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.
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.
“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?
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.
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.
