Not just for the birds

Author: Bob McMichael

  • Requiem

    Requiem

    The mood
    Traced in the shadow
    An indecipherable cause

    Heavy rain closed school today. Flooded roads. I got to work in the brewery; close. Yesterday we drove back from our quick trip east of the mountains. We looked but didn’t find. We’re out of shape and gravity keeps showing up for work.

    The Strait is mostly mud. 40 inches of rain in the last 6 weeks. I read a headline today: “How Will Idaho Recover From Drought?” Photos of dead partridges on Instagram adorn the sun-drenched November landscape, tailgate or barbed-wire as reliquary.

    Lennie Tristano recorded a tune he called “Requiem” in 1955. The blind pianist improvised the tune in response to learning that Charlie Parker (“Bird”) had just died. Tristano was a major harmonic influence on Parker’s revolutionary music, and I have to think that part of Tristano’s title came from the death of that intellectual relationship, one in which history did its best to evaporate the pianist before his own ears.

    As I walked across new (to me) terrain in eastern Washington this tune shadowed me. I don’t even like it much (“Line Up” is another thing altogether). But we don’t get to pick these soundtracks, do we? It took us 9 hours to get to chukar country — my first trip this season. It doesn’t seem like a reasonable or repeatable proposition. So that might be the cause. I don’t know what I was thinking, but it certainly wasn’t this. Life is full of surprises.

    Bloom did thrill me with one (the only) dandy point of four Hungarian partridges. Peat iced that cake with one of his classic backings. I missed an easy shot, failing to give Bloom the opportunity to think about a retrieve. Oh well. And that was it.

    Good looking country, scarce of birds
    At the edge of a big burn from this summer; probably could have picked a better spot
    Leslie and her proto-serious partners
  • Gyre

    Gyre

    A year ago we said our final goodbye to Angus, stroking him as the pentobarbital dimmed his eyes, sweet boy reposed in the back of the Jeep now owned by the man and woman who bred him. A few weeks ago, on our final day as residents of chukar country, knowing later that evening we’d be mired in the chaos of packing a 26-foot moving van and saying goodbye to people and landmarks ethereal, we rose early and took one last drive along 71 to Brownlee Summit and up our favorite road leading to the ridge we’d spent a decade marveling at Angus’s prowess as our partridge partner. With Peat scampering across biscuitroot and the 9-week-old Bloom, Angus’s great nephew, romping obliviously through greenup that — long before the season opens without us in a few months — will shine gold, we released Angus’s ashes into the biting southeast wind.

    I still haven’t cried. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

    Now, when it’s almost dark I look twelve miles across the Strait at a lighthouse whose beacon seems on a 4-second circuit. I need to learn about lighthouses. In addition to the beach, we’ve been walking on logging roads behind our house, seemingly endless miles of meandering, extremely well-maintained gravel corridors mostly through dense stands of alder, fir, hemlock, and cedar. Steep mostly, and the occasional clearcut. In places ferns. Salmonberries about to form. Occasionally a spot looks briefly walkable off-road, but mostly it’s either impenetrable vegetation or the nuclear winter of stumps, dirt, roots, rocks, and slash that define a clearcut long after the blinds go up.

    The other day some big birds flapped a startled retreat near Peat, who got electric. I saw one land in a tree, and it acted like — and was big enough to be — a blue grouse. Without binoculars, though, I couldn’t positively ID it, and it bugged me for the rest of our walk that it might only have been a giant pigeon. I need to learn the birds here.

    So yes, you could say I’m missing some things about the high desert. I feel for the dogs, but today — finally — we finally fenced (mostly) our yard so we can all sigh relief to forego the dozen daily team roping outings with tangled leashes in a vain effort to monitor Bloom’s bladder. I think he’s pissed inside more than 50 times. Just now he puddled his crate, again. Follows my slow learning.

    Adjustment. It will take time. And patience. We feel blessed but need a little reminding which isn’t hard when we look up. And I’m thinking about Angus more these days for some reason.

  • Peat Won

    Peat Won

    Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita…

    About halfway through his life, Peat has finally realized his incessant hope for a sibling who’ll play with him.

    It took less than a week. In Peat’s five full years with Angus, Angus rarely deigned even to humor Peat’s attempts to play. Peat never stopped trying, but whether it was self-respect, a religious devotion to his own dignity, or simply disinterest, Angus wouldn’t give Peat the time of day.

    Peat treated Bloom that way for a couple of days. Then, each day I could see the ice melt a little. This morning, Mothers Day, the dams are down. Peat and Bloom have been playing for several hours now, the older dog adjusting his energy and speed to cater to Bloom’s littleness. It’s beautiful to watch. Just a moment ago, Leslie put Bloom in his crate for a rest. Peat found me in the office, packing stuff for our impending move. He rubbed his head on my face, hard. He was telling me something.

  • Bloom One

    Bloom One

    Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.

    — James Joyce, Ulysses

    Related by blood both to Angus and Peat, Bloom, finally, like the spring, has arrived.

    It’s amazing our capacity for forgetting. The sudden shift of frame a puppy brings: Peat’s now the mature, even stately, one. I expected the butt-hurt, but not so much the kindness. He wants to, but isn’t sure he should, dote on Bloom. He’s on his way. But just the day before we got Bloom, Peat, age six, snagged and ate an entire extra-large Meat Lovers pizza.

    Sioux is Peat’s father, and also Merci’s father, and Merci is Bloom’s mom. Custer, Angus’s nephew, is Bloom’s dad. Bloom is calmer by several furlongs than Peat was, and that I still remember. Leslie is doing her damnedest to be Bloom’s mother, and I’m trying to take a back seat. It’s wonderful to glimpse in Bloom the distant memory of Angus. He has that steady, rocking gait, already discernible in the rotund germ of his body. We weren’t sure it was such a good idea to be getting a puppy right now, but he’s been a welcome distraction from the horror of packing for a major move. Small packages. Goodness.

  • Sea Change

    Sea Change

    appointed places set in motion like seasons. We are like salmon
    swimming against the mutation of current to find
    our heartbroken way home again, weight of red eggs and need.

    — Gloria Bird, (Spokane), from “Images of Salmon and You”

    I grew up on the Pacific. 21 years ago I moved to Idaho. I thought I’d work and live to a riper age here than it appears I will. We’re moving closer to the salt, lucky to have found work, but leaving the easy access to chukar we’ve enjoyed for so long. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t sad to imagine next opening day far away from the high desert. It’s been the best part of each year for more than two decades now. I won’t get nearly the same number of days in the field bitching about medusahead, seeking jouissance through the sight of a pointing Brittany’s ears barely visible above the bunchgrass just below the ridgeline. Inflections or innuendos? There are lots of ways to look at this. Most of them are good.

    So we have to move, sell the house and shop we’ve caressed and the soil we’ve cursed while praying for sprouts (let me know if you’re interested!). Never in my wildest dreams, before I moved to Idaho, did I think I’d live on 5 acres with a view of 5 mountain ranges, where I could hit a 4-iron across my property, or where we could let our dogs run around and eat all the horsepoop they could and not worry they’d get flattened by a Hummer. We’ll miss the nearby Weiser River Trail where our dogs’ pads get an almost year-round, traffic-free conditioning, complete with quail and grouse and turkeys (and the occasional bear, mink, and otter). The brewery will get packed up, too, and I’ll miss that until we can — at some unknown point — take it out of storage.

    A good home for a bunch of years
    The sky’s the thing here, even though it’s only Idaho
    We’ll miss this view
    So will Peat

    Chukar Culture will continue. I keep thinking of Frank Zappa’s gem, “Jazz isn’t dead, it just smells funny.” I don’t know how that connects, but it does. Maybe it means what I want to post here will smell funny for those who’ve enjoyed (or tolerated) our weird diet of chukar-scented prose. Fishy, maybe? Leslie hopes to head east with the dogs often to look for birds (hopefully not in the same way seen in Guterson’s East of the Mountains). And we’ll have the new pup, Bloom, to work into the mix, which is very exciting and promises to provide some interesting narratives.

    Bloom?

    In the meantime, we pack and strategize and plan and hope and argue and make up and hike and walk and run and fret and eat and drink and look for places to live up there (there aren’t many, sort of like here). Just so you know.