Daily Archives: November 5, 2011

Leaving

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We left Hopi because a small boy was run over and crushed by a truck.

Because a man killed his pregnant girlfriend and threw her off a cliff. Because a girl and her brother beat their mom to death with a barbell and burned her house to the ground. Because on the rez you can get away with murder. Because non-natives were dealing meth in the villages and no one seemed to care. And even if they did no one could do a thing about it.

Because every week acquaintances would drink themselves to death. Because a neighbor killed a raven. And poisoned an anthill. And beat a harmless bull snake to death with a hoe.

Because after eight years of digging the hard pan, the clay was still bone dry. Because I knew that after all I left, my work would remain undone.

Because our daughter needed to know what it was like to live off reservation. Because I couldn’t drive the 120 miles to flag one more time.

Because I spent my days composing telegrams from hell. Because most everyone we knew had already left. Because children were under served by their own families. Because I was tired of all that I knew. Because I was tired of the lies.  Lies told by my community.  Or by my own family.  Because we didn’t have much more left in us.

Because If you’re a sensate being you one day reach a point where you just can’t take it.

And then it’s time to go.

The Piano Store

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I had one more trip to make.

There once was a little girl and her father slept with another woman, and her mother’s heart was so broken that she hung herself.  What can a father do, but compensate for love lost?  And so he bought his little girl a piano.

But the piano never came into the girl’s possession, but instead the stepmother’s.  And over the years the hammers and strings deadened and the ivory was picked from the keys by one child or another.

The piano had come from the ABC Piano Store on the corner of El Cajon and 30th.  The store belonged to Oleg Gladkoff, a White Russian from the Ukraine.  He was a young boy, and during the War he fled all on his own.  At the close of 1944, he picked his way across Russia and Germany, stealing uniforms from dead German soldiers.  He was once caught by the retreating army, and the apprehending soldiers were set to execute him.  Desperate to live, he told them what he could, he told them that he could play Schubert.  The soldiers laughed at him and they took him to the quarters of the ranking officer who had with him a piano.  Played, they told him.  Play your Schubert.  And Oleg all of 14 did just that.  He played for the German officer, so beautifully, he said, that they let him go.

Years later he came to the States as an aspiring pianist.  Once he even debuted in Carnegie Hall. But it wasn’t ever going to come to anything.  Call it a crisis of confidence.

Instead of becoming a world class pianist, he moved to San Diego and opened up a piano store and raised a family.  He would sit for days alone in the store, playing the piano just for himself.  And he sold pianos to families in the neighborhood, but after years, even that came to a stop, as pianos came in and he found himself unable to part with them.  So they accumulated around him, piling higher and higher until they formed a tomb of sorts and he buried himself with his best companions.

He had four sons, George, Andy, Michael and Nick.  His son Michael was my best friend growing up, and so I in turn I grew up with the family.

Just after we moved to Sebastopol, I called Nick.  Anna wanted to have her piano back at last.  Would he be able to help us move it?

That’s how I came to fly to San Diego, and rent a truck and load it with whatever remained of my family’s busted up furniture.  And how in the evening, Nick met me and some friends at a house, and as only a master could do, effortlessly slipped a thousand pounds of wood and wire onto a dolly, glided it up a ramp and through the house, outside and up to the waiting truck.  He ratcheted it down tight with tie straps.  And he shook my hand.

I thought of Oleg and the now empty store, and of everything that gets lost along the way, and of true service done well over years and of how guardians present themselves in the most common of men.

I drove that piano all night, up the five, along the backbone of California and deposited the broken heap in our very own home.

But except for one winter day in 1944, I don’t know if a piano has ever really made it any better.

 

Island of the Blue Dolphins

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Mo was our cat, and at the last minute as Anna was leaving Hopi, he leapt out of the car.  Anna was tired, expectant and preoccupied.  She wanted to get that cat, but it wasn’t her priority and in the end she didn’t have it in her.  She was thinking of other things.  She camped by the culverts for a full six hours trying to lure him, but when all was said and done,  it was all she could give and so she got on her way.

The book always made me so sad when I was little. To think of the little girl marooned all alone by herself on that island.  Left to raise herself into an uncertain future.  Even then I wanted to reach out to her.  I wanted her to be safe.

Some would say it’s stupid to travel halfway across the country to rescue a scared and bewildered animal.  But such as it was.  Someone, someone in this wide world has to do it.  Otherwise, what really are we here for?

So I climbed into the car and drove 15 hours straight back to Arizona.  I spent 30 hours up at Hopi.  I found the life that we had built there completely dismembered and gone.   The ramada had been ripped to the ground, the gardens dug up, the fencing tore down.  There was nothing left of our life there.

I spent the weekend combing that empty neighborhood for the cat.  I crawled through mud and across tumbleweeds, caking my chest in bull heads, peering through both ends of filthy culverts.  I called out again and again for a white kitten.

And in the while, I learned a little about animal ways.  How when they get scared they hide and they dig in for dear life.  How we have favorite spots and they nurture us and give us comfort.  I found the culvert ends where he crouched in the soft mud leaving hieroglyphs of paw prints.  And where he would eat, and the puddles from which he would lap his water.  I found two dead birds at the stoop of Pearish’s porch.  He was still hunting, and he wanted to please, he wanted to remain connected with humans, with us, and show he was still present.

He was independent and well good enough to fend for himself.  Most creatures do.  For those of us still standing, it’s what’s allowed us to survive for near forever.

But he was so scared.  Too scared to even come out and face me and an uncertain future.  Too scared of retribution and fear of what may happen.

In the end we were saved by a Hopi security man.  He had spent weeks watching him on the hospital security cameras.  His watchful eyes are what saved us.

He was the one who saw him and alerted me to the fenced parking lot where Mo was sequestered.

I climbed the fence with a can of sardines.  Again and again he bolted from me.  So I lay on the hot pavement and I spoke to him.

I was so proud of him, I said.  He had survived for all this time nearly all on his own.  He was a mighty animal, fierce and independent, and smart enough to live.  But there were some things he did not know, I told him.  Winter was coming.  And his family was never coming back.  And if he stayed here, if he was too afraid to join us, then here he would die.

It was a long way to our new home.  I told him that it would not be easy.  That this journey would feel to him excruciating and endlessly long, but that Mango the dog and the other cats and the chickens and all of us had already made it.  It was just he alone that had stayed here.  And our life here was no more.  Most people had already left and decamped for other places.  The birds themselves would soon be flown, and the mice that he hunted and fed on would soon be burrowed deep in the ground.  Come to me.  Please, I asked.  Please.  Trust me.  It will all be okay.  It will all be alright.

He walked and nuzzled against my arm.  And I grabbed him.  Loving him so much I gripped him to my chest, and carried him in a near death lock strong enough to defy the sink of his teeth and his clawing scratches.

The End

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A raven was born, and wounded, and lived for a short time in this world.

He was taken at night by an animal.  He could offer no defense.  I knew straightaway where to go.  I found his severed head at the base of towering redwood tree.

Poe, I write this to you.

I am so sorry I was the cause of your destruction.  You believed in me and I kept screwing it up.  You did your best and I was the one who pulled the football away.

I don’t know where a raven’s spirit goes when it dies.  But I want you to find it within you a way to forgive. But forgiveness may only be in the province of humans, an unnecessary convention unsuited to the ways of birds.   I can listen for you and your own.  I can assign meaning.  It’s only an assignation, but it’s all I know how to do.

And in the end, what all do you care for my mortal shit?  You’re birds.  You do  your justice and sup on the departed.

Final Days

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Our furniture arrived in the middle of September.  Two movers hefted and shoved and carried on their backs more possessions than any being should have to bear.  They got it all in our house.  I brought Poe home that night from Occidental.  His eye was blind, his feathers falling out, he refused to preen or care for himself.  He spent the night inside, afraid to leave his courier cage.  In the morning he emerged and shit all over our dining room table.

He stayed with me while I unpacked boxes.  I spread packing paper across the floor and he receded into it.  Unable to see, he squawked and panicked whenever I approached him.  He could no longer perch, so he sat on the papered floor.

In the day I set him up outside on the lawn and he caught sun.  I fed him apples and cheese, that he no longer touched.  In the evening, he hopped onto the porch and walked inside.  The house was in chaos, boxes and junk everywhere.  I felt sick to my stomach and so did he.  His watery shit ran across the floor.  His sounds were few, just feeble cries.

I apologized, but apologies don’t matter a whit.  I couldn’t make it any better.  I told him if he could meet me half way, I could help him.  But I couldn’t do anything if didn’t want to make it better.  It was his choice, I told him.  And if it was too much to bear, he could end it.

All he felt from me was chaos and fear and anger.  And in the end, perhaps it only left him bewildered.

Anna drove a night and a day to get to us.  She had the chickens and dog and two of our cats loaded in with her, and I released them all hoping Poe would find them familiar friends and be happy for company.  He hopped away and buried his body and head against the rocks.

I knew Anna didn’t want him in the house.  So that night I set him on his perch outside.  I gave him a sampling of meat and cantaloupe and water.

I told him everything would be alright. And that’s how I left him.

Talk to the Animals

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Her name was Ariana Strozzi.  And she ran a place called Skyhorse Ranch.

I’d been given her name by someone in the coffee shop.  She worked with animals, I was told.  She knew a lot about birds.

A few days after returning to town, I fetched Poe from Occidental.  Penny was right.  He looked to be a complete mess, missing feathers, agitated, afraid to come near me.  I know of someone who maybe can help you, I told him.

That day, I took Poe to Valley Ford. We descended into that overcast channel west of Petaluma that leads on to the ocean. We drove up to Skyhorse ranch, a horse farm high on the hill overlooking the barren valley.  I pulled past the horse corrals to the house.  Ariana welcomed me at the door.  She appeared collected and thoughtful.  She invited Poe and I into her house and allowed me to take him from the carrier.

Ariana led workshops on interspecies communication, primarily with horses.  Animals were her thing.  They operate on the level of feeling and to be with them we need to quiet the noise inside ourselves.  She wasn’t part of the rehabilitation community and was a renegade of sorts.  On her own she worked with a whole range of predatory birds.  Hawks, peregrines, owls.  And ravens.

Ariana had done her graduate work at UC Davis.  While there, she had developed a system for wing rehabilitation using intensive physical therapy wedded to bird instinct. When she finished, she had been recruited to help with condor reintroduction on the North Rim. Her job would have been to prevent the birds from human imprinting.

Ariana felt that the ravens see everything and they know in deep way what we’re about.  She told me a story.  A while ago, her marriage was falling apart, she told me, and she didn’t want to admit it.  She was up at the ranch at the time, and the birds would come to her, they would follow her where she went and caw incessently.  Until one afternoon in a rage she stood outside her barn and called out what she had known all along and and she shouted and screamed to the birds and the world and the birds were at last silent.

I sat in the living room with her and Poe.  He sat on her table and she watched him, unconcerned as he shit over her living room floor.  She fed him meal worms. She was concerned about his thinness and his diet.  He needed field mice and insects, she said.  He sat calmly in her presence and preened.  She confidently took Poe by the legs and body and thrust him through diving motions again and again.

It wasn’t good, she said.  His right wing was damaged and fused shut.  His left wing seemed paralytic also, and his left foot wouldn’t grip properly.  In the diving motion he failed to respond instinctively by thrusting out his wing.

I doubt he will ever fly again, she said.

And if I take him to a wildlife refuge? I asked.

They’ll put him down, she said.

He can’t be a raven.  But can he live a life, a full life? I asked.

She smiled.  He can, she said.  Absolutely.  It’s clear that you have a special bond, she said.  You know one another and he trusts your presence.  He can be a happy member of your family.  He craves social interaction.  You can integrate him into your family.  When you eat, he can sit with you at the table.  He can be with you as you go about your day.  Stimulate him, pay attention, work with him and his life can be as full as any.

I thanked her.

I knew what I wanted to do.  I wanted to do this thing we call life, diminished though it may be.

Betrayal

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He believed in me.  We were friends, in a strange way bound to one another.  Abandoned into this world, I would like to think that he wanted to believe in me.

But I was busy.  I was distracted.  I was trying to take care of my daughter. To get her to school and coach her on homework.  To buy a house and an adjoining orchard.  To talk to my wife.  To be married to my wife.  I don’t know what he thought, but I believed he just wanted to see me.  I visited best I could, but it became sporadic.  And then I left.  I had to go to Telluride and then Hopi to help with the movers.  Penny and Michael and their daughter Loren stepped in.  Each morning one or the other would try and they would feed and sit with him.

Penny called while I was away.  Poe wasn’t doing well, she said.  He seemed sad.  He was hiding away.  He seemed to miss me, she said.  He had stopped preening and a wasp had stung him in the eye and it was swollen shut.

He just wanted me to be there for him, to listen to him, to give him hope, to tend to a broken wing.

But isn’t that what betrayal is?  Distraction?  An increment of cuts?

The Orchard and the Raven

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It was partway through the transaction that I learned the adjoining orchard was for sale.  People had known and no one had told me and I was livid.  Like all the old Grav orchards in the area, it was destined to go to vineyard.  The water would be drawn down, pesticides would be sprayed.

But it wasn’t just that, can you understand?  It was an old way of life, it was the culture of the Gravenstein orchards that had shaped this town for nearly a century.  And it was the life itself, one hundred and twenty apple trees, many over 80 years old.  Whom do you know who has lived to see eighty years? Termite ridden, some barely husk and bark, they still yielded apples.  Year after year giving up their own progeny so that others could drink and take sustenance.  A collective 100,000 years of sentience would be taken out because they couldn’t turn a profit.  By that measure, I should have been dead a long time ago.

So I had a vision.  I’m prone to visions and they sometimes overtake me.  Rarely to great fruition.  Sometimes to no good at all.  All the same I had a vision.

We would buy this orchard.  We would somehow find a way to make it work.  I would learn how to care for Gravenstein apple trees and we would learn to press our own cider and make our own vinegar.  We would have this raven Poe and over time he would get better, we would nurse him back to health and he would be our family mascot and my friend and companion.  Our home and the orchard and the adjoining parcels would become a haven where our friends, and the wild turkeys and the quail and deer and ravens, where all manner of life could come and live.  We would do this crazy thing and we would do it together.

But Anna would have nothing of it.  She was away in Arizona, Mazie and I in California.  Me running between her school, and a sick bird, and the county recorders and a West County real estate office.  Anna said it was too much to take on and what was the point.  She was distracted and preoccupied, and what with all it was hard for her to get the time to listen.

She didn’t want to be tied down, she said.  She wanted to be free and unhampered by an orchard.

I finally did figure out how we could get the land, but I was five days two late.  The vineyard people bought it.  Four days later the bulldozers arrived and began to rip out the trees.

That night I walked out into the orchard, and row by row, I sprinkled homa, and laid my hands on each and every tree standing and fallen. I said I was sorry.  It began to rain, slowly, then heavily and I trudged on in the mud and the dark.  I thanked them for all the life that they gave, for their sacrifice, for everything they had given.

A house is just a house, my father-in-law once admonished.  You are the moveable feast.

You can say that.  But it doesn’t matter in the end.  The truth?  Dreams and dreamers are just slim pickings.

The Transaction

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Fuck it.

The details are boring enough to be spared.

Mazie and I first visited the house alone.  Anna had already returned to Arizona.

It was more house than we had ever lived in.

It was rambling and grand and a combination of all that we had ever lived in and anything in a house that we had desired.  It had a pool and a sauna and orchard land and acres for vegetables and a dilapidated chicken barn in which any human would care to thrive.  It had a treehouse room for Mazie with windows that looked out over an orchard.  It was the room that she had always wanted.

It was surrounded by dozens of acres of open land and forest and orchard.  Perhaps as time passed, we could purchase some of it, and if we did that, nothing could touch us.  We would be protected.

Walking the house, I heard the ravens call out in the trees.  Again, I called out to them, Mazie hushing me to be silent.  I’m here, I wanted to tell them.  I would like to be welcome.

My family and I, we could all live here happily.  I could talk to birds here.  And no one would hear or judge.

To the extent that Poe, a small black bird, could ever be an auger and guardian-protector, I felt that he had in his own strange way led us to this house.  He knew what I wanted and he had made himself present for it to be.

But that is yet again a human construction.  The bird himself wants only to leave well enough alone, to communicate with his own kind and bear witness to folly and to live and to feed.

We found the house in the middle of the summer.  Anna was home alone with the other animals.  Mazie remained with me, but after a few days she decamped to LA to be with friends.  I stayed behind in Sebastopol, days filled with inspections and talking with mortgage brokers and moving money around as the world economy markets teetered, slipped and precipitously began to fall. A couple of men covered by umbrellas decided to occupy Wall Street.  Nothing new in this story.  It’s what the last ten years of this country’s history have been built on.  Our nation possessed by feverish desire, digging a foundation pit straight to the very bottom.  And at the bottom we would find only sadness and dissolution and rage.

I did everything I could to make it happen.

The House

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There’s another part that I’m not telling you.

It’s about the little boy who a long time ago lost his father and his mother grew away from him into her new boyfriend or her own sleep and he grew up in a crumbling house with a shitty carpet filled with fleas and stinking of cat spray.  Dishes would pile in the sink because no one would care to wash them until no dishes were left and even then it would move no one to lift a finger so they turned to paper bowls and plates.  On those days, it would be the boy who would stand on a chair to reach the sink and he would do the dishes, scraping rotting peanut butter from the knife, skimming flies and sheets of mold from the pots filled with putrid water.  It would take a full twelve hours for an eight year old boy to clean that kitchen.

There was a brother and once he wanted dog and it came into the house.  But no one would take care of it or feed it and it got sick and was kept penned up in the kitchen until the floor became a seething sea of shit and piss and diarrhea.  A neighbor visited and put a call out to CPS.

There’s more.  I could go on and on with more.  I could fill the remainder of my life and a catastrophe of pages with more.  But this will be sufficient.

Imagine what happened, how it was, when the boy first read Gatsby and how Fitzgerald seized him with a vision.  Just get the hell away.  Get as far and fast away as you possibly can.  Build a mansion.  Populate it with people.  Fill it with parties and surround yourself with campfires.  Night after night.  Go to that place, make that place, with your own majesty and desire will it in to being.  Matter not that the story ends in tragedy.  That all can be worked out in the details.

How stupid for a boy to be driven by such a silly story.

But he was.

I imagined one day arriving at a house.  It would be a grand place and it would be protected from anything bad or sullied that would want to intercede from the world.  It would have it’s own water, and good soil and could grow food.  It would be surrounded by protected space that would never in anyone’s lifetime ever be developed.

A family could grow and could grow old here.  And that’s the way it would be.

A New Life

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The coming days were flush with the banal.

Mazie and I, waiting for school to begin, shifted our ways to a local hotel.  They had a pool which Mazie was hot to swim in.  We joked about our big and fancy house. Poe, he stayed put in his hotel in Occidental.

On the last day of summer I took Mazie to the Harry Potter movie in Santa Rosa.  It was a dad daughter day and Mazie was pleased and funny and grateful, I think to have her dad’s attention.

On the first day at school, I drove Mazie from the hotel.  That first morning, nervous as heck, she asked that I walk her to the office, we check in, and then we walk out and as we did so she would peel away.  In that way, just as she dictated, I delivered her to her new school.

The kids were different, she later told me.  But she’s grown up resilient, and slowly, in her own way, she set to making friends.

Mazie and I would have breakfast each morning in the hotel lobby.  She would pack a lunch for herself from whatever she could scavenge from the hotel breakfast line: a piece of fruit, some juice, a PB&J.  I would then drive her to school.  In the evening I’d pick her up, we’d settle back into our hotel room, and Mazie would diligently sit and do her homework.

As for Poe, he became my own affair.  Some mornings and most afternoons I’d drive to Occidental and up into the meadow, where I would set with him.  I’d nap in the straw while he perched near me.  I’d feed him and talk to him.  He would sometimes mutter back.  I called Anna on the phone.  I wanted to tell her about the bird, but when we talked he would caw loudly until Anna would tell me to get out of the coop.  It was hard to talk with the bird near by, she said.

People seek solace and meaning and fire, and we each seek it in our own way.

I found it in dreaming of and fashioning for ourselves a new life.  I found it in Poe.

In the end, I think he just bugged her.

What Happens When You Believe

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I took a bunch of pictures to share, but now even that seems too much of a bother.

I had hoped that Poe could settle in at the Salmon Creek school in Occidental.  The school is set on 20 acres of meadow and redwood forest and wetland.  It also has an enormous fenced garden where I fancied Poe could hang out and regain a semblance of self.  Mazie and I took him there in the afternoon and set him free.

He enjoyed digging and exploring with his beak.  He hopped about in the wood chips and tussled with the greenery.  Mazie read quietly beneath an arbor.  Other ravens cawed out from the surrounding forest. Lovely clouds piled high in the sky and that afternoon the light felt marvelous and true.  I called Kerry.  We both were hopeful.  Perhaps Poe’s rehabilitation could become part of a school science program.  He could stay in the garden and mend.  And kids at the school could learn what it meant to be in close proximity to wildlife and maybe they figure out how to engineer some structure that would meet the needs of a wounded raven.

You see, this was all going to work out, or so it seemed.

But school would not start for a few more days.  The afternoon waned.  We gathered Poe into his carrier and in the setting light we drove up the hill and out of the valley.  Penny, the co-owner of the Holy Cow had offered her house up as a refuge.  She had an enormous chicken coop – the chicken hotel, she called it.  And hotel it was.  Ten feet high, fifteen across, open chicken wire walls all around facing out into meadow and oaks.  Poe took to the space immediately.  He ate and preened and hopped about in the straw.  Families and ravens flying over head would call out as they headed home to their roost.  Poe listened and called out in return.

Michael and Penny and I and even Mazie were elated.  Poe was safe.  I was safe, we all were, in the august darkness.

 

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Faith

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Is Charlie Brown believing again and again that Lucy won’t pull the football away from him.

My uncle once said that faith was believing in something that you knew was not true.  In this case, though, I really believed.  I believed it would all unfold as planned.

That first morning, Mazie and I, the raven in tow, made our way back to the Holy Cow.  Mazie and I settled down with cups of coffee and hot chocolate.  We waited until Michael the owner came around.

He remembered us from the month before.  Excited, grateful to have an ally, I ushered him outside and opened the car.  He looked inside and saw Poe inside the carrier.

Holy shit, he said.

He got it.  And I was so grateful to no longer be alone.  For he felt the awe.

I set to explaining how Poe had been held captive by the rehabilitator and that it was no good, and how –

You fucking stole him, he interrupted.  He grinned.  That’s so cool, he said, adding that we’d fit in just fine here.

He looked in again at the poor bird.  You can’t keep him in there, he said.  Bring him into the coffee shop.

And that I did.  And like that the three of us set at the table, health codes and wildlife regulations be damned, with Poe the raven holding court over all and customers coming forward and stopping dead in their tracks.  My god, each one said.

For those highly social birds are of their own world and not of ours, and though parallel, they scant intersect.  To be here in a coffee house on main street sebastopol, why to come full face with his claw-like beak and opal eyes and the impenetrable sheen of his blackness.  Poe was the ineffable born into flesh, and that day in the coffee shop, customers wanted only to be near him.  They wanted to touch it.

Mazie made friends with Michael’s daughter, Loren.  They made plans to get together and hang out.  They talked about the schools they would be going to.

Strangers approached and gave us their phone numbers, they had ideas of how to help.  They offered homes where he could stay.

That is what home feels like.  We had found safe harbor.

Mooring

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I could go on here forever, couldn’t I?

Although if you go on for too long,  your audience goes away.  They cease to listen.

What difference?  For most of my life, my writing has had an audience of one.  What difference does another ten or twenty make?

And in the end, who really does care about a bird and the string of betrayals exercised by and visited upon a single life?

That first night we stayed the night with our friend Hank in Santa Rosa.  We set up fencing in the backyard to protect Poe from the two dogs.  Once released, he squawked with agitation, pacing the pavement, bereft it seemed in his new environment.  I played bad father and bad guest, ignoring Mazie, feeding the bird, wanting badly to calm him, mindless to the shit he deposited all over the patio.

We slept fitfully.

Arrival

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It rarely is what it seems.  And sometimes it holds everything that is.

You might as well all know. Mazie and Poe and I ended up in Northern California.

On that first night, we needed nothing more than safe harbor.  Mazie needed some emotional relief.  And Poe needed most of all to be released from his confinement.

We drove direct to the home of our friends Mary and Al.  They’re family friends and to tell the truth we had nowhere else to go.  We parked in their driveway at their small mid-century stucco home.  They weren’t home.  But they had a decent sized yard and so we took Poe straight back there and let him out beneath a towering redwood.  He hopped away distressed and set his distance.  I fed him bits of pizza and old meat and whatever I had with.  A cat appeared and I barked at Mazie to hold the cat back, but she had a hard time doing it.

I thought maybe Poe could hang out in this yard for the evening and that he would be safe.  But I was way wrong.  There was no respite to be had here.  I called Michael from Holy Cow and then Maryanne, but no one was picking up.  Spent, I rounded Poe up and put him back in the dog carrier.  Mazie was frazzled and upset herself.  She needed as much tending as the bird.  Why was the bird getting it all, she asked?

Because if he doesn’t get what he needs, he’s going to die, I said.

We piled back in the car.  Because it was now time for Mazie’s school orientation.

We drove the scant six blocks to Mazie’s middle school where, in five days, Mazie was going to settle in to where she was going to spend the next year of her life.

Mazie didn’t want people to see us with the bird.  So we left Poe in the car while we entered the school gymnasium.  It was filled with a crowd of white middle to upper income folk.  Which I guess is what we now were.  The principal, a warm and nice man, introduced the school and the various programs and what children and parents could expect.  It was going to be a wonderful year, he said.

As we exited the gym, tears welled up in Mazie’s eyes.  I don’t want to go to this school, she whispered.

Mazie and I no longer knew how to live in this world.

Berkeley

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My father came here once and he camped out in the Doe library one foggy summer in the 1960’s searching the stacks for archival material about mining journalism in Nevada during the great silver rush.  He found a forlorn journal kept by a woman named Martha Galley in which she recorded her lonesomeness, the absence of her husband and the death of her children.  The last thing my dad did in this world was try to publish it, but by then it was too late and he was already out of time.

My grandmother and my aunt came to join him.  When my grandmother was a little girl in Philadelphia near the turn of the century she was run over by a carriage and it broke her back.  After that she was hunched and stooped and couldn’t play with the other kids and so she set to walking and that she did, up to ten or twenty miles a day.  Tilden Park? she once asked me.  Do you know Tilden Park?  Up in the hills?  Every day I would walk from the Rose Garden all the way up the hill to Tilden Park and back down again, she said.

My grandmother was in her sixties at the time and she would walk all the way to goddamn Tilden Park.

I went to Berkeley once.

I had completed my sophomore year in college and all I wanted to do at that time was run fast and far away.  I studied Russian during the summer and I stayed on for the fall.  I worked at Blondie’s pizza, sometimes prepping in the back, sometimes delivering on a scooter at night.  Once I didn’t strap the pizza boxes on right and they flew off the back all over the road.  I ended giving them up for free to the college kids who had ordered them.

I liked the feeling of riding that scooter fast through the night.  The scooter was red.

I found out that summer that my girlfriend was fucking some other guy.  It was my fault, she said.  I wasn’t there for her, she said.  It didn’t matter.  We didn’t have a good relationship anyway.  I’d cheated on my first girlfriend to go out with her.  None of us were any good.

I was living with a guy named Don at the time, right up there near Tilden Park, and I couldn’t stay down in town past three-thirty because that’s when the Livermore shuttle took it’s last run.  I didn’t want to walk up that hill.  My friend Kenny wondered what my problem was, why couldn’t I walk up a hill? he asked.  You walk up that hill, I told him and he tried and he scarce could do it.

Don was dating Maddie Wegner that summer.  He was madly in love and he confided in me that he loved her so much, that she was the one and he was going to propose to her.  He had it all planned out.  He bought her a ring and later in the summer when they were going to be driving through South Dakota, one sunset evening he was going to propose to her.

And that he did.  Except that she had no inkling he was in love with her.  She sat there with him somewhere in the midwest, embarrassed in the waning light, looking at the ring he held in his hand.  He was a nice boy, she said.  A sweet boy.  And that’s where she left it.

I would get out at the Livermore Center and walk the deer trail along the hillside and would hunker down by the wind organ and watch the sun make it’s way toward the horizon and at times the colors would be so profound that I would laugh and howl as if I’d lost my senses.

—

But now, on that afternoon, the one that matters most to us, my daughter and I and the bird arrived unclean and tired and needing food. We cut into town and found the Bread Board across from Chez Panisse.  We ordered pizza topped with goat cheese and peaches. We ate it sitting on a grassy divide in the middle of the road. The flavors were rank and disgusting and it made me such.  Mazie hardly touched it.  For Poe it was much the same.

All journeys, all races run, pass through a place of dissipation and I guess for us maybe this was it.  Mazie and I ate what we could in this place transitional and transcending as it has always been, and we piled then into the car and we headed north taking wrong turn after wrong turn after wrong turn until we found ourselves passing across the Delta, that swampland once parceled to the wanderings of Jack London and the tin boot fortunes of China camps, and rogue vagrants and bums and residents who had but fled all there was to flee from.

On this evening the light glinted flat across the misty water, posing an ephemeral halo for the yawning dilapidated penitentiary, and for Saint Quentin himself, I guess, tortured and beheaded as he was.  And now what stores of the unrepentant, lead and gold alike, were bound and locked tight within his chest, doing time for whatever crimes done unto?

Unseen, hardly a mote we were, Mazie and I and our companion bird passed across those mud flats, past chambered prisoners and flocks of crane set to taking flight.  By them all we passed.

 

Promised Land

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Some of you want to know what all has become of Poe.  The questioning, the wondering is fair enough.  And the silence and all has been unfair.  But some’s too much to tell.  But now you can have it. We can carry on.

We – Mazie, the bird and I – we left Barstow at dawn.

But not before absconding with some boiled egg and bread and sausage from the Best Western breakfast nook.  Once on the road, Poe set to caching his food amidst the newspaper in his carrier.

We blitzed California, racing up the 99 through that industrial farming hell, past warehouses, processing plants, sprayers, herbicide distributors, and miles of enslaved trees, genes, and soil and vine, Poe the raven himself bearing witness to the near incomprehensible machination and subjugation of all life to sate a specie’s hunger.

I told Mazie that her grandmother came to California because of a book written by a man named Steinbeck.  It was East of Eden and had been made into a movie by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean in which he became movement and life and desire incarnate.  It was about old California farming communities, and rivalry and lust and inheritance and the inevitable despoiling of the world through our actions.  About the Monterrey morning mist and the fields outside of Gilroy, and about old honor establishing itself in a new land.  My mother had wanted, I think, to be part of California before it was all gone and now it mostly was, at least this part of it.

And in this moment, we, my daughter and I, came to this place to be the bad kid, to find wildness and prove it upon the world once again.

Ashley, our GPS guidance system gave us a few bum steers, out of malice I think, because we hadn’t been giving her much due.  We passed out of the Central Valley, now draped with box stores and outlets for extruded meat, potato and corn products and descended into the Bay Area. Past those quixotic wind mills, harvesting that relentless mass of air pressing itself eastward from the pacific.  Past Livermore, that cesspool of life and death, beginnings and ends, where Edward Teller, in all of his fin de siecle Mitteleurop sensitivities, gave birth to the hydrogen bomb.  Is that what this state, in so much that it’s a state of being, is good for?

Of these things, though, I couldn’t intimate to my daughter.  And lest of all the bird, fragile and innocent and all-knowing intelligence that he may be.  Mazie was cranky and tired.  The bird was cooped.  And so relentlessly we pressed on.

The Bay Area. The Area of the Bay.