Not just for the birds

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  • Blooming

    Blooming

    …and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
    –James Agee, A Death in the Family

    We’ve had Bloom a little more than a year now. He’s an odd bird. I have to remind myself that it’s all relative. Everyone who’s had more than one dog compares the new dog to one(s) before. It’s a little unfair but we can’t help it. Of the four Brittanys, he’s the uniquest dog we’ve had so far. Even my first, Glenna, fit some prior description I had of “dog,” plus I had data from my brother’s Brittanys, and she didn’t deviate enough to warrant pause. Angus almost immediately improved on a known thing, by a good stretch. Peat initially (and easily) fit the antichrist character. Good to have got that learned. But Bloom, Bloom. Bloom. Whom?

    We named him after a fictional character we like, Leopold Bloom, from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s Bloom is a decent chap, one of the decentest. We thought, hoped, the new puppy would live up to his name. So far, I’d say he’s a good man, boy, dog. But it’s taken the entire time we’ve had him to gain even a preliminary idea of who he really is. He doesn’t show a lot of self-awareness. And there’s something in his eyes that is more like nothing than I’ve seen before. He seems, just lately, to be trying out patterns. We’ve worked with him as consistently as we can, but might as well have named him Enigma.

    Still, we love him well. Maybe once we spend time with him on the chukar hills we’ll be able to tell him who he is, but I kind of hope not. I’m finding I’m admiring the mystery a little bit, just as I admire how he moves. He does have the “Angus lope,” but with even more power.

    We’ll have more on him soon. For now, here’s a look at him growing. A scene near the end of the video shows Peat and Bloom playing in the yard during snowfall last Christmas Day. Leslie took the video while I played the pipes downstairs.

  • Yay

    Yay

    Soon we’ll head east to the west we’ve missed. Chukar season is on in Idaho, and we’ll have tried-and-true Peat and apparent prodigy Bloom with us in our travels to new (for us) and familiar places. We are excited. I’m so excited I made a silly little video of Peat. I’ll probably post one of Bloom soon, too.

    Enjoy.

  • 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)