Not just for the birds

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  • The End and the Beginning

    The End and the Beginning

    NOTE: I began this post in April, part way through my last quarter as a teacher at Neah Bay High School. I didn’t finish it for some reason. Now I want to get it out.

    In the grass that has overgrown
    causes and effects,
    someone must be stretched out
    blade of grass in his mouth
    gazing at the clouds
    — Wisława Szymborska

    It’s been a tough year for me out here away from birdland. I’ve missed so much and have done a terrible job dealing with that frustration. I’ve turned self-pity from a Georges Seurat triptych to El Capitan. Nothing gets through, and you know it won’t, so you stop trying.

    Or you should.

    But I haven’t, even though I’ve told myself a thousand times I should. Leonard Cohen puts it this way:

    Ring the bells that still can ring
    Forget your perfect offering
    There is a crack, a crack in everything
    That’s how the light gets in

    Until this afternoon I’ve all but ignored that light (despite focusing, obsessing on the cracks). Right now I’m sitting at my desk in my classroom overcome with overdetermined light and a few tears shed by an epiphany coming from a conversation with a student about the last stanza of Wisława Szymborska’s 1993 poem, “The End and the Beginning.” “…someone must be stretched out / blade of grass in his mouth / gazing at the clouds.” The poem is about recovering from the destruction of war. I hadn’t read the final image correctly, and I hadn’t even chosen the poem but rather used it as one of the readings in a canned textbook unit (something I’d never done until now, which — if you’re a teacher — will tell you something about my state of mind). And so here comes the student, trying to finish writing answers to the questions in the textbook, and we worked through it together, and we both saw the light at the same time. Dead center in the stanza is the word “must,” which is a word we must become desensitized to in order to endure parents’ and teachers’ and authority figures’ orders, or to make haphazard guesses as to whom is knocking on the door (“It must be the postman…”). But everything depends on that word here because, without it, the thing that signifies recovery can not happen. Someone must be lying there on the grass without a care in the world.

    When I was about 10 years old, still disgusted by the two-year-old fact that the Beatles had broken up, I edged up the alphabet to the next good thing to listen to: Beethoven. My favorite composition of his is the adagio to his string quartet Opus 132, the “Heiliger Dankgesang,” which he wrote after recovering from a near-death experience. If you haven’t heard it, it’s worth a listen because I think anyone can hear the joy of a kind of breakthrough, and we can all use that kind of experience from time to time. It was a rough year, two years, for everyone, and we’re still not out of it. Remember that, and remember to remember that you yourself are not exempt from the need for TLC. There were many times this past year when I felt I’d reached the end, and things like this string quartet, or like the experience with the student (I wish I felt I had the space here to do justice to that moment, and to the student himself) cracks open the chance for a beginning. We all must have those moments. They’re everywhere, but sometimes hard to see.

    So I’ve missed birdland, as I knew I would but didn’t know how much it would matter, and now see the chance to return to it, wherever or whenever that may be. All the responses to my previous post (“Granted“) were so kind and thoughtful and sincere and helpful. They’re the light that’s got through the crack, and I’m so grateful for it. I’m also just now realizing that after Beethoven, the next musical light that came on for me was just up the alphabet a bit: Bird (Charlie Parker). Which makes me think of Steven Feld’s amazing book on the Kaluli Indians of Papua New Guinea (Sound and Sentiment), whose existence is wholly wrapped up in the sounds of birds in the rain forest they live in (they rarely actually see the birds because the forest is so dense), so much so that when they describe those sounds they weep. Tears of joy. At the end of his time living with the Kaluli, Feld played them a recording of Charlie Parker, telling them he was called Bird. When they heard the recording, they wept. Tears of joy. I can hear the chukar calling.

  • Granted

    Granted

    “I took it for granted.”

    For granted. It’s one of those things we don’t want to admit to doing. It’s come to my mind a lot in the past year, mainly in thinking about where we used to live. I tried hard not ever to take for granted living in chukar country. This blog is my evidence. That doesn’t mean I’m not surprised by what transpired in the last year. I guess that’s a good thing. Still, we have to move. Again. The word “regret” shares a lot of letters with “granted.”

    During our recent 3-week trip in the camper, mainly to fish in Montana, we talked a lot about what we want and need in a place. At the top of my list is that it has to be within an hour of good upland bird hunting on public land. Second: within an easy day’s drive (<5 hours) from good trout fishing. Third: within a “reasonable” distance from an airport. Fourth: a town small enough to have a decent grocery store, at least one restaurant that serves beer, and one high school so I might substitute teach. Skewing all this is adding the word “chukar” before “upland.” We have some places in mind. Suggestions?

  • Saudades

    Saudades

    One summer while home from college I waited tables at an Italian restaurant in Laguna Beach run by some racist Milanese who’d recently emigrated from apartheid South Africa. How they ended up in Laguna I’m not sure, but their attitudes about people struck me as not only offensive but ironic considering that the kitchen and busing and cleaning staff were entirely Mexican. One of the other waiters was Reynaldo, a guy I liked, from Brazil. I’d been listening to a Brazilian musician (Nana Vasconcelos) whose latest album was titled “Saudades,” and I asked Reynaldo what it meant. Reynaldo, by the way, spoke English better than I did.

    Reynaldo’s answer was my first lesson in the poverty of my native tongue. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but I remember pretty clearly his frustration at trying to translate into English that single Portuguese word. Google’s definition (above) comes close to his translation but maybe because the concept the word conveys resides in the darker emotional spectrum Reynaldo’s exasperation still resonates with me: it can’t fully be said. It must be felt. I envy language like that.

    So, with about a week left in the chukar season, I’ve been feeling very saudade. This season is the first time in more than 20 years I haven’t sighted a chukar behind one of my dogs. If you’ve read this blog, you know I’m prone to self-pity, and it’s peaking right about now. I admit it, but am determined to do something about it. I’m not sure what, but it’s worse than I expected: missing the season was one thing, but missing it with an increasingly remarkable Brittany puppy and another beloved and accomplished chukar dog in the prime of his short life, both of whom have had to make do this fall with one bitterly cold, snowy quail hunt and the occasional spectral ruffed grouse, is something I hadn’t anticipated.

    We’ll get ’em next year.

    Breakfast in the hotel the morning of our last hunt of the season: snowing sideways, 12 degrees.
    Leslie moving ahead of pointing Bloom and backing Peat
    Bloom pointing quail
    Peat backs Bloom
    Bloom’s first retrieve of a game bird: a huge relief (considering Peat ate the first 6 birds I shot over him)
  • 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
  • Ebbing and Flowing

    Ebbing and Flowing

    “The road to Neah Bay is serpentine, a thin twist of wet double-yellow-lined gray. It flirts for twenty miles with the edge of cliffs that seem to stand at the mercy of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and its wide swath of soon-to-be Pacific Ocean. Mapmakers mark it as scenic when it would be better marked IMAX: waterfalls and cliffs and mud slides on the left; white-capped blue water on the right.” — Robert Sullivan, A Whale Hunt

    There is only one way in and out of Neah Bay and I know the road like the back of my hand now and take every opportunity in between hairpin turns to look out to the water for gray whales, big waves, and cargo ships carrying colorful stacks of containers. Back home in Idaho when I’d drive the winding road into the canyon to go chukar hunting I knew every hairpin turn, too.

    Our first major purchase besides our house just outside Neah Bay was a big portable generator because the locals told us that in the winter the power goes off a lot and sometimes for three days. We were also told to have supplies like food and water in your car in case you get stuck behind a landslide, and even to carry a chainsaw in case a big tree falls over the road. It rains 144 inches a year here, and life on the Peninsula is dictated by the tide charts and storms which come often. One second it’s pouring rain and then it’ll be sunny. We were also told it doesn’t start raining a lot until November but it rained 20 inches in October and an inch a day so far in November. After 40 years of living in Idaho where it rained 12 inches a year it’s been hard to get used to the wet climate.

    This past summer in-between home improvement projects and the many trips to Home Depot and shopping two hours away we took the dogs out exploring and we’ve found some logging roads so the dogs can run off-leash. These roads start at sea level and head up into the coastal mountains forking, intertwining, with dead ends and roads you can see on maps but they don’t exist anymore or have gotten so overgrown you can’t find them. In this part of the Olympic Peninsula where tall Sitka spruce, red alders, and Douglas Firs grow thick, they have provided a nice canopy to get out of the rain; but sometimes the precip smothers me, so I’ll seek out the huge clearcuts in the forest where I find solace and familiarity like the wide open spaces back home in Idaho.

    Bloom is almost 7 months old now. He’s turned into a beautiful dog with long legs and a show dog gait that when he runs reminds us of his great uncle Angus. He moved here with us when he was 8-weeks old and has only known the rain forest and the smell of ruffed grouse and the chukar wing that he chased around the backyard before pointing.

    Bloom and the Salish Sea

    We’ve been out looking for birds but grouse hunting in the rain forest can be a tricky proposition we have found out. Besides being steep and wet, it’s so thick of sword ferns, brambles, and tangled deadfall that when the dogs do occasionally find a grouse, trying to get close enough and into shooting range before they fly is next to impossible. I thought many times about just shooting my shotgun into the air to see what kind of reaction Bloom would show.

    Grouse hunting in the Olympic Peninsula
    Solace in the wide open clearcuts

    We all carry a relationship to land and to the place that we call home, or in my case the place that I used to call home and that is or was part of my identity. It was what molded me. The pull back to the place where I felt connection through nature and place was too strong to resist, and like a salmon heading upstream from the Pacific and back to the place it was born, I felt like I had no choice but to go. I said goodbye to Bob as he headed off to school one day and loaded up the dogs in the pickup and headed East and to a place where I knew Peat would find birds for Bloom.

    After eight hours of driving the landscape around The Dalles, Oregon changed from emerald green to brown, dry, and parched. A few hours after that when I finally got down into the canyon and to familiar places that had green shoots of bunchgrass growing back, cattle were now covering the hills and grazing it and eating all the grasses down to the nub that would — if they’d live — provide cover for the birds. I was sick to my stomach because of the overgrazing.

    My excitement and happiness being back to familiar surroundings was taken over by my anxiety and fear of going hunting alone with no cell service and I worried about everything that could go possibly wrong in taking a puppy hunting chukar for the first time. Things that went through my mind were, what if Bloom gets lost, gets torn up by barbed wire, bitten by a rattlesnake or falls off a cliff or his pads get ripped up from the rough rocks. My worst fear was what is he’d be gun shy or he he’d be a jerk and blow through every one of Peat’s points.

    Bloom and Peat on the chukar hills

    It was mid-afternoon when we finally arrived to the place where we parked and I put the collars on the dogs and took my shotgun out of its case and headed out. It felt great to be out of the pickup after the long drive. Within ten minutes Peat found some birds and when I got up to him he was in his classic Peat point which is almost comical but beautiful at the same time. Bloom caught up to us and seemed oblivious of what Peat was doing. I wanted to yell at him, “Look at Peat, back him!” Bloom instead was intensely smelling the ground and running around, and then he ran right through the covey of Huns that were hunkered down near some sagebrush. I lost my cool and in my frustration didn’t get a shot off and instead watched the birds fly away. I watched Bloom watching the birds and it was almost like he realized that we weren’t out for just a hike but we were actually hunting. It dawned on me that Bloom only knows rain forest scents and had never smelled Huns before, in addition to all the other smells of the High Desert. On the next couple of coveys of chukar and that initial group of Huns that Peat would eventually relocate, Bloom honored him. I was so relieved. Bob assured me before I left that Bloom is going to be good. He was, and nothing bad happened.

    After the hunt, I found a dispersed camping spot and I watched the sunset over the Wallowas. I could see in the distance the mountains and ridges that I’ve covered on foot, hundreds of miles over the past ten years with Bob, Angus, and Peat and know like the back of my hand just like the serpentine road back home in Neah Bay.

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