeting and one feels “lost in a pathless wood” as Frost proclaims, that Maternal strength or Paternal guidance is almost always enough to help us keep going, knowing that whatever happens we’ll be okay. Even if we lose, we suffer those losses together, and we move on. 

Sudeikis so thoroughly designed the first three seasons of the show to investigate all possible Father/Son relations, he completes the first three seasons with a montage of the characters’ post-Lasso lives with Cat Steven’s “Father and Son.”

There seems to be a lack of parental symbolism in the world, in the nation, in our lives. In fact, more often than not those who should be in those roles these days are appearing more like Jamie Tartt’s abusive and untrustworthy father. It would be perfect if we could always rely upon Sam Obisanya’s Yoda-like dad to turn to, but that’s not the hand we’ve been dealt. In fact, it feels like we’re a player down right now and this time it’s the captain of the team who is absent. That loss of security can be overwhelming. Ted Lasso’s season four comes just in time.

Watch Ted Lasso again starting Wednesday for Season Four.

As for this coachless world in which we find ourselves, well, we might have to switch our game plan, but we’ve got each other’s backs, and that might be enough. 

My brother, my son, and my dad, 2015

Baggage

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my black satchel

My son is leaving for Spain and Ireland in a few days–he’ll be gone about five weeks and while he kinda sorta knows where he’s going to go and what he’s going to do, he mostly has no idea where he might go or what he plans to do. He’s been there before several times and for extended periods of time. He’ll be fine (though he’s been warned about the heat, the surface of the sun that is current day Spain on the Meseta). He’s got one relatively small orange duffel bag. That’s it. Everything gets shoved in there. It works for him

Carrying just one bag used to work for me, actually, though mine was a backpack I carried for years, from Mexico through Massachusetts and well into Pennsylvania. My second favorite though was a black satchel I’d throw over my shoulder and carry from Russia to Ireland and Prague, and western New York. I liked having it with me since my important information, journals, and more were in there, but I also liked not having to carry it by hand leaving my arms and hands free. It also hung at my side which was more secure than on my back like a “take what you want” gift shop. We get used to bags, to luggage, to wallets and storage containers and just the right pockets in our winter coat we wear every day to the point where it becomes as much a storage area for our daily items as the junk drawer in the kitchen. My favorite was an Osprey backpack I carried from southern France to the Atlantic coast of Spain on the Camino de Santiago. For one summer everything I could possibly need was in that bag. It still is.

I still use a tan messenger style bag like the old black one, and every once in a while I dump it on the bed or the floor and go through the papers and envelopes and other crap I shoved in there without thinking. Matchbooks and old cards, some flyers from an art gallery, a KitKat bar. I dump it all out and trash as much as possible, pull my list pad out of a front pocket, rewrite the list on the next page of the notebook and throw away the pages accidently bent back from bouncing around the bottom of the bag. I rewrite the list and tuck it neatly back inside until I rewrite it in a few weeks, I put my school keys and ID back in an interior zipped pocket, and if I’m feeling ambitious, I’ll vacuum it out, wipe it clean.

I’m carrying less these days, and mostly stopped lugging around either a backpack or satchel. The brown bag goes with me to readings and come the fall to classes at the college. I don’t even carry a wallet most of the time. I stopped hauling books everywhere and I’ve found it better to not make notes while I’m out and simply wait until I get home to write observations or thoughts, make connections between a gull I watched this morning and something someone once said to me about birds on my porch and the passing of time. I’ve come to prefer to put some distance between the experience and my work, sometimes hours, sometimes weeks or months, sometimes two or three lifetimes during which I pick up and put back down even more luggage filled with nonsense I thought I needed but turned out I only needed it briefly.

Often I become so engrossed in something that I want to hold it close forever, for a while anyway. Eventually, though, we move it to the side to make room for more, and at some point we take it out of the bag altogether. For instance, for some time I carried a letter my friend Fr Dan had written me. I had it for six or eight weeks, more. I read it from time to time since it was the last one he ever wrote me just days before his passing. I just couldn’t bring myself to take it out and leave it somewhere other than with me. That was almost two years ago this week. Now the letter is in a stack of his letters behind my desk here at Aerie. It sits on a notebook filled one weekend I spent alone at the retreat Fr Dan founded on New York’s Southern Tier. Eventually, it will become a book I’ve been toying with since then, called These Days, and I’ll dedicate it to my friend’s memory and infectious laugh, and then I’ll be able to move the letters and journal further away from my reach, in a drawer somewhere. I find that drawers and cabinets are simply backpacks and satchels too big to lug around.

My first car, an old light blue Chevy Monza, used to be my baggage, and I filled that thing for two hundred thousand miles across the country, through Mexico where it carried several thousand blankets to Arizona, and Canada, then throughout my years in New England, and eventually Pennsylvania, where even there it held everything I owned and I never felt like I needed anything.

I’m carrying too much these days, from books to notebooks to letters and small stones and shells. But not on me, no. I leave my brown bag at home and usually don’t even carry my phone anymore. The list of items I want close to me has faded, and the people I used to call on a regular basis have all faded as well. Lately I find myself back in the moment, observing peacefully without the need to gather anything. That stuff only takes up room. Instead I prefer to simply remember, my mind a makeshift backpack with perfectly stored stuff, like a stack of homemade gift certificates my son made through the years–“homemade loaf of bread,” “lunch and a hike of your choosing,” “automatic win at chess to be used when you are losing bad.” I’ll always have them. Even if they get lost, I’ll always have them. Videos of my mom, golf and lunch with my dad, and trips to Spain, to Siberia, to all the state parks in Virginia, to boat rides on the creeks of the Chesapeake with my son. Time might steal some of their color, but I know what they are. That doesn’t fade.

I keep my hands and arms free these days, ready to hold someone else’s hand, ready to embrace. I miss people, their laughs, their sly look when we both know what the other is thinking, the songs we shared, I miss the random text or call. Better then to not carry my phone under some illusion it will ring, and better still to simply leave my bag at home. If I see something worth remembering, I’ll remember to tell you what I saw, just like I’ll remember to tell those I love I love them before they move on from this world. And if I forget to for some reason, well, I’ll carry that with me too.

66

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

Two ways exist to approach life–at least in the “sweeping generalization of all or nothing” perspective.

Live like you are dying. Live like you’ll live forever.

To practice the first I would have to be acutely aware that the distance from here to eighty is shorter than the distance from here to fifty, which is tragically depressing, but I can do that. I’d perhaps worry less about the shortcomings, the missed opportunities, missed relationships, missed moments of clarity, and focus instead on the truth of being here now, able to hear the wrens in the morning and the whippoorwills at night. I’d experience life more with my senses, feel the river around my calves instead of standing on the sand looking at it; I’d call people I love and tell them I love them. I’d walk more, let go of regret and guilt, let go of aggravation and hostility. I’d no longer let the punk who tailgates me into Deltaville EVERY FREAKING MORNING bother me at all; I’d pull over and let him pass, apologize for holding him up, bid him a good day when we both arrive at the 711 at the same time anyway.

I’d lighten up. I’d make that trip to the Faroe Islands, Belize, the Galapagos, back to New York to see old friends and family. I’d say yes to more things and I’d know better than to pass up a chance to be even more alive, to feel again how I felt on so many times in my life when I did something I never thought I’d get the chance to do.

I’d maybe not be as reckless as Tim McGraw, but definitely more involved in life than my former boss, Richard, who seemed to simply check out.

Or

I could live like I am going to live forever.

I’d let go of the haunting depression that tells me “there’s no point to learning a new language; when am I ever going to use it since I’ll be dead.” I’d sign up for classes like I have new careers waiting for me, and I’d stay in shape and eat well so I could keep going a really disgustingly long time. I’d lighten up a lot and put my focus on the positive so that when I do eventually succumb to some illness which only plagues the oldest of people, I’ll know I wasn’t a downer, wasn’t always complaining about politics and the economy. I’d talk to everyone since I know I’d have the time to start new friendships and learn a new instrument and even learn to make lemon meringue pie. I’d try not to get caught in that trap of taking others for granted, pretend they’ll always be around, because since I will be living forever doesn’t mean they will, and it is not easy being the last one alive out of a small group of people. I’d try and move forward with their memories and stories, and I’d probably pretend they’re just on vacation somewhere. Maybe I’ll run into them again on some travels in the coming decades as I get warmed up.

When you wake up, do you think you’re another day older or do you think you’ve lived another day? They’re not the same thing.

I turned sixty-six last week. It’s not really a big deal. I also swiftly skimmed up a mountain to a waterfall in the Columbia River Gorge (at my age I am allowed the liberty of poetic license). As a professor (which I never thought of as my “career”) I retired from full time almost ten years ago, but as a writer I’m busier now than ever before. The arts leave one the luxury that the longer you are at it the more recognition you get and the busier you become so that most artists never retire, not if you can stay in the game. This leaves us the notion we are not as old as others who hang up the hat and “slow down.”

So, professionally it is time to slow down, but professionally I am just getting warmed up.

How am I supposed to handle 66?

I suppose like I handled 33, and how I will handle, hopefully, 99.

Like this:

Like it or not I have regrets; and while people tell me I shouldn’t, it is exactly how I am able to not take someone’s friendship for granted, how I am able to give a second chance a fighting chance, and how I am able to change when I need to change. I celebrate regret for the lessons, for the reboot.

I am okay with denial and anger and depression and bargaining returning again and again for the same tragic loss. It is exactly how I know we don’t need to always move on in all aspects of our lives, that others will always be part of us and sometimes we get angry at them, sometimes we’d do anything to see them again, and sometimes we simply pretend they’re at the store picking up some Prosecco. It is how I can celebrate our lives even though I’m on my own.

I’m okay with embarrassing the hell out of myself at my age just like I did when I was nineteen in coffeehouses and twenty-four in a health club and twenty-six in love. We do stupid things and we feel ridiculous, and now, at sixty-six, my absolute best memories come from those times I thought, “I’m going to give this a shot.” Plenty of times I fell on my face; more often than not, but I’ll take a good face-plant over a “damnit, I should have said something” any day.

Alan and Marilyn Bergen along with Carol Sayer Bager wrote a piece I’ve never forgotten. Part of the song goes, “I pity the poor one, the shy and unsure one, who wanted it perfect but waited too long.”

Oh, I’ve waited way too long way too many times. It comes from the decree “What is the worst that can happen?” instead of the declaration “What’s the best that can happen?” I’ve had an extraordinary life so far. I know this. But it has always felt like, to lyric you one more time, this one from Jackson, “I’m just a day away from where I oughta be.”

Trudat.

So at sixty-six, with 24,116 days behind me and just 5,114 days until I turn eighty, I’m going to enjoy the passing of time the best I can. I’m going to spend as much time as possible with the people I feel comfortable spending the most time with. I’m going to “give it a shot” whatever it is at any given time. Not kidding. Sheeet, I’m sixty-six. People my age don’t kid around.

There’s not enough time, not nearly enough.

“To grow old is to change

to change is to be new

to be new is to be young again”

***

“Never give up

Never slow down

Never grow old

Never ever die young”

These Things we are Capable Of

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments
Before

It’s difficult to know what we are capable of. No one instructs us early in life on how to recognize the difference between “that might be doable” and “you’re wasting your time and absolutely kidding yourself.” The only sure way of knowing is doing.

Some legitimate guidelines help. Finding people who already know what they’re doing either through experience or expertise; hopefully both. Taking your time and going step by step without feeling overwhelmed by the big picture of the final product. When I was young and learned tennis and guitar—both mostly self-taught—watching professionals was a double-edged sword. On the one hand I felt inspired to push hard and keep pursuing those goals. Clearly it had been done before so this isn’t a fantasy. At the same time, there is reason enough to quit whenever I watched the pros play tennis or guitar and then I’d move with confidence only to annihilate my six string or hit a ball with the corner of my racquet and watch them both fly into the net.

Each day, though, a little more, a little better. Someone nearby to tweak the progress, some down time to recognize that the difference between never having attempted such a foolish ambition and where I was at was growing, and the reach from where I was at to some form of success was rapidly shrinking. Day by day.

My son and I built a boat last week. Took about four days. It’s a fourteen-foot Wright Skiff with three benches, bumper rails, and other cool things which have nautical terms. We named her Santiago, after the city we reached on our pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago in Spain, and after the Old Man in Old Man and the Sea, whose skiff looks just like ours, minus the sixteen-foot marlin carcass strapped to the side.

Still, we followed instructions printed out and had a half dozen expert boatbuilders on hand to walk us through it all. This stands in direct contrast to my life as a writer where every day I begin with a blank page and toss some verbs on there to see what happens. I rarely reach the same or even similar results. But we built our boat—Michael actually did the work—along side seven other teams and the boats all mostly look the same save some cosmetics and bad measuring of the floorboards (them, not us, I think). It reminds me of how far apart math and creativity often are. Follow the instructions, follow the formula, the builders begged of us. You can’t do that in writing (unless you’re James Patterson or EL James).

Of course, it wasn’t about the boat. We spent a week working together, switching on and off, recognizing each other’s strengths, helping, encouraging, laughing through it all. It is one thing to find out what you’re capable of; it’s an entirely other milestone to find out what you’re capable of with someone else, particularly your adult son.

I’m certain I cannot follow instructions for the next level craft—my forty-one foot Morgan Outisland or my aircraft carrier. But I’m equally certain I can do more than I thought I could just a week ago.

There’s another difference in the arts vs construction conversation. My last book, for instance, has a dozen different versions with various misfires along the way, and from them I tried something else, tossed more than I should. The book before that had originally been written as a series of twenty-three letters to my father. At some point someone I trust in the writing world asked why they were letters and I couldn’t answer her, so I rewrote them all as one long narrative. It is better. It is different. I’m not sure. But stray from the guidelines in the Skiff Manual and not only will six experts make it perfectly clear you are screwing up, they’ll cut and clamp and tighten until you are right back where you started. Consistency is the value of learning a new skill, except writing. Maybe.

Still, last night I walked to the dock and looked at Santiago floating patiently, and I glanced across the creek to another skiff where she rested calmly. They’re not the same at all, I noticed. I immediately saw my muscle-taut face holding two planks of wood together as Michael drilled a pilot hole followed by a screw, then another, and another, until we moved to the next board, satisfied. I saw the rising adrenaline each morning on the way to the boathouse, the growing confidence, the sense of accomplishment from perseverance.

I stared down at Santiago and saw us in the Pyrenees talking quietly as we moved across dozens of kilometers every day. The heat of Galacia, the wonder of entering Santiago and continuing to the end of the world, Fisterra, and back. I saw us crossing fields of hope and dreams in Siberia, and I could see back even further, staring into our skiff we build this week with no prior knowledge at all of building even a Lego boat; I could see Michael at five when we first started walking these docks, taking pictures of sailboats, and later when we bought a canoe and sculled the Rappahannock and creeks.

At some point we don’t think we’re capable of anything. Writing a book, climbing a waterfall, driving a car, being a father, building a boat. But with the right advice and a lot of patience, we move forward, half the time thinking we’re making it up as we go, and the rest of the time knowing we’re just following instructions.

It’s good to find out we’re capable of more than we thought. It’s good to build a boat. It’s uncanny where that little skiff has already taken me.

Free Bird Verse

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

At the river today I watched birds fly left to right as if to write on the sky. I suppose if they could they would spell out timelessness, they might scrible peace. A flock of geese flies spastically and lands on the river, on the pond, in the field and I’m reminded of Dylan–both Bob and Thomas–or John Prine. Meanwhile, swallows fly like clouds of mist or fog while somewhere in their past must exist a choreographer, and I’m certain they’ve read James Joyce.

I’ve noticed lately the poetic presence in nature–not just in the soul of our surrounings while walking along the bay or hiking up to a waterfall on the Columbia River Gorge, but in the actual structure, as if were I to slow the whole thing down I could diagram the breezes through the aspens, the waves along the Atlantic.  

When I see herons push back just once against the surface of air and glide at pelican height, feet above the Cheapeake, and that one push moves them downstream until they tilt back their wingspan to lift up and settle gently on some branch on a dead tree in the marsh, I know they’ve read Hemingway, or at the very least paged through the work of Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, who Sontag once said was perhaps the greatest European prose writer of the twentieth century, and whose one-sentence book, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, must be on the shelves of these herons and their cousin egrets. 

I went down to the water in the first place to work on a chapter from a new book. I’m trying to adjust the sentence structure to slow down the reader or help them run out of breath. I mix compound structures with simple statements. Some fragments. I want to control their pace, make them pause and perhaps reread a segment when I need emphasis, or have them gasp outloud when I wish to wear them out, give them a sense of unbridled energy, like a Siberian train or over-enthusiastic college freshmen in over his head. And it occured to me as an Osprey caught a draft and lifted gently into a nest where another osprey tended her eggs, that I want to write just like that, cover the pages of my new book with flights of starlings and the melodic song of the lark. How cool for the reader to watch the words as they lift out of the shallow marsh and push against the surface of the pond until they clear the beach, then spiral up and almost out of control–but clearly not–toward the mouth of the river, until they climax at the headwaters of the bay and resolve themselves in the delta. Gulls and comorants and allusive, small green herons punctuate the phrases. 

Damn, I really want to author a work like that, like the flight of birds, the singing, the hurriedness of the hummingbirds and the slow glide of an eagle, a hawk. How cool would it be if readers got swept up in the life of the words as they carried the narrative clear across the Rappahannock and the audience could do nothing more than follow along, thinking they’re reading at their leisure, not realizing they’re being pulled across the reach? 

My new book takes place in one day but has a list of characters as long as Audubon’s Guide to North American Birds. There’s me, of course, since everything I write, like feathers, is mostly true, but there is also Karen and Rachel and Trish and Mark–finches and songbirds for their tragic brevity. There is Lianne and Letitia, a couple of youth-sentenced canaries, the latter whom specifically promised to show up at the birdfeeders on my porch. And then there’s a punk who keeps reappearing until one of us gives in–yeah, guess who. I’ll make him the Turkey Vulture or a magpie. 

I suppose I have to be a bird too, seeing as it is a first person narrative. I decidedly do not want to be a Laysan albatross or a cockatoo, both of which outlive everyone else. Perhaps a hawk. The quiet, squirrel-eating type.

I sat a long time thinking about this because that is what I chose to do today. I thought about the birds we saw along the Pacific coast and in the Redwoods, and I tried to recall the ones along the Great South Bay when I was a kid, which made me remember a parakeet my cousin Lisa once had which kept flying into the mirrors on her living room wall. That poor bird was just a fragment, barely a subordinate clause. 

In the end, I chose (for now, anyway, since rewrites are possible in my birdword world) to pass on the feathered friends and be the redwood itself, not only here since before all that and here long after all this, but a resting place for them all, a safe place, with branches so high a bird can see across lifetimes and know how the narrative will end, which is more than my brain can handle right now. 

Honestly, I have been having trouble with this one, getting it right. The narrative constantly weaves in and out of future and past events all the while grounded in one room in the present. Trouble writing this one, indeed, that is, until today, when I realized I need to write like birds fly.

Of course. Why am I always the last one to see the obvious? 

I Just Decided To

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

A few weeks ago we hiked to the top of Multnomah Falls on the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon. 

Made that sound like we simply bounded up the trails–pranced even–didn’t I?

I heaved my way up each switch back (there are eleven, though to be fair, the last three are back down a bit). A few of them are a tendon-screaming forty degree angle reminiscent of the first day out of Saint Jean Pied de Port on the Camino, which is like scaling up a twenty-mile roof. 

I had to stop often for several switchbacks. My excuses? The air is thin, which is true–I’ve lead a sea-level existence. Also, we had just driven eight hours. I could have come up with more, of course, but instead I rested, waved to the eighty-year-olds jogging past me, tried to trip a few kids bouncing up the path, and then continued. 

The thing is, I knew if I turned around not only would I feel bad for causing us to return to the car, but I’d be pissed at myself for quitting. My heart felt fine, my pulse, my feet. I wasn’t dizzy, faint, or laden with lactic acid. I was simply not used to this. So I kept getting up and pushing on, thinking about Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff into the river. People going back down all had some comment: “It get’s easier!” “It’s worth it!” “Not too much further!” Meanwhile in true humor-clad fashion, I had to hear “Hey Bob, only ten more switchbacks!” “Hey, guess how many now??? Nine! Oh wait, this is still ten, sorry.”

I made it. We hiked many trails after that one, up waterfalls and down beach trails, through the redwoods, and I don’t remember an issue again after that day. On the way back down from the top of the falls, of course I encouraged others. Sometimes, “It’s not that bad! Move it!” and other times, “How many times did you throw up so far? Everyone up the next trail is heaving over the edge. Have fun!”

The falls were worth the climb. The view, the grandeur, the inconceivable beauty in the falling of water across rocks and millennia to the river below. Worth every doubt. 

The ends are worth whatever means necessary. We know this, too. One question remains which I contemplated on and off for the rest of the journey down the coast and which I have thought about since: What am I capable of?

Will I finish the one-man play I keep putting off? Will I lose the weight? Tone up? I know how to write and I know what I want to do in the play, so why isn’t it done? At one time in my younger days I was actually an expert in weight loss and toning, training everyone from women who wanted to lose more than 100 pounds to the Holy Cross Football team. 

I. Know. What. I’m. Doing.

I don’t know why I’m not doing it. 

I finished my last book not because of some lightning strike: I just decided to. Meanwhile, a book I agreed to rewrite for a publisher nearly two years ago is sitting here next to the Cheese-Its, but suddenly I’m stricken with Adult Onset ADHD. Maybe it is depression. Anxiety. The Crocodile Men of the Congo. All of the above.

Age! 

sigh…no, it’s not

I know not to eat certain foods. I know to move enough to push my heartrate. I know how to breathe, to stretch, when I write I know how to pause after a line for emphasis and when to make the dialogue choppy and staccato and when to slow it down and smooth it out. It’s not a fear of failure or of success of boredom or being too busy to focus or too distracted. No, we all get like this. You know what I mean, right? You know what needs to be done, to be said, but we simply let it go, put it off.

We know we can but we don’t. That’s it in a nutshell. We know we can but we simply don’t. 

Certainly, most people use the age thing as the best excuse. They can’t move as fast, they’re not as agile. The knees hurt, the hips. The back, the feet, the ego. Many of them are right, of course, but just as many seem to slip out of shape and use age as the cause. Not the eating between meals, not the stagnancy, not the belly fat, the beer belly, the extra serving. Nope, it’s “age.”. “Sucks getting older” people say. 

But when was the last time you made a list of ambitions and then contemplated which items on the list you truly can’t do because of your decrepit body and which items you just slowly, methodically, without even noticing, stopped trying to achieve because “life” got in the way, and now “age” got in the way?

What am I capable of? Probably more than I think. 

So this: The country’s birthday is in a month and so is mine. For the country’s birthday, the president is hosting a UFC Championship Wrestling Match on the lawn of the White House. For my birthday I’m finishing the play, the book, losing the weight, getting in shape

I just decided to. 

See you in a month.