d.

d.

humboldt waterfronts

woodley island marina

it’s morning.  i’m home visiting.  my parents are out.  charlie comes by.  he wants to go on a walk with my dad.  my dad is out.  do i wanna go?  i put on my shoes.  charlie has wobby, a dog, along.  we take charlie’s green ford ranger.  charlie has a round face and a round nose and messy white hair and a big, shabby white beard and smiling eyes, sometimes gray, as i recall them, sometimes green.  he’s a big man with pain in one shoulder due to years of handball.  we stop at some place downtown he and my dad go to for coffee, and he gets a red-eye, and i get coffee black.  and we go to the waterfront.

a dreary, gorgeous, stinking and sweet-smelling thing, it used to be busy docks and train yard.  but the fishing industry went under and the only fishing happening off the docks was families going out on the weekends and casting lines, hanging out and eating lunch and such on those heavy, tar-smelling structures, little kids putting fish in buckets of bay water and watching them swim in circles.  and maybe that’s what got somebody thinking to convert the docks to a nice place for doing fun things at, like basketball.  so they tore down a warehouse or whatever and built a teen recreation center.  i was a teen, and it scared me.  the train stopped running and the tracks are grown over with and buried under things and dust.  and they put in a little parking lot and a nicely paved path and this outdoor amphitheater, and they got some big plans worked up for the huge dirty plot of weedy land the path is on today. but, as anyone can see, it all fell through and the weeds and shrubs took over like they are, and the homeless moved in and made camps—til a week ago the eureka police and a crew went through with bushwhackers and took out all the bushes for camping in unseen.[CM1]

in the amphitheater now are some homeless people smoking pot.  on the bay in matching wood kayaks is an elderly couple.  the path is of smooth concrete, but you have to be very careful where you step because there’s the dog shit all over everywhere.  we weave and jump and circumvent and sip our coffee, and wobby takes a dump and charlie gets out a plastic bag and picks it up and ties a knot in it, and i hold his coffee for him.

it was the dream of his generation, he says, that this new society was coming on, and everyone was going, it’s about time, to understand that it was good to care about each other. and how everything was going to be fair, like how people with great jobs like doctors would work four hours a day, and people with crappy jobs like garbage collectors would work two hours a day, and everyone would be paid the same, and all this utopia was on its way like history.  but now, he says, it’s his generation controls congress.  and all of them bought up by corporations.  you want to understand the laws in this country, he tells me, follow the money.

a ways down from the amphitheatre, under the bridge that over the bay joins eureka and manila, is an unkempt cinderblock restroom, gravel lot for parking in, a floating dock with room for three small boats, and a washboard loading ramp.  charlie dumps the plastic bag in the trash.  beyond the restroom we take a path of rocks and rubble through a homeless encampment.  a man asks us for change.  he says something about how times are really hard and something about his wife and child and groceries.  i don’t have a cent on me.  charlie has forty-three cents and gives it to him and says there are free lunches at st. paul’s.  and as we’re walking away, the man says, fuck you.  and then he says it louder.  and then he hurls the money at us and says, fuck you, i don’t want your fuckin’ money.  fuck you.  and he keeps shouting that as we walk away.

and charlie says he just can’t tell, is obama letting us down, or is he just so smart and playing his cards so really close to his chest?  i hope it’s the latter, he says.  i really do.  he says that ted kennedy has dedicated his entire political career to national healthcare—thirty years—and still it hasn’t happened.  every month 3,000 people lose healthcare.  in the world, he says, the united states ranks thirty-seventh in its healthcare system, and the country that’s thirty-sixth is something like ukakistan or some-like name, some country nobody has heard of.  how can we say, he asks me, that 50 million people in our nation without healthcare is . . . okay?  he gestures to an expanse upon the dirt of what appears to be wads of stuffing and says it’s where the bushwhacker hit someone’s sleeping bag.

eureka slough

under charlie and maggie’s deck is the cool, shady place, japanese in its decor, maggie makes cheeses in—here the wooden cupboards with racks of wood strips upon which the cheeses rest and air and age for up to three years.  blocks of cheeses they rub in olive oil.  i ask how they deal with the killing of the goats.  and charlie says they don’t.  they take the goats to be killed professionally.  we’re gentleman farmers.  farmers depending on stuff for their livelihood don’t mess around: you don’t produce, you’re gone.  it’s that simple.  but we’re not of that mentality.  besides, what can you do?  we steal the cheese from the goats, the eggs from the chickens, the honey from the bees.  it’s the nature of things.

may i see the bees?

but of course.

the yard is gardened and the goats are penned, full of milk and sagging, and beyond the pen a distance, near the shore of the slough, are two pale-blue stacks of wooden boxes, five boxes high.  bees trickle in and out.  they seek pollen up to ten miles away, he says.  isn’t that weird?  they could be at your mother’s house right now.  you’ve heard no doubt about all the weird things happening with bees. they’re disappearing and dying for reasons we don’t understand.  these are new hives.  the last ones died.  you buy the hives—seventy-five dollars for about a thousand bees and a queen—and you start with the hive just two boxes high.  but as the boxes fill, you add another to the top of the stack, otherwise, without enough room, the bees will swarm.  when you harvest, you take all but the bottom two boxes.  and the process starts over.

i picture the bees swarming.

in the boxes are removable sheets, not unlike cookie sheets, upon which the bees build combs.  when the box is full, you take the sheets out, put them in a spinner, and extract the honey with centrifugal force.

up the yard and through the garage is another yard with a chicken coop.  it’s built all of scrap wood.  over-built, he calls it.  he grabs the heavy wire of the coop: nothing is getting through wire this thick but a bear.  most people just use chicken wire.

the posts the wire is nailed to are eight inches in diameter, and i ask if they are attached to underground cement blocks.  he says they’re not.  i ask how deeply they’re sunk.  he thinks a second, steps towards a post and checks its height against his own (the post is a wee taller).  about twenty-two inches is underground.  i ask, and that makes it stable?  and he says you tamp the earth.  throw in a little dirt, tamp it. he has an iron rod with a little plate on the end.  dirt, and tamp.  dirt, and tamp.  if you do that, it will be every bit as hard as cement and last for years.  there is an open area for roaming in, a wooden box for sleeping in, and in the wooden box, a nesting box with hay in it, and a roost (or beam the chickens stand on sleeping).

how do you deal with the killing of the chickens?  he says that when a chicken gets old, you can’t eat it.  the meat is too tough.  maggie takes the chicken out somewhere far away and says a few words to it and whacks its head off and buries it in a hole.  the chickens you buy in the grocery store are only nine weeks old.  that’s why they’re so tender.  what does “free range” mean in nine weeks?  it means four weeks the chickens are enclosed and isolated.  after that, someone opens a little door in the event the chickens want out.  but the chickens are terrified.  they may pop out bravely on occasion, but “free range”?  chickens need to be loved.  they’re social.  they must be taken out and played with in the free world.  these are free range chickens, he says of his own chickens.  everyday they play in the yard.

this is america.

spirit lake

i walked for seven days in the marble mountain wilderness—haypress trail east to spirit lake and on to whiskey camp and marble valley and little marble valley, yellow dog mountain and, on paths closed due to fallen trees and busted bridges, bear skull camp.  much of the country was burned, just black trunks of trees and of the sturdier shrubs, black branches.  and with the forest canopy gone and the forest duff burned, the flowers grow.  the land is naked and it’s scorching hot, one hundred and six degrees, and through the searing air and between the black trunks by the hundreds slowly weave the bumblers.  the path is soft and dusty and full of ash.  with all the bees and bugs come great numbers and varieties of birds, and with the forest in bones, they are to be seen in arrays at every depth, distance and height.  and unobstructed, undeflected, unabsorbed, their voices travel and interlace in ways possible only in the openness of aftermath.

upon the shore of spirit lake i camped a spell.  and one morning lakeside in the twilight, in the waters, beneath the ripples of the jesus bugs, i see a dark brown salamander swimming, its legs tucked and its tail waving slowly, its shadow upon the shallow bottom slipping.  and its tail stops and its legs come out and it spreads its fingers, and it glides to a halt and sits perfectly still a long time.  the ripples of the jesus bugs make the water look rained on, and the salamander tucks its legs and swims again.

i had this fantasy going into the mountains that from the mountains and rivers i’d borrow indestructible wisdom and strength.  beneath the stars i’d be reborn in static perfection.  but it doesn’t work that way, does it?  instead, you get to think.  uninterrupted and away from it all.  you go days without uttering a word to any audience, and you learn to address yourself.  and when it’s over, the truth you come away with isn’t a thing that transforms you once and for all, but a thing that, if from it you wish to draw virtue, you must to it, each and every day, go pay homage.  like i remember danny across the table in the elk, drunk as hell and all bleary-eyed and slurry-worded saying, it’s all about memories.  good memories.  it’s all about people.  it’s the memories we can make together that matter.  and that’s the meaning of music.

my mother’s kitchen

my mother makes polenta, and on the cutting board some mushrooms and zucchini and things are.  she tells me in a voice of damnation and disappointment that the food co-op in arcata has forgotten its mission.  in the beginning, she says, there was nothing at all in the mission about presentation;  the mission was organic food, that’s it, and minimal packaging, and prices the community could afford.  now it’s all about the presentation, and the prices are unethically high.  she prefers costco.

what?

costco.

but it’s a warehouse?

she shakes a knife at me and says, you’re the problem.  it’s snobs like you: but it’s a warehouse!  you’re to blame for what happened with the co-op.

costco is the new co-op?

costco is doing a very good job feeding the masses.  and they have organic food.  of course it’s a warehouse.  i want it to be a warehouse.  i love costco.

the arcata marsh

i’m with mom and dad at the arcata marsh, where arcata’s sewage is processed using mostly biological methods.  the footpath is narrow and bordered by blackberry bushes, tules and marshland, and the air smells sometimes of fresh water and sometimes of sewage.  occasionally are warnings: water not potable.

i ask my mother how you accumulate losses with aging and don’t fail of heart.  how do you just keep losing life and yet remain engaged with living?  she says the problem is with america.  americans have this expectation they’re entitled to a life of abundance and longevity, that it’s their right as americans; but, of course, we’re entitled to no such thing, and that’s why americans are always feeling let down, pissed off, or robbed when things don’t go their way.  sensible people, she says, live in the moment.

beside the path my father finds a snowy egret feather and hands it to me.  a gift.  it is no ordinary feather.  it has no vane.  it’s snow-white barbs are few and spaced apart.  they drift delicately. how on earth can he fly with feathers like this? i ask.  and my father says, he doesn’t.  for flying he has flight feathers.  this is one of his decorative feathers.

and the way my father says it—this is one of his decorative feathers—i understand now how every fallen-out feather belongs forever to the bird.

---

[CM1]Switched up punctuation to break up run-on

humboldt waterfronts

woodley island marina

it’s morning. i’m home visiting. my parents are out. charlie comes by. he wants to go on a walk with my dad. my dad is out. do i wanna go? i put on my shoes. charlie has wobby, a dog, along. we take charlie’s green ford ranger. charlie has a round face and a round nose and messy white hair and a big, shabby white beard and smiling eyes, sometimes gray, as i recall them, sometimes green. he’s a big man with pain in one shoulder due to years of handball. we stop at some place downtown he and my dad go to for coffee, and he gets a red-eye, and i get coffee black. and we go to the waterfront.

a dreary, gorgeous, stinking and sweet-smelling thing, it used to be busy docks and train yard. but the fishing industry went under and the only fishing happening off the docks was families going out on the weekends and casting lines, hanging out and eating lunch and such on those heavy, tar-smelling structures, little kids putting fish in buckets of bay water and watching them swim in circles. and maybe that’s what got somebody thinking to convert the docks to a nice place for doing fun things at, like basketball. so they tore down a warehouse or whatever and built a teen recreation center. i was a teen, and it scared me. the train stopped running and the tracks are grown over with and buried under things and dust. and they put in a little parking lot and a nicely paved path and this outdoor amphitheater, and they got some big plans worked up for the huge dirty plot of weedy land the path is on today. but, as anyone can see, it all fell through and the weeds and shrubs took over like they are, and the homeless moved in and made camps—til a week ago the eureka police and a crew went through with bushwhackers and took out all the bushes for camping in unseen.[CM1]

in the amphitheater now are some homeless people smoking pot. on the bay in matching wood kayaks is an elderly couple. the path is of smooth concrete, but you have to be very careful where you step because there’s the dog shit all over everywhere. we weave and jump and circumvent and sip our coffee, and wobby takes a dump and charlie gets out a plastic bag and picks it up and ties a knot in it, and i hold his coffee for him.

it was the dream of his generation, he says, that this new society was coming on, and everyone was going, it’s about time, to understand that it was good to care about each other. and how everything was going to be fair, like how people with great jobs like doctors would work four hours a day, and people with crappy jobs like garbage collectors would work two hours a day, and everyone would be paid the same, and all this utopia was on its way like history. but now, he says, it’s his generation controls congress. and all of them bought up by corporations. you want to understand the laws in this country, he tells me, follow the money.

a ways down from the amphitheatre, under the bridge that over the bay joins eureka and manila, is an unkempt cinderblock restroom, gravel lot for parking in, a floating dock with room for three small boats, and a washboard loading ramp. charlie dumps the plastic bag in the trash. beyond the restroom we take a path of rocks and rubble through a homeless encampment. a man asks us for change. he says something about how times are really hard and something about his wife and child and groceries. i don’t have a cent on me. charlie has forty-three cents and gives it to him and says there are free lunches at st. paul’s. and as we’re walking away, the man says, fuck you. and then he says it louder. and then he hurls the money at us and says, fuck you, i don’t want your fuckin’ money. fuck you. and he keeps shouting that as we walk away.

and charlie says he just can’t tell, is obama letting us down, or is he just so smart and playing his cards so really close to his chest? i hope it’s the latter, he says. i really do. he says that ted kennedy has dedicated his entire political career to national healthcare—thirty years—and still it hasn’t happened. every month 3,000 people lose healthcare. in the world, he says, the united states ranks thirty-seventh in its healthcare system, and the country that’s thirty-sixth is something like ukakistan or some-like name, some country nobody has heard of. how can we say, he asks me, that 50 million people in our nation without healthcare is . . . okay? he gestures to an expanse upon the dirt of what appears to be wads of stuffing and says it’s where the bushwhacker hit someone’s sleeping bag.

eureka slough

under charlie and maggie’s deck is the cool, shady place, japanese in its decor, maggie makes cheeses in—here the wooden cupboards with racks of wood strips upon which the cheeses rest and air and age for up to three years. blocks of cheeses they rub in olive oil. i ask how they deal with the killing of the goats. and charlie says they don’t. they take the goats to be killed professionally. we’re gentleman farmers. farmers depending on stuff for their livelihood don’t mess around: you don’t produce, you’re gone. it’s that simple. but we’re not of that mentality. besides, what can you do? we steal the cheese from the goats, the eggs from the chickens, the honey from the bees. it’s the nature of things.

may i see the bees?

but of course.

the yard is gardened and the goats are penned, full of milk and sagging, and beyond the pen a distance, near the shore of the slough, are two pale-blue stacks of wooden boxes, five boxes high. bees trickle in and out. they seek pollen up to ten miles away, he says. isn’t that weird? they could be at your mother’s house right now. you’ve heard no doubt about all the weird things happening with bees. they’re disappearing and dying for reasons we don’t understand. these are new hives. the last ones died. you buy the hives—seventy-five dollars for about a thousand bees and a queen—and you start with the hive just two boxes high. but as the boxes fill, you add another to the top of the stack, otherwise, without enough room, the bees will swarm. when you harvest, you take all but the bottom two boxes. and the process starts over.

i picture the bees swarming.

in the boxes are removable sheets, not unlike cookie sheets, upon which the bees build combs. when the box is full, you take the sheets out, put them in a spinner, and extract the honey with centrifugal force.

up the yard and through the garage is another yard with a chicken coop. it’s built all of scrap wood. over-built, he calls it. he grabs the heavy wire of the coop: nothing is getting through wire this thick but a bear. most people just use chicken wire.

the posts the wire is nailed to are eight inches in diameter, and i ask if they are attached to underground cement blocks. he says they’re not. i ask how deeply they’re sunk. he thinks a second, steps towards a post and checks its height against his own (the post is a wee taller). about twenty-two inches is underground. i ask, and that makes it stable? and he says you tamp the earth. throw in a little dirt, tamp it. he has an iron rod with a little plate on the end. dirt, and tamp. dirt, and tamp. if you do that, it will be every bit as hard as cement and last for years. there is an open area for roaming in, a wooden box for sleeping in, and in the wooden box, a nesting box with hay in it, and a roost (or beam the chickens stand on sleeping).

how do you deal with the killing of the chickens? he says that when a chicken gets old, you can’t eat it. the meat is too tough. maggie takes the chicken out somewhere far away and says a few words to it and whacks its head off and buries it in a hole. the chickens you buy in the grocery store are only nine weeks old. that’s why they’re so tender. what does “free range” mean in nine weeks? it means four weeks the chickens are enclosed and isolated. after that, someone opens a little door in the event the chickens want out. but the chickens are terrified. they may pop out bravely on occasion, but “free range”? chickens need to be loved. they’re social. they must be taken out and played with in the free world. these are free range chickens, he says of his own chickens. everyday they play in the yard.

this is america.

spirit lake

i walked for seven days in the marble mountain wilderness—haypress trail east to spirit lake and on to whiskey camp and marble valley and little marble valley, yellow dog mountain and, on paths closed due to fallen trees and busted bridges, bear skull camp. much of the country was burned, just black trunks of trees and of the sturdier shrubs, black branches. and with the forest canopy gone and the forest duff burned, the flowers grow. the land is naked and it’s scorching hot, one hundred and six degrees, and through the searing air and between the black trunks by the hundreds slowly weave the bumblers. the path is soft and dusty and full of ash. with all the bees and bugs come great numbers and varieties of birds, and with the forest in bones, they are to be seen in arrays at every depth, distance and height. and unobstructed, undeflected, unabsorbed, their voices travel and interlace in ways possible only in the openness of aftermath.

upon the shore of spirit lake i camped a spell. and one morning lakeside in the twilight, in the waters, beneath the ripples of the jesus bugs, i see a dark brown salamander swimming, its legs tucked and its tail waving slowly, its shadow upon the shallow bottom slipping. and its tail stops and its legs come out and it spreads its fingers, and it glides to a halt and sits perfectly still a long time. the ripples of the jesus bugs make the water look rained on, and the salamander tucks its legs and swims again.

i had this fantasy going into the mountains that from the mountains and rivers i’d borrow indestructible wisdom and strength. beneath the stars i’d be reborn in static perfection. but it doesn’t work that way, does it? instead, you get to think. uninterrupted and away from it all. you go days without uttering a word to any audience, and you learn to address yourself. and when it’s over, the truth you come away with isn’t a thing that transforms you once and for all, but a thing that, if from it you wish to draw virtue, you must to it, each and every day, go pay homage. like i remember danny across the table in the elk, drunk as hell and all bleary-eyed and slurry-worded saying, it’s all about memories. good memories. it’s all about people. it’s the memories we can make together that matter. and that’s the meaning of music.

my mother’s kitchen

my mother makes polenta, and on the cutting board some mushrooms and zucchini and things are. she tells me in a voice of damnation and disappointment that the food co-op in arcata has forgotten its mission. in the beginning, she says, there was nothing at all in the mission about presentation; the mission was organic food, that’s it, and minimal packaging, and prices the community could afford. now it’s all about the presentation, and the prices are unethically high. she prefers costco.

what?

costco.

but it’s a warehouse?

she shakes a knife at me and says, you’re the problem. it’s snobs like you: but it’s a warehouse! you’re to blame for what happened with the co-op.

costco is the new co-op?

costco is doing a very good job feeding the masses. and they have organic food. of course it’s a warehouse. i want it to be a warehouse. i love costco.

the arcata marsh

i’m with mom and dad at the arcata marsh, where arcata’s sewage is processed using mostly biological methods. the footpath is narrow and bordered by blackberry bushes, tules and marshland, and the air smells sometimes of fresh water and sometimes of sewage. occasionally are warnings: water not potable.

i ask my mother how you accumulate losses with aging and don’t fail of heart. how do you just keep losing life and yet remain engaged with living? she says the problem is with america. americans have this expectation they’re entitled to a life of abundance and longevity, that it’s their right as americans; but, of course, we’re entitled to no such thing, and that’s why americans are always feeling let down, pissed off, or robbed when things don’t go their way. sensible people, she says, live in the moment.

beside the path my father finds a snowy egret feather and hands it to me. a gift. it is no ordinary feather. it has no vane. it’s snow-white barbs are few and spaced apart. the

d.

humboldt waterfronts

woodley island marina

it’s morning.  i’m home visiting.  my parents are out.  charlie comes by.  he wants to go on a walk with my dad.  my dad is out.  do i wanna go?  i put on my shoes.  charlie has wobby, a dog, along.  we take charlie’s green ford ranger.  charlie has a round face and a round nose and messy white hair and a big, shabby white beard and smiling eyes, sometimes gray, as i recall them, sometimes green.  he’s a big man with pain in one shoulder due to years of handball.  we stop at some place downtown he and my dad go to for coffee, and he gets a red-eye, and i get coffee black.  and we go to the waterfront.

a dreary, gorgeous, stinking and sweet-smelling thing, it used to be busy docks and train yard.  but the fishing industry went under and the only fishing happening off the docks was families going out on the weekends and casting lines, hanging out and eating lunch and such on those heavy, tar-smelling structures, little kids putting fish in buckets of bay water and watching them swim in circles.  and maybe that’s what got somebody thinking to convert the docks to a nice place for doing fun things at, like basketball.  so they tore down a warehouse or whatever and built a teen recreation center.  i was a teen, and it scared me.  the train stopped running and the tracks are grown over with and buried under things and dust.  and they put in a little parking lot and a nicely paved path and this outdoor amphitheater, and they got some big plans worked up for the huge dirty plot of weedy land the path is on today. but, as anyone can see, it all fell through and the weeds and shrubs took over like they are, and the homeless moved in and made camps—til a week ago the eureka police and a crew went through with bushwhackers and took out all the bushes for camping in unseen.[CM1]

in the amphitheater now are some homeless people smoking pot.  on the bay in matching wood kayaks is an elderly couple.  the path is of smooth concrete, but you have to be very careful where you step because there’s the dog shit all over everywhere.  we weave and jump and circumvent and sip our coffee, and wobby takes a dump and charlie gets out a plastic bag and picks it up and ties a knot in it, and i hold his coffee for him.

it was the dream of his generation, he says, that this new society was coming on, and everyone was going, it’s about time, to understand that it was good to care about each other. and how everything was going to be fair, like how people with great jobs like doctors would work four hours a day, and people with crappy jobs like garbage collectors would work two hours a day, and everyone would be paid the same, and all this utopia was on its way like history.  but now, he says, it’s his generation controls congress.  and all of them bought up by corporations.  you want to understand the laws in this country, he tells me, follow the money.

a ways down from the amphitheatre, under the bridge that over the bay joins eureka and manila, is an unkempt cinderblock restroom, gravel lot for parking in, a floating dock with room for three small boats, and a washboard loading ramp.  charlie dumps the plastic bag in the trash.  beyond the restroom we take a path of rocks and rubble through a homeless encampment.  a man asks us for change.  he says something about how times are really hard and something about his wife and child and groceries.  i don’t have a cent on me.  charlie has forty-three cents and gives it to him and says there are free lunches at st. paul’s.  and as we’re walking away, the man says, fuck you.  and then he says it louder.  and then he hurls the money at us and says, fuck you, i don’t want your fuckin’ money.  fuck you.  and he keeps shouting that as we walk away.

and charlie says he just can’t tell, is obama letting us down, or is he just so smart and playing his cards so really close to his chest?  i hope it’s the latter, he says.  i really do.  he says that ted kennedy has dedicated his entire political career to national healthcare—thirty years—and still it hasn’t happened.  every month 3,000 people lose healthcare.  in the world, he says, the united states ranks thirty-seventh in its healthcare system, and the country that’s thirty-sixth is something like ukakistan or some-like name, some country nobody has heard of.  how can we say, he asks me, that 50 million people in our nation without healthcare is . . . okay?  he gestures to an expanse upon the dirt of what appears to be wads of stuffing and says it’s where the bushwhacker hit someone’s sleeping bag.

eureka slough

under charlie and maggie’s deck is the cool, shady place, japanese in its decor, maggie makes cheeses in—here the wooden cupboards with racks of wood strips upon which the cheeses rest and air and age for up to three years.  blocks of cheeses they rub in olive oil.  i ask how they deal with the killing of the goats.  and charlie says they don’t.  they take the goats to be killed professionally.  we’re gentleman farmers.  farmers depending on stuff for their livelihood don’t mess around: you don’t produce, you’re gone.  it’s that simple.  but we’re not of that mentality.  besides, what can you do?  we steal the cheese from the goats, the eggs from the chickens, the honey from the bees.  it’s the nature of things.

may i see the bees?

but of course.

the yard is gardened and the goats are penned, full of milk and sagging, and beyond the pen a distance, near the shore of the slough, are two pale-blue stacks of wooden boxes, five boxes high.  bees trickle in and out.  they seek pollen up to ten miles away, he says.  isn’t that weird?  they could be at your mother’s house right now.  you’ve heard no doubt about all the weird things happening with bees. they’re disappearing and dying for reasons we don’t understand.  these are new hives.  the last ones died.  you buy the hives—seventy-five dollars for about a thousand bees and a queen—and you start with the hive just two boxes high.  but as the boxes fill, you add another to the top of the stack, otherwise, without enough room, the bees will swarm.  when you harvest, you take all but the bottom two boxes.  and the process starts over.

i picture the bees swarming.

in the boxes are removable sheets, not unlike cookie sheets, upon which the bees build combs.  when the box is full, you take the sheets out, put them in a spinner, and extract the honey with centrifugal force.

up the yard and through the garage is another yard with a chicken coop.  it’s built all of scrap wood.  over-built, he calls it.  he grabs the heavy wire of the coop: nothing is getting through wire this thick but a bear.  most people just use chicken wire.

the posts the wire is nailed to are eight inches in diameter, and i ask if they are attached to underground cement blocks.  he says they’re not.  i ask how deeply they’re sunk.  he thinks a second, steps towards a post and checks its height against his own (the post is a wee taller).  about twenty-two inches is underground.  i ask, and that makes it stable?  and he says you tamp the earth.  throw in a little dirt, tamp it. he has an iron rod with a little plate on the end.  dirt, and tamp.  dirt, and tamp.  if you do that, it will be every bit as hard as cement and last for years.  there is an open area for roaming in, a wooden box for sleeping in, and in the wooden box, a nesting box with hay in it, and a roost (or beam the chickens stand on sleeping).

how do you deal with the killing of the chickens?  he says that when a chicken gets old, you can’t eat it.  the meat is too tough.  maggie takes the chicken out somewhere far away and says a few words to it and whacks its head off and buries it in a hole.  the chickens you buy in the grocery store are only nine weeks old.  that’s why they’re so tender.  what does “free range” mean in nine weeks?  it means four weeks the chickens are enclosed and isolated.  after that, someone opens a little door in the event the chickens want out.  but the chickens are terrified.  they may pop out bravely on occasion, but “free range”?  chickens need to be loved.  they’re social.  they must be taken out and played with in the free world.  these are free range chickens, he says of his own chickens.  everyday they play in the yard.

this is america.

spirit lake

i walked for seven days in the marble mountain wilderness—haypress trail east to spirit lake and on to whiskey camp and marble valley and little marble valley, yellow dog mountain and, on paths closed due to fallen trees and busted bridges, bear skull camp.  much of the country was burned, just black trunks of trees and of the sturdier shrubs, black branches.  and with the forest canopy gone and the forest duff burned, the flowers grow.  the land is naked and it’s scorching hot, one hundred and six degrees, and through the searing air and between the black trunks by the hundreds slowly weave the bumblers.  the path is soft and dusty and full of ash.  with all the bees and bugs come great numbers and varieties of birds, and with the forest in bones, they are to be seen in arrays at every depth, distance and height.  and unobstructed, undeflected, unabsorbed, their voices travel and interlace in ways possible only in the openness of aftermath.

upon the shore of spirit lake i camped a spell.  and one morning lakeside in the twilight, in the waters, beneath the ripples of the jesus bugs, i see a dark brown salamander swimming, its legs tucked and its tail waving slowly, its shadow upon the shallow bottom slipping.  and its tail stops and its legs come out and it spreads its fingers, and it glides to a halt and sits perfectly still a long time.  the ripples of the jesus bugs make the water look rained on, and the salamander tucks its legs and swims again.

i had this fantasy going into the mountains that from the mountains and rivers i’d borrow indestructible wisdom and strength.  beneath the stars i’d be reborn in static perfection.  but it doesn’t work that way, does it?  instead, you get to think.  uninterrupted and away from it all.  you go days without uttering a word to any audience, and you learn to address yourself.  and when it’s over, the truth you come away with isn’t a thing that transforms you once and for all, but a thing that, if from it you wish to draw virtue, you must to it, each and every day, go pay homage.  like i remember danny across the table in the elk, drunk as hell and all bleary-eyed and slurry-worded saying, it’s all about memories.  good memories.  it’s all about people.  it’s the memories we can make together that matter.  and that’s the meaning of music.

my mother’s kitchen

my mother makes polenta, and on the cutting board some mushrooms and zucchini and things are.  she tells me in a voice of damnation and disappointment that the food co-op in arcata has forgotten its mission.  in the beginning, she says, there was nothing at all in the mission about presentation;  the mission was organic food, that’s it, and minimal packaging, and prices the community could afford.  now it’s all about the presentation, and the prices are unethically high.  she prefers costco.

what?

costco.

but it’s a warehouse?

she shakes a knife at me and says, you’re the problem.  it’s snobs like you: but it’s a warehouse!  you’re to blame for what happened with the co-op.

costco is the new co-op?

costco is doing a very good job feeding the masses.  and they have organic food.  of course it’s a warehouse.  i want it to be a warehouse.  i love costco.

the arcata marsh

i’m with mom and dad at the arcata marsh, where arcata’s sewage is processed using mostly biological methods.  the footpath is narrow and bordered by blackberry bushes, tules and marshland, and the air smells sometimes of fresh water and sometimes of sewage.  occasionally are warnings: water not potable.

i ask my mother how you accumulate losses with aging and don’t fail of heart.  how do you just keep losing life and yet remain engaged with living?  she says the problem is with america.  americans have this expectation they’re entitled to a life of abundance and longevity, that it’s their right as americans; but, of course, we’re entitled to no such thing, and that’s why americans are always feeling let down, pissed off, or robbed when things don’t go their way.  sensible people, she says, live in the moment.

beside the path my father finds a snowy egret feather and hands it to me.  a gift.  it is no ordinary feather.  it has no vane.  it’s snow-white barbs are few and spaced apart.  they drift delicately. how on earth can he fly with feathers like this? i ask.  and my father says, he doesn’t.  for flying he has flight feathers.  this is one of his decorative feathers.

and the way my father says it—this is one of his decorative feathers—i understand now how every fallen-out feather belongs forever to the bird.

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[CM1]Switched up punctuation to break up run-on

y drift delicately. how on earth can he fly with feathers like this? i ask. and my father says, he doesn’t. for flying he has flight feathers. this is one of his decorative feathers.

and the way my father says it—this is one of his decorative feathers—i understand now how every fallen-out feather belongs forever to the bird.