Saxon Henry's Blog, page 24

The Depository of Arrogance

The once mighty Missouri.

We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set...

And the Book Becomes a Reality!

The Let’s Blog Off topic today is “What are you looking forward to in the new year?” Hands down for me, besides adroyt being a smashing success, is a book deal for The Road to Promise. I thought I’d take this opportunity, as this is the first post of 2012, to thank everyone who has stopped or continues to stop in and read my ramble through my past. Happy New Year to all of you, and don’t forget to read the other forward-thinking posts by our merry band of revelers. Today’s installment follows...

Incurable Untimeliness

The waterfall was barely smattering on the rocks as summer’s heat drank her offering before it could find its voice. The rhythm of the splashing mimicked someone struggling to breathe—the air heaving in and out of the chest as the midday sun sucked the life out of the body. Dark clouds threatened from the west but they only teased: there was simply no relief in sight from the intensity of a late afternoon broil.

The hawk was keening in the distance, likely as displeased with the steamy air it...

Land of the Free

Once we had exited the Rockies, driving from Steamboat Springs to Wagner, South Dakota, was a lesson in monotony, the Plains stretching into oblivion as we struck a straight coarse on the shaft of asphault that ran right up to the horizon. We passed over so many dried creek beds, I wondered how anything could survive on the sun-scoured expanse of brittle grasses. Old Woman Creek had packed up and gone, leaving behind a scattering of brittle bones and the splintered scaps of cottonwood limbs b...

God is Wakantanka

I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for accep...

Some Hint of Myself

The question for this round of Let's Blog Off posts is "What traditions do you keep?" Those of you who have been winding along The Road to Promise with me for a while are likely sick to death of hearing about my beloved writer's notebooks, which I've kept religiously since 1985—a tradition I now celebrate because were it not for these books, I wouldn't have the information necessary for writing this memoir. As of this week, I am posting twice a month rather than every week. If you've come back more than once, you must be enjoying the material and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for visiting. I also hope my reduced schedule won't keep you away. And now to "Some Hint of Myself":

We were a few days away from taking our first trip to South Dakota and I had no idea what to expect. We would be attending the Niobrara Convocation, a church convention for Sioux Episcopalians, in Promise, South Dakota. The Bishop had mentioned we'd see a bit of the wild wild west as we traversed the Great Plains—prairie dogs, buffalo, antelope and miles upon miles of barbed-wire fences. Though not as "exotic" to me as the animals he listed, I was battling some pretty sneaky Tennessee wildlife as I tried to protect my herb garden on the mountain, and it had me wondering whether the native animal kingdom on the Plains could be any more troublesome. 

For three mornings in a row woodchucks had decided it was their duty to dig around in my newly planted pride and joy—a series of mounds of dirt skirted by carefully placed stones from between which plumes of perennials and knots of herbs sprouted. I had planned this perfect garden for months and it had taken me an entire week to physically create it so I was understandably feeling a bit territorial. I had pegged the perpetrators as our regular visitors, the raccoons, until I caught the groundhogs red-handed one night. Just before heading to bed I had heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like terra cotta scraping on wood. I flipped on the deck lights to see the critters pulling my bay tree out of the dirt, placing it carefully on the deck beside the pot they were plundering. I left them alone, knowing the plant would survive the night in the open, and just before drifting off to sleep, I wondered if I should put some dried ears of corn at the bottom of the steps for them the next evening—a peace offering of sorts. Then I quickly realized how silly the idea was, as they didn't consider their behavior destructive; they were simply foraging for food.

Jim had built me a remarkable potting bench for planting herbs and flowers, and I'd found the perfect place for it in a nook facing the woods. I was making my way to it to repot my bay tree the next morning when I nearly stepped on a large snake sunning on the deck. I thought I was going to drop dead from fear before I could reach the door to the garage, high-stepping more successfully than any drum major I had admired when high school bands were still known for turning out such prancing leaders!

I shuddered all afternoon thinking about how close I had come to stepping on the slithering creature. When I described it to my neighbor's gardener, he declared it to be a harmless chicken snake but I felt certain it had been of the deadliest sort. I raced down to the bookstore to buy a guidebook so I'd be able to identify snakes from then on. Needless to say, I never nonchalantly walked around any corner on the deck from that day on, and when I would see an elongated reptile sunning on one of the large, flat rocks on the bluff below, I'd pull out my handy book and see if I could tell its type. It was a ridiculous effort, of course, because you had to get pretty close to a snake to make out its details and I certainly wasn't signing on for that task.

The next day, we took off for South Dakota before the light had come up on the city and I felt inexplicably nervous on the flight to Sioux Falls as I fingered a newspaper clipping with my grainy visage stamped into it—an advertisement I'd used to mark my spot in Black Elk Speaks. I'd agreed to model for this ad at the request of several friends who owned First Impression, a clothing store they'd just opened. I scanned the image for some hint of myself—some sign that it was really me—and I found nothing that told me I was present when the photograph was taken! In fact, it had been an embarrassing endeavor as I tried to figure out how to pose because I'd never done so. Afterwards, I realized I should have practiced before I went to the shoot but that wouldn't have occurred to me either. The photographer was completely green so he didn't have a clue as to how to help me, and I had left feeling self-conscious. That's what I thought about when I saw my wide smile, the discomfort causing me to jam the flimsy piece of paper into the back of the book as I vowed never to do something as out-of-character again.

I had made it about three-quarters of the way through the story of Black Elk's story and was gaining a Native American's view of how their lives were changed by the whites they encountered in the days preceding, during and following the "Indian Wars." Black Elk, who lived in a log house on the Pine Ridge Reservation between Wounded Knee and Grass Creek when he was relating the story to John Neihardt, said,"…the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes. Our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not with us any more. You can look at our boys and see how it is with us. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen years of age. But now it takes them very much longer to mature…Well, it is as it is. We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here…"

Until reading the book, I'd never heard the word wasichu, which means "white person" in Lakota. It was bizarre to be perceived as different because I'd never been put in a situation of minority before. I suppose something told me I was heading into tricky territory given the anxiety I felt as I finished the book, which I closed as we were beginning the final approach into Sioux Falls. I found myself swallowing tears as the medicine man's words lamenting the moment when Native Americans were relegated to reservations echoed in my mind. 

"And so it was all over…I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream…" 

Black Elk's story had been lived one hundred years before my arrival in South Dakota, and it made me sad that there had been even further decline for the freedom-loving people. "O make my people live!" Black Elk had wailed. It occurred to me that I would likely look back on Costa Rica as a piece of cake compared to the emotional territory I found myself entering in South Dakota. The thought was sobering as I stepped out of the plane and walked down the steps into the heat of the Great Plains.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

To read the clever posts of the rest of the #LetsBlogOff gang, click here and enjoy the ride!

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The Embodiment of Applause

I witnessed wind and water waging war with sand, the gusts blowing wildly as they vibrated the air around my pen, making it jump around on the page. The ocean crashed and billowed with a black storm's approach, causing the beach to tremble. The angry water thrashed as though the rain's touch was raping its surface and it was determined to refuse to be a victim of abuse without a fight. I squinted as I tried to make out what seemed like shadows moving beyond the fence but it was only night sharpening its lines. I sat frozen as semi-darkness turned dense, watching the sky spit silver drops like bullets into sand the color of cornmeal. It seemed right that nature's fury unleashed itself from time to time, but then I'd not been its target so this was an easy stance for me to take.

As the weather raged, I journaled about a trip we'd taken to Camp Ocoee the week before. I had stayed in the car while Jim gassed up at Cherokee Corners, studying how the late-day sun had its way with the grassy fields; how it made the Queen Anne's Lace at the road's edge glow. I wanted to try to record that particular quality of light as the cloud towers built in the distance, raising their boiling heads toward heaven. While I studied the pebbled whiteness of the spindly plants, something called in the distance—a goose or a dog with an odd bark, maybe, or a man gone crazy with grief. Only the deepest pain would have made a human run out into the afternoon and scream at nature like a howling animal, I thought, realizing as this popped into my head that my imagination was growing overactive in my pursuit of material. As soon as the admonishment sprung to mind, it occurred to me that to make a judgment like that was ridiculous because using the imagination was the purpose of being creative, especially for a writer!

I was thinking about this as I drove along the beach road the next morning—protected from the suffocating humidity by the whirr of the air conditioner. The waves of heat radiating from the hood and the memory of Queen Anne's Lace brought to mind another time when scorching temperatures and these leggy plants were fused in the experiential. A field of the "weeds," as the United States Department of Agriculture classified them, had stretched out for about a quarter of a mile behind our house when I was a girl. I sometimes walked up to its edge and marveled that something considered a blight could produce such graceful Victorian-esque blooms. 

I watched one day as they bowed their heads, wilting in the mid-day light right before my eyes. I understood—the air felt like a furnace as I turned away to trudge morosely toward the library with my little sister in tow. When we reached the spot where the Hosely's creek gurgled beneath the road, we looked longingly into the rushing water but knew we'd be in major trouble if we ruined our clothes so we kept moving, slogging on toward the elementary school to see what books were on the shelves. The antiquated air conditioning in the library provided little relief as we searched the rows of fiction for books to take home, and it wasn't until we'd returned to the dark coolness of our house with all the shades drawn that we'd felt the relief of being chilled to the bone by air conditioning that actually made a difference. I recalled how the covers of the books we'd carried home were soaked with our perspiration as we tossed them onto the kitchen table. I liked this memory because it was one of my first recollections as to how much books had meant in my life. The sacrifice of making my way through stifling heat to find new inspiration had been well worth the effort.

On that hot Florida morning, I sat in the car lost in thoughts of that time for only a few minutes after the air conditioning had quieted, the memories falling away as I realized I was suffocating. I roused myself from my reverie and hurried out of the car in order to begin closing the condo, as we would be relinquishing the oceanic air for that special brand of Chattanooga humidity. We were returning home to prepare for our first trip to South Dakota that afternoon, and I dreaded it, a fact that made me feel guilty and sad.

Once home, Chattanooga was living up to my memories and there was only one outdoor spot that afforded a dependable escape from the heat: the screened porch. I spent most of my mornings there and had decided it was the perfect place to entertain. We had invited our next-door neighbors for dinner, and they remarked that we'd found a great spot on the bluff as we settled into the comfortable furniture. As the breezes flowed up the mountain, the talk turned to our work in Costa Rica and South Dakota as it always did with people in our lives. Jim mentioned a mutual friend, a dentist, who had just returned from Haiti with a strain of incurable malaria. The conversation lulled for a few moments as Walter, a doctor, closed his eyes. When he opened them, he said, "I don't think I can imagine doing that. I could not put myself in such a situation as I'd have to choose between myself and myself." 

The astuteness and raw honesty of his comment ricocheted through my brain. I spent a great deal of time thinking about this as the days rolled along, dawning murky most mornings as the sun sparred with fog to gain a foothold in our patch of sky. The dampness of those precious mornings made me hug my cup of coffee close to my chest as I stood at the edge of the screened porch watching the mist play with the leaves on the trees. They flapped like the rotor blades on helicopters, the constant movement reminding me of how applause would look if the sound were made physical. What would the leaves be applauding? I wondered. Certainly not the choices I'd made…

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. If you are a regular reader, I'd like to take a moment to thank you wholeheartedly for supporting this effort that means so much to me. After next week, I will be posting every other week on either Tuesday or Wednesday rather than every week. I hope you will still stop in and continued to follow me along The Road to Promise! 

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The Bottom of Discontent

We were traveling to New Orleans to attend the Jazz Festival. The day before we left, I was flying around in a panic as I finalized the church newsletter, readied the house for our absence and shuttled Sam off to the sitter's—missing the precious boy the minute I drove away. As our group of six settled into our seats on the plane, I wondered what percentage of my life was spent in temperature-controlled tubes. 

I journaled most of the trip south, admitting in writing that I'd fallen completely in love with the mountain house, which was becoming hidden from the road as the woods dressed in shiny green—the lushness making me feel poignant about missing a minute of the ever-changing beauty. It seemed the only place I was ever able to relax was the screened porch with its "eye" on nature—her cooling breezes accompanied by an elemental soundtrack that included the splash of the waterfall and birdsong. But leave we always did and when we arrived at the fairgrounds in New Orleans, the festival was vibrating with so many types of music that the percussions shook the ground, a feeling akin to the earth having an oddly rhythmic form of palsy. The tents spreading out as far as I could see held gospel, blues, reggae, calypso, contemporary jazz, big band, Cajun, Zydeco and other genres of music I'd never known existed. The mass of people flowing through the grounds created a psychedelic ocean of color that not even Jackson Pollack would have thought to splash on the same canvas. I felt as if I were floating through a kaleidoscope of sound, hues and aromas.

The food ranged from barbecued alligator and crawfish étouffée to oyster poboys, and of course, beignets, which were brought to the festival by the famed Café du Monde. The aroma of barbecue was tantalizing as it floated above the row of food booths, battling it out with the smell of hot grease emanating from the proliferation of deep-fat fryers. Drinks were almost as varied as the dishes served—wine, beer and Bloody Mary's tempting at every turn. I reached a point at which I declared I had to stop putting things in my mouth because the run I'd taken that morning was becoming a token effort given the excess of food and liquor I was consuming. There were so many outlandishly dressed people that my brain couldn't fully process the scene as I scanned the crowd, trying my best to remember details that would color the backdrop of any story or poem I might write about the experience. My favorite fair-goers were the ones who stood as close as they could to the stage and swayed their bodies with the music—eyes closed as if they were making love to the rhythms. 

One such guy was dancing in the grass by a steel police barricade that protected the acts on the stage from the public. He was moving to the music of the Bluebirds—his skinny hips gyrating in shiny tight leotards. His scrunched socks were pillowed neatly above his Reeboks, which shifted on the grass as he flexed his knees to coincide with the whine of the guitar and the pulsing drums. His tan was obviously hard won and he would monitor it as he went along, shifting a sleeve farther up his arm when he sensed the beginning of a tan line or adjusting his shirt at the neckline as he spritzed himself with a spray bottle he kept at the ready in the beaten-down grass next to a bright blue towel he used to keep the sweat from his eyes. His hair was the color of cinnamon sticks and was clipped short except for a skinny braid that flicked around on his thin brown neck. His head was the liveliest part of his body—it shot to and fro as his arms stayed glued to his sides. Watching his thin butt vibrate to the grinding of the blues made me chuckle, and I was irritated that Jim and the gang were determined to move me along because I could have watched him for hours as I absorbed details that might have explained a bit more about how he lived his life away from the gregarious activity he was enjoying so keenly.

As I sat in the hotel room the next day watching the ships coming and going, I pondered how life kept me tossed about, supposing it would for a while no matter how much I hoped for a better balance. I was grateful for experiences like the jazz festival but I wanted so keenly to be able to be still and write. It was almost comical how many people asked me, "What problems could you possibly have?" I couldn't explain even to myself why I considered it to be an insult except that it brought about waves of guilt to think about how well off we were materially and how unhappy I could be at times. I guessed people believed this because for most of them, their nemesis had always been a lack of money. Even in moments when I doubted I had a "right" to my grumblings, there was one valid point at the bottom of my discontent and for this I wanted to give myself the acceptance to continue my search. I was extremely happy when I was bettering myself intellectually and creatively. In fact, doing so helped me to relax into a part of myself that was calm and loving. Therefore, I believed my desperation for betterment and for creative time was a valid one; not merely a phantom of psychological dis-ease. The bottom line, though, was that time for neither of these treasured things would fit into my life as it was, and my creative flow was drying up under the pressure of relational issues.

Knowing the spiral that took place when these subjects were uppermost in my mind, I decided that sitting and mulling them over would only push me into a darker place so I decided to take a walk. I headed to Jackson Square where I saw one of the most curious specimens of humanity I'd ever come across. It was a man who must have spent hours in front of a mirror putting on makeup and wrapping himself in rags. He had glued small tusks into his mouth, which pointed up into his painted, tortured expression. His eyes had been a lively shade of green before the bleeding of red had overcome them. He was a study in torn cloth, string and burlap—all smudged with dirt except around his shoulders where he'd fashioned the "costume" into a cape of sorts. At first, I couldn't tell whether his skin was black or just so dirty that it appeared to be black. 

His hairline answered the question, proving that he'd used dark body paint or some such substance to color his face because it had seeped into the hair framing his forehead. Were the blond and red goatees real or were they applied with glue as they extended from the bottom of a patch of white he'd painted to frame lips bulging with tusks? I wondered, standing completely absorbed as he slowly crawled toward a cigarette butt that someone had flipped onto the sidewalk. He extended his hand toward it in slow motion, picked it up with fingers slightly hidden by torn rags and raised it to his nose. He sniffed it like an animal would investigate something before eating it and then rolled it around in his fingers. I felt shy snapping photos of the man but the interest didn't phase him—he must have wanted the attention given the trouble he'd taken to draw a crowd in a busy square.

Afterwards, I sat in a café recording my impressions of him, curious as to what type of person would think that doing what he was doing was fun. There had to be some thrill in it or he certainly wouldn't have gone to so much trouble! I wondered what his mother would have said if she'd seen him in his get-up. Were there hints of his bizarre personality in his childhood? I questioned. Or was he perhaps merely a frustrated actor getting his kicks on a spring weekend? My musing made me think of a radio program I'd heard the week before during which Alex Haley said American family values were disappearing. While I listened intently to the interview with the famed author, I marveled at how he made me feel as if I were sitting on the back porch with him as he talked about his aunts, great aunts and grandmothers. He charged every person to interview his or her parents and grandparents because the current generation would be the first to not know who they were in terms of family if they did not. "Go and hug your grandparents," he commanded. "Say thank you to them because it is from them that you received your life." 

I wondered about the swaddled man in Jackson Square. Did he stay in touch with his grandmother; was she still alive? Did his mother "get him"; was his father kind to him or did he see a man who was either insane or practicing his performance art in an embarrassingly bizarre way? Did the savage-looking man crawling along the cement know "who he was"? Did he care? Somehow it seemed to me his unique way of expressing himself was one of the most sane examples of individuality I'd ever witnessed, even while his behavior was about as demented as any I'd ever seen!

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

 

 

Today's post is a #LetsBlogOff post. For a full list of participants telling everyone how they relax, click here.

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In Defiance of the Cold

With two Atlanta trips in five days behind me, I was drained. Spring was solidly in residence, but I felt the greening season had died in me along with summer and fall. I only carried winter around, and it felt damp, cold and lonely like the dead of a snowy night. My menstrual cycle created a madness in me that would leave me empty, shaken and longing for some weapon strong enough to fend it off. I was being told to look to God for solace but I felt lost to any deity's touch—somehow beneath the realm of any celestial being. I was actually severely shaken when I thought about how disconnected I was from everyone around me who reveled in the peace they found in their beliefs. "Peace, come to me and I will take care of you," I wrote; "Please, if there is a god, bring me peace."

The mists on the mountain bluff were my only solace—spinning, lifting and descending during the morning hours. We were in the clouds so much their filmy breathing fanned my morning world more often than the sun christened it with its dawning light. I could see the wispy pirouettes as they danced above the falls—water regaling water. The city, still dressed in drab winter garb even with early spring at hand, took the cloudy tears and used them to wash its streets. There were only tiny bits of color in the dullness of the muted world with the first burgeoning of red buds beginning to glow. The bulbs were still sheathed in soft green but seemed to be thinking seriously about opening their faces to the chilly air—tiny star-shapes in pale shades of their future colors aching to slice through the tips of their bulbous heads to celebrate their tender splendor. Japonica was pushing its Carmine-colored blooms from its bare stems as if in defiance of the cold while everything else preferred to patiently await warmer weather. 

I thought about how most people wouldn't think to describe a dreary world as lush but abundance was everywhere. This realization was unfolding in my mind as I grabbed a scrap of quiet for writing in the midst of the events surrounding Jim's oldest son's wedding. I lamented to my writer's notebook, "I can't wait to get back to you. I have missed your comfort." Once life had become my own again, I tentatively approached my writing but it felt far away—a foreign thing after the busy-ness that had left me worn. "I have been away from my heart, so now I touch myself tenderly as I review that piece of me that shows through in the faint strokes of my own anxious pen," I wrote. "Certain words touch me in return and I am sure they are mine. It is an acknowledgement when they whisper back, and deep emotion sparks in me; brings desire rushing forth and my emptiness is filled. My fullness greets me like a friend, but tentatively as if it is unsure how to approach me in my sadness. How can I fault either of us? I had to erect the walls in order to survive, and she was always forced to wait until I was ready."

As the weeks progressed, the air warmed and the bony tree limbs sprouted their buds like a fine covering of mesh. I made it a point to enjoy the morning lights of the city knowing that the leaves would soon hide them from my view. As I stared at the awakening landscape, I let my mind skip across scenes from my life like a blind person's hand touching brail in a delicate search for knowledge. As I did, a thunderhead plumed and I marveled at the power it so magnificently wielded as it drew the perimeters of its iridescent edge with a giant finger of light. It fashioned itself into a gilded pillow of moisture and when it unleashed its contents, the deluge wrapped me in a gray world through which puny light fought its way, entering the room tentatively like a tiptoeing mime bent on remaining silent. The storm thrashed against the windows as if angered that I was out of reach. I stood calmly, daring it to try and touch me.

The days seemed to careen along and suddenly the dogwoods bloomed. They unfolded their creamy flowers in concert with the azaleas, which plumped with profusions of color seemingly overnight. With our last Costa Rica trip about a month away, our destinations for the mission work were about to change. We were meeting with Craig Anderson, the Bishop of South Dakota, about repairing and building churches in his diocese, which held nine of the poorest counties in the United States on Native American reservations. We would be working with the Dakota and Lakota Sioux, and he showed us a video that broke my heart as to the conditions these people were enduring. I wondered what had transpired that would have brought them to the point of the poverty and despair I saw in the documentary. 

The film led me to search bookstores in Chattanooga for anything I could find that would help answer this question and the options were slim. I found the book Black Elk Speaks and had a difficult time with the pain the story evoked. I also felt an immediate kinship with the keen connection the Native Americans in the story had felt with nature. I looked at everything around me with a newfound awe—wondering if the owl visiting the bluff at night, being a nocturnal creature, ever felt it missed the visual lushness the daylight hours brought to life. Did he sense the excitement of nature bursting forth all around him? I wondered. Of course he would, lighting as he did on tree branches, which a scant few weeks before had been bare, to find a spiky growth like the prickly surface of a piñata beneath his feet. 

It was finally warm enough that I could write on the screened porch in the mornings and I loved being so much closer to the waterfall that its splashing was an accompaniment to my musings. I looked to the horizon and recognized the haze that had spawned the name Smoky Mountains—though we were not officially in the chain, I believed our ridges, which held a similar mix of mists and haze between their expanses, were close enough to share the same characteristics. These gaps and gullies, peaks and valleys were once home to a band of Native Americans with as painful a past as the one I would soon find myself greeting. Would I be up to "representing the church" with these people who painfully tapped into my wounding without even knowing it?

With that question resonating, I scribbled a poem on the empty page open in my lap. It would remain a rare first effort that turned out to be a final draft—even more unique because it predicted my experience in South Dakota and Alaska with eerie accuracy:

            Plume

 

It is difficult

to face

someone else's struggle

when it stokes the fire

of your own

painful burning,

especially when 

you've labored for years

to swallow the smoke.

 

          -Saxon Henry

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in! 

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Cold, Clear and Uncaring

The wildlife on the bluff was beginning to put in an appearance and I had to be careful to put Sam's dog-door in at night. We were sitting in the breakfast room one evening when he barked as if he'd seen his ghost, his animated brown eyes peering into the darkness that invaded the screened porch. It wasn't such a far-fetched idea because I spotted a fluffy raccoon making its way across the deck like a surefooted bandit, its smudged mask radiating out from its eyes making it seem guilty before proven so. I was as curious about the creature as Sam was so I eased the door open. As Sam launched into a serious riff of barks it skittered up to the screen and stood there—whiskers twitching and eyes keenly trained on us as we entered the outdoor room built into the corner of the house. But when Sam bounded over to greet it, the animal sidled backwards so fast its fur wobbled like it was wearing an interactive coat of fluff. 

It stopped when its backside met the deck railing and stood there, just far enough away to feel safe while being close enough for its pointy nose, which it held high in the air, to identify Sam's scent. I imagined this must have been as foreign a smell as it had ever encountered in relation to an animal given that Sam, who trembled with desire to get at the raccoon, had been to the groomer that day. Little did my beloved dog know he would have been no match for the teeth in that pointed snout.

Suddenly out of nowhere, a smaller fur ball came rushing in, tumbling under the larger animal as it playfully nipped at its feet. Sam was beside himself with the desire to play, prancing on his hind legs in frustration. The smaller creature, who had no fear whatsoever, stepped right up to the screen and stood nose to nose with Sam. I was guessing by then that the larger raccoon was the mother because the little guy was herded out of harm's way the minute Sam ran his manicured nails noisily down the woven metal mesh. As the duo skipped out of range of the floodlights flanking the deck, Sam moaned in disappointment that his potential new friends had escaped without a properly sniffed "meet and greet." 

I'd never been able to experience raccoons that closely and I had to admit, even while knowing they were dangerous, I'd loved to have cuddled both of them to my chest. It made me realize why people fooled themselves into thinking that they could domesticate wild animals. I'd always been fascinated with the outlandish behavior of non-domesticated species, and some of my favorite childhood memories were when my father and I watched Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom." We'd tune in and find ourselves crying over a dying bear cub during one episode or fighting back hysterical fits of laughter during another that involved a flock of wild birds being startled by an airboat. My dad had a passion for auto racing and had owned his own series of quarter-milers for years so when the leggy birds bolted, wings flapping and feet skimming the shallow waters of some exotic glade, the skinny wakes they made in the surface of the water made them appear as if they were in a dead heat in mother nature's version of a quarter-mile race. 

This was the only program, besides sports, that my mother would allow us to watch together because we were prone to being overly emotional and our tender psyches seemed to feed off each other. "Little House on the Prairie" had long been forbidden as the drama never failed to cause us to sob by the end of each episode. Before she nixed the show all together, she would walk through, roll her eyes and change the channel as we wiped our eyes and blew our noses, laughing a little too self-consciously at our silliness, which she thought was ridiculous! I'd never seen "Wild Kingdom" feature raccoons—maybe they weren't exotic enough for Jim Fowler, who seemed to prefer eagles, ocelots and monkeys—and I wished I'd known more about them when the duo visited again and again as winter progressed.

Sam never lost his desire to tussle with them—an ever-present frustration in his life as the weather grew colder and we had a second significant snow near Christmas. As the holiday loomed, I was determined not to admit that I was battling a serious case of depression, plagued by nightmares and bouts of sadness that left me feeling spent and wasted. I would make the briefest of entries in my writer's notebook and then go days without logging anything as I filled my personal journal with dark struggles: "The sky dulls with evening and my mood takes on its color." I felt like a the protagonist in a movie I'd watched—a dying man who knew his life had been lived in vain—when he said, "All those memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain." Would I succumb to a life lived in futility? I wondered. As I journaled about it, the red-tailed hawk patrolled the bluff, drawing me away from the page. I watched as it clung to a tree in strong winds, its talons gripping the limb as its body swayed in anticipation of its next move. Suddenly, it flattened itself against the currents and dove through the icy air, disappearing beyond the stony outcroppings at the edge of the yard. 

I was trying to write poetry but only snippets emerged. As the new year dawned, I made a resolution that I would put more words on the page, hopeful that I could hold my resolve better than I had in the past. My first entry for 1989 felt like a strong start and as was most often the case when I was at home, nature was my inspiration: "The sunrise burned to expose itself as the knobby heads of mountaintops penetrated wispy clouds. The moon was as thin as a clipped nail last night, bent and useless in its loss. I watch the falls and wait for the water to take on the color of the awakening sky but it refuses to be anything but itself: cold, clear and uncaring—it falls not for orange glory but for its own clarity." 

Life kept reaching out and I couldn't help but intertwine my fingers with its tentacles, which meant I was being pulled headlong after it and all it had to offer. I was often fooled into thinking I was planning the music of my days when more often than not I would end up dancing to songs I'd never intended to have as my soundtrack—all chosen by others. Why was it that life played its own tunes, forcing us to dance along while knowing the loving stances were the hardest to strike? 

My stances had been as far from loving as any could be, and it truly bothered me but I was dancing as fast as I could, the poses I managed to hold not so graceful. Besides Sam, the natural world surrounding the Signal Mountain house continued to be the only bright spot in my life. I studied the raccoons as the baby grew, interacting with Sam beyond the screen in guarded but curious ways. I watched the hawk as it rode the thermals, circling above the falls for hours on end. I wished I could glide as effortlessly through life as it was able to sail on those stiff breezes.

I had been watching for several weeks as a highway was being bulldozed through the landscape below—a connector that would make the morning and evening commutes for thousands of people easier. The machines were busy at work day after day, mowing down trees and cutting into hills. I realized that I had a problem with development in some ways. It took strength for human muscles to brandish an axe against a great tree, but I felt it took minimal effort to bulldoze one flat. As I watched the "progress" day after day, I thought how ironic it was that we were a people professing strength while simultaneously being a culture that plowed across the land without any consideration for the future. Would anyone ever be able to see this? I wondered as I walked away from the windows that looked out onto the long brown ribbon of a scab growing on the land below.

If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!

This is a #LetsBlogOff post; to see what my compadres are watching on TV, click here. 

 

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