Month: June 2026

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.