Consuming our Problems

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I've written before that our current civilization has the familiar reek of a speculative bubble whose days are numbered.  Whenever any of our leaders talk about our future, the combination of bad math, delusional happy talk, and faith that this time it's different just confirms the conclusion.

As far as John Michael Greer is concerned, the decline of cheap energy, combined with our unwillingness to change course until it is far too late, have doomed our civilization to join the many, many others that have fallen hard and left their people to find a way through the hard times and dark ages that can follow.  The destruction of a civilization can take centuries, but in fact it is already under way and has been for decades - a lived experience that more people are starting to intuit.

I have tremendous faith in humans' ability to muddle through, (which is why I gravitate toward Greer rather than many other doomsayers who envision a universally sudden, catastrophic and even extinctive collapse).  But there are reasons to think that our current crop of Americans are exquisitely ill-prepared to deal with the twin calamities of an end of the American Empire and the decline of Industrial Civilization.

I think there are numerous reasons for our terrifying inability to grapple with our upcoming problems.  One ingredient of our current recipe for incompetence is what (in our research work) we call the consumer stance.  The consumer stance stands as an antithesis to the engaged citizen or practical problem-solver and shows up regularly as a obstacle for advocates who are engaged with various public issues.  The consumer creates nothing - neither the end product nor the underlying conditions, but instead chooses among options that are presented to them.  However, in an ironic twist, consumer choice is mythologized as the proper expression of power and individuality.  Wherever you may be in the hierarchies of life, when you are the customer you are the one who holds the cards and the one who has to be catered to.  This delusion of power (trumpeted in each of the thousands of advertisements we face every day) can hide people's actual powerlessness.

In fact, most people don't get much practice anymore in creating their own things and social spaces.  Our tastes, our hobbies, our ways of defining ourselves may seem like they come from a kind of infinite buffet, but they are increasingly commodified and pre-packaged for us in ways we don't even perceive.  From the playground, to the workplace, to leisure, to the community organizations that used to be so central to daily life, most people have been maneuvered into being passive recipients rather than active producers and organizers.  

When it comes to politics, we don't get much practice in being producers of power, compromise, and collective problem-solving.  The problem of the consumer stance has been at the forefront of my mind in recent weeks, as I was researching in California, interviewing chance-met people about their thoughts on government.

There are all sorts of themes that come up, which I won't go into here, but one of the most unsurprising findings is that people do not participate in a democracy as creative, constructive citizens.  Instead they are classic consumers, forever electing between Brand X and Brand Y, and if one brand is mostly useless and the other poison, they don't see what they can do about that.  Vote against the poison or protest their lousy options by not voting at all.  Rather than considering their potential to meet challenges collectively through public, collective institutions, the average American is a dissatisfied customer increasingly giving up on democracy and its unreliable barkers.

In another project we research into how to communicate to farmers and their allies about sustainability.  Normally farmers are an unreceptive audience when it comes to progressive policies, since they skew heavily conservative and tend to regard government with scorn.  But interestingly, when it comes to sustainability they are much more "progressive" than regular people.  

Farmers have been producers and they are much more clued into how and whether systems can be sustained over a year, a lifetime, or through the generations.  They have some inkling about what is involved in protecting or maintaining the generative foundations that we all rely on.  Although they are trapped in an increasingly unsustainable food system and being sidelined themselves, unlike regular people they understand enough to be seeking for a way to keep things going over the long haul.

When I look around at the so-called solutions to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, unsustainability, and economic contraction, I see marketers hawking various bottles of snake oil (e.g. fracking our way to energy independence, SUVs driving on windmill electricity, productivity apps for our phones), but only in those cases where someone sees a way to turn a profit on us consumers.  Otherwise there is a deafening silence, and a population that doesn't fully grasp how and why it isn't being served.

A common thread among the problems we aren't solving - is that we need to consume less and do more for ourselves. We need to use less energy, consume fewer goods, participate in democracy and community (rather than delegating it to others).  We need to wind down the consumer-capitalist juggernaut that is quickly destroying its own foundations.  As long as Americans remain habituated to their consumer stance, and fail to become active agents, we're doomed to the sad spectacle of our current lemming-march toward multiple fiascos.

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Consuming Essays

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John Michael Greer, who posts a weekly essay on his Archdruid Report announced that he is going on hiatus for a while.  In response, I quipped that I'd come to really rely on his weekly post about the potential winding down of industrial civilization, and now I'd be forced to make the transition from consumer to producer.

I suppose I’ll have to get my weekly dose by writing my own version of the report on my own blog.  After all, one of the more promising avenues of adaptation (in addition to gardening, appropriate tech, etc.) has to be making the mental and material transformations from consumer to producer. And with that I have my first topic to explore . 

But now I have to gather my thoughts and muster my arguments if I'm going to attempt the kind of weekly manifesto that JMG manages to produce.  My recent research travels have given me grist for the mill . . .

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The Love Note to 2014, April 14 - 27

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I love skunk cabbage, a warm-blooded plant,
which unfurls to push away the winter,
and the pollen-dusty pompoms of the maple trees.

Porter as Anselmo the muleteer in The Man from La Mancha

I love a good hike sweat,
and the burn of trembling muscles,
and air drawn to inner-most depth of chest, deafeningly,
for a view of hawks or distant islands.

I love to see my boys becoming men

to hear the teachers say,
so comfortable in his skin,

he stands so confidently to speak,
to say his piece,
and the others - they listen.

I love their unabated curiosity -
and how their strong and agile minds
can prise out more and more
from this world
that so many take for granted.

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Ethnography in California

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I was taking a break from interviewing on the streets, sitting in a tiny Burger King in Central Los Angeles, drinking a soda and dribbling ketchup onto hot french fries.  I wasn’t hungry, only thirsty.  

The mentally ill man who rearranged all the chairs warned me that there was a fry at my feet.  He begged pardon before sweeping something only he could see from the aura above my head. 

I sat beside a red-haired dwarf and her friend, a fat man in cut-off sweatpants with a shaved head.  They were talking together sadly in Spanglish, while little Korean girls in sparkly shoes skipped around a father’s legs.

There was something wrong with the handsome man with the billygoat beard, though he looked perfectly normal.  But some human sense is triggered by invisible aberrations.  His short girlfriend could not help herself, but repeatedly reached up to touch and rearrange the heavily greased curls that that he wore.

I recalled how years and years ago in college Felipe and I used to wander out into the human mazes of Philadelphia and find such scenes and such people.  And how exotic and bizarre those nights were, filled with the colorful and the damaged and the mad.  We laughed and marveled and considered ourselves adventurers into the human panoply.

I had been interviewing people around this barrio – and behind the broken English, and dented lives there were passionate people with intelligent and observant things to say and contribute to the discourse I’m researching – about what the point of government is - and what's gone wrong.  

I didn’t feel ashamed of our old adventures, because it didn’t feel like mockery at the time, but something about the recollection made me feel old.  I can follow enough Spanglish to know that the little woman and her friend were discussing an old high school acquaintance who’d been struggling with illness.  The crazy man held the door politely for me as I left.  He had a dusty roll of paper towels under his arm.

Last I heard Felipe was one of the top neurosurgeons in the Southwest.

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Sans Langue

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[I had a request for a post on language, and since birthdays are involved, I thought I'd better deliver.]

In October of 1986 I'd been living and traveling in Europe for over a year.  I was in the final leg of my journey, having said farewell to Munich and hitchhiked my way along the foot of the German Alps to the Rhein.  I was wandering these last weeks in no great hurry, with no urgency to get home, but also without any burning curiosity about the places I was moving through.  The day before I had fallen in love with a German girl who picked me up in her truck - moving her things to university. I was fairly convinced that I could get her to fall in love with me as well.  But some part of me understood I was just drifting unmoored, and I should go on.  (I was also in love with a girl in Rhode Island, though she was months and many miles distant, and not waiting for me.)

At the Rhein the Frenchmen stamped a new visa into my passport - there'd been bombings in Paris during the summer and these visas were a new thing.  I shouldered my backpack and walked across the bridge, departing a land where people spoke a language that I understood and entering one where I spoke a few dozen words.  But one of those words was the word for train station, so if I could make my way to the city of Nancy, I'd be able to find the gare and get a ticket to Brussels and a flight home.

I had traveled without language before this -- Hungary, Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, northern Finland -- and some things are easy, like hitchhiking or buying dinner or flirting, and some things are hard, like a doctor visit, or a haircut or flirting.  I had no pressing needs in this hilly farming country and people seemed content to help an amiable, language-less American make his way.  I must have left my map in one of those cars, but it didn't particularly bother me.  I couldn't get any more lost than I was.

Perhaps I had muttered an inquiring "kemping?" to someone, because in the early evening I found myself at a farm with a little campground to the side, standing with the old couple who owned it.  I think they tried to explain to me that it was out of season and the little campground was closed, but my mute, unyielding incomprehension finally won out.  Before long I had my tent set up in their meadow and was making a little pot of potato soup on my cookstove.  The old woman came by and I held up my bowl of potato and carrot peelings toward her inquiringly.  She had seemed a little oppressed by my languagelessness, but she brightened up and with a cheerful merci, took my offering of peelings to the sheds to feed the pigs.  I was secretly glad that I hadn't been able to ask where the garbage cans were.

As I discovered when I went to wash up for the night, the campground's bathroom was filled with a huge pile of ear corn.  It was simple enough to climb over but the sinks were at the far end and the frugal farmers had set the lights on a 3 minute timer - so precisely every 180 seconds I'd have to scramble back over the pile of corn (this time in total darkness), find the light switch, flip it and make my way back across the corn for whatever was left of my 180 seconds.  Questioning the farmers about this set-up is one of those things that would have been hard without language.  They'd apparently already gone to bed, so I left them in peace.

I distinctly recall standing beside the burly old man early the next morning.  He was wearing his Sunday best and was anxious to head out for the day's errands.  I handed him the few francs or deutschmarks we'd agreed upon for the night's stay.  It was here at this moment that the impersonal exchange of cash for hospitality ought to be domesticated by an exchange of pleasantries - a remark about the weather, an inquiry about how I'd slept, a comment about the condition of the roads toward Nancy, or a belated acknowledgement of the pile of corn.  But farmers, even ones with language can be taciturn.  We stood for a long quiet couple of minutes companionably looking off into the cool, foggy morning while he finished his cigarette.  Then he turned, shook my hand and left me alone in the meadow to break camp.
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Midges are the most insubstantial things - just sunlight and dust with wings.  

They have been everywhere lately - swarming in the sun, filling every breeze, congregating on the side of the house.

I remember summers in the Poconos when the midges would come to the windows at night, attracted by the lights.

In the morning their piled bodies would be snowdrifts upon the windowsills.

The Love Note to 2014, March 31 - April 13

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I love the thawed earth - 

to rake the naked garden a darker shade,
and crumble clods between my fingers;
to find the dirt no longer dormant,
full of creatures.

I love to see music being made,
Nico at the keyboard, his fingers certain
with some secret understanding that I don't share,
Porter's baritone that swells the harmonies he builds with his companions,
Monica hums a snatch of song as her coffee cools.

I love the poets whose songs have been such fearsome company:
Uncompromising Dylan,
Pink Floyd along the precipice of sanity,
Johnny Cash enrapturing on redemption,
Joan Armatrading, Tom Waits, Van Morrison,
and all the others who companied my own triumphs and turmoils.

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Rocky Neck State Park

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Bride Brook marsh

We hiked at Rocky Neck State Park on Saturday.  The still ungreen marshes were alive with egrets and herons, green-winged teal and black ducks, and double-crested cormorants.  A pair of ospreys fussed with sticks in their nest upon a platform.  A flock of glossy ibis moved systematically through the reeds, poking their long curved bills into the roots and stems.

We looked for terrapin, but saw only minnows.  The breeze, for the first time since October, had no bite to it, but was soft and warm.

The campground, which is still closed this time of year, is on the east side of the marsh.  On the west side is a rocky spine of land that runs between the brook and Four Mile river. We hiked up along it watching the birds - more egrets, a great blue heron and a pair of hooded mergansers in their spring finery.

Nico and his friend Sam climbed some rocks and trees as we went northward up the spine and then back southward toward the beach.  We had a picnic in the sun on the rocks below the enormous stone pavilion.  As the afternoon came on more people arrived, walking, picnicking, clambering out the long stony jetty, or flirting with the cold ocean on the white sandy beach itself.

Grills Preserves in the wet season

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The Westerly and Hopkinton Land Trusts got together to build a 75-foot steel hikers' bridge across the Pawcatuck river, linking the 500+ acres on the Westerly side with nearly 700 acres on the Hopkinton side.  This winter they added a causeway and bridge across Tomaquag creek to make hiking this thousand acre preserve even more accessible.

And in these days of the spring floods, it is wonderful to be able to walk these woods without hip waders.  The swale of the Tomaquag is drowned entirely, but the bridge and causeway take you across to the granite hills on the northwest side.  Every little spring and brook is burbling and there are frogs eggs in the vernal pools.

The flooded swale of Tomaquag Creek

 We hiked from the Chase Hill road trailhead on the Hopkinton side, crossed the Tomaquag, walked over the Polly Coon bridge, waded through the remaining eight inches or so of the Pawcatuck that had overflowed the banks, and made our way along the river back to the Bowling Lane trailhead on the Westerly side (where we'd left our other car.)  It took about 90 minutes to cross at an easy pace.

Looking back at Polly Coon bridge, spanning (most of) the Pawcatuck river

Though we didn't manage the hike with dry feet, the new construction meant the woods were passable even at this time of year.  So kudos to the people who made all this happen!

Is it a trail or a creek?

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Garden Ho!

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In most of the northeastern US, the earth is finally ready for gardening.  Here in Rhode Island, March is normally an alternation of warm days (that tempt the gardeners) and hard freezes (that remind them it's too soon).  But this year the ground has mostly stayed frozen and dormant, and even on the rare warmish day there has been no deluding oneself that winter had departed.

Lately most of the nights have stayed above freezing.  The robins have left the woods and are to be seen again on the lawns and fields hunting for the rising earthworms.  The phoebe has returned to her perches. A long, steady soaking rain filled the streams and rivers to bursting and now the sun has come out.  Anyone with a drop of gardening blood  was out yesterday, clearing away the winter's detritus.  I raked my little raised beds in preparation for planting spring greens and pulled the weeds from the hugel.

The oregano and sage are putting out a few new leaves, and the first little fists of rhubarb are pushing through.

I dug up a handful of the jerusalem artichokes - each plant seems to have a tuber about the size of a chicken egg.  I ate one that I split with a pitchfork.  It tasted like a carrot, though with neither the sweetness nor the bitterness of a garden carrot.  (And since I gave up trying to coax a carrot from my garden, I'll take that as a win.)

I've been ridiculously late in ordering my seeds, but I took some of last year's leftovers and got them into the ground: mustard greens, mesclun mix, spinach, and chard.  Some I planted on the hugel, and others under cold frames in the raised beds.

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A Diatribe on the News

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I'm fascinated by world events.  At times I'm a voracious news-consumer, at other times I turn away in disgust, boredom or despair.  I don't have a television, so most of my news comes from the on-line versions of newspapers.  My morning set of bookmarks go in order: New York Times, Talking Points Memo, The Guardian, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung, the Irish Examiner, Караван, and El Colombiano.   The New York and Munich papers have the best grasp on world events, and the Guardian has the best commentary about North America.  TPM's obsession with US politics at every level gives a hint of what may be bubbling up in the next news cycle, if I care to know - which lately I mostly don't.  Караван ("Caravan") and the Irish Examiner are ways to check in on places I have lived and maintain an affection for: Almaty and Cork.  The Medellin paper, El Colombiano I occasionally read in order to learn some Spanish.

My RSS feed brings me articles from a handful of more specialized sources - on climate change, energy, and cultural politics.

I skim, which is why I can no longer watch television news at all.   In reading I can ignore all the groundless speculation about the Malaysian airliner (of course it fell into the ocean!) or the politics of Obamacare (of course the Republicans are going to lambast it!).  The specialized blogs hammer away at their familiar obsessions.  So, even in my queue of newspapers and blogs I read only a smattering.

Lately, day to day reporting has interested me less and less.  Crimea is a case in point.  I can empathize with Crimean friends without needing to master the minutiae of the situation.   Putin has it, isn't going to give it back, it's neither very surprising nor outrageous, and it's not really our problem - at least in the ways that the media discuss it. (That is, the idea that the US and Obama have to - but can't - project their power abroad, that they have to hold the line on sovereignty, that sanctions need to be imposed, etc. is all entirely predictable and pointless.)  I might be interested in a discussion about the global collapse of liberal democracy and our conservatives' unabashed admiration for Putin, or how fossil fuel constraints underly Russia's assertiveness and Europe's passivity - but I'm not interested enough to wade through all the other nonsense, since the best case scenario is usually to hear something I've already worked out in my own analysis.

When Egypt (or the rest of north Africa) lurches toward anarchy, it will be because they have too many young men and not enough wealth, and the geopolitical influence (and oil money) that allowed them to navigate into that cul de sac - are gone.  Who has the megaphones and who is suffering and dying at the ends of the truncheons will not be the crux of the matter, though the stories will all be about that.  If people come up with a different way out - then that would be news!

When India starves it will be because they put their economic faith in globalization instead of building a country that could look after itself - not because of the political clowns who organize the pogroms.  When Japan retreats to isolationism and China re-orients its empire away from supporting the global economy - not only will none of this surprise me, but the undercurrents of culture, economics and energy, which make it all seem so likely (if not inevitable) will remain outside of the stories that the media are willing to tell.  In the US, the combination of a destroyed and eviscerated public political practice, combined with economic decline and elite predation makes the rise of our own Vladimir Putin seem probable, and I'm interested in analyses that speak to that - but for that you have to wade into the blogs.

On the other hand, something that caused my ears to prick up was that the mainstream media actually conveyed the IPCC's assertion that the food system is at risk from climate change.  Here is one of those basic underlying dynamics that we have to understand if we are going to make sense of what happens in Egypt or Syria or California.  Agriculture (and thus civilization) relies on a climate that is predictable enough to raise enormous quantities of food.  We're getting the first impacts of destabilization, and the scientists (who understand the scale of the future impacts which are already built into the system) are beginning to panic.  The stakes are being raised.  Responses, political and material, are being called for with a new urgency, even as the fundamental rigidity of the status quo remains in place.

But that's news!

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The Love Note to 2014, March 18 - 30

I love the sudden sproutings of nieces and nephews - re-seen after months,
limbs stretched,
eyes deeper with questions and idiosyncrasies.

I love coming home.

I love this late March rain that pounds and pools in rippling, unstill puddles,
worms uncoil in earth made wet,
and seed casements rupture from root and stem.

I love this love of dirt,
some strange inkling that I might yet be a gardener.

I love the purring of cats,
their ludicrous headbutts,
the way their passions run to tip of tail and twitch of ear.

I love the kindness of my sons, which just might be the most important thing.

I love the charm that Monica exerts on people that she meets,
because I glimpse what made me love so irrevocably.

Back into the fray

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A week ago we returned from our travels in Costa Rica, back into the teeth of a winter still going strong.  After a few hours sleep I was at work, leading phone research calls among Midwesterners about sustainable agriculture.  And the week since has intensified the pace.

We have three projects wrapping up, none of which I'm involved in, except for sporadic editing of drafts as they pass by.  But we are ramping up 5 active research projects that I'll be managing.  One on sustainable agriculture, one on money in politics, one on how to craft a progressive model of government, and two over-lapping ones on matters of budgets and taxation, with the first focused on Washington state and the other national.

Gardening has gone completely off the rails.  I don't even have my seeds yet, and I'm going to have to scramble for seed potatoes depending on what I find in the cellar.  But on the bright side, the ground is still frozen, so at least I'm not gnashing my teeth like all the other gardeners.  This weekend I'll rake the raised bed and put on some cold frames to start warming up the soil for when I do have something to plant.

I still haven't unpacked my suitcase.  I'll probably be traveling for a week or so to Wisconsin (on a taxes and budgets project) as well as to the Midwest (on the sustainable agriculture project).  There are another 4 such trips to another 4 states on the governance project - but I'll have to hire ethnographer(s) for most or all of those.  Mix in a trip to California to see Porter at the end of April and it may be that gardening never gets back on the rails.  And the bees had best look after themselves.

Nico may have to start pulling his weight around here . . .

The Love Note to 2014, March 11-17, in Costa Rica

at Rio Celeste

I love the Oropendola in their raucous colonies of woven, swaying nests - these birds whose calls ring out as penny whistle, bamboo chime, and snare drum.

I love the frigate birds whose easy grace on cliffside, seaside air belie their silhouettes so sharp and weapon-ish.

The gaudiness of honey creepers, tanagers, and colibri, fierce feathers flashing like they're made of molten metal.

I love the din of howler monkeys that hootfully proclaim a sprawling forest valley as their own.

I love to take an unknown twisting road through woods and farms and dusty villages,

To stop at some dark and shaded soda for beans and rice and icy fruit refresco.

To have my sons along so some of this weaves into who they are and will become.

Manuel Antonio national park

Fiery-billed aracaris

This is our fourth visit to Costa Rica, but we've never been to Manuel Antonio, despite the fact that it is one of the most popular destinations in the country - for Ticos and foreigners alike.  A spit of land on the coast has been preserved as a nature preserve, and the outskirts of the park have sprouted a bewildering array of hotels and restaurants.

Playa Manuel Antonio

We've usually gone a bit more low key and off the beaten path.  But at some point you have to do these kinds of things - just as you have to see Arenal.

Nico, Monica and I left the car at the entrance to the park, hemmed and hawed about hiring a guide - in the end deciding not to.  Most of the trails are closed for maintenance, so the main path, which leads to the most popular beach was fairly peopled.  Still, we saw sloths and fiery-billed aracari, and a golden naped woodpecker on a leafless tree.  There was a turtle beneath a culvert - one of the few remaining pools of fresh water in this dry season.  A troop of howler monkeys moved noisily overhead.  Blue morpho butterflies fluttered down the path.  Passing conversations were in Spanish, German, Russian, English and others.

Our balcony

The beach is beautiful, with fruit trees all along the high tide line offering shade.  We set up on a large piece of driftwood.  Nico and I went into the warm water to swim.  Monica stayed by the stuff, since the beach is notorious for thieving capuchins.  (Though it was actually a pair of persistent raccoons that were working that beach.)  Clara, Eckart and Sofie joined us soon after.

When we'd had enough, the rest left me to go to the municipal beach where there would be food and beer and musicians.  I opted to walk the trail out onto Cathedral point instead.  I took it slowly, watching for birds, though it was the middle of the day and everything was on siesta.  But the views were magnificent - waves over rocky islands and frigate birds riding the wind.  I saw a couple of agoutis - like slender capybara quietly going about their business.  And a pair of beautiful hawks cruising among the vultures.  A small deer walked past me on the path, sniffing at me suspiciously.

Reflections

I came to another beach - less populated - and took a swim to cool off.  I kept an eye on my un-defended stuff from the water, but there were no signs of raccoons or monkeys here -- only iguanas.

Howler

Volcán Arenal

Volcán Arenal  

It's a drier than usual dry season here, but the slopes of the great volcanos are still covered in lush forest.  Arenal is the most active of Costa Rica's volcanos, though is has been quiescent for a couple of years.  No lava runs down its sides -- only streamers of steam emerge upon the peaks.

Waterfall on Rio Danta

Lunch at the lodge

The first night we stayed at a resort outside of the town of Fortuna at the foot of the mountain.  Swimming pools for the boys, hot springs for Monica and birdwatching for me.

The second night was at the Arenal Observatory Lodge.  Dozens of species of birds move around the gardens and woods there.  Coatis roam the property scavenging.  Geckos, "gek-gek-gek-gek!" noisily as they hunt in the rafters for prey.

Early in the morning, before I went walking I recorded the sounds: Oropendola, distant howler monkeys, crested guan and all the other birds of the dawn chorus . . .

Porter took a picture at night - the mountain under the big dipper:

Rio Celeste and Volcan Tenorio

In Costa Rica, south of Lake Nicaragua, a series of volcanos dot the landscape from the northwest to the southeast. One of those is the triple-humped Volcan Tenorio, famous as the headwaters for the Rio Celeste.  A sulfurous vent and calcium carbonate cause the river to run an opalescent blue.  We hiked up into the cloud forest to the catarata, past blue lakes and bubbling hot springs.  To the strange place where a white vein of mineral slashes across the crystal clear river.  There the river is shocked immediately into its unlikely shade of blue.

click on any picture to enlarge

The Love Note to 2014: February 16 to March 10

February 16 to March 10:

I love words.

These baskets woven of sound - these containers for some nugget that we have cut from the stream of our thinking.  We click and hiss and hammer the air and another brain catches our thoughts.

I love the murmur of a place where people gather - air vibrating as these woven baskets and their cargoes of meanings move among minds.

I love that humans play with this elaborately crazy adaptation - we joke, we sing, we pun.

I love to travel to places visited long ago.  To see the peaks of Olympus rising above the Puget Sound and think, "Oh, I'd forgotten how they loom over the city in light like this."  To see old friends who are sudden years farther down their paths and have them see me.  To replace memories that are tattered, blurred and incomplete, with new ones.

I love when memories of place get crossed - the drizzle of Seattle so exactly like the soft rain of Cork.  

I love to travel to places new.  In Costa Rica, there is a place upon the skirt of a volcano where a little seam of white turns a river an opalescent blue.  And markets where the fruit is strange and the seller must explain what parts to eat - tomate de palo, cas, manzana de agua, rambutan . . .

Anatomy of a Long Day

February 27:
I wake up in the morning in a house perched upon a hillside.  It is Mercer Island in Seattle's Lake Washington, and I am staying with old friends, Jordan and Susan.  We were housemates 20-odd years ago, when Jordan was trying to be both artist and anthropologist.  (He's an artist now.)  Beyond the far shore the peaks of the Olympic peninsula loom among clouds.  Every evening Jordan soaks some steel-cut oats and in the morning cooks them with dried fruits and nuts.  Susan has already gone off to work at  a school district to the north.  There is fresh coffee in the pot, and I eat my share of the oatmeal.

I'm here to work - on a week's sojourn in Washington state talking to people about taxation, government, community and such things.  The first two days I did a few longer sit-down interviews and walked the parks on Lake Washington talking to the young immigrants and others who were enjoying the rare sunny day.  But today, I don't have any appointments lined up, so I load my equipment into the car: a small video camera on a tripod, a pair of maps, a little black notebook and a laptop computer.

I drive southward, finding the 515.  I stop somewhere near the town of Kent in a land of strip malls and franchises.  I find a pair of African American women sitting in their car waiting for a Chinese mechanic.  They don't want to be taped, but I talk with them - about what it means to be a single-mother Black woman in Washington state, about taxes and community, and the priorities of the powers-that-be, about what might change and what won't.  After 20 minutes of so, when their mechanic arrives I thank them and leave.  I step into a vacuum repair store, but the proprietor won't talk to me, and a leather store where the proprietor's Mexican brother is willing to talk, though he knows little enough about Washington state.  I spend a quarter of an hour in a nail salon.  (The old Vietnamese woman who owns the place tries to destroy my camera with a glare, but when I close it up she ignores me and returns to giving the manicure.)  A Black girl with indigo toenails and a young Mexican couple with a toddler talk with me about the state and about taxes and jobs and getting going in life.

Soon I am driving further south.  Route 515 has ended, but with the Cascades on one side and Puget Sound on the other there is only so lost I can get.  I come across a large and bustling community college, where the guard seems uninterested in me.  I first interview a half dozen Danish students, but their take on things is pretty irrelevant to the task at hand.  A pair of landscapers are willing to talk and I video tape a chat with an Alaskan Vietnam vet, who's been in Washington since the 70's.  And I talk to a pair of friends sitting by a fountain - one Black one White - neither of whom seem particularly bright, but that's a demographic, too.  I get a trio of students - one African American, one half and half Italian, and a half-Anglo-half-Mexicano.  They are sharp and articulate and trying to find a way in a society more or less indifferent, if not hostile to their success.  It's a good, long, rich, far-ranging interview there in the bustling center of the college.  They take me into the main building to introduce me to others who'd have something to say, but I have to move on after some brief, polite interrogations.

Down out of the hills I find the run-down center of Auburn.  A construction crew is tearing up the central avenue because of some water main issue.  I interview a conservative union contractor outside of a bar where he'd stepped out to have a smoke.  I interview a liberal man out walking his dog.  But I'm hungry now, and a local woman directs me to a Vietnamese restaurant.  I have a soup and a mango bubble tea with black tapioca pearls in the bottom.

I get back on the road to Tacoma.  I walk the streets of Tacoma.  I shoot some video of the port across the river mouth - with its piers and ships and billowing smokestacks.  I'm pleased by some shots with a curious gull in the foreground.  I'm not finding many people to interview.  A parking attendant, a quartet of state workers on a smoke break, but the conversations are brief.  Probably I'm done for the day.  The ability to charm or cajole a person into a spontaneous conversation with a stranger is a delicate thing, and once that ability falls away, there is little chance of gathering useful data.

In any case, I need to offload my video and write down my notes for the ones that weren't taped.  I stop in a cafe in Des Moines for a couple of hours.  I drink a peppermint tea and tip the high school girls 5 dollars for letting me work there in peace.  I drive back north along highway 99 toward Seattle - past all the seaside industry.

I find my way to Freemark Abbey upon Phinney Ridge, where a poetry reading is scheduled.  An old friend has a new book out and she is reading from it tonight with some other poets. (There's a conference of writers in town.)  I know it must be 15 years since I saw her last, because I remember showing her my son Porter as a babe in arms.  She's surprised to see me there on the corner outside.  I can't stay long - but enough to hold hands and stare at each other and marvel at the trajectories of life.

There is another reading across town I've promised to go to - friend I've known since high school.  There is nowhere to park near the bar where he is reading poetry.  I drive around for a while until I settle on a little pay parking lot, buy my coupon, lock up and go off in search of the place.  It’s a gallery actually, but move down past the art and there is a bar in the back.  A beautiful woman with olive skin and a black dress is reading the last couple of her poems, and I settle in with a glass of red wine.  The poets read and I listen.

Afterwards, we go out for dinner and conversation - a couple of poets, a publisher and his wife, and another woman.  The first restaurant we try is packed, but upstairs is the Tin Table.  (Across the corridor is a hall filled with a swirling mass of dancers -- every age sweating and spinning, coming out in the hallway to cool off and stretch.  The sound of swing music reverberates.) This restaurant doesn't have any tables either, but they settle us in a rough circle of easy chairs.  They bring me grilled trout and my friend has wild boar sausages and we split a bottle of Verducchio.

When it is time to go my friend and I walk the couple of blocks to where my jeep in parked.  As I go to unlock the door, it takes me a moment to comprehend what I am seeing - that there is a glittering constellation of glass all over the back seat.  When I comprehend it, I mutter to my friend that someone has smashed in the window.  He curses and curses again when I tell him that the thief took my camera, laptop and all the video that I shot over the past three days.  I set about picking up glass that has fallen onto the front seat, mentally going through the inventory of things that are gone.

He asks me if I want to scream, but I don't want to scream.  I'm annoyed that I parked in such a dark corner, and that so much of the past days' work is lost.  But it has been more than 25 years since I've been robbed.  In that time I have intentionally not worried myself and I have trusted much and taken my chances.  That seems like a pretty good deal.  My coat and gloves are gone, though the thief left the second-hand novels that I'd bought for the plane.  The thick purple straw from the bubble tea is gone -- along with most of what I'd left there from lunchtime.  My friend takes pictures of the damage and talks to the police about how to report the crime.  But it is nearly midnight and there is nothing that a police officer could do tonight.  I will file the report tomorrow.

I take my friend back to his lodgings, and drive out across the bridge toward Mercer Island.  The open back window creates a throbbing, reverberation in the car that threatens to give me a headache.  But the day is nearly over.

_

Winter sunshine

_

I'm lying on my back on a sled by the climbing tree.  My jacket is under my head as a pillow.  The sun, which heaves itself a little higher every day, is warm on my face.  Today is one of those outrageous lapis lazuli skies.  A foot and more of snow is on the ground.  The frantic flocks of birds that were zipping and flitting and fretting around the bird feeders in yesterday's snowstorm are gone.  I'm staring up at the dapper nuthatches that are scampering in the branches.  Chickadees and titmice make occasional flights to the bird feeders for a sunflower seed.  A tiny, cryptic brown creeper is also poking around in the lichen and bark crevices.  I watch him work his way out the branch I'm under until my neck gets tired and I turn back to face the sun.

The wind occasionally sweeps down cascades of tiny, sparkling ice crystals, which fall upon my face and hands.  A downy woodpecker taps on a branch at the top of the tree.  Monica pops her head out and asks if I'm sunbathing.  She laughs and snaps a picture of me to show her sister in Costa Rica how we do things up north.  The sun feels so warm, but every breath is a little cloud of fog that the breeze takes away.  The tree is getting busier.  A half dozen goldfinches are at a feeder, a cardinal, a couple of juncos, a pair of blue jays pass through.  The wind is picking up and I see a glimpse of a fast hawk riding it southward.

When I lived in San Diego I would say sometimes that I missed winter, but people thought I was just being contrarian.  San Diego is a city made up of people who didn't like the winters back wherever it was they came from.

When I left southern California to spend a couple of years in the former Soviet Union, I thought the Russians at least would be a bit more stoic about the cold.  But it turns out that just as San Diego is as far south as US winter-haters can flee without becoming Mexican -- Almaty is as far south as Soviets can flee before the mountains rear up in a retaining wall of ice and snow.  Almatians are, for the most part, not lovers of the winter months.  They just haven't been as successful in their escape as San Diegans.

When I moved to Maine I found people who take winter in stride.  I suppose people who don't like winter have mostly moved to the San Diegos of the world or done themselves in in some bleak January.  The remnants who successfully live in the north seem to get out into what sun there is, and are not trapped by cold and ice . . . .

An upper branch of one of the trees drops a fist-sized clump of snow onto my chest, and I decide it's time to go inside.  Our mailbox was been knocked off by the snowplows and I need to rummage around in my shop for hardware to re-mount it.