Journey's End, or Reflections As One Thing Passes Into Another

Sky passes into sea, Rose Harbour, Kunghit Island, Gwaii Hanaas

4:30 am Atlantic Daylight Savings Time Sunday 27 August, 2017  West Quoddy, Nova Scotia

Just a week ago we were in British Columbia, preparing for our last day on the boat for the year.  We'd moved into the launch slip, for the boat was to be hauled for some repairs, and eaten a quiet meal in the cockpit as darkness dropped over the Fraser River.  Overhead, dozens of airplanes streamed in on the same route: a sharp turn over the towers of the Alex Fraser Bridge, and then the lock onto a final approach over the river; they rumbled overhead to the airport, lights like a searching beam coming right at us. Our bags were half packed; the next morning I'd strip the bed, wash the sheets, defrost the freezer and scrub down the remainder of the living spaces on the boat, while Marike stowed lines and investigated the persistent and worrying flow of water over the top of the rudder, among dozens of other vital details. Cushions were clean and stacked in the salon, bedding and blankets bagged, charts rolled up, guidebooks put away. And just like that, the journey, which had unfolded gradually across time and space, embedding landscapes and experiences in our flesh and memories for months, rumpled closed; its urgencies began to dissipate.

Rising tide. Hakai Luxvabalis Recreation Area, Queen Charlotte Sound

Did it happen? Of course it did--finally, we'd made it to Haida Gwaii and back--but the marks the voyage left on our bodies, the habits of vigilance and care that it instilled in the rhythm of our days, had begun to disperse.  Before long we would be embedded in the life of the land again, unconscious of each fluctuation in barometric pressure, unconcerned about the exact times of the tides or the force and direction of the wind. Before long we'd be in another geography, on another coast, in our house. Then the question in the middle of the night would no longer be 'how strong is the wind? or 'does the anchor hold?' but something more diffuse and existential: 'who am I; where am I; and what must I do that matters next?' 

A lengthy and demanding voyage relieves us of such questions in many ways by giving us a trajectory and many clear parameters: the goal each day is to make good enough judgments about when, where and how to go a certain distance, that we may arrive safely. The consequences of failing to do this are fairly immediate and significant. Why one goes is not at issue: the meaning of life is to be alive and to stay alive, to become a resonating body, attuned to the wind and waves, other creatures, the landscape, the tides, and to the sounds of the boat. You ask, 'did we make the right call there?' 'is the raw water pump working?' not 'who am I and why do I exist?' You move from chart to chart, asking how best to get from here to there; such efforts, for the time one makes them, seem to preclude the feeling that one has gone astray--above all these days, for thanks to the extreme precision of Global Positioning Systems, it is almost never necessary, while underway, to puzzle out painstakingly where you are. 

Fog lifts and smoke remains. Entering Johnstone Sound from Blackney Passage.

But back on land, reinserted (however fitfully) into the news cycle and various pressing human concerns as we attend to the circuitry--the communications, the appliances, the vehicles, the yard work and habits of cleanliness and order--that sustains our carbon-rich lives, the absence of charts, of an evident trajectory across the repetitions that structure each day, makes existence itself feel heavy, tenuous, puzzling.  Without a map to mark the way, questions about the meaning of life surface: "why am I doing what I am doing? Is it worth it? What am I building as we move from day to day?" Bare existence seems never enough.

And it isn't--not for anyone, and certainly not as a meaningful narrative about living. Elaboration is crucial. So too, a sense of direction. Somehow, always, we want the sense and unfolding self-evidence of the journey, even if that can only be played, on the one hand, as risk, and on the other, as retrospection.

Stars spangle the night sky and a thick dew settles over every surface. Sometime in the day to come, it will rain and we will sit indoors at our computers, writing, searching, replying, seeking contact, affirmation, revelation. But for now, to look out at the Milky Way just might be enough. The dog curls at my feet. I drink a glass of water and go back to bed.  

Grey light of early morning rises, blotting out the stars. I know that another night soon, I'll be up again to weigh the anchor of my soul, and find it wanting.

Carved cedar mortuary pole returns to the earth, K'uuna Llnagaay (Skedans), Haida Gwaii.

Notes

All photographs were taken in British Columbia during the course of a voyage to Haida Gwaii aboard Quoddy's Run (June 3-20 August 2017).

Public Stories: On Doubt and Debt

These days we write public stories not private ones.

What is the difference?
I say, what is the difference?

A public story is not a private one.
A private story is not a public one.

A public story is when someone wishes to believe--but you withhold, withal, some doubts.
You do not share them.

In other words,
a public story is when debts make doubts unutterable.

A private story is when when doubts are spoken softly,
as if inside a closed book.

Eyes shut, like in a dream.
Perhaps you believe wishes, but will not share them.

In other words,
a private story is when doubts make debts unutterable.

Doubts, debts, what is the difference?

These days we write private stories in public
and bury the public in private, tamping down its grave.

Notes:

In searching my old journals for some ships' log notes, I came across a short dialogue written in southern Mexico in February of 2006 that began "these days we write public stories not private ones." I'm not sure to what I was referring (how quickly memory fails us!), but I can tell from other nearby entries that all the ship's company were very ill then with salmonella poisoning, and we had not in fact communicated the extent of that to our friends and relatives, so perhaps that's what I was writing about. In any case, I felt a sudden urge, once I had stumbled across these words, to seize and remotivate them, to do something with them.  It seemed as if my 2006 lament was a prefiguration of the crazy mixed-up media and political landscape of the present, in which, at once, both privacy and the commons have become radically eroded, facts a matter of opinion,  public debt irrelevant (and private debt increasingly crippling).

Public, private, what is the difference? So many of us no longer clearly know, and yet this boundary feels crucial, even sustaining, particularly in private, if not in public. Although perhaps it should be.

I reflect that a personal blog, like this one, sits sometimes oddly on the boundary between public and private; it represents a space of limited publication, but within a potentially unlimited public,  like so much of whatever we who post do post on the internet. How limited? How unlimited? How can we know? No wonder we're confused, and cannot keep our accounts straight, our debts and doubts either separated or aligned.

Why have I stopped writing so frequently here? In part because I am publishing in other venues more and they do not like to be scooped by my own blog; in part because I have been working in other media and on other projects; in part because I keep several teaching blogs when I am teaching and just cannot bear to spend too much more time on the computer. Everything seems to flow through these narrow portals, and some days I spend far too many hours sitting at a desk and staring at a screen. In fact I must ask what are you doing here now, peering into that the odd doorway/ mirror of your computer screen? Hurry, get up, push back your chair, step outside and go for a walk! Get your your private in the public, where no one can see you!

Images from a walk at Taylor Head Provincial Park, Nova Scotia, October 15, 2016.

Thorn

goose feather snared by a thorny wild rose stem

While clearing alders
I am pricked by a wild rose,
whose touch still festers.

Melt

Melt water gathers beneath the ice, runs out down the rock face and pools at the bottom of the hill. Freshets everywhere.  

To watch on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niu7Q5xPgVI&feature=share&list=UUgWDhn2jpndC4hdPd8vb0zg

After the freeze

After the freeze, a thaw. Rain. Fog. Gusts of wind rattle the frost-bitten branches, toss chunks of ice to the ground. We crush them underfoot. And now another freeze, a breath-stopping chill that icicles your eyelashes. This is the way we will face the new year: swaddled in layers, our cheeks stinging with cold, breath turning to frost as soon as it strikes our scarves.

Last night I dream that everything in my office is burning; there is nothing we can do but get out before the roof collapses. All of my papers, my notebooks, the photos and the books are consumed by flames. In my dream, my only regret concerns the notebooks from last summer, from the trip to Alaska; I've not managed to make anything from them yet. I reach for them, and they whirl apart into cinders. We race from the building, dodge falling beams, and finally stand outside looking up into the night sky. Flames shoot through the roof; we are deafened by the blazing fire.

Suppose indeed, nothing were to be left?
Nothing? What of your memory?

Okay, nothing but my memory.
And the possibilities of imagination.

Yes, that too.
What then?

We'd start over again then, I guess.
Or tell new stories.

Yes.
And what if you were to begin anyway now?

Even without a conflagration?
Yes, even without a conflagration.

I don't know if I could.
You mean you don't know if you could want to.

Yes.
What is old is new again.

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Note: Another found poem, of course--and possibly a dangerous tool. Not really what you want to find in your workplace inbox, which is where this odd device appeared sometime last year. Spam, of course. I think, although one can never be too sure.

Photos were taken at the tumbledown remains of a cannery in Butedale, northern British Columbia. For more information on that site, as well as more photos, see http://quoddysrun.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/the-sound-of-running-water-butedale-cannery/

 

What you hope to find at the end of your rope

This sign may be confusing--on church suppers and other interpretive dilemmas

While walking to work along a Halifax street this week, I was struck by a sign in front of a neighbourhood church announcing a "HAM BEAN DESSERT SUPPER." At first I was befuddled--what was a ham bean? Was this a new food, something like a souped up meal-in-one Chinese steamed bean bun, sweet enough for dessert?  Somehow, on this corner, angled between the military base, low income housing, and an alternative Buddhist school, I didn't think so. When I turned around to look at the sign again, I noticed that the back of the sign read, "LIKE US ON FACEBOOK."

Churches these days! I wondered if anyone was walking the parish streets, knocking on doors and having conversations on the stoop or over coffee? Is God now just another character, another page to LIKE? Has it really come to this?

When I got home and reported on the HAM BEAN DESSERT SUPPER, Marike told me something even more astonishing that, swept away by the oddity of a HAM BEAN DESSERT SUPPER I'd failed to notice: below the supper announcement was this line--"Call for takeout." Wow, a church hall supper, and you don't even have to eat what is offered there with others. What kind of congregation is that? What a dull stretch my childhood would have been without the wild antics and odd guests attending church suppers. Our meals tended to 13 varieties of tuna casserole or, post-Thanksgiving, turkey tetrazzini (with or without potato chip toppings), finished off by box cake and sometimes singing. Or hide and seek and gymnastics, in adjacent rooms.

Imagine eating a church supper all alone, or in front of the tv, without long or short prayers, others' bad behaviour, sticky spills of purple kool aid, wads of paper napkins, getting pinched in a folding chair, or the necessity of pitching in to set up and then clean up.  It seems positively sacrilegious.

The "No Parking picture" was taken in Van Anda on Texada Island, looking out over the Malaspina Strait in British Columbia; "Staple and Fancy" is part of an old butcher's sign painted on a wall in downtown St. Paris, Ohio.

And yes, Martha Stewart does have a recipe for turkey tetrazzini: http://www.marthastewart.com/338343/quick-turkey-tetrazzini.  If you should make this meal, I hope you enjoy it, but please do not invite me. Hell in my book is being condemned to eat nothing but turkey tetrazzini in a church basement, over and over again. With or without peas. Without or without mushrooms. With thick or sticky,  thin or non-existent cream sauce. With or without potato chips on top. With crispy noodles or damp; white meat or dark; with or without breadcrumbs or thyme. On second thought, maybe they're on to something with that takeout option...

On her demise

You must let me go first because I live in the sea
always now, and know the road.
                  Emily Dickinson

No matter which way you slice it,
the story doesn't change.

Disastrous.
Forever miserable, my blasted flower

your petals all are blown.

Photos were taken in West Quoddy, Nova Scotia.

Becoming Landscape (Notes on Being Flattened)

Ground is a figure of orientation.  

As soon as you lie down, you become terrain.
The cat walks across me as if I am a small hill.
I bend my knees and the territory steepens.

Photos are of a character I called Felicia Aplanada ("Flattened Felicia"), after the Flat Stanley character and phenomenon, but with a feminist twist.  In my universe, Felicia was a young Mexican-Canadian girl with a camera, an intrepid and curious explorer. How did she get flattened? According to Daliah Friedland, my friend Sheri Weinstein's daughter, Felicia was flattened by her love of reading.  Here is Sheri's account of that moment of invention:

Subject: Felicia's backstory

From Daliah at bedtime: "Where does Felicia live, in Mexico or in flat Stanley's town here?" 

Me: "Karin's not sure yet." 

Daliah: "Okay, so we don't know if a landslide off a mountain in Mexico could make her flat, and that would probably kill her, so let's think." 

Me, interfering, of course, "I think Flat Felicia loves to read." 

Daliah's final answer: "Okay, I got it, so Felicia loved to read and she read so many books that they piled up on her bookcase, and she didn't want to leave her books home on her trip to Mexico, so she took them with her, and while they were traveling, the bookshelf fell on her. It didn't hurt her because reading makes you strong." 

Sheri's comment: Luckily, Felicia didn't have a Kindle.

Waiting

Waiting.
When will your letter arrive?

Given Wind (A Meditation on Time)

[In which time + wind makes apples fall]

A month passes. More. The wind, and we, rattle the branches, and the apples fall. At dusk the yard is full of deer grazing between the trees. In the morning, the apples are gone.

We shake down more. Crows come, poke holes in the greenest ones, carry away the smallest orbs.

A storm passes over us, and then another. Rain pelts the trees; the wind shakes down more fruit; the deer come, then go.

Early November.  One last apple clings to the tree: out of reach, stubborn, rotten.

Flexible dates

Mind reading and mentalism. Camera gear! 
Free psychic reader, 30 years. (I'm glad you're 
gone, I wish I had gone with you) Raw food. Garden
party. Thursday afternoon in the pet
store. You in your motorcycle jacket
looking at the fish. (Rebecca and I 
miss you) Me, talking to the bored bird. I thought we
had a moment (I miss everything about you) in
the hyperbaric chamber. Belly dancing. (When 
the time is right) You must speak
Swiss German. Have own platinum
dolls. Flexible dates. August 14,
2-5 pm. (You know who you are, 
you were bowling)

Notes
This poem was composed entirely from words lifted from the back pages of a June 2009 issue of The Coast, a free weekly newspaper distributed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Personals, event advertisements, job listings, adult services and classifieds spell out the traffic of so many secret lives.

Photos are of various sites in Halifax and on the Eastern Shore.

Setback

Trampled crocus,
half-green grass,
bitter wind:
spring stays at half mast,
requires more
firewood.

Notes
Pictures were taken under grey skies by a windy sea in West Quoddy this morning.  I wrote the poem--if we can call this ditty by such an elevated name--while sitting by the fire. Yes, it's that cold. Pity the lobstermen, who begin to haul their traps today.

How rocks age

for Marie-Therese

Rocks birth and break like we do;
anaclitic, unbalanced,
each tumbles from another in sudden parturition.
Pressed into form
by torsion or catastrophe,
the shattering goes on.
Ice shears them, cracks
new lines, peels and reveals new
facings. Rivulets run through
them, gash deep canyons, drill
troughs and holes and secret
caves where darkness flies and
echoes. Steady dripping wears them down, they
fracture, hole and pebble, crumble into sand.

Note
Photos were taken in West Quoddy and at Taylors Head Provincial Park.

Blue odour of iodine

Strange and complicated morning. A skim of ice
calms the sea; sudden colour scours your eyes.
Bright light white heat flood the house. 
Throw open the windows! Fling wide the door!
Flash of kingfisher wing and peaked blue crest
(you're back! we're so glad to see you!). Sparrows sing.

Scent of---    open water. Salt, of course. Blue
odour of iodine, knotted rotting bladderwrack,
sunwarmed grey stone steeped in cold mud:
each element bound to its proximate. Life
on the strand, lived at an edge, wind-tumbled,
cloud-driven. Unstable. Chance-riven.
What peculiar mercy makes us forget that
with heat, comes fog?

Notes
I am thinking of Boston this morning, and the two explosions at the marathon finish line yesterday. (Who in North America isn't riveted and horrified by such wreckage of runners and their families and friends?) But to write a poem about that seems impossible.  I judged a poetry competition once not long after 9/11, and the poems that commemorated that event were, without exception, awful. Mawkish versions of catastrophe miniaturized in dancing rhyme. An occasion for falling flat on your face, poetically speaking.  Still, as I finished this poem I realized something about yesterday's news was working me--that what one finds at the edge of a sudden change is not a clash of civilisations (that appalling phrase and idea authored by Samuel Huntington), but one thing slowly shifting into another, "each element bound to its proximate." And this too, of course: what draws us--heat, say, or celebratory events full of oblivious affluence, also draws other things we think we love far less, like fog--or anger and targeted destruction. We forget at our own peril our own angers, our own targets, how closely interleaved rage and righteousness are.

Pictures, more land-weaves and tumbling structures, natural and not, taken on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore.