Dinner and a Show

I went to see Gary Snyder last night. A friend told me he'd be in Acton, Massachusetts to collect a poetry prize. (Thanks, Wayne!) Acton is a full hour away by car and I was debating about going, but Wayne wanted to go too (Having a friend along always lends a bit of validity to my crazy ideas.) and, as he said, Snyder is 79, after all. In other words, who knows how much longer he'll be around.

I'm not worried. If I can look as good and seem as bright at 79 as Gary Snyder does, I'll be doing OK.

I'll confess that I didn't know who Gary Snyder was until just a few years ago. I had a significant chunk of time on my hands as I recovered from surgery in 2007 and I used it to immerse myself in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums, inspired by those other Dharma Bums. I learned that the main character, Japhy Ryder, was patterned after the real poet, scholar and activist Gary Snyder. When I think about it, it's pretty amazing to be able – in 2010 – to see a living character from a 1958 Kerouac novel. Maybe all that outdoor living kept Snyder healthy enough to outlive so many of his contemporaries.

I've since started exploring Snyder's vast body of work. I'm no student of poetry, but I find many of his poems striking a chord. So far, my favorite is “For the Children” in Turtle Island. Snyder is also an essayist and so many of his writings from the 60's and 70's foretold and warned of many of the social and environmental perils we face today. If only we paid more attention to our visionaries.

Snyder was in Massachusetts to collect the Robert Creeley Award. This prize was created in honor of Robert Creeley - another poet I need to learn about – who grew up in Acton. Starting his presentation, Snyder read “ I Know a Man”, one of Creeley's best-known poems. (Or, “po-ems” as Snyder calls them.) There's much discussion and speculation about the meanings of this little poem, but it ends with the lines:

for christ's sake,
look out where yr going

To this, Snyder said, a Buddhist's interpretation would be:

Pay attention.
Pay Attention!
PAY ATTENTION!

He also told us to live, big, outrageous lives.

Well, it's a little late for me to start living a very big and outrageous life, but for the time I have left, I can try to pay attention. I'm not exactly sure what I'm supposed to pay attention to, probably life as it is happening. It would be sad to look back on a long life, wonder where all the time went, and realize I wasn't paying attention. I also want to be on the lookout for signs and wonders. When I get a sign, I don't want to miss the wonder.

I got a sign a couple of weeks ago reminding me it was time to head up to Moose Hill for the annual spectacle of the peenting woodcock. It was a perfect night for it unless it was a bit early in the season. When I first went to Moose Hill specifically to watch woodcock two years ago, it was April 8th, but this night was too good to pass up. The sky was free of clouds and wind and it was 60 degrees when I left home at about 6:30. Sunset was around 6:56, and from experience I knew I had plenty of time because the show doesn't start until after sundown.

I rode my old touring bike up the hill and headed straight for the old field beyond the Billings Barn. With the mown stubble of the field surrounded by woods and a red maple swamp, this is a perfect spot for woodcock vernal nuptials. I leaned the bike against one side of a trail-marker post in the field and used the other side for a backrest. Even though the day had been warm and sunny, I could feel the cool air slowly draining from the hill behind me, so I put on my hat and jacket and had my blanket ready to throw over my shoulders.

I unpacked dinner – veggie bake, one of my winter favorites – and poured a cup of Earl Grey from the vacuum bottle. I enjoyed my dinner, but started thinking I would have to go home without a show because everything was quiet. The only bird I heard was a cardinal chipping in the brush behind me, and no peepers were calling from the swamp. Then, a great blue heron flew low over the treetops with slow, silent wingbeats, giving me hope. I peeled an orange, sipped tea, and thought about Gary Snyder to pass the time.

I heard the first tentative peent at 7:08 from down by the swamp. By 7:14 I heard two or three birds on the ground. At 7:21 I heard the first twittering flight and peered into the darkening blue dome above hoping to catch a glimpse. I didn't see that flight, but was reminded how the flight is usually followed more vigorous peenting from the ground after the showoff lands.

It was getting so dark, the trees around the field were little more than silhouettes. The oaks and maples, in their nakedness, were revealing their forms against the sky, and the white pine were turned black by the night. Just then, a woodcock flew directly overhead like a big, silent beetle, before climbing in preparation for his plunging display. I could hear but not see his twittering decent. It was getting so dark, I couldn't see the words I was scribbling in my notebook. A honking flock of geese flew right over the field but I couldn't see them and wondered if they might be navigating by Orion's twinkling stars above.

At the height of the peenting activity I was a little surprised to see a trio of young men emerge from the dark woods. Actually, I heard them clomping over the Bluff Trail boardwalk long before I saw them. They were carrying backpacks and seemed like nice guys, not ne're-do-well teenagers old guys like me expect to see in places like this. Who knows, maybe they are rucksack revolutionaries. I told them they were just in time to hear the woodcock and they paused and heard. I wonder if some day far in the future they'll remember the moment and perhaps seek signs and wonders of their own in valleys and pastures where we can meet.

They went on their way and it was getting too dark to see anything. I had a last bit of tea, packed my bag and pushed my bike down the trail. When I got to the flat part of the gravel road leading back to the street, I hopped on the bike and rode slowly, guided only by the center part of the old road where the leaves had blown away, exposing the lighter sand and gravel.

Back on Moose Hill Parkway, I pedaled quickly down the hill, hoping to avoid cars since I was poorly dressed for the dark. My shadow was chasing behind, and then racing ahead as I approached, and then passed the street lights.

Five Seven Five

With the energy and optimism of youth, a young man here in town organized a poetry night at our local library. It sounded like something different and fun to do on a cold February evening. I wouldn't call myself a big fan of poetry, but at times I find resonance in the work of some poets like Robert Frost, Donald Hall or Gary Snyder. There were six of us, and I thought that was a pretty good turnout for a place where everybody is always too busy. It was fun and stimulating. I met a few new people and got re-acquainted with some old friends.

I didn't want to go empty-handed, and since the closest thing to poetry I had to offer was a handful of haikus that I've put in this blog in the past, I went through my old posts and jotted them down. About all I know about haiku is that, in one form, there are three lines, the first and last lines have five syllables and the middle one has seven. That length is appropriate for my attention span, and I like to have some simple rule to follow.

These little poems brought back memories, both fond and bittersweet, so I decided to collect all of them in one place. Each one is accompanied by a little background about the moment they came to me. The dates refer to the blog posts where they first appeared.



May on the Deck
May 2007

I like to think about the cycle of seasons and how it affects the natural world around us. Every summer on May first, the chimney swifts return to Sharon to zoom and twitter overhead all summer long. On September first, they are gone. Also in May, the catbirds return to nest in the overgrown and unruly clump of forsythia in my backyard. I love to sit on the deck on a warm May afternoon watching formations of swifts flying their patrols over the house and listening to the catbirds mewing from the green depths of the shrubbery. It makes me feel like the world will be OK for at least one more season.


chimney swift catbird

sky above forsythia

good to have them home



Running to Another Place
June 2006

One of my regular runs takes me from home, through the town center, and over the tracks to the road up Moose Hill. On a good day, my body will feel efficient and my stride will be smooth. As the pumping blood washes over my brain I can get lost in dreams and, at times, I feel like there are secrets in the forest and that maybe a little bird - like the wood peewee - might be trying to share them with me.

Warm summer rain run.

Endorphins bathe open mind.

Pewee calls from woods.

Cold Blood
June 2007

Often times on these Moose Hill runs, roadkill is a reminder of life and death and the way we can crush the natural world beneath our feet and machines. One warm, damp late spring morning, following an overnight thunderstorm after a long dry spell I came across a big bullfrog that had me wishing we could all slow down and be more careful when we drive.

Rain lets bullfrog move

Warm road feels good to cold blood

Driver does not care.



How Quickly We Fall
June 2007


In 2007, I was trying my best to recover from prostate cancer surgery. (Everything is fine now, thanks.) My recovery was not going well, and in fact, I was feeling sicker and weaker all the time. What I didn't know at the time was that I was coming down with a nasty case of Lyme disease, totally unrelated to my surgery. I was confused, frustrated and depressed.

Having had almost no exercise for about seven weeks, I decided to hike to the summit of Moose Hill. While I was reaching for life, once again it didn’t take long to be reminded of death by roadkill as I turned onto Moose Hill Parkway.

Shagbark hickory.

Squirrel tempted by crushed nuts.

One last fatal bite.

Walker sees squirrel.

Maggots dine on rotting flesh.

No life is wasted.

This brought to mind the writings of Gary Snyder where he reminds us that all death nourishes new life.

As I climbed, I felt sicker and weaker. It was hot and dry and trees were dropping leaves prematurely. I was thinking of seasons - and lives - ending before their time.

When does youth turn old?

Like summer turning to fall,

We want to hold on.

How will we turn old? Will it strike overnight like a sudden hard freeze? Or will youth slip away gradually like summer slipping quietly, barely noticed, into fall?

Dear Readers

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

- from “For the Children” by Gary Snyder

My mind is in a fog lately. Since I started reading books and web posts by James Howard Kunstler during the past few months, everywhere I look I see signs of impending doom. My senses are alert. I listen to the news on the radio. I read the Globe. I look around. Every tidbit about the war, the election, the global food crisis, the energy crisis and the credit crisis falls perfectly into the pattern of collapse that Kunstler predicts. I’ve pretty much always felt it would come to this, but the crisis took longer to get here than I imagined. I couldn’t articulate my concerns in an organized way, but Kunstler gives these issues a structure that shows the interconnectedness of our follies in a way that helps make things clear, and the vision is not a pretty one. Even though they were written a few years ago, his books, particularly The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency, shed a bright light on the errors of our ways.

Just imagine a family of four, five or six in a big new cul-de-sac out in the country. They took out a second mortgage to pay for the two SUV’s in the driveway and the power boat, ATV and jet skis in the three-car garage and the hot tub out back. That wasn’t a problem because the value of the house went up year after year. Mom drives the kids to school, dance class, Gymboree, baseball and soccer and then ferries them to the mall. Dad works in town for a big financial company and drives 50 miles each way because they could get so much more square footage a couple of towns further out.

Of course, no one is going anywhere if the parents can’t drag themselves out of the master bathroom. You see, it’s like a mini-spa in there with heat lamps, whirlpool bath and one of those showers with eight shower heads. The house is so elegant. There are bedrooms and bathrooms for everybody and a special room for every use. It has a grand entrance that is open to vaulted ceilings two stories up.

The kitchen is state-of-the-art with stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. There is a machine for every chore, but luckily there aren’t many chores to do because such a busy family eats out often or does take-out. When they do cook, it’s really easy because everything is pre-packaged, pre-cooked and heats up in the microwave. Cleanup is a snap because all the packaging simply goes in the trash compactor.

The house is always so comfortable with air conditioning in the summer and oil heat in the winter. They never have to bother with opening and closing windows; the thermostat takes care of everything automatically. The kids are too busy to mow the lawn, being so busy with their cell phones, iPods, and all, but Dad doesn’t have to worry either because the lawn guys come every week and keep the sweeping lawnscape perfect and green with their fleet of stand-up mowers and roaring hive of leaf blowers. The sprinklers are on a timer and come on automatically every morning and the latest chemicals prevent those embarrassing weeds.

Now, imagine gasoline at four, five, six dollars a gallon. It costs a hundred bucks just to fill up the Durango. Imagine the monthly payments on those two (or three) adjustable-rate mortgages after interest rates jump up a couple of points. Not only are the payments higher, but as society realizes the unsustainability of this lifestyle and more and more similar houses come on the market, the value of the property will drop and the family will be upside-down on the loans. That is, they will owe more than the house is worth and even if they are able sell, they will still be deep in debt.

Dad’s job at the finance company is looking less secure as the mortgage securities that made them so much money just a few years ago become worthless as more and more people default on loans. The oil truck pulls up to fill the tank with winter on the way, and that first bill of many comes to $1250.

But still, little Sis will simply have a total meltdown if Mom doesn’t score those Hannah Montana tickets, and Dad has plans to drive up to New Hampshire for the big NASCAR race. McCain wants to drill in Alaska. Obama wants to use more crop land to produce corn ethanol. Thanks to the Jimmy Carter implosion of the 1970’s, you can be absolutely certain that not one major candidate will ever don a sweater and sit in front of a wood stove and tell America that they need to wake up and start living like very hard times are just around the corner.

These are the kind of things I find myself thinking about lately. I’m constantly looking at my own life and the lives of those around me and I wonder how things will be in just a few years. I worry about our kids who are just now launching into their own lives. At least they haven’t screwed those lives up yet and I tell them to build lives where they don’t depend on cars and stay out of debt.

I’m not getting into the woods much these days. We are in peak deer tick season and I have zero interest in getting Lyme disease again. I’m doing more cycling this summer, so my weekend mornings are pretty busy anyway. But I think the main reason I’m not coming up with any posts for the Moose Hill Journal is that I’m so preoccupied with the events unfolding around me that my thoughts just aren’t going in that direction.

I feel that we are on the verge of a major turning point for America but the scale and scope of the forces bearing down on us are way more than a simple man like me can ever comprehend. I want to observe the changes and write about them, but it’s all beyond me. I do know that driving Priuses, screwing in compact fluorescent light bulbs, shopping at Whole Foods and putting recycling bins on the curb will not save us. That said, I don’t want to get all preachy and stuff. Glass houses and all that.

So, dear readers, I’m still here and still thinking about things to write about. I just haven’t figured out how I want to do that yet. Until I do, please check back here once in a while and check my Moose Hill Notebook where I post shorter, more scattered thoughts and observations. I would love to read your comments about where you see our world headed and how we can stay ahead of the crushing wheels of history. Until then, I leave you with the closing lines of the poem “For the Children” by Gary Snyder. This wonderfully prescient poem was passed along to me by Robin Andrea of the Dharma Bums and I find myself clinging to these words as a life ring of hope:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

How Quickly We Fall

Having had almost no exercise for about seven weeks, I decided to hike to the summit of Moose Hill. While I was reaching for life, it didn’t take long to be reminded of death as I turned onto Moose Hill Parkway.

Shagbark hickory.

Squirrel tempted by crushed nuts.

One last fatal bite.

Walker sees squirrel.

Maggots dine on rotting flesh.

No life is wasted.

This brought to mind the writings of Gary Snyder I recently discovered where he reminds us that all death nourishes new life.

I pushed on up the road and at the steepest stretch near the top my heart rate approached 150 beats per minute. I’ve decided I needed to get more realistic about how long it will take me to fully recovery from my surgery. After all, less than ten days ago I was in the emergency room for a chest CAT scan for still-mysterious chest pains. I promised myself I’d stay in my aerobic zone – 140 bpm or below.

I left the road and started up the trail to Moose Hill Summit. On the steep, rocky trail near the top, it took great discipline indeed to go slowly enough to keep the heart rate down. I reached the top and was not surprised to see the fire tower was occupied. We’ve been in a nasty drought and any spark could ignite a conflagration. It took me over 49 minutes to cover the distance from my house to the summit, a trip that I did in a little over 23 minutes a few months ago. Of course this time, I stopped along the way to jot down a few lines of haiku and to make a few stops to accommodate one of the less pleasant side effects of my surgery, but mostly I’m just weak and out of shape. Not wanting to be too hard on myself, I thought of the dancing bears. We shouldn’t criticize their dancing but be amazed that they can dance at all. My evaluation of my next hike will benefit from low expectations.

As I turned at the summit and began to walk back down, I saw drought-dried leaves littering the trail. I thought of the wonderful recent blog post by Julie Zickefoose (See sidebar.) called “Letting Go” about how summer can slip away before we notice she is going. I thought about how my chimney swifts left – as they always do – on September first, and I wasn’t paying attention and never said goodbye. I thought about other things that slip away, too.

When does youth turn old?

Like summer turning to fall,

We want to hold on.

How will we turn old? Will it strike overnight like a sudden hard freeze? Or will youth slip away gradually like summer slipping quietly, barely noticed, into fall?

Know Your Place

Berkeley, California, Sunday, August 19.

It was two hours before the warm sun finally rose above the Berkeley Hills. It is my habit when visiting our daughter in the Bay Area to rise about dawn (It helps to have lingering Eastern Time in the blood.), brew a strong pot of Peet’s coffee (A Berkeley original.) and stroll around the funky neighborhoods on the slopes above the University of California campus. On this morning, I was up around 6:00, walked for about an hour before stopping back at the apartment for more coffee and to pack a PBJ to take to a neighborhood park for breakfast. At the edge of La Loma Park, past the ball field, there are a few picnic tables and a small stone wall that affords a nice place to sit and gaze out over Berkeley to Oakland and the San Francisco Bay below. This view is often foggy in the morning, but on this day the air was clear.

As I sat quietly in solitude, I felt a little like I was perched on one of my favorite rocks on Moose Hill. At the edge of the flat park the slope drops away steeply to the west. Trees growing from the hillside – thus putting their tops closer to eye level – attracted a good variety of birds that came by as I sat, ate and daydreamed. I found it a little hard to believe that some of them weren’t coming by just to see me.

Many of the birds were familiar, but different. There were juncos, phoebes, chickadees, creepers and towhees. There were also some sparrows and tiny kinglet-like birds. Since I tried to pack light for this trip, I didn’t have my binoculars or field guide. So, while I felt sure some of the species I was seeing, like the robins, were the same as back East, I knew others, like the towhees and chickadees were different species even if their behavior seemed much like that of those back home. The hummingbirds of California are most striking. In Massachusetts, we have only the ruby-throated hummer and they are uncommon enough that I always pause to watch when I spot one buzzing from flower to flower. In California, hummingbirds are everywhere and they seem more robust and they seem to perch a lot more. I can’t begin to separate the species, but I know there are a few.

On this dry mid-August morning, the birds were mostly quiet. There may have been a soft call or chirp or even the occasional scold, but no songs. Summer was drawing to a close.

Even though it was a summer Sunday in a college town, I was surprised at how quiet it was. Berkeley is not a morning town. Here was a beautiful, dry, clear, cool Sunday morning but no one was up. In over two hours of walking around I saw one walker, one cyclist, two or three cars, and one of those was the paper guy. I didn’t even see anyone sitting on a deck reading the Sunday paper. Maybe they were all waiting for the sun to rise above those steep hills.

One thing I like to do when I travel is to lose myself in a good book, preferably one that is connected – even if only peripherally – to the place I’m visiting. Somehow I got it in my head that I wanted to read Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums while I was recovering from my surgery. Maybe it was a California tourist guide book that recommended it as a quintessential California story. Or maybe it was a favorite blog with that name. Whatever the reason, I’d never read it and figured it was about time. I found myself wishing I’d read it 30 years ago and wondering if my life would have been different if I had. Probably not. Seeds need to be planted in fertile ground.

I often find myself amazed at how writers in the post-war years like Jack Kerouac and Edward Abbey foresaw bad things happening in our society and wonder how they would feel today if they could see their worst nightmares realized ten times over. I love the idea that a book like Dharma Bums could launch a generation of “rucksack revolutionaries,” and hope that at least a few of them didn’t wind up driving SUVs to their McMansions in the suburbs.

The main character in Dharma Bums is Japhy Ryder. It turns out that Ryder, like many of the characters in Kerouac’s books, is based on a real person: the poet, Asian scholar, essayist and environmental activist Gary Snyder. (I even found a typo (?) where Kerouac refers to Japhy as Gary.) Unlike Kerouac, Snyder survived the 50’s and 60’s and went on to enjoy a long and productive career. Thanks to our hometown library and some of the great used bookstores in Berkeley and Walnut Creek, I was able to get my hands on some of Snyder’s poetry and essays. I’m not much of a poetry reader, but plenty of Snyder’s poems speak to me, and it is through his essays that I learn more about his way of thinking. That is what I was pondering as I waited for the sunrise.

He teaches that people should learn to know and love the place where they live, and we should live in it without subduing it. We should learn its geology, weather, plants, animals, and history. We should think about how people can live in a place and make it their own without destroying it. We need to understand that humans are a part of nature and that humans inhabited and adapted to the places we live long before any of our non-North American ancestors arrived and that those people had ancient biological and mystical connections to our lands that go back for millennia. We should try to feel, appreciate and respect those connections in the ways we live today.

Most of Snyder’s writings that I had were from the 60’s and 70’s. Many of his contemporaries didn’t make it to the Twenty-first Century, but Snyder did, and I wondered how he feels about how things are going today.

A few days later, as we flew east, leaving our carbon footprints along the way, I looked forward to a walk on Moose Hill. I was hoping thoughts I had on a stone wall in California among redwoods and eucalyptus would help me learn more about my woods of oak and pine back home. For now, southern New England is my place, and I feel obligated to try to know it.