What the Wild Things Are

While showering one recent evening, I noticed a spider, likely a black house spider, although I’m certainly no expert, crawling along a ceiling beam.  If she continued along this slow march, soon she would be directly above the shower stall.  I watched the spider’s advance with a reflexive, total-body cringe. My first and only thought arriving in a hot flush of prejudice: Kill it. 

The swift finality of this verdict came as something of a surprise. I’m no “spider hater,” or so I thought.  I’ve captured many an arachnid, skittering across the cabin floor or well-defended in a web-draped corner, and relocated her outside.  My work in the garden, vineyard, orchard and mucking about the forest and meadow picking wild herbs and berries has largely cured me of the creepy-crawly heebie-jeebies. When I find the errant six- or eight-legged stowaway somewhere on my person (and I often do), I attempt to separate us with as little violence as necessary.  When I come upon a spider in a web, whether among squash leaves or blackberry canes, my intention is to leave her be.   Sure, I get bit and stung, by all sorts of tiny creatures seen and unseen. But over the years I’ve become rather philosophic about the process.  While there’s an undeniable sacrifice of body and blood  involved in reaping the fruit of the land, it seems little enough to give for what I get in return.  After all, it must be admitted, it’s Their World—the garden, the meadow, the forest. I’m just barging through.

But back to the shower.  This was My World, and the spider on the ceiling was about to enter the drop zone.  I felt—ok, I’ll go ahead and admit it—both vulnerable and harassed, afraid and defensive.  I imagined jumping out of the shower, forcing the spider to the floor with the swat of a broom, and then squashing her under my foot.  Gotcha!  I could already hear the wicked hahaha of triumph.

Really, Dawn?  I asked myself.  Yes, really.  This spider has no business up here in my bathroom.  This spider needs to die.

And then something happened.  The spider moved to the low edge of the beam, still a few feet from the shower stall, and dropped down into thin air on a slowly unfurled strand of unseen silk.  Hanging stomach-up, about a foot below the beam, her legs began working the strand with knitting needle precision. Tying knots?  Weaving a leg-hold? I certainly couldn’t see what she created, just that whatever it was involved highly skilled labor. Finally, she spun in circles like a Cirque du Soleil aerialist, caught herself with her two front legs, and climbed the rope of silk back to the beam.  She stayed there for several moments, appearing to rest. 

Astonished, I gaped at her perhaps ¾-inch length, legs drawn in against her body, huddled on the edge of the beam.  She dropped again. Repeated a process my eyes could only barely register.  Standing in the shower, where moments before I wanted nothing more than to squash this creature to her death, now I wished for binoculars to better witness her art.   How else to describe the athleticism?  The full-body grace? I thought of freestyle skiers, gymnasts, high platform divers all of whom share an uncanny body awareness. Even as they fall through space, they know exactly where their limbs are in relation to the structures around them.  There is seductive magic realism in such bold defiance of gravity’s absolutes. 

But while the aerialist performs with the confidence of someone mere inches above the ground, she knows one wrong move, one instant’s lack of focus, could lead to a plummeting death.  What of the tiny spider hanging eight feet above the floor?  Does the spider know what she risks?  Perhaps, yes, in the sense that such risk is all part of being a spider, and merely doing what spiders do.  The risk of building a web, whether in high tree branches or house beams, is simply an inescapable aspect of spider life.

As I finished rinsing my hair, turned off the water, and stepped out of the stall, what made me smile was the realization that her being a spider, merely living her spider life here in my bathroom had nothing whatsoever to do with me.  This spider was not out to scare me, much less to “get” me. She was not seeking a plum opportunity to fall off the beam and into my shower.  This aerialist artist arachnid was just doing her best to survive in the upper reaches of my bathroom ceiling.  Attracted here through cracks in the log walls, through gaps in the window sills, or brought here, entirely against her own preference, on my coat or in my backpack.  She’s making the best of it, I thought, as my eyes kept tracking her efforts: drop, knit, spin, climb.  She’s doing all she can to make a home here. She wants to fit in.

And you know what? I believe that’s all most beings on this planet want. We want the chance make a go of it, wherever we happen to find ourselves. From diverse immigrant communities in New York City to mixed congregations of predators and prey at watering holes in the Okavango Delta in Botswana, there is manifest evidence of the desire to go along and get along in order to survive.  In my very own Brightside garden, a teeming variety of reptiles, amphibians, birds, mammals, insects and spiders live in what largely appears to be balance.

While it is true that the meadow voles do, on occasion, take more brassicas and snow peas than I consider strictly fair, I’ve also noticed that the garden ecosystem only grows stronger, producing more abundant fruit, to the extent I refrain from selective genocide.  When, godlike, I declare one individual or species “bad” and condemn it to death, I set in motion a chain of events with consequences I, a mere mortal, can’t possibly foresee.

So, if I know all of this, why my Kill the Spider reflex?  

When I meet a spider on her turf, I react one way. I’m more than willing to go out of my way to let her be.  However, when a spider “threatens” my most vulnerable space, my gut reaction is to kill first and ask questions later.  My reaction is based on my general sense of spiders as alien and therefore hostile.   While intellectually I know spiders to be very important members of the ecological community, while I abide spiders in the garden, vineyard, orchard, forest and meadow, when a spider is in my bathroom, my first response is to lash out.  My first response is to assume ill will on the part of the spider, who shouldn’t be here in the first place, right? My first response is to justify preemptive violence on the grounds that if this spider could be trusted, she’d stick to spider-ville.

It’s a tight circle of thought that serves to replace the actual spider busily minding her own business with a “wild thing” of my mind’s creation.  When this “wild thing” comes to life in my mind, the actual spider ceases to exist. She is thoroughly replaced by a projection of a well-honed set of biases and fears.   Once this happens, only my concerted effort, my focused attention, my willingness, above all else, to watch and wait before acting, can reverse the process.

If this is true in my response to spiders, snakes and even bears, it is surely true, and arguably more important, in my response to humans I’ve come to label as alien and therefore hostile, humans I’ve learned to fear when I encounter them in unexpected places.  Actual humans, with names and families and business to tend, that I might rush to replace with a “wild thing” of my mind’s creation.

It is easy for me to imagine that George Zimmerman and Michael Dunn replaced the actual Trevon Martin and the actual Jordan Davis with “wild things.”   It is easy for me to imagine these killers so blinded by their projections of well-honed biases and fears about young black men, that they could not recognize the humanity of the boys they accosted.  Zimmerman and Dunn were not willing to give the boys the space to demonstrate their intentions because the killers did not see the boys as boys, but as “wild things” out to “get” them.  Rather than watching and waiting before acting, Zimmerman and Dunn chose preemptive violence. Kill first—no questions necessary.

Zimmerman and Dunn did not defend themselves against unarmed teenagers, but against “wild things,” menacing, aggressive imaginary creatures.

There, but for the will to wait and watch before acting, but for the desire to see the actual human next to us, go we all.

 

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There is a Season

The wind roars in a way that’s at once machine-like and animal. As manufactured as the sound of a jet engine readying for takeoff and as organic as the throbbing pant of a lion. There’s a rhythmic asymmetry to the ascension and declension of sound that attracts the ears and draws the mind toward it. Like jazz, the music of the wind is an aural riddle. As I wash a glass, chop potatoes, pull on my boots, I find myself stopped mid-action by an unexpected change, a new layer in the pattern. Unaware how hard I’m listening until I feel a little thrill of recognition: Aha! Uh-huh. I got it. It occurs to me that this is the auditory equivalent of completing one layer of a Rubick’s Cube. The only way to get the next layer is to let the first one go. To trust the pattern to reveal it again.

All of this is to say that the sound of the wind distracts me.

There’s a patting-my-head while rubbing-my-stomach aspect to anything I undertake when the wind displays its roaring glory. Even as I sit here at my desk and observe great puffs of dry snow lifted from the white earth, whipped and whirled into a vision-obscuring cloud, and dissipated in an instant, it is the sound that accompanies this transient tumult that occupies me. It is the sound that becomes an itch I can’t reach quite long enough to give it a satisfactory scratch. It is the sound that I try to understand even as my rational mind tells me that the only hope for understanding (much less getting anything else accomplished) is to stop trying.

Stop listening to the wind as if it were trying to teach me a lesson and start listening as if it were Billie Holiday or Sarah Vaughan singing well-past midnight in an underground bar. Music isn’t found in individual notes. The essence of a thing can’t be found in its parts. There are occasions when further inquiry is downright destructive. Rip tides ask only that you swim with them. Allegheny wind is much the same.

******

In a winter less wintry than any I can remember, today fully qualifies for the season even as it nears its end. Whereas this time last year I had come to look at the monochrome landscape—a flat white reflection of the sunless sky—with the same cowering humility a servant might beg her master’s pardon, today I embrace the blanketing white, so seldom seen this season. Snow a presence made welcome by the simple fact that it hasn’t been around.

We’ve had some bitter cold temperatures. A handful of mornings when Cosmo’s water bowl on the sunporch was frozen solid. A couple wicked days in January and February when I had to change out the chicken-waterer every few hours. That single January weekend when the wind at the garden gusted upwards of 50 mph, the temperature hovered around five degrees Fahrenheit, and I found myself so very thankful for the six inches of snow that preceded the rising winds. By piling and packing the snow against the sides and top of the visqueen-wrapped chicken run, I was able to keep the girls quite snug in their Allegheny igloo—and prevent the whole contraption from blowing away!

That January wind was a wind to be obeyed, without question or equivocation, and most especially without delay. A grandfather wind I trifled with at my peril. Subtle? No. Unforgettably instructive. I got the message loud-and-clear: Hey, kid, I brought you into this world; I can take you out. Whatever else might be said about it, it’s a message that focuses the mind.

Such slap-me-upside-the-head instruction has been relatively rare these past three months. The mainstay of Allegheny Mountain winters, the capacity to endure—feet of snow, weeks of sunless days, clear and present danger, inability to go anywhere—has been replaced with something entirely different, the capacity to adapt to a constant state of flux. This winter, the weather has been my bi-polar roommate, recently discovered to be schizo-affective to boot! Thirty-degree temperature swings in 24 hours. Snow. Rain. Sun. Ice. Mud. Wind. Snow. Mud. Rain. Sun. Don’t get me wrong, after last winter’s persistent gloom, the sunshine has been nothing short of a miracle, and I’ve loved every minute of it. I’m not complaining! Just stating a fact: the refusal of this season to settle has left me unsettled as well. 

This winter’s colors haven’t been white and grey, black and lichen green, colors of introspection, colors of “sitting-with.” This winter’s colors have been burnt umber and ochre, wheat and chestnut brown, butter gold and periwinkle blue. This winter’s colors have been those of “getting-up-and-going,” colors that invite action, that promise results, that—not at all unlike a guy on a Manhattan street shoving a flyer in my hands as I walk by—offer a once-in-a-lifetime deal I might, just might regret I missed. This winter has offered a chance to get ahead, to game the system, to do more meeting-and-greeting on bonus time, time stolen from the season, time I’m really not supposed to have. 

I must admit I’ve found the colors of this season impossible to refuse.

Today, looking out on one of my favorite winter scenes: the black-and-white silhouette of Spruce Knob through the snow covered branches of the maple, hickory, red oak, white ash and black birch that line path to Wiley Way, I wonder at the cost of such refusal.

The “going-in deep” that is the gift of Allegheny winter has been, this season, a gift refused, and thus a gift denied. The here-to-fore forced winter hibernation from worldly engagement that provides the fuel for spring industry has not occurred this season, replaced instead with the near-constant travels and meetings the mild weather has allowed. I don’t sit here today regretful of my choices. I do sit here mindful of the message of the seasons, and the nature of time that is the essence of each one.

There is a season designed for every endeavor. Despite what the man-made world might lead us to believe, every day is not interchangeable with any other. Whether or not the ground freezes, fields lie fallow because the earth must rest and recover before it can bloom again.

I can’t help but wonder if my lack of fallow time this strange non-winter will exact some unforeseen cost come summer. A human version of weak soil.

This afternoon, the snow falls harder, creating a whitescape etched in pen-and-ink and entirely obscuring Spruce Knob. On the deck railing lie several inches of snow kicked through here and there by juncos crafting their own personal high-walled condos. 

The courage to stay still—for a moment, day, week, month, or season—is the courage to look Nature in the face and hold Her eyes.

How the man-made world wants to divert my gaze! Oh, how it slaps flyers in my hands and screams in my ears! How effectively it beckons! Even here, yes, even here, on an Allegheny mountaintop, without phone or television. Even here, I find it all too easy to look away from Her. Even here, and despite all that I know.

And what I know is this: Any season of my life that I don't engage Her is a season fundamentally wasted, regardless what worldly spoils I might have to show for my time away. Mere dust in a mighty Allegheny wind.

******

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
--Ecclesiastes 3:1

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A Grouse, a Fawn & a Question about Existence

I looked out my office window and caught sight of a male ruffed grouse in full display mode. His banded tail stood erect, a flat fan of autumn-hued feathers, perfectly crafted both to conceal and to attract, not unlike the fan of a geisha.

Glossy black feathers formed an areola around his speckled face, a mane of masculine glory that brought to mind tribal masks, Bob Marley’s braids, and mythological griffins. The grouse was a creature implausibly present, strutting one haughty step at a time across the leaf-strewn meadow, three or four females bobbing and weaving some twenty feet behind, courtiers at pains not to disturb the king. He had an unmistakably royal air, theatrical and contrived, every movement designed to convince the observer of his prowess, seduce her with his beauty.


I don’t know how the act was working on the hens who skittered and pecked in his wake—they seemed a bit distracted actually, multi-taskers obsessed with things-to-do—but I must say he had me at hello.

When he turned his head to one side with a dramatic jerk and puffed out his yellow-feathered chest, I couldn’t help but giggle at the come-hither bravado. Patrick Swayze dressed in fabulous, feather-boaed drag.

Workin’ that hat girlfriend, workin’ it hard.

It was the first time I’d seen such a display in real life with my own eyes, absent the photographic editing and sonorous voiceover of a nature show. It was the first time I’d had the opportunity to interpret the grouse on my terms, to make my own associations and draw my own conclusions. There was just the grouse, high-stepping across the meadow below the house, and me, watching. My vision un-blinkered, my mind blissfully un-led by any externally imposed breadcrumb trail of an expert notion of What’s Important to Notice About the Male Grouse.

Faced with new, unfiltered experience, my mind was free to decide for itself. My mind was free to think.

****

One afternoon this past mid-summer, our garden activities were interrupted by a horrible bleating scream, the truly scalp-tingling sound of infant terror. Cosmo had startled a very young fawn from the hiding place where it had been left by its mother, and the babe had run pell-mell into a remnant of rusty barbed wire fence at the forest edge. We, all of us, immediately dropped our tools and moved toward the screams, drawn by the alarm just as urgently as if the fawn had been a human child.
We quickly realized that we knew the fawn and her mother as “residents,” frequent visitors to the Grandmother apple tree, the Spring Road, and the copse of locust just beyond the garden enclosure. As we used my pruners to free the tiny struggling deer, I said aloud: What if the mother doesn’t return? I was near tears, heart-struck by the passionate wailing of the child for its mother. We watched the fawn, so spindly-legged and tiny, yet so fiercely strong, bound away, screaming “Mommy!” just as clearly as if it spoke English or we understood Cervidae, the family to which white-tailed deer belong.

The hollering and wailing of that fawn, so entirely “human” to my anthropocentric ears, forged a bond of commonality: our shared experience of the pain and suffering, the wacky, unpredictable terrors, the sudden, unanticipated mercies of life on earth.

“You are like me,” I thought, as the fawn disappeared into the forest and I knew without doubt that from a nearby yet expertly hidden location, the doe watched all that had occurred.

None of my reading about deer had previously elicited such a progression of thoughts. And nothing about my decade-long experience suffering under the persistence of their appetite for cultivated plants could dissuade me from such insight. The resident deer were no longer The Other. No longer The Enemy of All Things Agricultural. They were neighbors. They were…well, suffice it to say, I couldn’t wait to see if the doe and her fawn came back.

They did. They came back. Along with another doe and her twins. And a mixed-family group that includes a button buck. For four good months now, seldom is the morning that I look out the bedroom window and don’t see one or all of these groups moving up the spring road and across the slope of the ridge. In the early hours, they venture within just a very few feet of the house. The conifers planted along the crest of the ridge are a favorite spot for hanging out, bedding down, and uhm, fertilizing the rocky, hungry dirt. I look forward to the sight of them no less than to the sun itself, illuminating the winter-brown grasses with amber light.

It’s not that I’ve stopped believing in venison as one of the healthiest meats for the human body—and the environment. I haven’t. But I have begun to think about deer unfiltered by what I’d read or seen or even experienced myself in the past. The new experience with the trapped fawn tripped a re-set button of sorts.

Do the deer themselves feel it? Do they sense the change in my intention toward them? Who knows?
I do know this: They're comfortable here, increasingly so, and the sound of my voice does not frighten.

****

In this most consumerist of all seasons, a time during which I myself am very much engaged in peddling my wares, a question simply won't leave me alone: If we are but consumers of the things others tell us to want, but reflectors and repeaters of the information given to us, but conduits for others' preprocessed ideas do we, any of us, really exist?

To live is be a consumer of air, water, food, shelter. I consume, but not because I’m told I deserve a new handbag, or new shoes designed to make me appear prosperous to others. There’s little room for artifice in my world. I consume to live.

To think is be a processor of experience into thought, not a pipe for the transference of other people’s unmeasured ideas. I think because, frankly, I have to think in order to live.

I experience most of my life right here and now, unscripted, unfiltered. No sonorous voiceover, no photographer’s edit to guide me to what’s important. No utility company. I, uhm, pretty much have to figure out what's important for myself. Right now.

Rene Descartes said: I think, therefore I am.

It’s a philosophical assertion much interpreted and debated, to be sure. I prefer to take it at face value.
How does one know who she is until she thinks for herself?

Certainly, she may well prosper in the purely physical realm through the abject adherence to others' ideas regarding what she may or may not think and what she may or may not adorn herself with to reveal her value. Surely, she may prosper as a physical body with no original thought at all. But what of her mind?

Where does the Self that importunes the mind for existence on its own merits, entirely separate from its ability to purchase the newest technology or rubber-stamp the latest social-theology—where does that Self reside?

Mental freedom is perhaps the most significant blessing of life in the wilderness.

But such a blessing is bestowed, much like God’s upon Abraham (or Gene Roddenberry’s upon Captain Kirk) with a corollary curse: to boldly go where no (wo)man has gone before, regardless how manifestly difficult, absurd or lonely the journey.

To live in the wilderness, in 2011, is to plant, pick and snowplow in the face of a culture that says: Oh, for pity’s sake, what are you doing? What's the point? Follow me.

It’s all online. All downloadable. Google-YouTube-able. Easily answerable. Poll-able. Wikipedia-ready. You don’t need to experience in the flesh what you can experience, virtually. It’s more efficient this way, life as the highlights reel of a really intriguing movie. Who cares if the thoughts aren’t your original thoughts, the conclusions aren’t those you were present to make? They’re well-vetted, they’re probably the majority, they’re the ones you would have made yourself, surely, most certainly.
Follow me.

Really? I dunno. Somehow, I remain unconvinced.

I never saw a nature show that came anywhere close to nature reality.

I never valued for long any thought I didn’t earn through living.

I'm the kind of fool who falls in love with a flannel shirt and wears the sucker 'til it comes apart at the seams.

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Self Reliance

When I was 16, I fell in love with Ralph Waldo Emerson.


You think I’m kidding? Oh no. I would never speak lightly of such passion. Yes, it was 1982. And yes, Ralph died in 1882, but no matter. He had that je ne se quoi that makes a long-dead philosopher irresistible to a teenage girl. Or, at least this teenage girl. I appreciated Henry David Thoreau, but Emerson’s bombast I found, in retrospect, frankly sexier.

In Humanities class, junior year, when I learned that Socrates had said “The unexamined life is not worth living” my god did I love it. I wasn’t crazy after all! These were the days of Deep Earnestness, when I carried a journal with me everywhere. When I believed there was nothing that occurred that wasn’t worth recording and analyzing. Evenso, it was Emerson, my Ralph Waldo, who kicked it up a notch.

Emerson said the things I barely dared think.

Emerson said: “Know thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

Emerson said: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.”

Emerson said: “Whoso would be a man would be a nonconformist.”

I was certain he intended “man” to be inclusive of “woman.” After all, he hung out with Emily Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott. Wherever Ralph wrote “man” I assumed him to be speaking, unequivocally, to me.

And my favorite essay, the essay that spoke most clearly to the girl who was trying to rationalize the impossibly conflicted external realities of her life with a blooming sense of iconoclasm, was Self Reliance.

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

Twenty-nine years later, I can’t help but wonder what ol’ RWE would say if he could see me now.
If we met over tea (a nice aromatic blend of nettle, yarrow, and mullein perhaps) would he give me a “yes, but” when I quoted his 170-year-old words back to him? Perhaps he’d argue that he was, indeed, promulgating an interesting philosophical argument, an intellectual entertainment of the type highly valued in 1841, but that he certainly never intended anyone to attempt to live it. Let alone a woman on an Allegheny mountaintop in 2011. A woman struggling with all the practical survival issues well-known to the 19th century, coupled with something nearly as insidious and unstoppable as a plague of small pox: The expectation of electrons-on-demand, of pumps that move water at the flip of a distant switch, of worldwide communication at the click of a piece of plastic called a mouse.
I imagine his bemusement at the peculiarities of my plight. But even more compelling, I feel his nodding recognition of my struggle with Expectation and its corrosive impact on my sense of Self, even as he lambasts me for it.

I imagine him saying something along the lines of: “The man who stakes claim to a mountaintop and endeavors to carve his life upon that rocky earth would do better to build an Ark and wait for the Flood than expect the solace of regular society to carry him away from the Self he seeks. The valley and the ridge are joined by the land between them, each rod of which, once advanced, cannot be foresworn save by the liar or the fool.”

With all due apologies to RWE, I do imagine him “getting” me.

I imagine him prefiguring the best of the existential authors of the 20th century, when he’d say to me: “Once your Self has claimed its authentic home, celebrate, grieve not. Resist the siren call of conventionality and the safer drudgery it promises. Your trust in conformance is what restrains you, it is the barometer of your Self-defined failure. Leave it behind, as the hair your mother cut from your brow so you might see.”

Unless there really is some chamber of the afterworld where Meeting of Minds (the 1970’s-era PBS series hosted by Steve Allen) actually occurs, I’ll likely never know what words RWE would say to me personally.

I do know that I’d likely not be here today, at Brightside, if I’d never heard the words he wrote way back then. Words that continue to bolster and cajole me even as they irk me. “Yes, but” I want to argue. I want to give him a personal laundry list of grievances. A list so long he’d be moved to…what? Applying a gold star for “non-conformancy” to my furrowed forehead?

Much more realistically, I imagine his hawk-nosed countenance peering at me (not unkindly, oh, not at all unkindly), and after hearing all my woes and sorrows, simply inquiring this: "Who do you wish to be? Your Self? The woman who has endured great suffering to be here, and who is even now carving a life on this rocky earth. Or the woman who now believes she’d been better off never having taken the first journey up this mountain because, well, to be honest, up here it is really difficult attempting to conform to all the expectations of 21st century life?"

“Who are You?” I hear him ask. (Beyond RWE’s voice, I hear the tick-tock of the grandfather clock in the Meeting of Minds parlor. Steve Allen looks so snappy in his ascot. Our tea has grown somewhat cold.)

RWE leans back and crosses his legs. He knows I know that he knows I know.

We smile at each other over our tea cups.

One inescapable truth of my life is this: Growing up in post-assassination Memphis with parents who established a hazardous waste recycling business in the heart of the African-American ghetto, I learned early not to define what I was capable of. Which is to say, I learned not to put an arbitrary limit on it. Limits didn’t matter. Coping with the situation was what mattered. Enduring was what mattered.

This is not to say that everything I’ve endeavored since has been a roaring success. Far from it. It is to say I’ve rarely shied from the attempt.

If you’ve learned early on that there’s no point in limiting what you can endure, then there’s little sense in limiting what you can attempt.

Quite literally, trite as it might sound, how does one know what it is she can do until she has tried? And this 45-year-old woman, like that girl who first read RWE 29 years ago, sees little point in living life sheltered from the discovery of what it is that she can do. (Which is not the same thing as saying I don’t have my dead-dog-discouraged moments, or long days and weeks of doubt.)

I also know something else, taught me with incomparable efficiency by my childhood in Memphis, and my later tuition under RWE. And it is this: There is no certificate of competency, no graduate degree, no class grade that would somehow qualify me for living here, at Brightside. No imprimature from an outside authority that would give me special dispensation in dealing with the weather or the wilderness or the wild animals or the manifest difficulties of off-grid life. To be sure, various societal authorities have endowed me with their seal of approval, but unless backed by my personal integrity and my steadfast belief in my ability to see it through, come whatever is required, of what worth is such a seal?

It is worth nothing. When snow is falling and the generator stops working and there is no communication with the outside world short of 15 mile drive, no diploma is gonna bail me out. And no government agency or local utility either. I’m on my own. Left to my own wits, my own, perhaps previously untapped capacities. Capacities I must be willing and ready to tap. And fearlessly so.
This was RWE’s most important point.

What society authorizes you to do is one thing. Societal authorization creates a feedback mechanism which, today, I would call co-dependence. (RWE might call it conformance.) In society, you can only do what you do if you’re authorized a priori from an external authority. Such authority must continue to support you in what you do in order for you to continue to believe you are worthy and capable of doing it.

What you can do by pushing yourself to find out if you, indeed, can do it (regardless what all those outside authorities might say) creates a different sort of feedback loop.

I really don’t think RWE would mind if I call it Self Reliance.

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Lady Pocahontas Jumps the Shark

The phrase “jump the shark” comes from a scene in the fifth season premiere of Happy Days (1977), when a water-skiing, perfectly coiffed Fonze decked out in swimming trunks and his signature leather jacket, accepts a dare to jump over a shark. In a series whose lifeblood was its gently self-mocking kitsch, this scene was a-kitsch-too-far, at least to some reviewers. Happy Days remained on the air for another seven seasons. Nonetheless, the term came to signify the defining moment when a favorite television show has reached its peak, after which it will simply never be the same. The idiomatic usage of the phrase has since broadened to refer to the moment when any endeavor moves beyond the core qualities that defined its success, and begins a decline from which it never recovers.

Yesterday, as I picked the few surviving (and actually ripening) cherry tomatoes in snow so thick and sticky-wet I could barely see what I was doing, the phrase came to mind. As I wrapped the not-yet-winterized chicken coop in visqueen as an ad hoc barrier against the snow and wind, among other unprintable thoughts that occurred one was dominant, so much so that I spoke it aloud: “Lady Pocahontas, you’ve jumped the shark.”

Allow me to digress as I explain.

Brightside is located in Pocahontas County, a mountainous land of about 940 square miles and 8,700 people. Named after the Native American princess, this county is easily anthropomorphized as she. Lady Pocahontas, as I’ve come to think of her. My fickle, difficult queen.

She is the mother of eight rivers, the hostess of the National Radio Quiet Zone (limited cellphone service is available in only two towns), and a doyenne of darkness. All of the traffic lights here can be counted on one hand. My Lady’s world is one of cloud-slung valleys and mist-wreathed ridges. A world of near-primordial vistas, where one might be less astonished to see a brontosaurus raise its head than an airplane take off. Since the end of vast logging operations at the turn of the last century, mankind’s mark upon her body has been relatively light. And it shows. It shows in the rolling voluptuousness of her skyline, unbroken by human constructions. It shows in the purity of the air that is her breath and the water that is her blood. In the abundance of wild animals that thrive in her lushness. In the deep silence that can be found at all times of day, and most especially at night.

But make no mistake, Pocahontas is no easy woman. Not in any sense of that word.

Even in the valleys, in the county’s three incorporated towns, living with Lady P. demands the evolution of a patience, a kind of self-soothing here-and-nowness not experienced by most Americans since the 19th century. Consider this: wherever you live here, it’s at least a two hour round trip to get everything you need. Sure, you learn to make do without and need much less, but sooner or later, you gotta go. And for most if not all of that drive there will be no convenience stores, no gas stations, no streetlights, no cellphone service, and often no radio either. You’ll only have Lady Pocahontas for company. Which is just the way she wants it. And you do, too, right? Or else you wouldn’t be here.

Well, of course, sure. But within some well-defined metes and bounds. If I do my part, she’ll do hers. I mean, can’t I get a contractural agreement?

With Lady P? (Ha-ha-ha! You poor dear.)

Here’s when I need to confess that I’ve never envisioned Lady P. as anything resembling the mythic/historic figure of the actual Pocahontas, but more Elizabeth Taylor as a neurotic/petulant/viciously self-interested amalgam of Scarlett O’Hara, Cleopatra and Richard Burton’s wife. In mud boots, fashionable winter parka and perfect eye make-up, of course.

This woman ain’t signing nothin'.

Perhaps it will help illuminate the (okay, I’ll go ahead and say it) deep distrust at the heart of my personal Love Story with Lady P. if I admit that it was September 15, the day after I wrote my last paean to her, that she froze the remains of the Brightside garden. Of course, like any well-trained vixen, she left a few come-hither dribs and drabs. A handful of heretofore mentioned cherry tomatoes, a half-dozen peppers, a bushel of sweet mama winter squash. She took all the rest. All the late beans, the last resurgence of zucchini, summer squash and cucumbers, the hard-fought renaissance of slicing tomatoes, the astonishing abundance of spaghetti squash, the mounds of culinary herbs. Frozen as if by Narnia’s White Witch.

As if?

Standing in the ruined garden on September 16, I saw her bat her shadowed eyes and shrug. Not my problem, she seemed to say. But you still love me, don’t you? I know you do.

Within 48 hours, the trees began to color in earnest. Brilliant yellows and reds. The mountainside across Hidden Valley became a living tapestry forming moment by moment, woven by invisible hands using internally illumined thread. One warm evening last week, the ridge was filled with migrating dragonflies, tens of thousands of the insects with their iridescent tails and matched sets of pearl-colored wings buzzed and clicked in the flaming goldenrod and the last of the bright white Queen Anne’s lace.
“She takes, Lady Pocahontas. But she never takes more than she gives. The trick is to be present to receive her gifts. She is always giving. Receiving is what’s difficult.” I said these words last Thursday.

It started snowing in earnest Friday night.

Yesterday afternoon, as I swaddled my chickens in plastic sheeting, I thought, with a wry sort of knowingness that can only come from deep intimacy: Lady P. has jumped the shark, this season is over. Good god ya’ll, there ain’t nowhere up from here. Just a swift slide to winter and, best case scenario, a six-month slog to spring.

As I write these words, snow is falling.

The snows of April were indeed five months ago, a while back, to be sure. Yet somehow the time between doesn’t seem quite enough. Why? It’s not that I don’t like snow. It’s not even that I don’t like winter. I have said many times that the beauty of Lady P. is never so revelatory as in the winter. Perhaps my personal problem, my hang-up, my grief comes from the fact that this simply is not what I was expecting to happen next.

Fact is: I’m not privy to Lady P’s script.

What I call “jumping the shark,” an unexpected and unfortunate season decline, Lady P. calls nothing more nor less than exactly what must and needs happen next.

My expectations regarding what needs happen next? Well, Scarlett would no doubt say something along the lines of: “Fiddle-dee-dee!”

I can only imagine that Lady P. would fully concur.

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Love, Actually.

I awakened this morning convinced that the eastern towhees have departed. These dapper thrushes with their distinctive call dominate the Summer dawn, their incessant importuning to Drink your teeaa! both cheerleader-like and just a wee bit overbearing given my growing reputation as The Tea Lady. Nevertheless, I came to appreciate them more this season than ever before.

In the rosy bloom of morning, as I lay listening, the long day’s labor not yet begun, I began to learn the voices of individual birds. I began to recognize idiosyncratic variety in a song I once believed rigidly defined. In what I’ll term the “traditional” towhee call, the second note is lower than the first while the third note is higher, and resonates with operatic vibrato. While plenty of these divas spent the summer performing at Brightside, this very world a stage where they modeled their impeccable technique and proved the crystalline clarity of each struck note again, and again, and yet again (Listen to me! Oh yes, listen to meee!), I came to realize that most towhees were less the stars of the show than chorus members, and many of them prone to singing off-score.

As the Summer progressed, a devil-may-care iconoclasm that smacked of Groucho Marx’s insistence that he wouldn’t be a member of any club that would have him, seemed to inspire the majority of towhees to improvise—as if flicking their elegant tail feathers at tradition. Sanctioned towhee song be damned.

These birds began with the highest note, or placed it squarely in the middle of the three-note run, or abandoned the third note altogether. These birds sang buzzy, raspy, flat notes, much more Jimmy Durante than Beverly Sills. One bird I came to think of as the New York Taxi Driver prefaced a quick three notes that neither rose nor fell in pitch with a sound eerily like the “Eh” that precedes Bugs Bunny’s famous “What’s up, doc?”

And now they are all gone. After reaching a peak near the beginning of August, the dawn has become increasingly emptied of song. Crickets now create the prevailing morning music, punctuated by the occasional scream of a blue jay or caw of a crow, the resonant buzz of one of the few remaining female ruby-throated hummingbirds. Sometimes now, so soon, there is no sound at all. In the aching silence that speaks so loudly of the arrival of Fall, I yearn for the babble of bluebirds, the melody of vireos, the sonorous two-note mating call of black-capped chickadees, the irresistible improvisation of towhees.

This year has been dominated by physical labor more than any other in my life. And although most of this labor has occurred outdoors, a concomitant sense of alienation from the natural world has taken root and grown within me, creating a none-too-subtle firewall I imagine as a dense hedge of multi-flora rosebushes interwoven with rapier-like black locust and hawthorn. I’ve come to believe that this unwelcome, uncomfortable, ugly separation evolved as a reflexive defense. Total sensory immersion brings forth but ever-diminishing rewards when Nature herself seems at incomprehensible odds with my purposes.

There’s playing hard to get, and then there’s intransigence and outright hostility. As with any human relationship, these behaviors do not exactly encourage trust.

There exists a tipping point (and apparently I reached it this Summer) when my capacity to extend myself to Nature is simply outmatched my Her capacity to repel my advances. Thus, if I’m to continue to be able to do what must be done physically, I must retreat emotionally. Or so I’ve informed myself, sergeant major-style: Cut the cord! Don’t take it personally! It’s just the weather! Just the woodchucks! Just the drought! Just the rain! Just the blight! Just do your job! After all, it’s not about you, Dawn.
Really?

“It just doesn’t matter.” I’ve said aloud, forcefully, trying perhaps a little too hard to channel Bill Murray in Meatballs as I’ve picked bushels of tomatoes ruined by the drought/rain cycle. As I’ve thrown out, down the hill, another round of cantaloupe scraps, leftovers from the woodchuck’s garden smorgasbord.

It doesn’t matter? Really?

I’ve come to the conclusion that perhaps the question is not, in fact, whether or not It (any of It, all of It) matters in some Cosmic Big-Picture, ultimately unknowable, self-justifying Scheme of Things, but why It (any of It, all of It) matters to me.

Why am I here, living what occurs to me in the middle of a sleep-deprived funk as an impossibly difficult, perhaps outrageously ridiculous and entirely illogical life?

There are two sets of fawns I’ve watched grow to adolecence this Summer. There is the contrary fact that from the “worst” garden I’ve ever tended in my life are some of the very “best” vegetables I’ve ever had the joy of placing on my tongue. Quality certainly trumps quantity this year. And within this paradigm I find myself more thankful than I’ve ever been for each homegrown meal. There is the spicy citrus of scarlet bee balm, the musk of yarrow, the sharp green bite of goldenrod, scents that no thorny emotional barrier can withhold. Then, of course, there’s the towhee chorus. And its sudden surcease.

Why am I here?

To paraphrase Jack Twist in Brokeback Mountain: “I can’t quit Her.”

Despite Her betrayals of my trust. Despite Her consistent fickleness. Despite the thorny hedge I erected as last-ditch defense against the sorrow of my unmet need. Despite the brutal fact that no matter how hard I try, it still may not work out between us: Nature has flat-out ruined me for living without Her.

Ruint. That’s me.

The truth of my love resonated in this morning’s silence even more than in the aural potpourri of June and July. This far into our relationship, I can’t help but notice Her, even when I don’t want to. Even when I recognize the emotional risk that such acknowledgement entails. She has taught me the meaning of the word “crush” far more fully than any boyfriend.

As I lay in bed this morning, Her early-pink sunlight glistening through the hair on my forearm, I felt Her heat burn through my brittle defenses as through a field of dry oatstraw. I watched matted thorns fall to dust. Smelled the acrid smoke of loss, grief, and forgiveness. I heard, in the empty air left by the towhees, the incomparable sound of Her breath.

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The Gloves Are Off

There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say: “It is yet more difficult than you thought.”
--Wendell Berry, Poetry and Marriage

And so it is in the life of the gardener. So many visions. Not nearly enough time. Even less—yes, even less—understanding with each calendar round.

The essential paradox of living intimately with Nature is that the truth one seeks is actually not contained in the list of facts one acquires, season after season, year after year.


Sure, the raw data, the facts and figures compile and accrue, becoming a sort of transcript, proof that one has showed up to class, certainly, but indicating nothing whatsoever about lessons learned. Tempting as it is to comfort oneself with such a litany of credits, to do so is pure hubris, and every bit as dangerous as Siren song to sailors who have no idea how lost they are, let alone how near the deadly rocks loom.

The idea that the more one learns the less she knows she knows is not a new one. When I learn one fact about nutrient deficiency in tomatoes, I glimpse a world of soil science virtually unknown to me. With every new fact I acquire, I am confronted with the depth and breadth of my ignorance. This is not the essence of the paradox I’m addressing.


The paradox at the heart of a gardener’s relationship with Nature is much more primal, and centers around the idea that every fact I acquire, everything I think I know says more about Me than about Nature. Every item on the ever-expanding transcript amounts to a projection of sorts, a desperate attempt to impose predictable order on a system viewed solely from one, very limited human perspective.


Not that there’s anything essentially wrong with that. I shudder to imagine life without Field Guides and How-to Manuals and Google searches. The challenge is remembering that the acquisition of such human-derived knowledge will only take me so far, and not one step farther, on the overgrown, nearly impenetrable path to truth.


The best brush hog is a mind that doesn’t presume to know, a mind that doesn’t project, but absorbs. A mind that, instead of insisting how it all works, marvels that it works at all.

Such wonder is the fertile earth in which humility grows. And although I’d certainly be lying if I claimed not to derive great pleasure from my tomatoes and snowpeas and unusual squash, the older I become, the more I’m beginning to “get” that the most valuable fruit of my garden is how humble I feel when I sink my bare hands into its dirt.


Of this garden’s many mysteries, I understand nothing at all. Increasingly, I gotta tell you, I’m good to go with that.

Yesterday, as I tied up grape vines gone wild and pinched back tomato suckers run amok in just a few days’ time—how does this happen?—I tried to come up with a metaphor that might convey not just my lack of understanding, but also my necessary acceptance of it. As a tree sparrow babbled at me from the vineyard wires, I came up with this:

Imagine a confectioner who has spent years icing and decorating, but never baking, cakes. Having adorned dozens of types of cakes of myriad textures and shapes, she might begin to believe she “knows a thing or two about cakes.” And, indeed, she does. No way to argue with that. But her knowledge, if she’s honest about it, is only icing-deep. Having never baked a cake herself, she can’t truthfully claim to understand what a cake is. A humble confectioner would be well advised to acknowledge her debt to cakes.

Having never germinated myself, I can’t truthfully claim to understand what a bean is. As a humble-gardener-in-training, I would do well to honor the bean I can never be, and thus never truly understand.
Oh, sure, I can learn a thing or two about cotyledons and seed coats and secondary roots and radicles. I can plant the bean seed in carefully-crafted, nutrient rich dirt. I can kneel with my nose to the ground and search for the delicate bent neck of an emerging stem. I can spray the new leaves with compost tea. I can even speak to the young plants in cheerleader tones: Grow beans, grow! I can implore them lovingly: Please!

What do I understand about the miracle of a seed becoming a plant that bears fruit I can eat and seeds I can plant again? I understand much more about cakes. And, fact is, I always will.

This year I’ve given up wearing gloves in the garden. Not for the sake of knowledge, not even for the sake of understanding, but simply because I crave the feeling of dirt against my skin. The dipped holy water of another context. A physical acknowledgment of my mendicant status. A simple sacrament that celebrates the mystery of life.

Increasingly, I gotta tell you, I’m good to go with that.

Discover more about life at Brightside Acres. http://BrightsideAcres.com