Category Archives: Beings

About all creatures great and small.

Day One Maui in 5 Conversations

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We roll in yesterday, 36 hours little sleep trying to forge our way out of Sebastopol.  We stop for repast at a shrimp truck and lemonade stand on the side of the road outside of Kahului.  And then the slow meander over the saddle and up the coast to Lahaina.

We’re all gling glong. We grab a sixpack of bikini blonde and a stack of raw fish and settle in on the porch of the Lahaina Inn.  Nap and up to Ka’apalani to throw ourselves in the ocean at sunset.

What do I love about conversations?  They’re all fundamentally false. They’re basically stories that we tell one another.  And for the very same reason in the deepest sense they are absolutely true.

Conversation #1.  Ten at night at Cheeseburgers.  Surf crashing on the sand beneath us.  Sitting at the table next to us a guy, Del who grew up in the Fillmore in the sixties.  In Maui for the first time.  He’s been there for a week with his girlfriend who he flew out from Buffalo.  Come to San Francisco, he told her, and I’ll take you somewhere warm.   He lived for a long time in North Carolina working as a general contractor building golf course homes and then his ninety year old mom begins to slip away so he went back to San Francisco, back to the Fillmore with his boy, and then he was going to stay and take care of his mom and his wife was going to join them.  She shipped her stuff. And three weeks before she was to get on the plane she died.  He and his boy never saw her again.  Flash forward a year and his boy, seven years old, he sees his dad so sad, and he’s so sad,  he goes onto on online dating site (Seniors Dating dot Com) and he makes a profile for his dad and one night he goes up to him and he shows all these pictures of women and he’s weeping and he says “How ’bout that one, dad?  Or how bout that one?”  And together they set on a few and he calls this woman in Buffalo.  She has a couple grandkids of her own. She works the night shift in a tire factory and they talk every morning on the phone.  It’s been three years now. She’s come out twice before and now Hawai’i.  And we tell her he must like her a whole awful lot and she starts to laugh this big full laugh and she flashes her finger and asks, “Where’s the ring then?” And he starts to laugh and he looks to us and he laughs even harder and I suddenly feel happy for him and I feel happy for the world because without any further information  I trust what’s coming.

Conversation #2. 6:30 am  dawn breaking over the harbor.  I trudge to the coffee shack adjacent.  Espresso girl not there yet.  But they got drip.  Bank card thing not working yet.  You staying round here? the owner asks.  I nod my head next door. You can pay later, he says.

Conversation #3.  Anna and I running south on Front St, to get to the courthouse banyan tree and the beaches, and then up and over the curb plows a dude in a wheelchair, he has a stump of a leg, he’s attired in an immaculate vintage black suit and a pressed t-shirt with South Park style characters.  I turn back.  “Yo,” I say.  “Who’s on your shirt?”  Dude does a split quick pivot – his thin face gnarled and smiling and tweaked –  “Cheech and Chong,” he says.  “Cheech and Chong.”  “Where’d you get that shirt?” I asked.  “I saw it on a dude,” he said.  “And I said, ‘that’s my shirt.’  And he gave me the shirt.”  “That’s a good way to get a shirt,” I said.  We bumped fists and went our separate ways.

And I thought, this guy was  basically a peg leg pirate.  Except that he didn’t even have a peg leg.  He was blazing through Lahaina in a suit in a wheelchair and was about as empowered a person as I’ve ever seen.

Conversation #4.  We run along the breakwater, crowds lining up to board the whale watching excursion boats and we stop at the Hawaiian Ocean Project booth and have a word about Snubaing with Eric.

He struggles to be polite, but then confesses that he’s a free diver and he doesn’t particularly like the Snuba thing. You’re stuck in that 10-20 foot range, he tells us, and even as an experienced diver the breathing is kind of tweaky at that depth. You can’t really breathe until you go deeper.  Which of course leads to conversations about where we’re from.  He’s from Mill Valley, he says.  He use to own a string of car washes. Palo Alto, Marin, Fairfax, but he lost it all in the divorce. All of it? I ask.  All of it, he says with a full smile.  962 grand worth.  I said she could take it all if I could have custody of my boy.  And that’s what I got.  Day after the divorce, I went with my baby to the San Francisco Airport and asked when the next plane was leaving for Hawai’i.  Lady told me 12 hours.  I told her I wanted one one-way ticket and she handed it to me and I never looked back.

His son?  Healthy as an ox.  He surfs.  Grown up in the Caribbean,  Virgin Islands, Maui, this island, that island.  Sixteen years old, had an amazing life and he’s an amazing kid.  Still thinks his dad is as cool as his girlfriend.  And in all that time, not once has his mom asked to see him.  I got the better end of the deal, Eric says.

Conversation #5.  Walking past the boats to the beach and Anna spies a set of baby pigs all crated up.  They’re adorable. Picture twelve little Wilburs.    Three dudes standing dockside.  Where you taking them? Anna asks.  Moloka’i, one guy answers and nods to a pint size cat boat half the size of the Minnow.  Moloka’i? Anna asks.  Could we hop on?  We have a friend living there and plane fare is a hundred a piece, but it’s only 45 minutes by boat.  Could these guys take us there?  The three guys, nice guys, shrug and laugh.  It’s up to the captain. It’s his boat, one guy says.  Pigs though get priority seating.  Nice guys.  Would be a fun trip.   We go back to the hotel, grab an extra shirt and toothbrush.  Girl at the coffee shack says it’s kind of gnarly in Moloka’i.  We might have to hitch a boat to Lana’i and then take the ferry boat back from there.  Back dockside captain has shown up.  Tough dude.  As he should be.  It’s his boat.  The vessel and all manner of life and limb are under his command.  A hundred bucks, he says.  A fair price.  But not fair enough for us, knowing that we were shanghaiing ourselves and might not even make it back.  Some things best saved for another day.

Puzzles

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I like the process because it affords that chance so rarely available in a gallery or museum or even in every day life.

You end up sitting with a masterwork for a very long time and you’re given that rare opportunity to puzzle over the individual brushstrokes and minuscule bits of paint and broad swatches of color disaggregated from any image at all.  You sit with those brushstrokes (or at least the shadow of their facsimile) for days and days and days.

In doing so the obvious becomes, well, obvious.  As does the genius.

First, of course, we seek the boundary.

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Many of us begin by finding the edge pieces.  They’re easy to locate. But they also transform an infinite sprawling mess into something finite and perhaps apprehensible.

We want to declare order and somehow bound the chaos.

Secondly the sandstorm of color is not really that chaotic at all.

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We detect clear patterns.

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Most magnetic and appealing of all burns that mass of of complexly layered yellow and mustard.

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As well the eye and fingers are drawn to the countervailing mass of blue and darkness.

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These two palettes beyond all else seem to dominate.

But there’s that third muddled mess of pastel reflections of the light and darkness, more muted and intertwined.

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And then perhaps you notice that the darkness is not black. It’s violet and blue and umber and pitchy turquoise if there were such a thing.  And scintillating pulsing points of light, more bright and piercing than the warm ochre and mustard and tangerine, punctuate the darkness.

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The darkness is not dark at all, I tell my wife.

But it was, she countered.  For him it was.

I differ.  I still don’t believe it was the darkness that did him in.  Instead, perhaps, it was his perceived inability to render that darkness, to make it as manifest and material and dimensional as he himself saw it.

In his case the brushstrokes themselves mattered most of all.  Perhaps he no longer believed in those brushstrokes.  Or perhaps the loneliness inherent in their execution were too much to bear.

 

Disconnected

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All I had to do was one thing, the right thing, and this post may not exist. But instead something else is gone. And in it’s place we have this.

Last night my friend Johnny Meyering took his life.  Before he did so, he changed his Facebook profile picture to an image of the ocean and a warm beach.  A line of footprints traces the line of the surf.  I would like to think that he wanted to find peace.  And that he cared enough that he wanted people to know that.

Twelve of his friends liked the picture.  Two posted comments. One said, “Beautiful!”  The other asked if he was alright.

The problem is that he’s no longer there to receive it.  The line is now disconnected.  And no one will be there ever again to pick up.

Every thing in Johnny’s life up until last night could have possibly been fixed. And for some reason he couldn’t see that. And so he did the one thing that in fact could not be taken back.

This morning I looked at his Facebook page, that strange 21st century totem that is all about memory and memorial.

I wanted to Message him to tell him to please stop, to please not do it.

I wanted to Poke him to let him know, hey, someone is out there and cares.

I want to Post on his Wall and tell him to come up and stay with us for a while. I know some kids who are struggling to stay in school.  If you just go and sit with them for a little while and help them a little bit with their writing and math, you will immeasurably change the world.  And you alone can do it.

But he’s no longer there to receive any of it.

I look at his Friends.  I see faces from Seattle and from Japan and San Diego and Chicago. I know a few, but by no means all.  But the person who is friends with every one of those people?  The one person who bound all those people together into a circle of friends has made himself gone.

I look at his Likes.  The movie Gerry, and the movie Samsara, Jazz, and The New Yorker.  The Wire, Raymond Chandler, David Sedaris, Art Spiegelman, Taberna 1931, The Bill Evans Trio, Langston Hughes, Paolo Coelho, Huruki Murukami, The Urban Land Army.  And more.

This is the filagree that composes a person.  There is no one in the world who liked exactly the same things as Johnny.  And there never will be.

When the person becomes gone, the Likes and the Friends lose their life as well.  The thing that gave rise to the Likes and the Friends has gone away and in turn they have become a dry and intractable husk.

I remember decades ago a crazy Thanksgiving dinner we held in a small walkup apartment in Golden Hills in San Diego.  Anna and I weren’t married yet and a good handful of Meyerings were there and Johnny was too.  Anna’s high school English teacher came and left and got a DUI.  All the rest of us probably could have been in the same boat.  And Johnny was there, he had been studying Japanese.  He was looking youthful and handsome – he always, for as long as I knew him, looked youthful and handsome.  And his manner was funny and dry and he was as gentle and brilliant a person as I’ve ever known.

And that’s the weird part.  Even now, on this Memorial Day morning, I can feel him.  Which is to say that he had a feeling, a presence that was unique unto him.  No one else in this world ever has, nor ever will, feel like Johnny Meyering.  The feeling was so special.  And so precious.  And such a great gift to the world.

But we never recognize it in ourselves.  And we fail to understand that it will actually matter when it’s gone.

It’s so wrong.  And now nothing will ever bring him back.

That’s what I would tell him.

 

 

Song Birds

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ImageHer card describes Kristen Hein Strohm as a Wildlife Biologist and Statistician and is illustrated with a songbird (the species of which I do not know) and a warble of lambda equations and binary sets of numbers.

Last night Kristen (with her husband Steve in accompaniment) warbled something far different than lambda equations. Sweet and lilting, her voice strayed between a whisper and song. It was quiet and full in a way not dissimilar from her manner of speaking.

I bumped into her this morning as she was making her way toward coffee, her skirt stitched with swatches of fabric outlining an owl basking in the moon.

In addition to her fieldwork, Kristen also leads workshops in teaching people how to observe wildlife. Once you know what to look for, you don’t need many more tools. So much depends simply on abandoning preconceptions and investing the time to make the observations.

Kristen’s expertise begs a pet question: Did other species of birds express the same social complexity as the corvids?

It doesn’t take much to get a trained wildlife biologist going so fast that you can’t keep up with her.

The corvids are incredibly complicated, she says. They have intricate language and distinct vocalizations. She went on to describe how many species have song patterns that sound identical and repetitive to us. If you examine a spectrograph, however, you can see that these songs are chocked with microtones that are undetectable to our ears, but signal a range of meanings and references to the song birds themselves. Despite our manifold abilities, we perceive only a limited range of sound, essentially moving through the world with mufflers on. She goes on to explain how certain species of hawks hunt cooperatively and that each hawk is trained to fill a specific role: chasing, banking, cornering, going in for the kill, which they fulfill every time.

All the while as she talks, Kristen parses her sentences with the sweet chipper of bird songs, as if she herself was some hybrid genetically engineered species.

But not all birds communicate with songs, she says, and she talks about the condors, the carrion vultures that don’t have much vocal expression (at least that we presently know about), but instead demonstrate rich and complex gestural displays. As they reintroduce the condors to the wild, they bring in wild condors to tutor the young in the complex code of visual signals. The mentor condors teach the fledgelings a language that is particular to that set of birds. When at last reintroduced, the young have been known to seek out the training condors. When found, they repeat the gestures that they have been taught, including what amounts to a spread winged bow, as if expressing a kind of abeyance to the creature that taught them to be wild.

So much for coffee. Proof, perhaps, that we are, in fact, at the Planet Bluegrass Song School.

Beings

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This picture was taken at the Edible Schoolyard at the Martin Luther King School in Oakland. It’s the sort of place I would love for my daughter to go. In the picture you can see a handful of young human beings sitting in a garden surrounded by young plant beings. Vines curl their tendrils around the beams of the ramada, flowers break open their blossoms, canes send forth their berry.

Both the children and the plants are at school together. They are all learning. They are all peers.

The young human beings nurture the young plant beings. When it comes time for the children to eat, they take the body, the leaf, the fruit, the seed, the progeny from the plant beings and ingest it. Their own beings use the energy from the plant beings to grow and emerge.

Ideally, their own waste – the carbon dioxide they exhale and perhaps even their own shit – one day may become food for the plant beings.

That whole process is what we call life. It’s a verb: to be.

Quite tragic and beautiful, really.

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A New Year

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Bolinas Alter

The end of one story.  The beginning of another.

On the first day of the new year, Anna and I awoke before dawn and took Poe’s remains to Bolinas.  We drove through the Sonoma and Marin darkness, past the unseen dairy and cattle hills, toward and eventually into the San Andreas fault zone.  As the sky lightened we dropped into the narrow crack that separates the North American Plate from the Pacific Plate and we crossed over to that new continent that moment by moment is shedding itself northward and away from our world.

We left Poe at the maritime shrine on the main street along with a photograph of his younger self.  Afterwards we ran on the rocky beach against the roar of the receding surf, watching the flyovers of the resident ravens and hawks.

We left Bolinas later that morning.  Driving out of town, I looked to my right.  An open meadow.  And across stretched a line of 22 fenceposts.  And on each sat a solitary raven, all warily eyeing the world.  Eyeing perhaps even our own departure.

Ravens in Bolinas

Chickens

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Have we talked about chickens?

Let’s talk about them.

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This is little white chicken. We don’t really have a name for her, so that’s what we call her. She’s also the sole survivor.

She started in a brood of five. All of her siblings were taken out by other animals. She was joined by a black Austrolope who was taken out as well. And then later we added three Bardrocks, all gone. She’s basically an Auschwitz survivor.

I’m writing about her because four weeks ago she took to roosting on the front porch. Up until then she was totally happy roosting in her coop. For two years, at dusk each night she’s gone in there and put herself to bed. It was fine. But four weeks ago her last sister was taken out by a dog right next to the coop. Ever since then, she’s been afraid to go to sleep in her customary home. So instead, at dusk, she goes up on the porch and puts herself to bed on the railing where it’s much more safe.

Let’s think this one through. She’s a chicken. But she prefers this to that. Even more fundamental, she can discern this from that. That means she has discernment. And she has preferences. Preferences and discernment define sentience. She is aware.

Furthermore, she doesn’t go near her old home because she associates it with the death of her sister (she was besides herself the morning it happened). She had an emotional response. A bunch of neurochemicals kicked off inside her. It doesn’t matter whether those neurochemicals expressed fear or sadness or anxiety. She felt something and associated that feeling with an event. She has chosen to sleep somewhere else because she will be safer. She feels and she is self-aware.

On Tuesday morning, I heard her going nuts in her coop.  I looked out the window and saw the two dogs that killed her sister running about maybe 600 feet distant. They were hardly visible, let alone a threat.  But she appeared to remember.

Each day she goes over to play with the chickens next door. She prefers this. Then she comes back with them to have a little party at our house. They eat and scratch through the compost pile. She prefers to be with other chickens. She craves the social interaction. She is a social animal who finds pleasure or safety or satisfaction in being with another living creature similar to herself.

In the evening the chickens return to their respective homes and put themselves to bed. And it begins all over again the next day.

Granted, she would have a hard time building a rocket ship. But then again, so would most human beings.

When can we stop privileging ourselves over others?

 

The First Feeding

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20111222-124051.jpgThe turkey vultures have come to feast.

It took three days. But they’re here now in full force. And it’s been quite the party. They circle low and Mango loves chasing them. Even the horse down in the corral down the way became excited. Our neighbor came over and was wondering what had gotten under his skin – he was prancing and snorting, his tail held high. The vultures, however, had been circling and feeding for much of the morning. In addition to the impression of their tremendous mass, what feelings do they incite in other species? The horse was clearly unnerved.

What other conjecture do the birds summon?

  1. They are patient, keen observers. The splayed open body of the raccoon rested on the roof of the chicken house for two days before I noticed the first flyover. It was near dusk and two vultures flew slowly over the chicken house, circled once and continued on their way. They waited another two days before they began to work the body. I wonder how much they observed before they decided it was safe to eat? And do they use the close flyovers to test the animal to see if it’s still alive? Living creatures tend to run and bolt at the flyovers.
  2. They have at least some semblance of cognition and work their food. They didn’t feed on the roof. Instead one of the birds lifted the raccoon corpse off the roof and moved it 7 feet to a spot on the ground where they could easily circle and rest while picking at the flesh. They ate the first side of the raccoon on the first evening. The next morning they rotated his body a full 180 degrees to more easily get at his other side. Later I moved the remains and hanging entrails to the tree outside our house. Within hours they had removed the body from the tree and once again were working it on the ground just outside our dining room window. Do they have a set routine in how they will dismember and eat an animal?
  3. They may be highly social animals that work collaboratively. So far I’ve seen a primary pair that are sometimes accompanied by a third. Only one bird eats at a time. The other two either perch in the tree, on the backs of the garden furniture, or sit on the ground. In all instances they face outward toward the open meadow, watching it seems for any advancing threats. This morning when the neighbors pit approached from the meadow, the feeding raven stopped and joined the other two gazing outward. As the pit advanced, the birds slowly took flight. Two of the birds seemed to have disappeared for the day, while one remained in the tree. When my friend Danny walked outside, the bird descended from the tree and circled the carrion raccoon as if protecting it. Was the bird guarding the food? Or was it taking flight in self-defense? How do they communicate? How are responsibilities divided among the group? Is their a pecking hierarchy?
  4. They may have an acute sense of hearing. I was watching the birds with binoculars from our dining room window. At some point my cellphone sitting on the far side of the room in the kitchen chirped when an email came in. The turkey vulture outside and 10 feet from the house started and looked up in my direction. I know for certain that I would not have been able to hear the phone from outside the house. How to test their audial and visual acuity?
  5. They can quickly discern friend from foe and react accordingly. The first few times I walked outside in their presence they were startled and flew away. They watched, however, when I retrieved the raccoon and relocated it. And they also watched a couple times as I walked in and out of the house without bothering them. It only took a couple passes before they became accustomed to my presence and ignored me. Mango with all his bark and scampering on the other hand, is another story.
  6. Their necks and beaks may have adapted to small prey. Watching the vulture pick flesh with it’s beak, I thought of the vultures on the Mara. The birds there have long extensible necks that they thrust deep into the chest cavities of the wildebeest, elephants, or whatever other megafauna they feed on. North America hasn’t had megafauna for at least 15,000 years and nothing on the scale of what was in Africa. Did different carrion birds evolve different beak and neck structures that would allow them to feed on different kinds of animals? Have carrion birds evolved different strategies for dismembering corpses? I would imagine that an adult vulture has a far keener understanding of raccoon anatomy than I do. They’ve undoubtedly feasted on dozens of roadkill.

There you have it. Twenty minutes of observation and six questions.

And I haven’t even planted the garden bulbs. Or assembled the apiary.

 

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The Host and the Kill

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Time to get back with the program.

I found him in the morning while walking Mango. He lay on the side of the road at the other end of the 40 acres, his body fully intact. His chest cavity still had a trace of warmth, though rigor mortis had started to set in. Without any real clear intent, I picked him up, much to the chagrin of a waiting turkey vulture that immediately took flight.

I thought he was beautiful. He was heavy, heavier than one might think. Carrying his dead body, he felt something like a small dog. The pelt was thick, and the tail less pliable than it looks. His teeth and claws are predatory, ready to sink into any small vole – or wounded raven, perhaps – that he might happen across.

It all led to the basic question that ultimately faces everything: how best to send him on?

I could bury him, though that seemed respectful only in our world in which we seek to hide the look and stink of death. A waste of a perfectly good carcass, as Kerry Hardy would put it. I could gut him and do something with the luscious pelt, but I felt his native form was too beautiful to render into ornamentation. I could only screw it up. Kerry suggested eating him. Anna, of course, was worried about hydrophobia.

It took a good day for the answer to present itself.

This morning I drew a knife neatly down the middle of his chest and peeled back the pelt revealing the rose bloom of his chest. Lacking animus, his body now existed nearly exclusively as matter. But not quite. His matter still contains resident within a potency. We call it vitality. Enough that other creatures may seek to take it and draw it into their own.

We call this eating. On one side of the divide: sacrifice. On the other, rendered by consumption, it becomes the sacrament and the eater the sanctified.

Isn’t that ultimately what it meant in the transformation of the Host?

I took the body of that poor coon and splayed it on the roof of the old chicken barn out beyond our house. It’s within clear line of sight of our deck and bedroom windows. In a few days it will begin to stink.

If I’m lucky, the neighboring creatures will be hungry enough to overcome the fear of this place and of us. You all are welcome here I say to them. To the ravens. To the crows and vultures. To all the scavengers. I want them to come to this home and feed.

It really is time for me to get on with it. We have a wonderful home. And I’m back in it.

Here’s the invite. If you’re wild, I’ll feed you raccoon.

For the rest of you, I have a table to build. And things to grow. And kill. And render. It will be beautiful and delicious.

Come. You’re all welcome. It’s time to sate the hunger.

 

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.

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.

 

.

 

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.

Cliffhanger

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Paddy Mitchell

It seems I’ve left a lot of friends and readers hanging by their fingernails on the white crumbly chalk of Dover.

But not for long.  There’ve been a lot of developments yet that need a clear moment for me to tap out.

In the meanwhile, two nights ago, 10 pm California time and Mazie and I are holed up in a bottom feeder in Petaluma.  It seems every room in the county is booked up on account of some speedway event.  So we’re relegated to this grim shoebox pinned between a mostly vacant industrial park, victim of the Great Bubble, and an indian casino wedged in by the 101.  Roar of a freeway outside, the sheets smell like pee and loud banging emanates from the room next door.

The phone rings.  It’s Poppy Davis from the USDA (more on Poppy later).  It’s one a.m. in D.C. and she’s doing her best to impersonate an official from Fish and Wildlife.

She eventually breaks.  Remember when I had to reprimand Mazie for writing about your youthful indiscretions on Facebook? she asks.

I do.

Well now I’m doing the same for you, she says.  YOUR WIFE IS A DOCTOR.  You cannot be writing about illegal activities on your blog.

Yeah.  She’s right.  Which is why I tried to password protect it, but in the end it would have required too much policing and management, and as long as our exact whereabouts are not disclosed – well heck, California’s a big state.

And who would Paddy Mitchell and the Stopwatch Gang have been without their brazenness?  It distinguishes the petty thief from legend.

I peek out the curtain and look down at the tawdry lights from the casino.  I didn’t know their were any gaming tribes down this way.  A minivan weaves erratically through the parking lot.

What would a raven do? 

The Hideout

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It’s bad.

We checked into a Best Western in Barstow late at night. We snuck Poe up to the room, drew the curtains and considered our situation.

It was basically no different than that of all the other criminals holed up in Barstow that night. We’d done wrong, had a kidnap victim in our possession, and were high on junk food.

No sooner had we passed Kingman when Kerry started getting the calls. The rehabilitator, upset and frantic, had been on the phone, accusing Kerry of having stolen the bird. She didn’t even have to waterboard him, and within minutes he was already pointing the finger at me. A century of abolitionist roots and Maine tenancy down the tubes. Sorry, Kerry.

And the rehabilitator had set to calling our house. She worried that I would release him to the wild and that he wasn’t ready. And I think she was just plain ticked that we had taken him from right under her husband’s nose.

Anna insisted that I call the woman back, but Kerry and I concurred there would be little utility in doing so. She was nice enough and had done her part, but there was little point in looking back at that phase in Poe’s life.

Besides, I didn’t want her to have my cell. And if she was really hot under the collar, she could use it to trace our whereabouts.

And lastly, we had bigger fish to fry. We were camped out in the Mojave with this dang bird that we needed to keep alive. The first priority was just getting to our destination and getting him out of the dog carrier. His life had already been hell enough.

We set Poe so he could watch us sleep and shut our eyes for the night.

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Poe hiding out in Barstow

On the Lam

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So that’s how my daughter and I became fugitives.

We bolted left then right then left out of the suburban neighborhood. We got caught behind a truck trying to make a left hand turn, all the while eyeing the rear view mirror while Poe sat swaddled in Mazie’s lap.

Within minutes we were on the Interstate heading west toward California. Ten miles down the road we pulled onto a side road and released Poe into the dog carrier which we positioned again on Mazie’s lap. We got back on the highway and once we were safely past Bearizona in Williams (where I was afraid the rehabilitator might be), we pulled off once again and positioned Poe behind us, giving him a full frontal view of the road ahead.

We all felt elated – Mazie couldn’t believe we stole a raven, I was pumped that Poe had a fighting chance, and as for Poe, I think he was just glad to be free of jackhammers.

Mazie and I talked contingencies. Keep your eye out for highway patrol, I told her.  Once we crossed the border into California we’d be a measure more safe.  If we were pulled over for any reason, she would drape the sweatshirt over the carrier. If anybody asked, it was a pet animal that was easily agitated. If anyone caught sight of him and had questions, we were rehabilitators taking him to a sanctuary in California. We decided we would keep him covered when we passed through the border inspection station.

Early evening, we pulled into an In n Out and ordered Poe a cheeseburger with fries. He didn’t take to the deep fried potatoes or the bun, but he relished the cheese and beef. He paced inside the carrier, he gurgled, he peered out at the advancing road.

It was time, I decided, for Mazie to hear the talk on Huck and the Higher Law. It’s not good to steal, I told her. And it’s not good to lie. But consider Huck. He was an orphan and outcast. He habitually stole. He was profane. And given a choice between truth and the lie, he always told the lie. And what’s a lie, but a fantastical story? But as he and Jim float down river deeper and deeper into the dark soul of the country, they are increasingly surrounded by the larger lies told by all the adults around them, and the largest lie of all, that Nigger Jim was chattel, a slave unworthy of even being considered human. And as Huck’s lies and the lies of the world compound around him, the deeper truth emerges, that he and Jim, outcasts though they may be, are friends and brothers.

It’s something to think about as we fumble through our own untruths, ever into the ascending darkness.

And with that, the interstate ribbon unfolds before us. Lots of ravens drift in and out of sight, sentinels each and every one. They roost on telephone wires, pick at carrion in the road, mouths agape, cool themselves on the side of the highway. Under their watchful eyes, the three of us – my daughter and I and a fugitive raven – descend off the Plateau, past the Colorado and into the Mojave.

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Poe eating road food

It Takes a Thief

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“Blame it, this whole thing is just as easy and awkward as it can be. And so it makes it so rotten difficult to get up a difficult plan. There ain’t no watchman to be drugged — now there oughtto be a watchman. There ain’t even a dog to give a sleeping-mixture to. And there’s Jim chained by one leg, with a ten-foot chain, to the leg of his bed: why, all you got to do is to lift up the bedstead and slip off the chain. And Uncle Silas he trusts everybody; sends the key to the punkin-headed nigger, and don’t send nobody to watch the nigger…..Why, drat it, Huck, it’s the stupidest arrangement I ever see. You got to invent all the difficulties. Well, we can’t help it; we got to do the best we can with the materials we’ve got.

Anyhow, there’s one thing — there’s more honor in getting him out through a lot of difficulties and dangers, where there warn’t one of them furnished to you by the people who it was their duty to furnish them, and you had to contrive them all out of your own head.”

And so spaketh Tom Sawyer in the 35th chapter of Huck Finn.

There’s the right way to do something and the wrong way.

In our case, Mazie imagines black face paint and ninja costumes.  Kerry dreams up fake transportation permits and forged documents from the Hopi Tribe.  I consider several furtive and superfluous transfers between waiting vehicles a la Mission Impossible.

In the end though, we just take him.

In our last moment before leaving Hopi, we disinter an old dog carrier from the garage and load it in the car.  That’s the extent of our plan.

A few hours later we find ourselves at the home of the wildlife rehabilitator.  We knock.

After a long wait, the husband shows himself.  His wife is gone.  He doesn’t know where she is, or when she’s getting back.

We came to visit Poe, we explain and he says that we are free to go to the back.

Which we do.  Mazie carries with her a Middlebury sweatshirt.  The air once again is filled with the cacophonous roar of jackhammers.  I step into the cage with Poe and he looks up with wearied eyes.  I whisper for Mazie to walk quickly to the car, retrieve a shred of burrito and bring it back.  I meanwhile sit with the stricken bird.  Mazie returns and we feed Poe with some scraps of meat that he takes eagerly.

And just like that I drop the sweatshirt over Poe and swaddle him in my arms.  I race across the yard.  Behind me I hear Mazie closing the gate so it is slightly ajar.  Goodbye Poe, she says.

We dive in the car and quick as can, we peel away.

 

Considerations

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Walpi Housing is all in transition.

Kerry and Kristina are moving out next month as are we.  We have a bunch of folks over for dinner and most everybody, including Hopi, are heading out in the coming weeks.

A particular era is over.

But where will this leave Poe?  It’s clear he’s not coming back here.  Without mending and stewardship in the near term, he would be finished.  Kerry and I contemplate taking him to Bernd Heinrich in Maine, but we don’t know if he still has his aviary.

And Poe deserves…he deserves what?

At the very least to live large.

He’s not a beast. And I wouldn’t denigrate him with the word animal.  He’s a being.  On par with human beings.  And every effort needs to be made to make him whole and restore him to raven-ness, whenever, and wherever that may be.

One morning I make an announcement.  We’re taking Poe, I say.

Mazie wants to know how.

We’ve already been read the riot act by the rehabilitation community.  He’s a protected species.  It’s illegal for people to own them or have them in their possession.  It’s illegal to transport them across state lines without a permit. And as I’ve been reminded, I haven’t been trained in rehabilitation.

Thank god.  If I was trained in anything, it would keep me from doing half the things I do.

Being Poe © Kerry Hardy