Out on my skateboard

Grandpa Jenks's hands

Did your grandfather knot up with tears at the least occasion? Both my father and grandfather can dissolve in weeping at the slightest push by memory or nostalgia, especially during prayer. After graduation I moved in with my grandparents and great-aunt in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a seventeen-year-old with three octogenarians. I cringed inside when Grandpa Jenks prayed over beef roast and gravy, his tears catching his voice.

“As God holds us in the holl' of his hand.” He couldn't hear the harsh midwestern vowels of his accent, but I could, and spot the hypocrisy in his emotional faith. I felt trapped in their one-bathroom house, watching Keanu Reeves movies I blockbustered on the Jenks's card: good ones, too—Bill & Ted's and Point Break and My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Zant's homoeroticism especially bewildering before the white birch of my father's childhood front lawn. At night I read Ayn Rand and Henrik Ibsen.

My cousins came over for Sunday dinner, and when he'd choke during his prayer--”We thank thee for our family gathered here together. Our children, grandchildren, all our loved ones. We thank thee”--when he'd melt, embarrassing all of us grandchildren with such an awkward silence that we squinched our eyes open to peer at him. I couldn't look at his face, at the age spots, the brylcreem-combed hair, only the grease-stained collar of his faded Dickies, till he gained control again.

Remembering the intensity of the emotions I felt then—when I was denying the existence of any emotion, thanks to Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand—Howard Roark rapes a woman in the very first chapter of Fountainhead, spoiler alert—bewilders. But now I knot up in tears at the least push, too, although maybe it's only when I'm weakened by hormones and winter that a melodramatic commercial or film or any honest sadness will make me catch with tears. The other day it was a short film, on the Academy Award collections of short films I've been Netflixing:  Binta and the Great Idea.  Watch it.

I am as weak as my forefathers.  Or is it strength? But my archetypal Father is plagued by grief and loss. Jesus weeps above the city of Jerusalem.

Clouds in the sky

Oatmeal bread

I've been making lots of bread. I bake oatmeal bread a lot, because it calls for oatmeal and whole wheat flour, and I have seven-grain mix from the Amish, so it's technically an eight-grain bread. As my cookbook says, “it makes delicious toast.” I'm convincing myself that it's a health-conscious choice, but it just tastes like decadent lavishness.

I convinced myself I needed oatmeal for breakfast in winter, and I can't eat eat real oatmeal anymore, not since the Appalachian Trail. Before I left, I blended six months of whole oats with wheat germ and soy powder and whey protein to make a high-protein breakfast cereal I packaged in ziplocs. By Maine, even when it was our prime source of calories from the mail drop, I could bear just to bring the goop to my mouth. It'd been invaded by weevils in my mom's basement, and was threaded with webbing.

I didn't find any actual insects, but I recognized recognized the signs. I knew she'd still had them, because when she came to hike with me, for a week in Tennessee, the box of generic mac-and-cheese she'd packed had insects fly from its cardboard. We didn't eat dinner that night. But the cereal wasn't as bad, just a bit of extra bitterness.

As Bahamians said, when we were invaded by boat weevils, you only need to worry after the bugs leave. Because till then, it's got plenty of protein. So we swallowed the bitter oatmeal, kept hiking to Katahdin. But I can't eat oatmeal anymore.

Ash Wednesday

Carrot in winter

From that close I could smell him. A musky almost fungal scent, a smell I was familiar with after two months on the trail. But his was almost spritely, green, alive. A funk so deep I could grow broccoli in it.

“So, Maaaaah-zipan,” he says. “How'd you get that name?”

After a month of being saddled with a ridiculous name from an online comic, I was sick of explaining. Sick of dividing marzipan from marscapone, explaining how it's like playdough, made of almond paste, and that people build things out of them and then eat it. People in Hungary build statues of speed-skaters out of it. And that cracked me up, to no end. My secret, truthful reason for my fascination with marzipan was the exquisite molded mangoes and custard apples I used to spy at the Thai department store. Central. When Mom finally let me buy some they tasted like wax.

But I told one more person the story. I breathed his funk as I made everyone at the shelter laugh with the story of marzipan.

“Big County,” I say, finally, my revenge. “How'd you get that name?”

“Biggest county east of the Mississippi,” he says. Aroostook County, his home far away. Where he has Belgians and 120 acres of fir and spruce. So big that to locals it's just the County.

The first night we camp together I make my favorite, mac and cheese. It should have been only mac and cheese in my mail drops on the trail. I leave behind my wild rice mix and dried shiitake mushrooms at hiker boxes, unable to stomach them. I pick up mac and cheese and taco fiesta liptons, grab pepperoni and tuna packets whenever I can find them. I'm still cooking in my dad's old boy-scout pot, and it's far too small for even one mac and cheese, plus the additions I'm starving for. I'm distracted by County, still, so distracted that I can't manage my soda-can alcohol stove. My noodles stick. The pot is half-burnt at the bottom, and the top half is crunchy and raw. Orange powder unevenly distributed.

He laughs at me, cooks rice and beans—my rice, that he retrieved from a hiker box behind us—and feeds us both.

Tonight, nine years later, I make ham, carrots, potatoes and broccoli dauphinois. Carrots, potatoes, broccoli, garlic grown from our Aroostook soil. Happy valentine's day, lovers.

Mars Hill potatoes, our broccoli and garlic, Houlton Dairy milk

Could I be

Birch, chopped

 Winter has been getting the better of me, I must admit. The first ice storm of the year sent trees down all along my snowshoeing trail, which entangle Shadow when I take him out and frustrate me. I'm forced to hold one broken tree aside while I push past another, and switches swat my face, leaving welts. Like that Frost line:

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

There's a man who understands a New England winter. And how'd he deal with it? Liquor and suicide and eating his family alive from the inside. Is that the fate that waits for all of us?

No, that's the lack of vitamin D speaking, although at this point I'm up to 1000% a day. Plus the heat lamp, which is only supposed to be effective if I use it to support my circadian rhythm, meaning I'm supposed to have it on at 7:15 every morning. If I could get up at 7:15 in the morning, I'd probably be fine. Another case of bootstrap-ism. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! Physician, save thyself!

Lately I've taken to walking through the woods with a handsaw grazing the snow. I attack the bent poplar with vicious intention. I take all of my anger out on them. Good for my anger, perhaps. Bad for my shoulder.

Neither one gonna turn and run

They’re making a voyage to the sun
“His Master’s voice is calling me”
Says Tweedle-dee Dum to Tweedle-dee Dee

We had a thaw here on two weeks ago, with a high of 50 degrees, and then a week of twenty below. It seems as if the climate has changed even since my first winter here, in 2004. Bizarre weather patterns breaking out all over the place, lows broken in California, highs broken here. No surprise for those of us who believe in global warming, but everyone else seems to find it remarkable.

Climate change is climate chaos.  Climate change makes weather erratic and unpredictable.

Are we making a voyage to the sun? Are we going to turn and run? I have not called Goldman Sachs, my investment bank, home of my meager savings. I hope to convince them to divest. Maybe I should just write an open letter on these pages.

Dearest Goldman Sachs:

I am greatly appreciative of the work you do managing my money. I appreciate that much of my happiness in retirement--if, in fact, happiness is dependent on financial security--is dependent on your management. I appreciate that, even in difficult circumstances, you have made my investment savings grow, at a rate beating my CD by about 1000%.

What I am less appreciative is the demeaning names you call me behind my back. Although I am a “muppet”, I am also intelligent, well-read, educated, and driven. Just because I entrust my financial future to you does not mean that I am dumb. If that is your opinion, I would like to know. I am not a cow to be milked of whatever you can suck from me. I am not ahuman to your vampire squid.

I ask you to take a look at the evidence for climate change. Take a simple, unbiased look at what 99.5% of scientists, commonly accepted scientific theory, not that provided by your employees, the executives of carbon-based energy companies.

Will you please divest entirely from carbon-based energy sources? Even if you view me as food for your hungry vampire children, in need of cleaners and nannies and boob jobs and botox and gardeners and private school and Harvard, you must care about their future. You must not want them to live in a world of chaos, despair, disaster, and economic collapse. If so, do you think you can change course, you, middle-manager, sitting there, deciding whether or not to invest some muppet's pension in Exxon-Mobil?

Only you can slowly, but surely, turn around this great ship of state. Unfortunately, such power no longer is held by our elected officials.

Do you love your children? What about your grandchildren? If you love your grandchildren, do you believe they will love theirs? Their future rests in your hands.

I also believe it is a sound—nay, prescient--investment strategy, enriching us both. Warren Buffett is currently investing in alternative energy sources. If you choose to stop buying shares in buggy-whip-factory stock, your children may end up not just surviving apocalypse, but also retaining their position in the oligarchy.

Also, will you please refrain from manually abetting terrorists and mass murderers? [See HSBC.]

Sincerely,

Melissa Jenks

I am willing to be persecuted

Gilda.  Of the Stone Rooster.

Until recently I didn't know that what I am doing here is travel writing. When I first began writing here, meaning the internet, I was interested simply in recording the story of backpacking the Appalachian Trail. As the years have worn bu, and I near my decade anniversary of blogging, I've continued to analyze—some days, obsess—about this new, strange genre. It is many things to many people, and the internet's ability to morph as it reflects human behavior is unexpected and immeasurable, but for me the constant is a record of an alien sojourning a strange land.

I am almost always more interested in places than I am in people. Perhaps that admission makes me suspect. I shy away from people as I travel, being drawn into contact with them, despite myself. I find myself in the middle of all my best stories, dragged there kicking and screaming.

Travel writing is omnivorous. In writing about a place, I am able to write about history, and geography, and geology, and about food, and animals, and God. Rural America is as interesting, as, say, rural Belize, or Poland. I am as interested in Brilliant, Alabama, as I am by Quincy, Massachusetts, and everywhere I go I want whatever food is quintessentially Alabaman, whatever beer is unequivocally local, whatever experience the locals are already bored by. Each place is unique in its narrative, the fingerprint that anthropology and time have made at that latitudinal nexus. Who knows whether I'll ever pass a particular crossroad again.

What I look for most as I travel is authenticity, and everyone knows that authenticity is like the Holy Grail. It cannot be found, can't even be sought. And an authentic experience, when you hunt one out, is something that has been shorn of any extraordinariness. If I were to hunt out an authentic American meal, I would find myself eating at McDonald's.

Nonetheless, I seek it. I have been apologetic about this in the past. I intend to be so no longer.

One night back

Crooked Island, right now, courtesy of KO.  Wish I was there.

Well, they’re going to the country, they’re gonna retire
They’re taking a street car named Desire
Looking in the window at the pecan pie
Lot of things they’d like they would never buy

In my ongoing thesis about Bob Dylan's plagiarism, I have new evidence, this time from his new album that I have yet to buy or listen to. And from a new interview with Rolling Stone. After Mikal Gilmore, the interviewer, confronts him about the accusation, Dylan concurs:

“In folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true.”

Then Gilmore cites instances where Dylan stole from specific authors, Japanese novelist Junichi Saga and Civil War poet Henry Timrod. Junichi Saga's books were out of print when the plagiarism was discovered, and have since been reprinted, a point that has always seemed important. Dylan agrees with me:

And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who's been reading him lately? And who's pushed him to the forefront? Who's been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it's so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get.

Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It's an old thing – it's part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you've been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil [an unprintable word for ‘people’] can rot in hell.

Dylan added:

I'm working within my art form. It's that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It's called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.

Before I die, I'd like to write one book, just one, where I analyze the layers of quotation and reference in a Dylan album. “'Love &Theft'” is the one I've chosen, because of the elegance of its quoted title, because of the way that Dylan makes the theft overt, even in the album's name. Frankly, though, a single book may not be long enough for even one song.

Take “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum.” If you're a regular reader, as I'm sure you are, you'll know that I've been quoting this song for a while now, the first of “'Love & Theft.'” The consensus among critics is that song is referring to Bush and Gore, at the time the song was written, in 1999, the two candidates for president. An apt parallel to the goofy twins of Carroll, for sure. So in the content of the song itself, we have an echo of contemporary politics. It's fun, too, to imagine Bush and Gore doing all of the things in the song, retiring together in the country, window-shopping for pecan pies.

But the title itself also echoes Alice in Wonderland, of course. And a simple internet search reveals that lines from the song also quote those of “Easy Rider,” perhaps only thematically:

Well, you boys don't look like you're from this part of the country.

That was a UFO, beamin' back at ya. They've been coming here ever since nineteen forty-six--when the scientists first started bouncin' radar beams off of the moon.

Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

We're rich, man. We're retired in Florida, now, mister. Whew.

Maybe you can't see the subtle linkage there, even if google can. But is it any coincidence, that Easy Rider, too, is about two men on a quest, hunting after America? Is it difficult to imagine Dylan, late at night, watching Easy Rider on AMC, noting the connection between Billy & Wyatt, and Bush & Gore, and Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum?

Or are these merely archetypes, the links between them existing only because they exist in our deeper, inborn layer?

Because, of course, Billy & Wyatt echo Huck & Jim, who echo Don Quixote & Sancho Panza, who echo the knight & his companion from time immemorial. And now we're into the archetypal realm.

For the first time, after discovering a copy of Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Jung, in a box in my parents' basement (perhaps some archetypal resonance, even there {and still more, in that Joyce called Freud and Jung Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum}), and after many years of obsession with him, I'm actually reading it. More on that—much more—in days to come.

A quick definition of the collective unconscious, by Jung himself:

A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term “collective” because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal. It is identical in all people and constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature present in every one of us.

Easy Rider ends in New Orleans, where “A Streetcar Named Desire” begins. And that carries with it a whole new train of associations, like the first monkey pulled from a barrel.

“Nothing new under the sun,” says Ecclesiastes. Bob Dylan stole everything, because all stories are old stories. All songs have been sung. All characters are tropes. All ideas have been used. So artists steal. They plagiarize from the collective unconscious, and the more they can unite their consciousness and their unconscious, the more creative fertility they find.

TS Eliot allegedly said: “Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.”  But the line may have been stolen.

We didn't know what to think

A traditional Cape Cod hockey game -- a sport endangered?  Or is that just a caption to tie this cool photo with my post?

On my desk, for a while, has been sitting a front page of the Bangor Daily News with an article by Amateur Naturalist Dana Wilde. He says what I have been saying for a long time. Everyone wants to believe that climate change is a hoax. Everyone wants to believe that science is wrong, even if it manages to be right about absolutely everything else, specifically the electronic device I am using to type these words, the invisible electrons carrying them over wires, the satellite dish riveted to a spruce on my front lawn, the nether-regions of space, and whatever invisible blogger server distributes these words, these very same words, directly into your computer or tablet or phone or e-reading device. Yes, the scientists are right about computers. They're just wrong about carbon dioxide.

Several readers reassured me earlier this month with a few pats on the head that climate change, if it's even happening, is a natural occurrence that's nothing to do with us and moreover, to jog me out of naivete, that global warming is a hoax. Don't worry, be happy, we were sagely advised in the 80s.

Here are some points I've heard meant to reassure me there's no need to worry about climate change or global warming:

-It still gets cold in winter.

-Earth's climate has always changed and always will change.

-Global warming is just a theory.

-There is no proof that the exhaust from my car hurts anything.

-Scientists are often wrong.

-Scientists fake climate research findings.

-Global warming is not mentioned in the Bible.

-There was no Y2K disaster (or 2012 Mayan disaster, I could add).

The problem I have with these arguments is that I believe in the existence of computers, cellphones, penicillin, bone marrow transplants, and internal combustion engines. I also believe in photosynthesis, DNA, infrared light, blood types, and the theory of relativity, although I have never seen any of these actual items or processes with my eyes.

What I mean is that the same method of study—namely, “the scientific method”--has led to microchips, life-saving chemistry, and electronic communication.

At this point, maybe I'm preaching to the choir. But I encourage you to rethink your presuppositions when it comes to science, and particularly the scientific method. How have all of the scientific advances of the last 200 years come about? By the persistent and dedicated effort of scientists on an endless pursuit of absolute truth, of matter in motion, of data tracking. Data doesn't lie. It can't. We're the ones who are lying.

I was excited to hear an ad on Maine public radio for Union University, the first college in the US to divest its endowment from investments in fossil fuels. No, I haven't done it yet. I quail. But we'll do it, or we'll die.

Divest. Protest. Grow vegetables.

Joyeux Noel

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night, and God bless us everyone.  That's what we're supposed to say, isn't it?  After the turkey and dressing and gravy has been eaten?  And the presents are opened?

I don't know about you, but I like a straight-up Thanksgiving Christmas, none of this fancy stuff.  My idea this year was to do only dishes my Grandma would have made, which means mashed steamed butternut squash, more delicious than it is complicated, and green-bean casserole with canned beans and cream-of-mushroom soup.  One of these days it's going to be home-canned beans and mushroom soup.  One of these years.

It's so easy for me, along with everyone, to discount all of the things I do have at Christmas.  Isn't that what all these cheesy movies are about?  I have more solitude than festivity, but that's what I've chosen.  Evergreen boughs and cheap tinsel.  Every onion in today's feast came from the garden out front.  How easily I let these things drift into the past where I forget them.  There was a time when I thought that impossible.

Maybe it's just that I don't like endings, that I hold on to every bit of this last year.  The deadlines roll so quickly--Festivus, then Solistice, then Noel, then New Year's, then my big Capricorn birthday.  Thence all of 2013 stretches in front of us.  And the Mayans promised we'd get out of it.

Joy and peace

“A disaster that no one could foresee” is what Chris Christie said on Jon Stewart last night, about Hurricane Sandy. Really, Chris? Really, when environmental activists have been telling us that this is exactly the sort of disaster we could foresee if we continue to pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

It's like Chicken Little running around saying the sky is falling, and then everyone acting surprised when the sky falls. Except Chicken Little in this case is the best science we have, the cutting edge of all scientific and technological progress over the last two thousand years. We just don't like what the scientists have to say. We cease liking science when it tells us that we have to use technology to adapt to ecological limits instead of using it to bypass them.

Science is telling us we are destroying our world. And we're not listening.

Everyone should stop what they're doing right now and go read this interview, "If Your House Is on Fire," with the naturalist and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore, author of Riverwalking. Some quotes:

“Toxins in the water, radioactive waste in leaking tanks, acid in the oceans, and climate chaos. And we’re too busy to protest because we have to buy the kids the right kind of shoes for the soccer tournament? What kind of love is that?”

“There’s a disconnect in our culture separating what people do from what they really care about. I love my children and my grandchildren more than anything else. I care about their future. I love this world with a passion. The thought that we might be losing songbirds, trading them for something I don’t care about at all, like running shoes, makes me angry. And still I drive to the store and buy running shoes.”

“The worst offenders are happy to implicate and entangle us in every possible way and make us blame ourselves for climate change. We have to do our best to shake loose of that entanglement and never turn our rage against ourselves or allow self-criticism to dissipate our anger toward the real culprits. Of course each of us should be using less oil. But when I hear people piously say, 'We have met the enemy, and he is us,' I say, bulls***. I didn’t cut corners and cause an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I didn’t do my best to undermine the Environmental Protection Agency and every other agency that might have limited fracking. I’m not lobbying Congress to open oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean. I didn’t cut funding for alternative energy sources. Big Oil is pouring billions of dollars into shaping government policies and consumer preferences. And what do we say? 'Oh, I should be a more mindful consumer.'”

Interviewer: Does having a discourse in moral reasoning mean we need to listen to climate-change deniers?

Moore: No. Perhaps a scientific discourse would engage deniers in a debate about the facts, but a moral discourse isn’t about science. It’s about right and wrong.

Debates about the causes of climate change have become distractions. If your house is burning down, you don’t stand around arguing about whether the fire was caused by human or natural forces. You do what you can to put out the damn fire. You throw everything at it, and then you hold your breath, because there are people inside that house....

Moral arguments are trump cards, whereas economic arguments can always be overridden by matters of principle. Yes, you might profit from keeping slaves, but it’s wrong. Yes, you can profit from ruining children’s futures, but it’s wrong.

This final quote is the one that kills me:

“Many of us wake up in the morning and eat a breakfast of food we don’t believe in and then drive a car we don’t believe in to a job we don’t believe in. We do things that we know are wrong, day after day, just because that’s the way the system is set up, and we think we have no choice. It’s soul-devouring.”

So many people are asking questions about Connecticut, about these horrifying acts of terror coming from inside of ourselves. We want to believe that if we ban the gun he used, if we lock all of our elementary schools up tight, this kind of horror can't happen. Instead, I believe our society is a snake eating its tail, and things like that will continue to happen as long as our souls are being devoured from the inside. I used to live a life like that, the one above, and every day I had to stuff down the horror I felt at living, stuff it down with our cultural addiction of choice, an addiction to cheap consumer goods, cheap food, distraction.

The Appalachian Trail saved me from that life, led me to a life of story; story in all things. Being honest with each other, telling each other stories—these words here, included—is what will save us.

Moore absolves us of our guilt, as Christ did before. Can we all remember that at Christmas? Our guilt is washed clean. Clean as snow, as white as a white Christmas.

All we need is to take action, together. Believe. We can join together and make a difference. Inspired and unified human action brought down slavery, brought down colonialism, brought down segregation, brought down the Vietnam War, brought down apartheid, brought down the Berlin Wall, brought down, most recently, an Egyptian dictator supported by the United States.

We can unite, too.

I'm making a proposal. Our enemies are transnational petrochemical industries. The only way we can fight them is with money. Yes, I'm complicit, as are most of you. I'm culpable. I own petrochemical stock, through my mutual fund, my meager retirement savings. But there are ways to take a stand even there. We can bond together and ask our financial power-brokers to divest themselves of petrochemical stock. To invest in trains, local agriculture, education, science, and alternative energy. If we speak with one voice, eventually they'll listen.

For additional inspiration, a list, from McSweeney's 40. Egyptian students studied the Serbian youth movement called Otpor! that overthrew Milosevic and From Dictatorship to Democracy, a handbook for activism written by a UMass Dartmouth professor. The handbook lists 198 possible nonviolent actions, and McSweeney's published their favorites:

        1. Public speeches

        6. Group or mass petitions

        7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols

        8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications

        9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and bookshelves

        12. Skywriting and earthwriting

        17. Mock elections

        19. Wearing of symbols

        20. Prayer and worship

        24. Symbolic lights

        25. Displays of portraits

        26. Paint as protest

        28. Symbolic sounds

        30. Rude gestures

        33. Fraternization

        34. Vigils

        38. Marches

        46. Homage at burial places

        51. Walkouts

        52. Silence

        54. Turning one's back

        62. Student strike

        69. Collective disappearance

        71. Consumers' boycott

        117. General strike

        119. Economic shutdown

        141. Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws

        148. Mutiny

        153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition

        158. Self-exposure to the elements

        162. Sit-in

        163. Stand-in

        164. Ride-in

        165. Wade-in

        166. Mill-in

        167. Pray-in

        179. Alternative social institutions

See? We have power, too.

Bridgewater, Maine

That's how we roll in Bridgewater, monsters.

 

I'm trying to convince friends and neighbors to go out with me and cut down ye ole Christmas tree. I live among a bunch of heathens, people that didn't grow up in the church. For me, Christmas is about the gift Christ gave the world. To them it's about cheap plastic crap and forced commercial saccharine travesty. I play Sufjan Stevens's Christmas album, wear my red scarf with the gold stars.

But no one will go cut down balsam with me, even though there's plenty of it out there to be cut. It's like a weed. I find myself relating to the heathen from my past, the Druid ancestors who invented advent traditions, of cutting down greenery to hold down the smell of their chickens in the house. Or goats. Whatever. My research into northeastern Europe's medieval livestock is fuzzy at best.

Why must all of you who didn't grow up in the church be such Christmas-poopsters? Such Scrooges? It's a good holiday. It's good ayurvedic practice to fill your nostrils with pine for one month a year.

Anyway. I'm going to find a way to sneak some pine into the house, if I have to buy it at Lowe's. It's a major local employer. At least I'll be contributing to the economy. Investing in evergreen farming.

Aroostook County, Maine

Sky tonight

I'm back to my trailer in the woods, after almost two months spent traveling. How many states did I hit? New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Michigan, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and back again. I took my first walk back in the woods this afternoon at dark, back with my Shadow, crunching through the ice in the first snowfall of the year that's stuck.

I'm realizing how far I've fallen out of the habit of recording my experience in words, here, in a digital medium. Back on the boat, on the trail—every day I was looking for a series of words on which to hang my experience. Mostly that hook was the tedium of travel, the tedium of adventure. Most adventure is more about outright pain than it is about anything else.

Webb Chiles (download his ebook, the masterful Storm Passage, for free here), the first American to circumnavigate solo, says: “I am itching and scratching my way around the world. Perhaps the ability to endure such mundane discomforts for months is the hidden heart of all adventure. Ulysses probably scratched his way around the Mediterranean for ten years, although Homer neglects to tell us so.” It's true, that.

Now I have little discomfort in my life, little pain. Except for the cold in my still broken shoulder, the cold in my breast, the cold when I face the challenge to go outdoors in the winter. Winter is growing on me, as Aroostook County does. I find myself longing for the eight inches of snow that will support my snowshoes.

I wrote these words today, in an essay, of my journeying: “All that time, I wrote. I wrote travel essays, food essays, small pieces on spirit and alcohol and pain and weather, nature meditations on walking and sailing. I posted these essays in an online journal I call a commonplace book.” That's this, although commonplace book, of course, I am stealing from Alan Jacobs, my college professor whose every digital word I still hang on. But it's an apt description of what I do here, on these pages—and I miss it when I don't.

And plead and beg

A Creative Life, from Alt NYC

An infographic I've been meaning to post for a while, that I found courtesy of A Single Layer.  It really captures some things I've been thinking about lately--to start with, do what you live.  Like the whole jobs thing, unemployment as a crisis.  I truly believe that the forty-hour-a-week job with some big company and benefits is going away, along with traditional manufacturing jobs.  And what's rising in its place is cottage industry, small business--people making soap or jam or pickles or books or kayaks in their basement and selling them, mainly on the cyber-web.

Jobs can't be created ex nihilo, not by Democrats, not my alleged "job creators," not by anyone.  Just by ourselves.  We create our own jobs, we shape our own lives.  So just do what you love, whatever it is.

Is it that simple?  Not really.  Because there's all the rest of the stuff on the list, which mainly involves other people.  The community, the church, collaborative partners--whatever you want to call it.

My favorite example is Gaughin and Van Gogh, as much as they are over-used models for the creative genius.  But how great is that?  You go out and paint all day, earn barely enough rent to cover the upper room in your yellow house, and then you come home and get drunk and argue about the meaning of the horizontal and vertical line and cut off your ear and hang out with harlots.  Maybe that's what all of us need in life.

I hear the train a-coming

Isn't it funny sometimes where the internet takes you?  Sometimes I'm wandering down rabbit holes, and I find something like Filthy Creations. 

The Scanner No. 4

Udolpho Vol. 26

The art on the cover is by Gerald Gaubert: Jael & Sisera from The Song of Deborah, which I mention only because I played Jael in our middle-school production of Judges, driving a stave through the head of an imaginary man in a dome tent set up on the gym stage.

I don't know why it makes me so happy that people were publishing literary journals in Aurora and the Isle of Wight from 1988-1991, literary journals that specialized in horror and gothic fiction, and that people today are celebrating that there used to be these physical objects that had beauty, and we can still preserve them with the bits and bytes we use today--all these things makes me happy.  It makes me think that this little putting together of bits and bytes that we do on the internet--this act I perform now, typing on my keys--has value.

I was thinking the other day about art, how perhaps what I mean by art is an object that carries meaning.  I've been thinking that gas should probably cost $100 a gallon, if we're going to cease carbon emitting, but that means we would have to stop buying cheap plastic crap and start making things again.  Things like wardrobes.  Boats.  We'd have to grow trees and cut them down to harvest.

And then we'd make them into literary journals and make woodcuts from the cross-cut milled cedar dipped in paint we'd figured out how to use our minimal petroleum products into, and again we'd be creating objects that carry meaning, objects that have beauty.  Or maybe we wouldn't.  Maybe again I'm just subsumed with optimism, for whatever reason.  Or maybe I'm just reading too many books about sailing.  Three at the moment, including:

On the Water by Nathaniel Stone

Given the merest assistance the blades release themselves from the water.  Press down slightly on the handles of the oars while gently twisting the grips toward you a quarter turn. In an elegant instant the spooned blades abandon the stroke and feather into nearly horizontal forward flight toward the next catch.  Release leads to recovery; remember, reach for the toes and slide into a crouch on your way to the catch.

You know who he is?

Friends J&N came over and made eggs benedict.  That's my fresh local organic rye bread in foreground.  Yes, I do like to brag about my bread.  Also generic Thai sriracha on the condiment tray, garlic hanging in the window, Aroostook potatoes in the cast iron, and K&N making hollandaise.  Good times.

K. and I drove to Marion yesterday, for a vacation among family, an extended vacation, which, if everything goes according to plan will take me Rhode Island, Illinois, a road trip to Chattanooga, and then a second road trip back to Camden, Maine, via Maryland.  That's the plan, at least.  We came bearing a van full of produce:  whole kale plants upended in buckets full of water, bags full of chard, carrots, turnips.  We came towing the dory, as yet officially unnamed, which I'm hoping we'll get to sail across to Martha's Vineyard (she says, half tongue-in-cheek) even though I'm still on the DL, limping along and unable to lift heavy objects with my right arm.  Or light objects from high or low places.

Nonetheless.  I refuse to allow it to stop me anymore, although it did exactly that for three months.  Although it also, essentially, took the harvest.  As usual, I'm realizing how much guilt has power to take the garden away from me, and pretty much, once July rolls around, guilt is a constant in the garden.  Everywhere I look, I see all of the things I could have done, all of the things I haven't done, all of the things that have gone by.

Harvesting the day we left was the same.  I strolled past at least a dozen cucumbers, left out for the frost, that I could smoosh with the tip of my toe.  I cut a bag of beautiful rainbow chard, not affected by frost, vivid orange and dark red, not a leaf of which we'd eaten.  Head upon head of cauliflower left brown and unpickled.

It's enough to bring on despair, and it did, for several months.  I don't know how many summers it'll take for me to learn the lesson that doing something small is better than doing nothing.  Or maybe I really did need three months of absolute rest.

Farewell, perhaps Ashokan

Tomato trying to grow in the glass room

Will it see fruition?  I doubt.  But then again, I always doubt.

Tonight I'm trying to decipher which versions of Ashokan Farewell and Amazing Grace are included on random mix cds bestowed on me by my siblings.  Surprisingly, there are more than one of them.

Snow flurries predicted tomorrow.  The maple leaves are half on the ground.

Dinner should be broccoli, but the best we could do was cabbage in the salad.  We are more than ever convinced that cabbage is merely a variation on iceberg lettuce.

X-rays today.  Maybe they'll tell me what's wrong with me.  Or maybe I need a psychic.
Cedar burning in the wood stove.  The neighbor says, "The only good thing about winter is the smell of woodsmoke."  I disagree.  There is also snowshoeing.

We always keep hollow

I have a feeling tonight of:  where have you been all my life?

[The same feeling I had the first time I heard Bob Dylan's "If Dogs Run Free," with its undercurrent of a jazz strumming on a bass guitar--who knew Dylan sang jazz?  Is there a way for this here internet-thingy to play you the song?  Yes, here it is:

And now go give 99 cents to the artist, even if he is a millionaire:  http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/if-dogs-run-free#]

Where have you been all my life, I asked Environment Maine, as now all of a sudden I feel like I have a community, people on my side.  Of course I could have had this last year, if I'd bothered to look up this event, when they tried to get an initiative on the ballot for 20 percent sustainability in Maine, I could have found out about them a year ago, and I could have seen this map:

With a better explanation here:  Extreme Weather's Local Impact.

I've been wanting to do another big climate change post, but let's just say I turned off the debate in about ten minutes when a candidate said he was a "big fan of coal--clean coal."

I've been compiling a list of things to post, proof of the climate change.  Maybe this is becoming an obsession.  Maybe everyone should go give money to your local environmental charity.

Tonight broccoli stirfry for dinner.  How come when I feel guilt about the garden's abandonment I feel prideful about bragging about garden meals?  Here's what was leftover:

Can't see over to the other side

The Psychedelicates and their wine-soaked songs

Last night I went to see my friend Carol's show in Presque Isle, at Bou's, a club aptly named. It made me feel, as usual, on most days when I wander around Aroostook County, that I don't belong. Spending time with Carol, who belongs so thoroughly, who builds community as art practice, as much as I love her and love spending time with her and at her home in Castle Hill, makes the feeling especially acute. All of the county girls were out last night, in kitten heels and shorts, all of the twenty-somethings, one of which I once was.

Now I'm not. Now I'm watching my blown-out garden, praying I get tomatoes indoors, and maybe a pepper or two before frost, bolting cilantro and lettuce, basil I can't bear to cut back. I feel always like the odd man out, the one that doesn't know the score, the thin man in Bob Dylan's ballad. Here I am, the one thing that I want—belonging--the one thing I can't have.

It makes a better story that way. K.'s been looking at boats and boat blogs again. Here are two:

Downeast Cutter

Ingrid 38

I'm not allowed to post links whereby you might go find these fine sailboats and buy them yourself.

And then, what follows soon after sailboat searches?  Adventurer blogs.  This guy, Grillabong Quixotic, flew to Mexico with nothing but a dream, to build an outrigger sailboat. Now he's in Panama.

These people raised a child on their engineless Ingrid. Who needs an engine?

As soon as I'm happy, comfortable, putting down roots, I begin to make plans to pull them up again. Kayak searches to Baja. Lonely Planet guides. Emotional separation from the dog that'll never survive Mexico.

Casting off, you say? Casting off indeed. Sometimes I believe that the best thing to do would be to stay put, that again I'm just running away from belonging, from stability, from home. Sometimes I don't want to run aymore.

I want to paint walls. I want to plant rosebushes. I want to put up bookshelves and brackets for hanging plants and window boxes. But what's the point of buying paint or bolts or lumber for someone else's house? Better save that money for epoxy and teak-and-holly ply and bosun's chairs.

Don't you remember

To some extent, maintenance is a matter of doing the same thing every day. Brushing our teeth. Eating, sleeping. Weeding, in the garden. Writing, as a practice, on these electronic pages and elsewhere. Coming to my desk to work, coming to my mat to practice yoga.

We must do these things every day, or we lose flexibility, we lose skill, we lose resilience.

At least I do. I become flaccid, lazy, weak. Or that's what I believe. I don't know.

It's been a rough couple of months. The shoulder thing has blossomed into a full-on injury, and I keep blaming myself for it, internalizing the national dialog that's taking place right now over my choice to pursue my own entrepreneurial dreams of being an adventurer, traveler, writer—the choices that have let me to consequences, to a career without health insurance. I've been stewing in my own juices of self-pity and self-blame, thinking about karma (my favorite word to say with a Boston accident) and martyrdom (almost as fun) and how if I had just done more yoga, to the correct amount of vigor, if I had just been able to listen to my body, if I'd had enough faith, more courage, more moxie, more vim—I wouldn't be in this situation. Yet here I am.

In the meantime, I've been traveling, writing, writing about traveling. I had my first ever retreat to the wild world of the Allagash. I'll get around to posting photographs eventually.

The tomatoes are stricken with blight, and no hot peppers this year for green-tomato salsa. The rest of the garden is overcome by weeds. My immobilization means I've been eating ramen, dreaming of the days when I can once again carry wood and dig up sod and knead dough.

And I'm going to see a doctor, even if I have to make a run for the border after.

Well you can ride, ride, ride

Wandering around in Camden. Here for two days helping my friend Carol.  Some photographs from the day:

Trees

Edna St. Vincent Millay achieved her literary debut bare yards from where I nest on a bleached duvet, in the Whitehall Inn music room.  We're here visiting our friend the chef, who works in the kitchen.  Tomorrow morning I am hoping for house-made hollandaise on his own English muffins.  Possibly the world's most perfect food.  In fact, the whole day has been like a food tour.

Eating is an agricultural act.

Big County

 There it is way up there in the tip--Cold River potatoes and 22 Vodka.  Home sweet home.

Libations

Delectable Hendrick's gin cocktails.  If I were a good food blogger, I'd know what restaurant we were at.  I just follow where I'm led and drink gin.

Best crab cakes of my life.  With iceberg wedge.

How do they get them so flaky, but crispy?  It's that conjunction of textures, plus being served piping hot.  Or maybe it's the crab.  I am yearning for lobster, but none so far.  I want to get one that's $3 a pound around here and find a pot and eat it in someone's backyard.  Despite having lived in Maine for eight years now, very off and on, I have yet to eat a Maine lobster.  I eat them in Mass, where K.'s family has the local hookup.  I am told, by Mainers, that Cape Cod lobsters have nothing on the babies up here.  They have to say that.

I finally get a picture of a moose!  Also:  I heart jugs.

At the local, where we finished the evening with piles of french fries, steak salad, and a haddock reuben.  I've never even heard of such a thing before, but it was exquisite.  The mild flavor of the swiss goes astonishingly well with haddock.  Again, if I were a good food blogger, I would actually have a camera that could take photographs in low light.

The walk back to the inn