David Gessner's Blog, page 5

Lundgren’s Lounge: “One Eyed Man,” by Ron Currie

 

A disclaimer is in order here: Ron Currie is a friend of mine. We watch baseball together while drinking beer and it is my fervent hope that the upcoming Red Sox season will help to ameliorate the execrable political situation we are presently wallowing in. However none of this has anything to do with the review that follows.

Last year I re-read a novel, a rare occurrence for me. What with teaching and the constant onslaught of new arrivals on the book scene, the idea of revisiting something is a luxury I don’t often indulge. But the book was Everything Matters, Currie’s first novel and I realized as I read, that it is a work I will return to again and again over the coming years, because it captures the tone and tenor of a specific time so exquisitely. Now we have a new work from Currie, The One Eyed Man, an unsettling, satirical glance at contemporary culture that again perfectly captures the zeitgeist of this very strange time in the evolution of the American experiment.

The protagonist in One Eyed Man is identified only as K and the allusion to Kafka is no accident. The existential angst that permeates Kafka’s most famous works, The Castle and The Trial is on full display here. Early on the K of One Eyed Man characterizes his existential bewilderment when he receives a text message from his friend Tony telling him that Tony’s wife, “…Alice didn’t want me at their house anymore. I felt a twinge of regret like the mild fleeting sadness I’d experienced the previous night when hearing a story about Christians slaughtered like beef cattle at a Kenyan mall.” There is so much going on in that seemingly simple sentence that any careful reader should be immediately on alert: this is a writer who demands our attention.

The problem is that K is paralyzed by grief over the death of his wife Sarah and in the aftermath of her death and his attempt to understand ‘the persistence of grief’, he has lost the ability to approach reality from any perspective other than the literal. This leads to constant conflict with nearly everyone he encounters, because contemporary culture prefers metaphor—metaphorical language is so much more marketable and since it can be so broadly interpreted, perhaps it might be less likely to offend?

What happens to K is, of course, stranger than fiction. He foils a robbery at his local coffee shop thereby capturing his Warholian 15 minutes of fame and becoming a media celebrity and the star of his own reality show. That 15 minutes morphs into national celebrity as Currie peels away the layers of America’s obsession with reality TV as well as anyone since John Jeremiah Sullivan in his essay “Leaving Reality” (http://www.gq.com/story/john-jeremiah-sullivan-leavin-reality-gq-july-2005-reality-tv-star-future). The episodes in K’s travels become far less important than the questions that Currie is encouraging us to ask ourselves, prominent among them being , what exactly is it that we think we are doing?

Given that the author probably began conceiving/writing this novel 3 or 4 (or more) years ago, his prescience is breathtaking. Or maybe it is just happy coincidence? Unlikely? The One Eyed Man  is a mediation on the nature of grief, a common theme in Currie’s work, but more than that it predicts the world we find ourselves enmeshed in, a time when the very notions of facts and truth become fluid, dependent upon their transmitter. As Sean Spicer pronounced a few days ago, ‘you will know the truth when the president tells you.’ How Currie has “happened” upon this nexus of literature, pop culture,  and political polarization is remarkable and uncanny. As Pulitzer Prize winning author Rick Russo notes, ““Nobody writing today walks the knife edge of cynicism and sentiment more bravely, intelligently and confidently…”

Currie will be reading from and discussing his newest novel at ‘Print: A Bookstore’, 273 Congress St. in Portland (across from the Portland Food Coop) on Thurs, 3/9/2016 at 7 p.m. It promises to be a highlight of the late winter/early spring literary season.

 

 

Bill Lundgren is a voracious reader who writes book reviews in hopes of sharing his enthusiasms with fellow readers. He lives in Portland, Maine with a wild menagerie of dogs and cats and birds and his wife Carol, the veterinarian. He teaches writing and literature at Southern Maine Community College.

Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Peregrine,” by J.A. Baker

 

Somehow this once obscure, extraordinarily unique book found its way into my hands, transporting me for a few days to the coastal fenlands of eastern England and the world of the peregrine falcon. The Peregrine by J. A. Baker was originally published in 1967 during a period of steep decline in the population of these magnificent raptors and perhaps that was part of what motivated the author—to attempt to describe the life of a creature at once so ferociously singular and powerful, before it was gone forever. But what Baker accomplishes along the way is much deeper, achieving “… an account of a human obsession with a creature that is peerless.”

Werner Herzog suggests that The Peregrine is “… the one book I would ask you to read if you want to make films…” and Naturalist Barry Lopez has written that the book is “… one of the most beautifully written, carefully observed and evocative wildlife accounts I have ever read.” But none of these observations can adequately describe the sweeping impact of Baker’s language:  what he has accomplished in this slim tome is granting the reader the power and permission to momentarily slip the strictures of our human consciousness and enter the soaring, magisterial world of the falcon. One commentator observed that “… again and again, (Baker) astonishes us at the level of the sentence,” while others have alluded to Baker’s “becoming” the falcon in a process likened to transubstantiation.

Throughout Baker’s account we are offered little of the author’s personal life. His methodology is simple: to follow a pair of falcons around the marshes and estuaries of eastern coastal England, sometimes on foot, sometimes on bicycle, assiduously avoiding all contact with other humans. We get the sense that sometimes days might pass with little contact with his subjects, but those periods of isolation and loneliness are forgotten in the intense experience of contact. In the aftermath of one breathtaking account of a partridge kill, Baker writes:  “… for the hawk, resting now on the soft, flaccid bulk of his prey, there was the rip and tear of choking feathers, and hot blood dripping from the hook of the beak, and rage dying slowly to a small hard core within. And for the watcher, sheltered for centuries from such hunger and such rage, such agony and such fear, there is the memory of that sabring fall from the sky and the vicarious joy of the guiltless hunter…”

Writing this description I am suddenly aware of the inadequacy of conveying the power of The Peregrine by writing about it: it must be read and experienced through the eyes of the author and more significantly, the intense, unrelenting gaze of his subjects.

 

Bill Lundgren is a writer, teacher, critic, and bookseller living in Portland, Maine.

 

My Inaugural Poem

All eyes on 2018! Let’s take these fuckers down!

Our Portland, Maine, Other Inaugural Read-In was yesterday, huge turnout, great sister feeling with millions of marchers worldwide and tens of thousands right here in Maine, huge multicultural turnout for the Ball, thousands of dollars to go to the Immigrant Legal Assistance Project of Maine. All eyes on 2018. Let’s take these fuckers down!  Here is my Inaugural Poem, since Trump didn’t have one:

Inauguration, 2017

 

Donald, congratulations, and thanks for

making me inaugural poet.  I’ve always wanted

to do this.  And I think we’re a good pair

No lofty language, just practical phrases,

in as few words as possible.  Happy.

 

Great pick on secretary of State

Rex Tillerson, cool.  You’re a big man

and won’t mind someone out there

who’s got maybe more business

acumen than you.  I mean who might

be seen as being a big-hands guy.

 

But he knows Putin, and rumor has it

well, we don’t care about rumors, do we.

Rumors, sad.

… But they have it that Rex and Vladimir

are pretty close.  Like really, really close.

 

You’ve been in threesomes before—

that’s no secret.  And you know in

threesomes there’s always someone who

doesn’t get as … wet, let’s say.

 

Maybe better to put in someone who’s

your lesser.  Just in case, you know?

Hillary, for example.  That’d shame her

–travelling all over the world under

your domination?

 

And why stop there.  Fill your cabinet with

libtard cucks and socialist wimps—that way, see

there’d be no one around

to make you look bad.

 

Hmm.  That education lady?  She’s pretty rich.  She’s

probably quite a bit richer than you.  You gonna let

her tell the school children who’s rich and who’s not? Not on your life.

But Diane Ravitch—she’s poor.  Of course she’s

poor! Always whining about the have nots:

It turns you into one.

 

Proposal: Not too late to make Bernie

Vice President.  Pence, you know—

they say he looks presidential.

He gives you that side eye.

I’ve seen it on TV.  We all have.

Bernie’s too old to strangle anybody.

 

But Pence.  You see the forearms on that guy?

Reince Priebus didn’t tell you about who would take your place?

My point exactly.  These people, they don’t tell you anything.

Michael Moore, much better chief of staff—

at least you know where he stands.

And just standing there he’ll make you look thin.

 

Just looking out for you, Mr. President.

Just looking out for you.

OFF TO WASHINGTON FOR THE MARCH

Nina and Hadley head up this morning!

 

The Other Inaugural Ball!

Some artist friends and I have been putting together a day of anti-inaugural events in Portland, Maine.  These to complement marches and other actions taking place all over the country, and around the world.  Read my Portland Press Herald op-ed piece at the link or below to get a sense of the impetus behind our action.  And if you live in the area, come join us for one or all of our events!

The Other Inaugural Ball: an evening to re-imagine our world
January 21, 2017 – 7-11 pm* at the historic  Mechanics Hall, 519 Congress Street, Portland, ME
TICKETS FOR THE OTHER INAUGURAL BALL AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR!

keynote Speaker:

Founder of Immigrant Resource Center Of Maine (IRCofMe) , Fatuma Hussein

Performances by:

Hi Tiger
Sudo Girls
The Theater Ensemble of Color
Followed by Dancing with DJ 32French & DJ INNOX

For more information on TICKETS go to our TICKETS PAGE or directly purchase tickets HERE

TICKETS FOR THE OTHER INAUGURAL BALL ALSO AVAILABLE AT THE DOOR!

 

GALLERY EVENTS  ‘Hope Through Art’                                                 FRIDAY & SATURDAY, january 20TH – 21ST

Four galleries will offer exhibits celebrating diverse voices and artistic expressions from nationally and regionally recognized artists, as well as spoken word events, an interactive theater workshop, and a banner-making workshop.

FRIDAY, january 20TH
ABLE BAKER CONTEMPORARY at 29 Forest Avenue, portland
5-8 pm: Radical Banner-Making for Inauguration Weekend hosted by GET READY WEEKLY . Join us for a protest banner-making workshop in preparation for the inauguration! You can either make a banner to take with you to Boston or Washington, DC OR help prepare banners for The Other Inaugural Ball here in Portland! All skill levels and ages are invited to join in on the fun! We’ll have the basics: scrap fabric, alphabet templates, scissors, irons, and examples!

Please bring: fabric glue, scissors, irons, ironing boards, + sewing machines. The more supplies you bring, the more we can accommodate folks who aren’t able to. Visit us on facebook HERE .

SATURDAY, january 21st
Speedwell projects at 630 Forest Avenue, portland
12 pm: Interactive Theatre Workshop with Irene Kapustina, the founder and artistic director of The Angle Project (TAP) , a NYC based theatrical production company and a performance art initiative that helps imagine, embody, and materialize possibilities for displaced and multicultural communities. Irene will facilitate the workshop based on the play TAP is currently developing from real life stories of refugees. Through a series of interactive activities, we will read, explore, and experience those stories together. Come to play, connect, collaborate, and express your solidarity!
2 pm: Open mic reading MC’d by Portland Poet Laureate Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

3 pm: Other-Inaugural Read-In with new American and poet Kifah Abdulla, Maine Poet Laureate Stu Kestenbaum, Maine State Poet Laureates Emeritus Betsy Sholl and Wesley McNair, Portland Poet Laureate Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Portland Poet Laureate Emeritus Steve Luttrell, USM Diversity Coordinator Reza Jalali, Other Inaugural Organizer and Poet Louise Kennelly, MWPA Founder and prize-winning poet Lee Sharkey, and writer and singer Sarah Goodyear, with bestselling novelist Bill Roorbach as MC.  (Suggested donation, $10 at the door. But any amount will help! Proceeds go to benefit the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project.)





Zero Station at 222 Anderson Street, Portland
9:30 am – 10:30 am: Transform the News: a Visual Poetry Workshop led by Julie Poitras Santos. Discuss the news with your neighbors, transform recent newspaper articles into poetry, envision ways to transform our communities. Bring in a newspaper article you want to transform. All other materials provided. Artist & poet Julie Poitras Santos will lead the workshop. We will have coffee and it will end in time to walk up to join into the Portland March from Munjoy Hill to Congress Square. Read more about it here .
12 pm – 5 pm: One-day benefit and exhibition at Zero Station. See  ARTISTS PAGE for full listing of artists. For more info click here or visit www.zerostation.com . Proceeds to go to ILAP .
12 pm – 5 pm: A citizen library offering interesting suggestions on what to read and the opportunity to sit down and make your own visual poetry by “transforming the news”.




Speedwell projects at 1 north street, portland
12 pm – 5 pm: Exhibition of work by Spindleworks , a non-profit center for artists with disabilities


Artwork sales to benefit the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project ILAP



For a listing of artists please go to our ARTISTS PAGE



Donate in support at Indiegogo

The Other Inaugural Ball will be held from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Jan. 21 at the Mechanics Hall, 519 Congress St.,

At Speedwell Arts, 630 Forest Ave., several events all day:

at noon, The Angle Project will offer a theater Workshop.

At 2:00, an open mic for younger writers.

at 3:00, a reading featuring Portland. For more information, go to:

www.weareamericanbeauty.org

Here is the text of the op-ed:

Commentary: Mainers to celebrate immigration at The Other Inaugural Ball
www.pressherald.com/2017/01/17/mainers-to-celebrate-immigration-at-the-other-inaugural-ball/

By Bill Roorbach and Jocelyn Lee Special to the Press Herald

One of our favorite works of art in Maine is a series of charcoal drawings on paper squares about 2 feet on a side and pasted like posters on the outer wall of a little café called Java Joe’s in Farmington, where they are slowly dissolved by the weather.

The simple and poignant portraits, by the artist known as Pigeon (aka Orson Horchler), depict a wide array of humanity, different races, faces, different hairstyles, smiles, frowns, types of dress, hopes and dreams implied. The title of the work, printed in large letters on the brick wall above, is simple, too: Mainers. The artist has explained that his subjects were all born abroad but all live and work now in Maine. The owner of the café recently asked Pigeon back to reinstall the temporary work. Why? Because people like it.

If a work of art can offer welcome, an artist can, too.

And that’s how The Other Inaugural Ball – coming on Jan. 21 – was born. A gallery owner, a painter, a writer, then another, a singer, a printmaker, and then our friends, and their friends, and their children, and their neighbors, conversations about what positive contribution we might make in what was starting to feel like a negative environment, how we might form a coalition that would grow into a network of mutual support that depends on everyone, all shapes and sizes, that accommodates difference (including political difference), that can and will not only endure but thrive, get us all through the inevitable crises to come.

We felt that rather than despair in the wake of recent blanket denouncements of certain religions, certain races, various ethnic groups, certain nationalities, certain political factions, and rather than remain passive in the face of vandalism and hate mongering both subtle and overt, we’d try to come together, make a statement together. A statement both simple and complex: diversity brings riches, and we Mainers are the beneficiaries of these riches. And as such, we must all show one another gratitude, must not only work together, but celebrate together. Our little group, being Maine artists, quickly became a bigger group, and then bigger yet, reaching out beyond the arts, Mainers showing one another gratitude, expressing our joy at being part of the great American tradition of immigration.

It’s the shared duty of all Americans, and certainly of Mainers, to ensure that the guarantee of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which is at the core of the American experiment, is held out to the newest among us. That we put out the welcome mat, and more than that, continue to offer the assistance and protections that keep our own lives feeling secure. And take action to face the reality of fear, like children hearing news reports that might just refer to them or their parents, like store owners wondering who’s painted slurs on the walls of their American dream. That in the process of becoming new Mainers, we become we. That we – this new, magnificent we – make use of all the building blocks at our disposal, that we work from common interest toward the common goal of inclusion, true community, universal acceptance.

We thought a day of art would be the best response to the inauguration going on down in D.C. We wouldn’t spark further division by barking out demands or complaints or diatribes or insults. Instead, a ball, The Other Inaugural Ball, which would bring together all corners of the community for a night of fun, communication, positive fellow feeling.

And why not bring in all of the arts – musicians, dancers, writers, painters, performers, actors, on and on? And rather than a single evening bash, why not use some of the wonderful gallery spaces in town to show work by people who care, to hear the voices of our best poets – Reza Jalali, Wes McNair, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, Portland’s poet laureate and Betsy Sholl, former Maine poet laureate – to put on view the work of our best artists – Abby Shahn, Accra Shepp and Peter Rolston – to dance to the spins of DJ32French; to experience the wonderful Theater Ensemble of Color; to eat food from all the corners of the world that have come together to build our contemporary Maine.

Keynote speaker Fatuma Hussein, founder of the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine, will speak directly to the refugee experience, the importance of courage, and why immigrants help Maine thrive.

Together we can solve all the problems we face. Apart, the problems will only multiply.

 

 

 

Finally, a Victory!

In one of his last acts as President, Barack Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument, preserving more than 2000 square miles of land, land that not incidentally includes my favorite campsite of all time, in southeastern Utah. To which I say: yes! Who knows who long it will take the coming Bozo squad to try and overturn this, as well as the Antiquities Act itself, but for now let’s raise a glass and celebrate something good. At last.

 

In saving this land of twisting stone and desert, Obama has, of course, been part of a political tradition, one most famously exercised by Teddy Roosevelt, of preserving land when leaving office. But there was another tradition at play here, a literary one.  The tradition began with none other than Wallace Stegner. In 1955 Stegner, in an effort to stop the building of a dam in Colorado’s Dinosaur National Monument, edited a book that described the wonders that would be lost if the dam were built. Working with the publisher Alfred Knopf, who contributed an essay, Stegner organized and edited the contributors’ work and the photographs, wrote his own essay and introduction, and pulled This Is Dinosaur together in two short months, pushed by the urgency of the moment. Stegner wrote in his unpublished autobiography: “That little book, distributed to every member of Congress, had a part in stopping the Upper Colorado River Storage Project in its tracks, and in uniting the previously dispersed and weak environmental organizations into a political force that by the 1970s was formidable. It also confirmed in me an environmental activism that has taken precedence over every interest except writing since that time, and has sometimes taken over the writing too.”

It would not be going too far to say that that first fight, and victory, provided a template for the battles to come, and the use of This is Dinosaur as a tool for lobbying was part of that template, one that would be continued and refined over the next decades. Forty years later, in 1995, Terry Tempest Williams and Utah writer and photographer Stephen Trimble put together Testimony: Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah Wilderness, an anthology of the work of twenty writers whose purpose was to help preserve 1.9 million acres of land in southern Utah. Just as with This Is Dinosaur, the book was distributed to every member of Congress. It was part of the effort that led to the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. At the monument’s dedication on September 18, 1996, President Bill Clinton held up the book and said, “This made a difference.”

With Bears Ears, Steve Trimble once again took up the fight. He teamed up with Kirsten Allen of Torrey House Press to create an (almost) instant anthology about Bears Ears called Red Rock Testimony. Like its predecessors, it was distributed to Congress, agency heads and the President. There is a very real chance that it too made a difference.

I’ll paste a list of all the book’s contributors below. If you are interested in Bears Ears here are some key articles:

 

big picture national view in The Atlantic

official statement from the Inter-Tribal coalition

commentary from Jackie Keeler, with a strong Native perspective

detailed backstory in HCN

Steve Trimble’s op-ed  rewritten as news of the proclamation broke.


submit your own testimony here

Red Rock Testimony conveys the spiritual, cultural, and scientific values of Utah’s canyon country through the essays and poems of 34 passionate and heartfelt writers whose births span seven decades. From widely published elders to scholar/scientists to former elected officials to Native leaders to Millennial activists, these writers explore the fierce beauty and the dangers to ecological and archaeological integrity in America’s redrock wilderness. This chorus of storytellers will move you with their emotional, quirky, knowledgeable testimony. They capture the healing power of this land.

​Red Rock Testimony gathers passionate words from three generations of writers who treasure Utah’s public lands. Their words will first be printed as a limited edition chapbook to be distributed to Congress during this moment of crisis and opportunity. The text will then be published as a trade book in celebration of these exquisite landscapes.

RED ROCK TESTIMONY

EXCERPTS FROM RED ROCK TESTIMONY

Charles Wilkinson

Introduction: “…the authenticity, passion, and rightness of protecting Bears Ears.”

​

Simon Ortiz  

RIGHT OF WAY: “And so you tell stories…”

​

Kevin T. Jones   

THE MAN WITH A HEART OF STONE: “Fremont people were farmers, builders, dreamers, and thinkers.”

​

Jana Richman 

THE LAND OF NO USE: “Our external geography informs our internal geography.”

​

David Gessner

 THE FREEDOM OF RESTRAINT: “The myths of western land are myths of freedom.”

​

Karen Shepherd  

THE ONLY WAY FORWARD: “If Bears Ears is to be saved, President Obama must save it.”

​

Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk 

IT’S TIME TO HEAL BEARS EARS: “…personal healing like nothing else can be.”

​

Lauret Savoy 

ON COMPROMISED GROUND: “Mutual concession requires that we do more. It requires respect.”

​

Christopher Cokinos

STONE THAT LEAPS: “This place. Lifted, cracked and stilled.”

​

Kathleen Dean Moore

WHAT SHALL WE GIVE THE CHILDREN?: “Let us give the children wonderment, radical amazement…”

​

Jen Jackson Quintano 

MEMORY: “I want to give it all to my daughter, wrapped in balsamroot leaves.”

​

Jim Enote 

A PLACE FOR MEDIATION: “…indigenous knowledge will be the keystone of collaboration.”

​

Alastair Lee Bitsoi 

SHASH JAA’ FOLLOWS WHEREVER I GO: “I never thought I would write about Bears Ears in my Brooklyn apartment…”

Juan Palma 

THE WILDNESS IN NATURE BINDS US TO THE PAST AND THE FUTURE:

“…a place I come to re-connect with my Hispanic heritage.”

Shonto Begay 

THE VIEW FROM THE MESA: “…the place that harbored the ancient gods and animal beings.”

​

Mary Ellen Hannibal 

THE UR-BEAR: “…a gigantic bear embedded in the geography is more than symbolic.”
​
Mary Sojourner 

BEAR’S EARS: “Meet me in Mexican Hat. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

​

Amy Irvine

SEEING RED: “Looking at the horizon was like looking through a telescope at Mars.”

​

Thomas Lowe Fleischner

THE GRACE OF WILDNESS: “In all my years as a naturalist, I’ve never had an encounter like this.”

​

David Lee

PRELUDE: “Moses did not go to an oil well derrick to receive the Law…”

​

George Handley

FAITH AND THE LAND: “Our beliefs might differ, but our values harmonize.”

​

Brooke Williams

LEASE UTU91481: “Leasing this land was not part of our plan.”

​

Anne Terashima

WE (HEART) WILDERNESS: “Millennials need what this wilderness brings.”

​

Jacqueline Keeler

IT IS THE LAND THAT TELLS THE STORY: “My Navajo grandfather pulled out his wire cutters and cut the fence.”

​

Michelle Nijhuis

WHAT THE TORTOISE TAUGHT ME: “Locals prefer to speak for themselves.”

​

Chip Ward

WHOLE AND HOLY: “We act as if there is no upstream, no downstream.”

​

Ann Whittaker

WHEN THE DESERT MORNING RISES: “I take my questions, alone, to the redrock canyons.”

​

Gary Paul Nabhan

UP BETWEEN THE BEARS EARS: “That place triggered my metamorphosis that still informs my life.”

​

Bruce Babbitt

IT’S TIME TO ACT: “The best way to defend the Antiquities Act is for the President to use it.”

​

Mark Udall

I AM A SON OF THE COLORADO PLATEAU: “I have walked in the wildest, most remote terrain in the Lower 48.”

​

Stephen Trimble

WE COME OUT DANCING TOGETHER: “To respond to the wounds in this land, we must first see them.”

 

List of writers who contributed to the original Testimony, edited by Stephen Trimble and Terry Tempest Williams:

Stephen Trimble, Terry Tempest Williams, Rick Bass, Olive Ghiselin, Brewster Ghiselin, William Kittredge, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lyon, John McPhee, Ellen Meloy, N. Scott Momaday, Margaret E. Murie, Gary Paul Nabhan, Richard Shelton, Karen Shepherd, Donald Snow, Mark Strand, T. H. Watkins, Ann Weiler Walka, Charles Wilkinson, and Ann Zwinger.

 

 

 

 

 

Selling the House

Photo by Mark Honerkamp

This is a hard one. As some of you know, our family house in East Dennis is now for sale. About the same year I was born, fifty five years ago, my parents bought a plot of land on a hill across from Sesuit Harbor. Not long after that my mother was driving through the town of Middelborro when she saw an old house that was scheduled to be torn down so that the new highway could be built. The house had been built in 1726, a Cape Codder with cedar shingles, wide oak floorboards, and thick hewn beams the color of chocolate. Before my mother pulled out she had purchased the beams, floorboards, and paneling for $50 and had them transplanted down to the land in East Dennis.That was the house where we were most a family, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been a writer without the house. My first book’s title, A Wild, Rank Place, referred both to a Thoreau quote about Cape Cod and the house itself.



 


The land, with its moat of trees and brush, its views of the harbor and the Bay, and its proximity to the beach, is amazing, and I suspect that the new owner will likely (and understandably) knock down the house to build something bigger and newer. Which is why I’m posting this today. With the small hope that there is someone out there who might love the house as it is: old, small, and beautiful. Please help me spread this post to those out there who might want to be the next family to be lucky enough to inhabit what has been, without overstatement, a magical place.

A State of Insanity

Now it’s official. We live in the most crazy-ass state in the whole crazy-ass country. Any nice houses for sale up in Maine, Bill? Any jobs?

Imagine how angry he would have been if he had lost…..

So today, for whatever reason, was the first day since the election that I fully pulled my head out of the sand and really watched the news. So is this what passes for a normal day now? A day where 1.The North Carolina legislature tries to strip the power of the incoming governor in a move that would embarrass a banana republic. 2. Everyone in the world but the incoming President admits the Russians hacked the election, and 3. Trump admits that the “Drain the Swamp” line was a cynical ploy for votes that he thought would be too hokey to ever work. So: what will tomorrow bring?

 

P.S. I’ll BE ANGRY EVEN IF I WIN.

 

 

Goodbye to Sundance

           The full moon over the marsh in North Carolina this morning takes a little of the sting away, but I expect the withdrawal to last for some time. On our last day at Sundance I couldn’t stop skiing. I had the back mountain practically to myself, and I kept going down, telling myself it was my last run, trying to take my skis off and then saying screw it and heading back up. The day before had been a stronger ski day (Black Diamonds after midday Hops Risings in the Bearclaw lodge up top, though no double Black Diamonds because I want to live).

 

My last afternoon really wasn’t about skiing, however. What was it about?  I was trying to not forget. Trying to memorize the face of Mount Timpanogos like a lover you won’t see for a long, long time. The avalanche chutes and the dark slashes of the Douglas firs. The clouds streaming overhead, crossing with other, slower batches of clouds. The wind coming from the west, pushing in the storm and blowing over the top as if trying to shoo the rest of us off the mountain. The raptor that was riding that wind (which was definitely not a turkey vulture and which I first thought a baldy but whose white underbelly said hawk). The slashes of sunlight cutting through the storm clouds.

A few times I skied the easiest runs so I could ski

Beer break at Bearclaw

backward and look up at the mountain face. I know it’s strange to feel so emotional about a place you just met. A part of this is the building desire I have had, over the last few years, to get back out West. But it’s more than that. I was at Sundance to talk about Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner who, in very different ways, spent their lives fighting for wild places. In both of their cases what ended as activism started as love.  It’s a simple formula: fall hard for a place and you are more likely to fight for it.  That’s the history of Sundance, too. Remember, I can hear my more radical friends cautioning me, you are talking about a ski resort.  Point taken. But it is also thousands of acres that have been preserved beyond the resort and a place that has pushed back against the prevailing ethos of more and bigger.

That was what struck me most. For a place of such vast and sublime surroundings it is surprisingly intimate. In less than a week I felt on friendly terms not just with the face of Timpanogos or the view of Cascade as you got off the chairlift, but with the ski school staff who took Hadley in their hands and transformed a frightened North Carolinian who had seen snow 6 times into a skier. And with the generous and amazingly well-read (especially in the Gessner oeuvre) rental guys, including Patrick and Matt 1. Of course if I get started with thank-yous I won’t be able to stop. From Paul who drove us from the airport to Matt 2 who drove us back, to Tristin at the ski school ticket office, who not only made our lives easier but sometimes came out from behind her desk to roam the slopes like a goodwill ambassador, to Ryan and Kelly at the ski school, who took such great care of us and decided that everyone on the mountain would have the word “Hadley” on their ski tickets on our last day, to Mari and Emma, who set up my reading with such professionalism (I do a lot of these things and can tell you they are the best) while doing everything they could to make us feel welcome.  And finally to Chad, Amber, Conor, Shauna, and to all Redfords far and wide, including the head honcho who got us out there in the first place.

Since this is starting to sound like an Oscar acceptance speech I will shift gears. When I posted the picture to the right on Facebook, all my “real” skier friends gave me flack for not wearing a helmet. I replied that when I started skiing, back in the old days, Papa Hemingway and I didn’t need any fancy equipment but would strap some boards on our feet with vines and go bombing down the mountain, drinking as we went. The day after the post, and the criticisms, I posed for another picture at the same spot where we had taken the helmetless picture the day before. This time I took Nina’s helmet and looked at it with disdain while Nina snapped the picture.  After she took that one I put the helmet on the ground and pretended to squash it with my ski. The problem is that I put it down top first and before I knew it the helmet had taken off, over the

Before the fall

edge of Bishops Bowl, moving down the slope at about 40 mph and ended up a good mile away downslope and out of bounds. An hour or so of chaos ensued, during which I tried to find a way to cut over to get the helmet without killing myself and Nina and I got separated. Another sign of the mountain’s intimacy is how quickly the story spread. At the base of the chairlift I ran into a couple who already knew the whole things and said: “We ran into your wife and she told us that she’s trying not to get angry with you.” In the end it was the ski patrol who bravely rescued the helmet. By then Nina had gone back to get Hadley at ski school. I thanked the ski patrol guy and hooked the helmet onto the bottom of my coat. In this way I skied the rest of the day with a helmet.