Travel

Foolish. Insane. Successful.

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Some of us are masters of self-deception; we can convince ourselves of just about anything and we learn to look for the smallest of clues to justify whatever illusion keeps our delusion alive.

I am certain this all sounds somewhat psychotic, even sinister at times. I know. Yet this mental acuity of delusion and ambition is not only necessary, it’s what separates those of us in lives of quiet desperation from those whose names are synonymous with acts of greatness.

Two truisms:

One, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over hoping to reach a different result.” Okay.

Two, “The Greater Fool is the one who thinks they can succeed where others before have consistently failed.”

But notice the problem; no advancement in technology, science, the arts, moves forward without a delicate balance of both: Science in particular means doing the same thing over and over to check results, to see if it comes out differently even once, only once in a million trials, to make certain everything is okay or everything just changed. The movie The Right Stuff which begins in California with test pilots does an excellent job of showing how insane those fools were to get into yet another new jet after everyone else had died, only to take flight to another level and eventually out of this world. Certainly the engineers made alterations each time, so it wasn’t the same thing over and over, but with patience and caution.

It is a difficult thing to keep trying to get something right that continually fails. And worse, everyone that cares about you watches and calls you insane for still persisting when nothing positive has happened, and they call you a fool for not listening to the sage advice of intelligent and caring people. But the reality is only we know what we are capable of and so few of us ever try to find out what that is.

Example: Vincent van Gogh kept painting the way he believed was right despite being told to change his ways by the most respected art critics and dealers—including his own brother—of the day. When he failed, they said, “The fool is insane, and he lived off of his brother!” When he succeeded, they said, “His persistence paid off, and he had the undying support of his family.” When he painted “Starry Night” from a room in the asylum, it wasn’t liked at all by others in the art world. Today, some estimates place its value at just about one billion dollars. Can you point out the genius among delusional if pressed to do so? Can we ever know for certain the guy on the corner in St. Augustine I met decades ago who was screaming to passers by that the voices in his head told him the “water is rising my brothers and sisters; the water is rising,” wasn’t talking about Hurricane Mathew? There’s a thin line between genius and delusion; and history has proven it takes an insane person, a fool, to be exalted for their persistence and determination. “How pathetic” they say beforehand; “How original” they say later.  

I’m sure that, like me, this all makes you think of the overweight patrons at the health club I managed forty years ago. Some of the members were there to lose well over one hundred pounds, some fifty. I taught an advanced class for the football squad at Holy Cross College as well as a class where the minimum desired weight loss was fifty pounds, and some wanted to shed triple that. They tried everything. Everything, over and over.

One day I walked into class with five, five-pound bags of sugar in a backpack. I sat on the small riser at the front of the room and put the pack on the floor and told everyone to sit down. We talked a bit about weight, about the physicalness of carrying it around, the mental weight we carry with it; the ridicule from others, the spouses telling them they’ll never lose it and to give up, the neighbors calling them fools for going to the club everyday when “you should have thought of that before you gained all that weight,” never understanding, never ever empathizing.

So I asked a woman to come up and pick up the pack. She gasped when she tried, of course, and she barely got it off the ground. So I told her to crouch down and I put the pack on her thighs so that she could wrap her hands around it, and then I told her to stand up, helping her at the elbows. She laughed when she was all the way up, and then I told her to drop the back, which she gladly did, and it made a thud when it hit the gray carpeting so that everyone jumped. She sat back down; I picked up the backpack and put my arms through the straps.

“This is heavy,” I said, and we laughed. When I asked if anyone else wanted to try and pick it up they all shied back, laughing, looking away. I sat again and opened the pack and pulled out the yellow bags of sugar one at a time and lined them up on the riser.

“Sugar! Not-yet-completed cake!” We laughed. “How many people want to lose twenty-five pounds?” Everyone’s hands went up, of course.

“Of course! You have to want to lose fifty just to get in this class. This is just half of that–this is twenty-five pounds that you could not lift without great effort! Should I get another five bags so it meets the minimum of the classes’ desires?”

Everyone was quiet.

“Buy a backpack. Buy ten bags of sugar—granulated sugar of course.” We laughed some more. We had to; we had to laugh to do this at all. “Buy the backpack and fill it with ten five pound bags of sugar, and when someone tells you to give up, when you tell you to give up, when someone calls you a fool or says you’re insane for trying what you’ve already tried before and it clearly isn’t working, hand them the back pack—give your weight to them and tell them to carry it for a while. And then come to another class. Let them know that this time it’s different.”

“Persistent and determined remains crazy and foolish unless you keep going and succeed, but to keep going short of success is insanity. That’s where you come in. You believing in yourself is all that’s necessary for everything to work out. The others are just more grains of sugar you have to carry around.”

Why is it we praise the people who stay within our boundaries of expectation and understanding, but when someone pushes the envelope a bit, heads out toward Mach One on the meter, they’re crazy because they’re doing something we wouldn’t.

“Maybe people laugh at you because they know they do not have the determination and persistence you do to do what you’re doing, and they don’t have the vocabulary to tell you that. Don’t get upset, just keep emptying that backpack one bag of at a time.”

I have felt foolish lately and it has slowed down a project I am working on, and I thought of the members of the club, and I thought of Richard, the club owner who himself at one time needed to lose more than twenty bags of sugar, but he played the role of The Greater Fool, and he persisted to the point of insanity, until he crossed that thin line into “inspirational.”

There’s a thin line between so many things, but most allusive is the one between failure and unprecedented success. The problem is sometimes that line is so far ahead of us giving up seems not only easier, but logical. “No one would blame you if you just strapped the pack on and kept going; it’s easier than trying to empty the damn thing.”

But that’s why when we’re working on something you believe in that no one else does, something which everyone else might consider insane and foolish, it’s important not to look toward the distance for that line, but to look at the next step, then the next step, then the next one after that.

Flip Flops

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

This work was originally published in “Barely South Review” about twelve years ago. It has since been anthologized and often pops up around 911.

“Death plucks my ear and says, ‘Live. I am coming. Live now.'”

–Virgil

I went to the local hardware in Hartfield and bought a sickle—a huge rake-like piece of
steel only instead of a rake at the end there is a double-edged sharp, wavy blade made to rip
through branches, thick weeds and other bone-like growth. Eighteen dollars.

The front of my property is wooded, and on a few acres toward the river, I spent some
time clearing out brush and unwanted vines. I piled it up to haul away, but before that could
happen, other more tenacious weeds—small trees really—took over the area. Some I pulled out,
some I mowed, but I couldn’t grasp to tug out the tougher ones—so the sickle. One warm
morning while alone I put on shorts and flip flops, grabbed the sickle and walked the six hundred
of so feet through the woods to swing away at a small grove. None would rip out easily, so I
aimed for the fences, came down from my right with major-league force and tore through the
vines like an axe through balsa. I attacked one after another, muscles taught so that sweat came
fast, and I made progress. Then I stepped to swing at what looked like a thick, knotty growth at
the bottom of the stump. It was a Virginia creeper vine. Sometimes these monsters look rooted
but aren’t. But what do I know; I’m from New York. So I swung at it like A-Rod. The blade
passed through as if the weed were nothing more than a figment of my imagination, and with all
my energy plus a good deal of inertia, the metal blade ripped into my left ankle.

I like flip-flops. I grew up on the beaches from Long Island to Virginia, so I’ve been
wearing them since I’m a kid. I actually had one pair for ten years, sometimes rigged with a thick
paperclip to hold them together. My feet from April to October have a thick white stripe across
the tops seen only when my flip flops are off. I teach in them. I walk in them. I even mow the
lawn and chop wood in them. Despite what many have said, they are not the cause of the blade
Tarantino-ing my ankle. I don’t remember my foot slipping. I do remember almost not going out
to cut the underbrush to begin with because I couldn’t find my flip flops. What a different story
this would have been had I not come across them on the back porch.

When it happened, blood exploded like water in a hose that’s been held back by bending
and then released. My ankle, foot and flops looked as if dipped in bright red paint. I hobbled the
six hundred feet to the back of the house to wash off the wound, bandaged it, then went back out
to cut more wood; I was wired from adrenaline, my ankle didn’t hurt too badly, and to be honest
I had a lot to do.

That night I iced it. I kept it clean. I was fine. Really.

A week later my leg was pitting a bit when I pushed my thumb into my shin. Excess fluid
I figured. Prior to the whacking, I had been running up to eight miles a day, prepping for the
Rock and Roll Half, so one evening when I was feeling a bit more hyper than usual, and the
swelling moved to both legs—a feat I could not comprehend from injuring one ankle, but I don’t
have a medical degree—I stopped at Kroger and spotted a blood pressure machine. This can’t be
right, I thought, when the first reading came up 270 over 190. I did it two more times and both
readings came pretty close to the same. At the checkout I let them know the machine was
broken. We all laughed at my numbers—even the bagger laughed and put the laundry detergent
on top of the bread. It was that funny.

The next day, worried about my ankle, I washed off my flip flops and went to the doctor.
He took my blood pressure. Again. Again. He asked why I was stupid enough to wear flip flops
while doing yard work. I pointed out I wacked myself above where any shoe would have come
anyway. He asked if I were doing cocaine, heroin, or any other substance, asked if I had
shortness of breath, dizziness, if I had thrown up, fell down, or otherwise felt corpselike. He took
my blood pressure again. He asked how long I felt hyper. “Years,” I said, and he took my
pressure again. Then he sent me to the emergency room. Average BP—260 over 175.
Tests. IVs. Tests. On and on it went for several hours. Nurses came, two doctors stopped
by, some punk there to visit a friend who had overdosed came by to check out my vitals because
my blood pressure was the talk of the ward. The nurses upped the meds. Finally the doctors said
based upon my blood vessels behind my eyes and various tests, my blood pressure had
apparently been that high for probably some years, and that if it wasn’t for the fact I’m totally
healthy otherwise with excellent results from blood and other tests, I’d have had a major stroke.

I asked the cause. The doctor shrugged. Genetics; in a high stress situation for far too
long; a combination, he said. They brought it down to 190 over 95 and sent me home with meds
to bring it back to normal. They told me to keep exercising and that because of my medicines I
could do the marathon, but to be clear, I’m going to be very weak for awhile until I adjust to a
life where I’m not pumped on triple doses of double shots coursing through my veins.

A few weeks later at a follow up where my pressure was at 110 over 70 the doctor told
me in complete agreement with the cardiologist and another doctor, had I not gone in, I’d have
most likely had a major stroke trying to run the half, and probably would be dead. I asked why I
didn’t have one while doing the eight miles a day prior to the Great Sickle Incident, and he was
quite professional about it: I don’t know, he said. I really don’t know. You should have. Good
thing you wacked your ankle, he said.

Yeah, thank God I wacked my ankle. And I thought how often that happens. Good thing I went back for the keys. Good thing I stopped for coffee. Good thing you kept me on the phone, or I’d have been at that intersection just at that moment.

“Good thing I watched Monday Night football on the 10th and overslept: I work on the
85th floor and I’d have been right there,” the stock broker said in the street to the television crew.
As the towers tumbled, he counted his blessings.

Good thing Larry Silverstein, owner of the lease of the World Trade Centers, has a wife
who made him go to his dermatologist appointment that morning instead of yet another meeting
in the North Tower.

Good thing Chef Michael Lomanoco of “Windows on the World” broke his glasses and
had to stop at Lenscrafters that morning to get them fixed.

Good thing Lara Clarke stopped to talk to her friend, actress Gwyneth Paltrow, in a
chance meeting down in the village that morning making her late for her job on the 77th floor.

Thank God singer Patti Austin, booked on flight 93, had to leave Boston a day early
because her mother had a stroke and she had to get back to San Francisco on the 10th instead. “I
went back and forth all day about when to leave,” she said.Thank God actress Julie Stoffer and her boyfriend had a wailing fight that morning and
she missed Flight 11.

Actor Mark Wahlburg is still haunted by that same Flight 11 to LA, which he missed at
the last minute when an 11th hour invitation to a film festival sent him to Toronto instead. He has
nightmares thinking about who took his place on the flight. He would have been sitting next to
Family Guy creator Seth McFarland who also missed that flight when his manager gave him the
wrong boarding time and he was fifteen minutes late. He, too, still has bad dreams, he says. But
thank God, he says.

It’s chance. It’s the phone call, the caught light, the traffic backup. It’s changing your mind. It’s
sticking to the plan. It’s oversleeping, insomnia, an upset stomach. It’s a few seconds. It’s the
wrong shoes. It’s the stroke of luck.

The Higher You Climb

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

This one’s for me.

When I was out west we hiked uphill (because the West is uphill) to a waterfall. I’m not sure of the elevation but it really doesn’t matter since I live at sea level and the waterfall is not. My home is about 80 feet above sea level and a short stroll down the hill is zero.

A few days before the waterfalls we were at just above eleven thousand feet; June, and still there was snowpack on some of the trails. At night we had a fire going, of course to toast peeps but also to keep us warm. In the cabin we kept the wood burning stove going all night. Back home the ac was running strong. Back at zero elevation. that is.

On the way to the waterfall–it was hot that day–I had to stop more than a few times due to my unconditioned lungs. I had no issue with my heart or legs; no, I felt pretty strong actually. It was just the lungs which in my mind looked like the deflated oxygen masks in planes. I wanted to quit; it was clear I wanted to quit, but it was also clear I just needed to catch my breath and push on. “It’s just a little further” translated to me to those days driving my son long distances and from the back seat I’d hear an impatient, “How much longer, Daddy?” “Not far,” I’d say, as if a two year old could translate “not far” into some sort of calculable distance. Yeah, that was me on the mountain as kids–I’m not kidding, kids!–ran past. I reminded myself they’re closer to the ground and need less air, and “it’s just a little further” to me translated to “move your ass for Buddha’s sake, or we’re going to have to make camp soon.”

I made it. I sat on some rocks and watched the majestic water fall from other rocks, down to a pool, off into a creek, down the mountain past the path we just hiked. I quickly gained my energy back as the issue was my lungs inability to climb at that altitude, not “be” at that altitude. A few days earlier we were at eleven thousand feet and I was fine because there was little steepness about us; it was a casual altitude gain. Plus it was colder. But there I sat outside Ogden, Utah, having climbed what I swear was the Matterhorn and I watched the sky grow bluer, watched the water mist up into the trees, and watched the world below try and make excuses for itself. I can’t recall ever feeling so at peace.

A few years ago we did the same thing not far from there to a place called “Wind Cave” and that was more than just a steep climb, for a flat-earther like myself it was like scaling The Freedom Tower, but we climbed and a few times I wanted to quit–apparently I’m not adept at steepness yet–but I didn’t, and when we came around the top slope and walked back down to the opening of the wind cave, there was nowhere on earth I would have rather been. And so again in the mountains, and then again at the waterfalls.

Fast forward, for that is the theme here: Today I wondered about two distinct things: Why is it so hard for me to do these things when I used to have no issue with them when I was younger? and why did I push myself to finish when I could have so easily stopped without objection?

Let’s get the age bullshit out of the way first. Yes, there are conditions which can slow a person down as we age, and it makes it harder to do what we could do with ease decades earlier, but all things being equal, one can battle a decreased metabolism by eating right and working harder. The list of reasons those antiquated excuses are irrelevant aside, internal motivation has more to do with accomplishment than external excuses. I have some experience in fitness and working with people whose challenges could not be calculated, but who, with the right motivation and persistence, reached their goals. So why is it so hard for us other than absolute and flat out indifference as our minds are occupied by other issues? And two, what changed? Why did I push on despite my better judgement only to find out I was capable of more than I thought? The company? Partly. The kids running past? No. The beauty at the end of the hike? I promise that wasn’t on my mind while dry-heaving into the creek.

No, something different took over.

I wanted to do it for myself.

***

I went to the Y today, again. I’ve been going on and off for some years now, though I took a break during Covid and another break not during Covid. I get bored, or I find something else to do, or…or…or…I lose some weight and I get in shape then I tumble back. This is normal. While my old boss at the fitness club could take an eighty year old and make them feel young and able to accomplish anything–and they often did–it was more normal for a healthy, capable young-something to cave at the first sight of a donut. Enter me.

But I have gained less time, and that is something they and most of the members I trained when I was there did not have at that age back then. It takes a while to understand that all we gain as we age is less time.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock people; times ticking away.

When I did the math this past weekend as the calendar turned on me again, I realized the list of things I plan to do is longer than the remaining time allotted, and that’s if I’m generous with myself. So I went to the Y today just like any other day, but this time I wondered if I could push it a bit, so I increased the incline on the treadmill and turned up the mphs. And again, until my heartrate was safely beyond what I normally do, until I was sweating, which I rarely do, and until I was at the point I never have been to before at the Y–the point where I wanted to quit for a reason other than boredom, so I pushed the dial up a bit more and for ninety minutes I climbed to the wind caves and to the waterfalls, I climbed Mt Wachusett in Massachusetts and to the upper falls of Sabino Canyon near Tucson. It brought me back to those days, first, when I taught classes at the club and I had to push myself because the class wanted to be pushed, and then earlier when playing tennis, and I wasn’t done until I dropped on the court, spent.

Why? Because I want to ride my bike to Coos Bay, Oregon, and I want to go to Seattle and hike Mt. Rainer with my cousin, and I want to make the climb to the waterfall a stroll, a meander. Because I saw the clock. I didn’t want to look; I really didn’t, but I did and I saw it as the large digital numbers clicked over, and I did the math because I’m pretty good at math and the distance from here to 80 is barely enough time to love anymore, barely enough time to dream anymore.

Something was different today. Something clicked. It’s that there are going to be a plethora of things out of my control as I move forward, so I’m going to take control over those aspects of my life I do have some say about. Of course I’m not going to get back to my club weight again, which is fine since I forgot to eat from 1983 to about 1988, but I am going to get to the point I believe I can if I decide to. And that might be all I need during this last push to the summit.

And by the way, we do these things at this point in life for ourselves, no one else, and that’s different too.

This time it’s for me.

Winging It

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

I no longer like butterflies. Those miserable little hyperactive buzzards flutter around like drunk scraps of tracing paper. “Oh they’re beautiful, especially the Monarchs,” everyone says. Why? Because of their colors? Their fragility? We just like things more delicate than we are. As George Carlin famously pointed out, we eat more lobsters than bunnies because bunnies are soft and furry and lobsters look like miniature monsters. No contest. Honestly, I used to love the little beauties, butterflies. I was always intrigued that the average life span is less than a year. I watched documentaries about the monarchs’ migration from northern regions of the states to the mountains of southern Mexico. I couldn’t find my way there with a map and a guide, and these little fuckers do just fine every single year. But lately I have lost interest. They’re as disturbing to me now as the flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz.”

I turn sixty-five this week and I’ve been thinking about that trite and necessary Bucket List. I figure I have another good–good being solidly vertical–fifteen years. Hopefully more, of course, but with some adjustment for pace. Still, the first six and a half decades found me mostly pinballing through life. This evening I sat setting up my new Snoopy and Woodstock 3D light and thought about what I might still be able to accomplish.

Here’s my list:

Whatever. It’s all good to me. Just glad to be here, really. A good garden and a small grove of fig trees. Go for walks in various countries, through marketplaces, along coasts, small villages. Nice walks, hikes, talking and laughing. Sit at a café near the ocean with drinks and a soft breeze.

Not what you were expecting, huh? I guess I’ve already done what I wanted to do. The time left is reserved for those I love and as much laughter as possible.

And as for the “The Wizard of Oz, ” the scariest scene is not the flying monkeys, or the balls of fire the Wicked Witch of the West throws down upon the bone-dry scarecrow. It is the hour glass filled with red sand set up in the castle room with Dorothy. Such a small scene in an irritating film still affects me half a century later. “You see that?” the witch cries to the terrified Judy Garland, “That’s how much longer you have to be alive! And it isn’t long, my sweetie. It isn’t long!” This scared the crap out of me. You mean it’s that easy, I thought, to no longer exist? Someone just flips the hourglass and the sands run out? My heart raced every time the camera focused on the depleting red grains dripping through the huge timepiece.

It didn’t help that during those years my mother watched “Days of Our Lives,” and the opening sequence was always, “Like sand through the hourglass, so go the Days of Our Lives.” Whoa! Talk about depressing. I was raised saturated in this daily dose of “you’re going to die soon.” Growing up near the beach probably didn’t help; the shifting patterns of sand symbolized to me the passing of seconds and hours and days and years. And when aunts and uncles exclaimed I had an “old soul” I thought they were ordering last rites.

So some sense of urgency festered in me from quite early on. I started attacking my ambitions like I had just three weeks left before the sand ran out. When I was young, I had an outrageous list of dreams, ambitions, or “fantasies” as most others called them. One of the first brilliant ideas was doomed for failure: My friend Eddie and I had been sending up rockets; the ones with a gun-powder-filled battery shoved up their tails which we bought from a hobby shop. We were getting good at this and our imagination ran away fast. This was around 1973 and I was totally into adventure. Papillon had just come out and my mind was already bent on traveling to faraway lands. Mostly, though, I was obsessed with becoming an astronaut. I knew all their names, and I had memorized every detail I could find about rockets, their speeds, thrust, history and expectations. I had a brown cpo jacket and asked my mother to sew on an American flag and a NASA patch. When we went into stores I liked to pretend people thought I must have something to do with the space program. I played it cool, of course, holding my mom’s car keys like I just got back from the Johnson Space Center. I was twelve.

Even so, Eddie and I had a plan. We were going to take apart the batteries to study how they are made, and then we would make a large one that could carry one of us, me, into the clouds. We knew we would have needed a heat shield to exit the atmosphere and return—we weren’t dumb—so we planned to use a metal garbage can. We only were going to lift a few hundred feet just to show the naysayers we earned our patches. So we slowly filled a coffee can with the gun powder from several dozen batteries bought over several months. But one night Eddie left the coffee can on his patio in the rain. We didn’t have enough money to buy more batteries so we tossed the plan and played baseball. A few years later I moved away and found more pragmatic plans. I am not certain, however, if I was ever so serious or energetic as I was when I thought I was going into the clouds. To me that fantasy was simply reality’s childhood.

Back then I couldn’t possibly know that eventually the most treasured content of my bucket list would be the simplest of thoughts—plans really—like lying on the floor playing Risk and Boggle with my son and sharing a bowl of pretzels while we laughed at the anxious final seconds of each round. Or the one of walking slowly through a mall with my dad, sitting on a bench reminiscing or being quiet, sitting having Scotch on Tuesday nights. I was always excited to be able to sit and watch a baseball game on television with him, neither of us saying a word. That doesn’t sound a bit like a dream for anyone’s bucket list, but it makes it into most of ours at some point. I thought of all those small moments while standing in the doorway to his room during his last days. I’d lean against the wall and stare at the paper butterfly, the universal symbol of comfort care, on the door jam.   It’s crazy how the simple moments like time together get overshadowed by fleeting ideas like skydiving and hot air ballooning.

I’m certain at some point early on in my life while listening to “Days of Our Lives” my mind turned toward adventure. I’m equally sure that my dad had a lot to do with that. Every Christmas he bought us books and for some reason, perhaps intuition, the ones he picked for me all focused on outrageous escapades. Robin Lee Graham’s The Boy Who Sailed Around the World Alone; Peter Jenkin’s A Walk Across America, Bound for Glory about Woody Guthie, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, and more. These were obvious influences for me, and growing up a child of the late sixties certainly added to the action. From the moment of Kennedy’s decree to reach the moon to actually reaching the moon occupied exactly my first nine years of life. Many moments in my youth lit a fire under me that still burns. This can be both exhilarating and exasperating.

Still no one ever told me I was wrong. No one ever indicated anything I suggested was a bad idea, only that it was too early, or that I was “too young.” So dreams got pushed aside, never making it to the “did that already” bucket but never really leaving the list. It took me years to realize the dreams we fill our lives with don’t necessarily play out in chronological order. I’m lucky, actually, that some chaotic appearances on my radar don’t coincide with their fruition. I learned quickly that if things don’t play out as planned to just toss them back in the bucket and let them simmer around awhile like a lottery ball.

I have only a little desire left to climb in a garbage can and light a fire under my ass, but since then biking around Ireland made the list. Or maybe I’ll just go back to Spain. And more than a few folks older than me sail the Caribbean well into their sixties. Many many years ago I had hopes of getting to Greece. Maybe I’ll still get there and share a bottle of wine. Sometimes it’s just that we take the long way. I had other bad ideas besides dying in a flaming piece of metal. There was the time my friend Tom and I were going to push a desk from Tucson to Washington, DC to point out corporate waste while people were starving to death. Even philosopher and writer Leo Buscaglia dropped us a line to wish us luck. It took us a while to realize he was being sarcastic. No good Monarch would waste his time on such nonsense, no matter how noble. Butterflies, man. Butterflies are bad examples; they offer false hope.

Whenever my son and I would play that Boggle game, he flipped that damn hourglass with the three-minute timer and tap his finger. Tap. Tap. Tap. My anxiety level increased and my blood pressure peaked. OH, he knew what he was doing. But he couldn’t know he was feeding the trauma of PTSD from some fictional witch. “In good time,” I can hear her saying. It was that threatening decree, “In good time,” that motivated me. Still, she never said “in time”; it was always, “In good time.”

I suppose even a witch, like turning sixty-five, can have some redeeming qualities.

Bob Unplugged

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment

No running water, no electricity, no means of communication. We hiked from our cabin at just over ten thousand feet in the Uinta Mountains to just over eleven thousand feet. Snowpack remained, and while the temperature was pleasant, often even warm, a quick turn into the shade marked the cool dryness. In the evening we kept a fire going in front of the cabin, cooked on a camp stove, drank, went for a walk to watch the moon rise—which didn’t—walked to the dock at Spirit Lake and lay on our backs to watch the abundance of stars. An otter or two swam by, a few moose showed up in the field, chipmunks buzzed about, and the unmistakable peace of absolute silence dominated the days to the point I didn’t even notice. The nights turned cold and we fed the small, nearly 100-year-old cabin’s wood burning stove long enough to make it to morning.

Absent was the news, cellphone reception, communication with anyone else save the lodge owner and his wife, no neighbors in the few other working cabins to chat with, just the indescribable silence and laughter, a lot of laughing.

I worried about grizzlies. “There are no grizzlies here; they’re over in Colorado. Just black or brown bears.” So I worried about black and brown bears.

I worried about snakes. “There are no snakes at this altitude. Too cold.”

Damnit, I needed something to worry about. Habit. What I didn’t worry about was the disconnection with the world; being above the tangled waves of electronics saturating the air just a few thousand feet below. I could breathe; well, except for the air being so thin that I couldn’t breathe. And I could in that brief stretch of days, for the first time in a long time, be unapologetically myself because I knew I could. Sometimes it takes a friend to reveal who you really are. Sometimes it takes a lifetime.

Bob Unplugged.

I’ve been this way before, a long time ago during my sometimes-weeklong jaunts into Mexico before cellphones, or two excursions into Africa, and other places where I was mostly alone, or where the people I was with were equally absent of some umbilical to all things civilized, and all that was left to do was to talk, so we talked. Indeed. We talked about how we missed our moms, we talked about what breaks our hearts, we talked about what we dream of and what we don’t dream of, we talked, as Harry Chapin described, “of the tiny difference between ending and starting to begin.” We talked about how sometimes it takes years to understand the beauty of silence, the value of peace. Remember talking? Not words out loud, but real talking.

The night before I left Virginia I hit “Send” on the email to my publisher which contains the final draft of a book which talks about, in fact, celebrates, that very sense of disconnect, the abandonment of society, the push into the unknown. Early one morning after wandering to the outhouse and then up to the field to see if the moose had returned, I wandered to the lake and walked out on the dock. A soft orange sky spilled just to the top of the mountains, and the water worked from dark black to its normal greens and blues, and I stood alone before the dawn and my mind dislocated itself from time. This could be 1981, I thought, remembering a solid portion of my just-sent book; or it could be 1984 half a world away. It could be 1986 in Pennsylvania, or a year later waist deep in some equatorial river.

It might be years from now or just as easily the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods when dinosaurs tramped about these very hills. I forgot what day it was, and then I forgot how old I was. And then everything fell apart because that happens, things fall apart, but as it turns out that just makes it easier to rebuild from scratch.

I found myself on the dock completely at peace no longer worried about anything. I lay again on the dock as we had the previous night but this time alone and looked up and felt transported in such realistic ways that to describe it here would be to hack my way through this short reflection, but I was transported not to Pennsylvania 1986, not to Senegal or Allegany or the Congo. My entire presence slipped into Great River, New York, nearly fifty years earlier to the very day, and Eddie Radtke must have been somewhere in the woods looking for firewood, and I stared past what must have been the Great South Bay early one morning which he and I had explored daily for a solid wave of our childhood. That’s where my mind went; it reeled northeast about as far as one can, and slipped into 1975.

It was like being back in 1975 at the start of something but this time knowing how to handle it, knowing what to say right and what not to say at all, this time. I had not yet unearthed tennis courts and guitar shops, not yet swallowed the ocean water of the southeast beaches, not yet changed my mind, not yet learned hesitation and self-doubt that befell me just a decade later.

—

I turn sixty-five in two weeks. This year that day is tangled up in so many memories and symbolism, but something is different now than just a few weeks ago, pre-disconnect, if you will.

At one point in the book to be published later this year, I had been working in a bar in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, with no true sense of direction except the absolute conviction that the lack of direction was not working for me. Late one night, early one morning I woke on a bench near a lake in a local State Park with no real recollection as to how I got there. I had not been drinking, no drugs, no overworked exhaustive excuses led me to the familiar shore where I had at one time laughed so hard. No, it was my complete indifference that brought me there. And I sat up and waded into the lake to my waist. When I returned to my home that morning, everything changed; or, better said, I changed everything.

Peace does that. Silence, and the depth of some connection that is difficult to find does that.

I lay on the dock at Spirit Lake and remembered the bench two thousand miles east. I’ve had so many changes this past year, perhaps more than in all my previous years combined, and I thought of Jackson Browne: “Oh God, this is some shape I’m in.” But I recalled not the last twelve months but my long drives into Mexico more than forty years ago when I thought I’d find the answers, or the walk across Spain, or the train across Siberia. All those times I was so at peace, so much in the moment and loving my existence, but I had not been this much at peace with myself and who I am—or, better said, who I need to be—since that morning in the park when I felt some sense of absolute clarity, when on a dime I let everything go, disconnected from absolutely all aspects of thought and commitment and simply let myself be myself as I imagined I was meant to be. And I lay on the dock and thought of Paulo Coelho who wrote, “Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place,” and things seemed suddenly obvious.

Thank you clarity.

We packed, we meandered our way four days later though the mountains to the lowlands through a small swatch of Wyoming and back into now, back to suburbia, back to the news—the bombing of Iran, the bombing of Israel, the war in Ukraine, the disarray of Washington, the murder of protestors, the abandonment of morality, the sacrifice of truth—all of it, and I briefly envied those who left—Eddie and Letty, Dan and Dave and Mom and Dad. They have been spared this nonsense.

But, briefly, so was I, by choice. We sat in chairs around the fire and laughed like hell when I accidently burned off the soles of my sneakers, laughed harder when after banging my head several times on the exceptionally low doorframe, returned at one point to find the door jam covered in bubble wrap, laughed at the sudden appearance almost on demand of a family of moose, and laughed at the nature of change, the value of friendship. We too often choose not to step away from it all. Seriously, metaphor warning: If you keep your feet too close to the flames something’s going to burn.

I’m stepping away from the nonsense; life is too short. Six and a half decades down and I’ve already outlived nearly everyone I know, so I suppose it’s “time and time and time again to find another way.”

Periods of Long Ago

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 3 Comments

A few days ago I walked out on the 14th Street Pier in Virginia Beach and stopped in Ocean Eddies. It was the dive I would frequent the summers during college. Back then the bar money was kept in a box and the register was a big brown monster. There was no a/c and the windows had to stay open in the oppressively humid night, but the live bands would wake up guests at the hotel I managed next door, so I had a deal with management: I’d not call the cops on him and he quit the music by 1 am, and I’d get free drinks and a burger. Now, almost fifty years later, there is a  deck around the outside, inside has ac, and the food is better. The tide, however, is still just a few feet below the floorboards.

I was nineteen when I got the job at the Sandcastle Hotel at 14th Street on the beach. The owner, Johnny Vakos, and I got along, and the manager, Jack, had a heart attack about a month after I started, so John made me manager. I stayed that way for four summers, May until August, working all shifts, dealing with every character conceivable. Sometimes at night I’d head out to Eddie’s and swap stories with other locals over margaritas. Sometimes when I worked the overnight shift, come morning I’d head up to the seventies past all the hotels and sleep on the beach, and later in the day friends would show up and we’d waste away an afternoon swimming and listening to music. At night we’d all head to Sondra’s Restaurant or the Jewish Mother or Fantastic Fenwick’s Flying Food Factory to listen to my dear (still) friend Jonmark Stone play guitar. But come the following morning I was back at the beach, working the desk, talking to Niki the bike rental girl, bs-ing with guests about where to eat or about the weather or surf conditions. I only have to think about those days and I can smell the salt air.

Something was different this time, like I really won’t be back this time. It happens.

Still, that part of my life stayed in my blood and every once in a while it passes through my heart and becomes real again. We all have periods of long ago like that. For me it’s probably this place because I’ve almost always lived near the ocean, or maybe it’s because our brains and bodies and this planet are all about seventy percent water and I simply feel the tug of the tide. Perhaps I just like the sound of the surf. But I’ve not come upon many places in my travels which simply don’t change. Old neighborhoods seem smaller, the trees suffocate the once open fields, and old hangouts usually have new crowds, or shut down, weeds pushing through parking lot pavement, some windows broken and boarded near the rusted dumpster. Sometimes it’s simply that people pass away, and the reasons for being somewhere pass away with them.

But the ocean and me, well, we go way back. The rest of nature can show signs of change as well. Forests give way to fires, or new growth simply pushes out old oaks changing the landscape; rivers erode at the banks, and while the mountains can retain their majesty, trails and roads can rip small scars across the land, or some new cabin is built whose windows catch the sun and the glare flickers across the valley.

But I can stand on the sand behind the pier and know what i’m going to see. Certainly some days are rougher than others, and in winter a white foam can gather at the break point, but it is the same as it ever has been. The strength of a wave is like no other natural force on earth. Just to stand in the surf waist deep is a lesson in mobility and resistance no physics class could replicate. At some point you give in and fall back or dive forward, and feel that dark, salty, always slightly cool water sweep across every aspect of your body.

And when you look out across the vastness of nothing but blue water, steel blue, metallic greenish slate blue water, you are looking out at exactly what John Smith saw when he first landed a mile and half up the beach four hundred years ago. It is what Powhatan saw, and whatever wandering seaman or viking or ancient civilization saw, exactly the same. Maybe rougher, maybe in the morning perfectly still like glass. Maybe the tide was higher, or so low they could walk out to the scallop beds and pull them up by the load. But it is the same. Exactly.

I can stand here and it might as well be 1979, or ten years earlier and four hundred miles further north, on the beaches of Long Island. It simply makes sense to me. We all need a place to go that makes sense. It was just ten blocks north of here at my son’s tent for a juried art show in 2017 that my mother walked for the last time without assistance; it was just fourteen blocks south at The Inlet House that my dad lived when he first moved to Virginia Beach before buying the house we would all move into four miles west. They’re all gone now, Mom and Dad, the Art Show moved to October, the Inlet House is a parking lot. But this ocean, well, it’s right there keeping my anxiety at bay.

I read once that we all should discover a “third place.” We have home, which comes with it certain responsibilities and routines. We have work with its predictable patterns of give and take. But we need a third place that is neither, that is ours to claim how we want, and gather with friends, or be alone, and let our stresses and expectations dilute in the deluge of “somewhere else.” For many it is a bar, or a coffee shop, or a park or a gym. For me, back then, I thought it was Ocean Eddies where I learned more about people than I ever cared to know. But it wasn’t; it was outside, on the sand, looking out toward Portugal, toward Spain, and Africa. Looking up the coast toward the Island. It’s lonelier now than it ever has been, and maybe I’ll not be back for some time, or ever. But I like knowing it is here. I like that I can depend upon this. I like that I know it is time to leave.

December 17th, 1944

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 1 Comment
The American National Cemetery at Margraten, The Netherlands

When my Uncle Tom Burton died, the service was held at Arlington National Cemetery. He was a war hero, then a sheriff, always a father and a fine man. He lived a long life and it was an honor to be there when a marine knelt in front of my cousin, Audrey, and whispered, “On behalf of the President of the United States…” and guns were fired, and a soldier stood amidst some headstones and saluted the entire time. Nearby a horse-drawn carriage waited.

I walked about the cemetery that day and noted the names and dates, and while many of them did indeed die in combat and were interred at Arlington, many, such as my Uncle, served his time and lived a good, long life–never long enough, of course–and played with his grandchildren before that inevitable day. I wrote about Arlington Cemetery for the Washington Post, and while sadness was a motivating factor in my prose, it was not nearly as present as was pride for the women and men who served.

Staff Sergeant Edward L. Miller of the 309th Infantry, 78th Division, from Pennsylvania, was never buried at Arlington. Killed during the Battle of the Bulge, his final resting place is in the American National Cemetery in Margraten, Netherlands. His is one of more than 8000 soldiers buried there beneath the white crosses with names carved in perfect formation. The grounds of the cemetery–officially American Territory about two hours southeast of Amsterdam–are manicured and, in April, spectacular for the flowering trees and freshly mown lawns. Sergeant Miller’s niece, Kay Miller Debow, with the assistance of the abundantly friendly and respectful staff of the cemetery, made a rubbing of her uncle’s stone. After, she rubbed sand from the beaches of Normandy into the letters of the familiar name, washed the stone, and stood back to note how Edward’s name now stood out from the rest of the whiteness. What an honor it was to be there, to be part of this journey which began across the German border more than eighty years ago, and which continues with relatives who do not want their sacrifice to be forgotten.

In fact, honor was the word most exchanged in Margraten that day. The staff commented several times that it is an honor for them to care for the grave of the men who protected the country from the Nazis and liberated them not long after Edward Miller’s death. Kay commented what an honor it was to meet the people who look after so many fallen American’s, and the family who cares for his grave drove to meet her and brought flowers for her uncle and said it has been their family’s honor to be able to do so since the end of World War Two.

I don’t hear the word honor anymore. It was an emotional day for the obvious reasons, but also for what no longer seems to be so common: honor, respect, sacrifice, gratefulness.

It was a beautiful day; clear blue skies and a soft sixty degrees. I’ve known Kay since we were young, before the world slipped into our lives with all of its competition and anger; before Kay’s own service in the United States Air Force, before the world invented a way to sit at a table, logon, and find fallen soldiers, back when Sergeant Miller had been gone just forty or so years. That was a lifetime ago. Several. And I looked out at the crosses and wondered how many families in the States take the time to come to this remote, country town to pay their respects to someone who never made it home again to see their mom; never returned home again to get back together with an old flame and get on with their lives; never saw the sunsets and distant beauty of a morning mist.

Still, I could not understand why this was so much more emotional than the internment of my own uncle at Arlington. Then it struck me as I watched Kay place her hand on Edward’s headstone while no one was nearby: She never knew him. I knew my uncle; we laughed at parties together, and he showed up at my parents’ anniversary parties and always laughed with us, told stories. He died when my son was already in his twenties, and when my cousin’s kids were adults. Edward Miller died when his brother, Kay’s own father, was still a child.

Eric Van Heugten, the man who brings flowers to the grave and whose family has done so now for eighty years, stood next to me along with our host, Roel Timmermans, as I looked about and said, mostly to myself, “These men were the same exact age as my students.” That is what I couldn’t shake. That’s the difference. When I’m in class and my students are reading their text messages or staring out the windows, I look at them on the front edge of their lives, many of them living away from home for the first time, and they are the same age as the soldiers beneath the soil of Margraten. Eight thousand of them. More. Eight thousand men still teenagers and in their early twenties who never chose a major, never asked anyone out, never got back in touch with an old friend and said, “I’m so glad you’re home.” Because when someone you love goes to war, you simply don’t have a clue if you’ll ever see them again, and it’s terrifying.

And I don’t think my students understand that, or even understand the honor it is to be alive at all. I wish I could bring them all to Margraten, or the American National Cemetery at Normandy, or any of the other thirty-one cemeteries in seventeen nations which forever hold the remains of men who just learned to shave, just learned to drive. Just fell in love.

RIP Sergeant Edward L. Miller. You’d be proud of your niece and all of those who served with her in yet another war, this one in the Gulf.

Vocabulary list for my very-much-alive twenty-year-old students: Honor. Sacrifice. Gratefulness. Loss. Mortality. Love.

Love.

Best Cheese I Ever Had

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment

So here’s one I wrote and let it go. It’s partially told in a piece in my short collection Howl at the Moon (Cuty Wren Press). It came to mind this morning because I’m leaving in a few days for Amsterdam, and I’m sure there will be cheese involved.

I was in the Netherlands about twenty years ago, maybe twenty-five. I lectured at the University of Amsterdam and talked about art and Van Gogh and death. Normal stuff. In class one day, which was open to visitors and in which everyone was required to speak English, an older woman whose late husband was an artist sat in for the lecture, and afterwards she gave me an etching her husband did of a local cathedral. When she learned I was going to find a way up to the Zuider-zee, she offered me her son’s motorcycle for the day. Students gathered to talk about Van Gogh and about America and more. While the woman and I spoke, they talked amongst each other. One guy asked another if she was working that night and she said no, but the next night she was. He told her he’d come by. Another said it hurt to speak in English, and the young woman said it’s good for him to learn, that she wants to learn as many languages as she can. They all talked about van Gogh’s art.

That night on my way back to the hotel, I walked through the Red Light district to use a computer at a Brown Café to tell my officemate about how it was going so far. The windows of the district display scantily clad women, select lingerie on the floor, a couch, maby velvet, sensual surroundings and lighting. They move about tenderly like flesh and bone mannequins, and when a prospect passes, they urge him to pause, consider coming in for a quick turn. They whisper to them in Dutch, in English, French, German. There’s a back room for the business end of the exchange. I kept walking.

The next morning was one of those movie-set days with a perfect temperature, ideal soft breeze, postcard tulips and windmills, dikes running roadside holding back calm waters. I rode out to a Volendam café on the docks where som sailor just back from the states finished washing down his ketch, and we talked about his Atlantic crossing, about the Chesapeake Bay where he had been, and about the cheese he had on deck which he shared with me. We went in the café for a beer and the waitress offered some Gouda and bread with eel and herring. She said the cheese was from a small factory just a few miles away and that I should go, so I did.

Inside the cheese factory—a small barn-type building—a young man and woman stirred a vat of vlaskaas cheese which was sharp, and they told a half dozen of us how gouda is made and molded into wheels and how we shouldn’t refrigerate it, and how healthy it really is, being a hard cheese, including aged, smoked, and toasted. I bought two wheels for fresh gouda and stacked them in my pack and walked outside where a few other travelers from a bus sat at a picnic table.

A Dutch girl about twenty-five eating cheese and drinking white wine asked me to sit with her, and when I told her she looked familiar she said she had been at my lecture, and she swept her blond hair behind her ear and that’s how I knew her—she did that the entire reading, it kept falling forward and she kept sweeping it back and I thought Geeze just tie it back already. I told her simply I recognized her.

She offered me a glass of wine and retrieved a plastic cup from inside, and I shared her cheese. Her name was Abby and she came up to get a few wheels for her family and one for her. After about thirty minutes and a glass of white, the bus driver called for them to go so she left and said she’d hoped to see me again, and I walked toward the bike to leave. The cheese was heavy but I was glad to have it, and the perfect day made me not care so much.

That night I packed for my trip home the next day and decided to head back to the Brown Café to write again to my officemate back home to tell him about the ride out to the North Sea and the sailor and the hair-sweeping blond. I did so on the upper level of the first café I came to where the open door swept the smoke from the hash up to the internet café section so that by the end of my email I couldn’t spell anything correctly.

I left the café and strolled around the district where people drank espresso and the aroma of various smoke filled the narrow streets and top-shelf women worked the windows, and if you can see this coming you must believe me that I certainly didn’t see it coming at the time: I turned a corner and glanced at a blond in a prime-site window, and it was her, Abby, the hair girl with the cheese, and she motioned to me like I was just another passerby, but then recognized me and sat up more from where she had been prone on some pillows and her white lingerie lingered just a bit behind, and she pulled her strap back on not trying too hard to do so, and she pressed against the glass and urged me to come inside, motioning toward the door on the left. I thought about just walking by but that thought didn’t hold so I went in just to say hello. She cut me a slice of the cheese she had bought that day and she pointed that out, that it was the same wheel of cheese that we shared earlier, and that thought seemed to connect us closer than I cared, but it hung there between us. I had one slice of the vlaskaas on the table and said I didn’t want her to lose business on account of me, and that I really had no intention of patronizing her profession, and she smiled and said she understood. I left, and on the way out I passed the guy from class who had asked her if she was working that night. He glanced at me and I laughed. This is not like the colleges at home, I thought.  

On the way home I walked by the Van Gogh museum one more time. It was quite in that part of town, and I stood in the cool night air, the sweet aroma of flowers everywhere, and remembered Vincent’s words about Sien, a prostitute who lived with him for a while with her young daughter. About her he wrote to his brother, “I believe there is nothing more artistic than to love people.”

Next week I’ll be there, at the museum, at the village where he lived a while with his parents, and along the canals. Just look at how everything in our lives moves on, grows and changes and, eventually dies. We age and hold out hope that some of who we used to be remains, knowing, of course, that is true only for a little while. Since I walked those streets last, friends and loved ones have died and my world has changed time and time again, but this week I’ll walk along that avenue and the hallways of the van Gogh museum where his work remains on permanent display, and I’ll think about the man who was nothing more than a peasant who lived with a prostitute, didn’t make any money in his last ten yers, lived off of his brother, was disliked and consdiered a leech and a failure by everyone including the best artists of the day who for the most part said his work had no hope. And I’ll think about that as I pass people sleeping on benches in the park and wonder which ones are artists and which ones of us merely pass judgement.

Van Gogh Drawing of Sien Peeling Potatoes

Vincent van Gogh

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ 2 Comments

Vincent van Gogh was born on March 30, 1852, and died at birth. His parents buried him in the entrance to the graveyard in the church where his father was an Episcopalian minister. Exactly one year later to the day, the couple gave birth to another boy and named him after his dead older brother. Vincent van Gogh was born March 30, 1853, and spent his youth seeing his name and birth date on a headstone when he went to the church.

He tried working in a bookshop, as a tutor, an art dealer, and a preacher in the mines of Belgium. He spoke multiple languages, read Hugo in French and Dickens in English. He fell in love with his cousin and lived for some time with a prostitute and her daughter. For the last ten years of his life he lived entirely off of his brother, sold only a painting and a scattering of drawings, fought with every artist he knew and rarely paid his bills. He was belligerent and sick with syphilis, manic-depression, and epilepsy. He was considered a bum by every contact he made, and only two art critics thought he showed any promise at all. At thirty-seven he shot and killed himself.

That was 135 years ago this July. We’re still talking about him.

By today’s standards, he would be outcast and dismissed as a man who wasted his life pursuing a passion with no hope of even making a living at it, let alone gaining any success. He would be quickly forgotten.

A few years after his suicide, Vincent began to be recognized for his innovations in art, his vision as an expressionist, and his deeply-moving letters to his brother about life, love, God, hope, art, and death. Today he is considered one of the most influential artists in history.

I’m going to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam next week followed by a reading I’ll be doing at the Van Gogh Library in Neunen, Netherlands.

It started when I was a freshman in college, and a dear friend, the late artist James Cole Young, gave me a three volume set of letters Van Gogh wrote to his brother and other artists. I mostly ignored it for a few years, until in Massachusetts when I went home after work each night and read them several times, intrigued by two seeming contradictions: One, he wrote extensively about his inability to gain any attention at all in the art world and other artists’ bad opinion of his work, yet he became one of the greatest artists of all time; and two, he stated often his thrill for being alive, for life itself, for everyone, and he wrote of the insane idea of taking one’s own life, yet he did just that. So I looked further. As a graduate student, I wrote a one man play as one part of my Masters in Arts and Humanities at Penn State and performed it at the Olmstead Theatre in Pennsylvania, under the direction of the late playwright Eton Churchill. Eventually, my work Blessed Twilight: The Life of Vincent van Gogh was released in 2018. It is all first person from Vincent’s letters.

In just over a week I get to hang out where he lived and wander aimlessly down the same streets of Neunen. Perhaps I’ll even drink some absinth

Most people love Vincent’s art. But I like his writing.

Like this:

In a painter’s life, death perhaps is not the hardest thing there is. 

The earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, and is today, that between Paris and Arles, it is. But science has proven the world is round and nobody contradicts that nowadays. But notwithstanding all of this people persist in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present. For my part, I know nothing of it. But to look at the stars always makes me dream as simply as I dream over the black dots of a map representing towns and villages. Why, I ask myself, should the shining dots of the sky not be as accessible as the black dots on a map of France? If we take a train to get to Rouen, we take death to reach a star. One thing undoubtably true in this reasoning is this: that while we are alive, we cannot get to a star any more than while we are dead we can take the train. So it seems to me possible that cholera and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion just as steamboats and railways are the terrestrial means.

To die quietly of old age would be to go there on foot. 

I feel more and more that we must not judge God on the basis of this world; it is a study that didn’t come off. What can you do in a study that has gone wrong if you are fond of the artist? You do not find much to criticize; you hold your tongue. But you have a right to ask for something better. It is only a master that can make such a muddle as this, since then we have a right to hope that we’ll see the same creative hand get even with itself. And this life of ours, so much criticized and for such good and exalted reasons—we must not take it for anything more than what it is and go on hoping that in some other life we’ll see a better thing than this.  

–Vincent van Gogh

On This Silent Night

~ aviewfromthiswilderness ~ Leave a comment
The Blue’s Brother’s Light Display

It’s misty tonight but not raining, and all the lights have halos from the soft air. Today I slowed down after sixteen weeks of not, followed by a few days of noise–it was all in my mind, of course, but noisy just the same, so this evening I decided to slow down and after standing on the front lawn looking at the moon through the haze in the east, I drove down into town.

I put on some solo piano music from George Winston’s December and rolled slowly past the fish market to the real estate office where Steve and Randy Blue have the best lights I’ve seen. They have music synced with a radio station across the river, and the largest tree in the front keeps beat with the sounds, but I kept my windows rolled up and just listened to George’s deep rendition of Variations on Canon in D. Kids with parents ran through the paths between light displays, and I assume they were yelling, or calling out what they saw, but I heard nothing. Just George and Pachelbel.

I stopped next door at 711 and bought some hot chocolate, talked to Wayne a while in the parking lot, but families started moving past the Nutcracker display to the parking lot, so I drove off toward the bay, pausing in front of Hurd’s Hardware. Jack Hurd has the entire front window filled with illuminated Christmas trees in various colors, and on the left side the trees are several deep. This window against a black sky with no other stores around makes it more silent than it should be. I turned off the car and the radio and rolled the window down and still heard nothing but quiet, a faint spill of music from the light display at the realtors.

Behind Hurd’s and across the street is the village branch of the county library, and tonight my son worked while a local Y hosted kids who had entered their artwork to be hung in the library gallery in the back. I rolled down the street and looked back into the window. This, right here, is one of my favorite things to do in the dead of a cold night in December; to see kids and families laughing and warm inside a window, not able to hear them, but watching them play and talk while outside I can see my breath and my face is tight from the cold. At one table near the front Michael talked to a woman, while over near the door a few kids entered to head back to show their parents their work.

On the way home I rolled into the IGA and could see Kristin from the museum and one of her kids at the checkout, talking to the clerk, laughing. The lot was empty, mostly because it’s Monday but also the rain, and I headed to the river, rolled down the windows, and turned off the car and sat quietly. Out on the Norris Bridge I could hear the whining of truck wheels moving across to White Stone, and the light at the airfield was circling, indicating someone will land at some point tonight, probably Mike in his PT-13 headed back from some weekend show. All of this going on yet all I can hear is the lapping of the Rap on the sand and the slow movement of a heron about fifty feet away in the marsh. To my right in the windows of the yellow house across the reeds is a blue light of a computer or television flashing on the walls.

I like the peace I find when I am outside looking in at Christmastime, and some rebirth of familiar connections take hold of everyone. It is fleeting of course, but present for now. I enjoy watching these flashes of life around me. I try not to be creepy and prefer only to look in public spaces like convenience and hardware stores, but it is nice to catch a place like the library where so much activity is going on behind my music, like shadows on some cave wall. But this year is different than last. Some of the people I used to talk to every day have gone silent, somewhere beyond the ideas and anticipations of those still here. So my world in general has gone mostly silent in the past several months for the first time in three decades.

So tonight I decided a drive made perfect sense; not only because it fills me with some sort of hope to see life being lived, but also because I’ve always been just outside looking in.

This happens to a lot of people, especially this time of year; we have a sense that we’re better off a step back, perhaps a small part of the conversation but not participating as much as others, preferring instead the safety of the next row back instead of the circle of talkers; we are more comfortable on the patio bench quietly watching the stars until someone else who feels awkward comes out and quips about needing some air. That’s where I am, away from the small talk, and I turn around, place my elbows on some wrought iron fence behind me, and look in a everyone laughing. I am okay a step back.

But at the river I sat in silence and thought about why this distance works for me.

It is safely consistent. I know blindfolded how to walk through most of the Blue’s Brother’s light display, and I know Wayne and Maria will be at 711 at this hour. Monday nights Michael always works the library, and Jack’s trees make everyone smile for a few weeks. They make me smile anyway, and I appreciate that. It is predictable and consistent at the end of a year that has been anything but either.

So I drove around listening to Winston’s version of Bach’s Joy and felt completely and literally at peace. Life is out there, through the windows, in the market and the front steps of the convenience store. The kids in the library laugh like Michael used to when I brought him in to sit at those same tables two and a half decades ago. This is what we can count on when we are running out of things to rely upon; that Christmas will bring out people with lights and once dark window displays are somehow almost personified, the trees in Jack’s window display appear more like watermen at the cafe standing around talking about the coming snow.

I slowly rolled down my long, winding driveway until I reached the lamppost near the lawn at the house. The porch is lit with white lights, as usual, and the wreathes illuminate the walls and windows. I had one other significant loss this past year; the Penguin, affectionately known as Pengy, died last January. His wires were shredded from years of moisture and his skin simply popped. Sad really, because I liked seeing him for twenty years at the corner of the porch.

But things change. I have new light displays now someone sent me, and after tonight’s Chocolate Bailey’s on ice I’m not going to care so much anyway. But I do have a suggestion: Turn off the music except for something peaceful, and stay outside for a bit–watch life for a while from the outside, observe it’s consistent laugher and predictable love. Watch others enjoy the moments they have together while they still have those moments.

But don’t stay out there too long. The love is inside.

Hurd’s Hardware, Deltaville
west on the Rappahannock tonight