Channeling Hank

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately... to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life...."  ~ Henry David Thoreau in Walden

There is a scent created by the sun warming pine boughs that cannot be replicated by those scientists who seek to offer you a car deodorizer. It is a true Nature bouquet that will make you John Denver high the first time you smell it after a long bout of severely cold temperatures.

One week ago, I took the attached photo. Today, very little of that snow is left, and I’m having a hard time staying indoors on this long weekend with temperatures in the 60’s for the first time since early November.

My daughter and I are like cats; we seek the warm spots. This morning, in a t-shirt and my flannel pajama bottoms, I walked outside to the sunspot on the road between my cabin and Eric’s, and simply stood with my back to the sun, feeling it warm me all the way to my bones. Doing so reminded me of the halcyon days when my grandchildren were tiny, my daughter lived with me, and we would head to the back yard or the front walkway in the first days of spring to find the sun patches where we would sit and drink tea and talk for hours.

The warmth this weekend is a gift, mercifully bestowed by our mother, Nature. On previous weekends, I have been in hibernation mode, reading books while wrapped in a blanket in front of the fire, trying to keep the blood in my feet circulating. While the idea of reading by the fire may sound romantic, it is not as pleasant as you might imagine when your nose and hands are freezing. (Another reason to love the Kindle; I can lay it on my lap and keep my hands under the blanket until I need to quickly press the button to turn the page.) Today, I ate lunch outside, as I often do in spring and summer, and later threw my hikers on and simply meandered around the loop, finally coming back past Rob’s house. As we stood and talked, Bob and Jean Walker drove up in their truck, and Bob regaled us with stories of the winter of 1969, when there was so much snow in our canyon “you could walk across it.” As we talked, we soaked in the liquid sunshine, listened to the stream gushing just below us, marveled at the volume of water in the falls, and were silently thankful for this blessed respite.

Oh, I have no delusions about an early spring; I know we will have more snow, and I will have more mornings of digging out before dawn. But I’m hoping if I write all this down, when those times come, I’ll have something to think about while I shovel.

The Town Where I Live

When I left the mountain to head to my brother’s house for a family dinner last Sunday, it had already been raining since Friday. Other than water draining over the highway, road conditions weren’t too bad. There’s a drainage—“the dip”—across the road about a half mile from my cabin, and when I drove through it, my thought was, ‘That’s gonna be deep when I get home.’ Indeed it was.

When I returned at 6:00p.m., there was a bulldozer down in the dip, pushing rocks and debris over the side and into the canyon. Several cars were waiting to cross. I watched a Honda Passport make it across, so I knew the Tacoma would easily. I wasn’t expecting the water to splash all the way up and over the cab. Whoa. Deep. I planned to stay home for a few days, until the rain stopped falling or turned to snow. Good thing.

The next, day, Monday, it continued to rain, and by the end of the day the water flowing near the dip had undermined, then broken, a water main. We were without running water.

By the next morning, the highway just below the cabin was a riverbed. I walked down early in the morning, only to find that the entire road in both directions had become the run-off for the higher elevations, and it wasn’t just water—the pavement was covered over with aggregate, rocks, branches, chunks of trees and a few boulders. The dip had filled with dirt and debris and the water was now diverted in front of it, creating a huge gash in the top of the canyon over which the water was falling.

The residents of Mt Baldy keep in touch via a Google email group entitled Baldy Bear Telegraph. On Tuesday around noon, word came via email that the highway lower down the mountain, north of the village, near Icehouse Canyon, was washed out in one spot. Friends who were below the dip and above Icehouse couldn’t go up or down. Or so I thought.

My phone started ringing Monday night and didn’t stop until the rain did. I averaged one call every 30 minutes during that time—people on the mountain were calling to make sure I had food and water, people down the mountain who couldn’t get home were wondering if I could accomplish one small chore or another, turning off heaters, checking on pets. At one point, I had the keys to three different cabins. No way could I run out of food or water.

In the meantime, stories began to be exchanged. While I was sitting before a roaring fire, catching up on my reading or watching my recorded NCIS marathon, brave Baldyites were out in the pouring rain, cutting dead trees to divert the flow of water back into the streambed, bringing in heavy equipment to start work on the washed out road—and repairing the water system. (By Tuesday afternoon, our water was completely restored. I had expected to be without running water for days. Fourteen hours didn’t seem long at all—but man, was I glad to take a hot bath.) Others did what they could; two of my neighbors are nurses. On Tuesday, as I brought in firewood, they stopped to chat—in the pouring rain. They were soaked to the skin, and had hiked in from their cabin a mile or so away. They were making the rounds of the cabins in my neighborhood, checking to make sure everyone was OK, asking if anyone needed food or water.

When I found out last month that the, er, gentlemen who were going to buy my cabin had changed their minds, someone said they were “sorry” and hoped I wasn’t “too disappointed.” No. Eventually, when the cabin sells for real, I will cry when I leave this community. People wonder why I ‘put up with’ the challenges of living on a mountain. It’s more beautiful here than I can say. Beyond that, I love these people who are willing to experience inconvenience and to sacrifice personal comfort in order to make the lives of those in their community better. In a world that becomes increasingly more selfish with every passing day, I cherish that quality.

The Book of Bunk

I know I’m really enjoying a book when I start reading it aloud to my cat. Such was the case with the much anticipated new novel from Glen Hirshberg, The Book of Bunk. Hirshberg is a tremendous story teller—even when the man tells stories during his speaking engagements, the audience hangs on his words—and this book showcases his story-telling prowess in its most favorable light to date.

I don’t usually use my blog to promote the work of others. Heck, I hardly use it to promote my own work, except for a mention now and again. But this book has not been printed by one of The Big Five fancy schmancy publishers. It was done by a small press, and I’m all about small presses and print-on-demand these days. Besides all that, this is a damn fine book. Trust me. I read a lot of books as a Vine Voice reviewer for Amazon. Most of the stuff being offered to readers by The Big Five is not literary—it’s “mar-ket-a-ble”—schmaltzy or gimmicky or depraved, but not well written or well edited. Actually, it’s not edited at all.

The Book of Bunk takes place in the 1930’s (already I love it—my favorite decade) and concerns one Paul Dent, a young man who leaves impoverished Oklahoma during the Depression (the other one) and ends up in Trampleton, North Carolina, working for the government as a writer with the federal writers’ project.

That’s all I’m going to tell you. No really, I can’t give any more away. This book is magical and surreal and very real but fantastical. I think this is why I love Hirshberg’s writing so much. He leads his reader down a path that looks at first as if it winds through a pleasant garden. With a couple of turns, you find yourself in a dense forest, jogging to keep up but slowing down to take in the dark beauty that surrounds you. This is how I felt when I read Hirshberg’s previous novel, The Snowman’s Children, and the experience was renewed in reading The Book of Bunk.

I have placed an Amazon link to Bunk on this page in case you want to give in to that temptation to click on the “Buy it now with one click!” button. For more of me going on and on about Hirshberg’s work, there’s a review posted there as well.  Here's the link to Amazon:

The Book of Bunk: A Fairy Tale of the Federal Writers' Project
Or to order from the publisher directly (and get more information about what you're getting):
Earthling Publications

Old Stuff, Part 3: The Dresser

When they moved from Illinois to California in 1954, the year I was born, my parents could fit very little in the U-Haul trailer they pulled behind their Buick station wagon. One of the few items of furniture they brought with them was an oak dresser. It was a solid piece of furniture with birdseye maple drawers (except for the bottom drawer, which was made of cedar and had a hinged cedar cover).

After my father knew that he was dying, he and Mom embarked upon several home improvement projects. I think that Dad, since he couldn’t work, wanted to feel like he was being productive. Unfortunately, one of their projects was to “refinish” and “antique” the beautiful natural wood of the dresser, which meant painting it a hideous color of green, streaking that with a garish gold color, and then applying a coat of shellac which gave everything a sickly yellowish hue. They also spray painted the brass knobs the color gold you see as trim on merry-go-round horses. Yeah, it was awful. But they put the thing back in my brothers’ bedroom and we mostly just forgot about it.

Dad passed away, the boys grew up and moved out, and the dresser was shifted from one home to another. Finally, when I married in 1972, Mom gave me the dresser but made me promise that I would someday refinish it. I had every intention of doing so, but life happens.  Decades later, the dresser ended up in my two boys’ room—still the same awful color it had been since 1963, but also still functioning as a very solid piece of furniture.

Three years ago, when I moved to Mt. Baldy, we put the dresser in the basement on the day I moved in. Space is limited in the cabin, the master bedroom has a beautiful, rosewood-topped built in dresser (thank you, Richard Stutsman) and frankly I was reluctant to move the old green monstrosity into my beautiful new living space.

A week after I moved in it snowed, and a week after that we had pouring rain for hours on end. It wasn’t until several days later that I went looking for something in the basement and discovered that water had leaked (a repair that was supposed to have been completed during escrow) through the ceiling down there and had been dripping for days—right on top of the old green dresser. The wood on the top was peeling up and the drawers were warped and wouldn’t open properly. I was devastated, angry, disappointed in myself for not taking better care of something that had grown in meaning for me with every year of my life. I moved the dresser away from the leaking spot, covered it up, and tried not to think of it.

Two years went by. Last winter, after I put the cabin on the market, I knew I would have to deal with paring down, getting ready to move. I went down to the basement with the intention of breaking the dresser into pieces and taking it to the dumpster. As I examined it, though, I realized it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. The top was ruined, but it was just a thin veneer that could be replaced. The drawers were also finished with veneer and it was that which was warped, not the oak itself. Slowly, painstakingly, I began restoring the dresser, using wood glue to repair in some places, finding wood to cover the top, sanding, painting—and replacing the knobs.

Yesterday my friend Michael came up to visit and I enlisted his help. Together, we brought the green dresser out of the basement and into the bedroom where it belongs. It’s beautiful, I’m proud of the work I did on it (sorry it took so long, Mom!), and it will always be with me, truly the possession of a lifetime.

 

Old stuff, Part II

On Thursday, when I was making Twice Baked Potato Casserole for the Thanksgiving brunch I hosted, I went looking for something to “mash the potatoes a little,” just as the recipe had instructed. At first, I used a big fork, but it wasn’t doing the trick. Then I remembered Mom’s old pastry cutter.

The first time I married—foolishly, in 1972, when I was 17—Mom went through her gadget drawer and pulled out some utensils she thought I might need for my new domestic duties. In the box she handed me was an old steel carrot and potato peeler and the pastry cutter. Picking up the peeler back then immediately brought to mind memories of Grandma coming out on the train from Los Angeles to Lakewood (a 20-minute drive in a car these days), Dad picking her up at the train station, Grandma bringing day-old cinnamon-raisin bread (because her boyfriend worked at a bakery), coloring books and crayons. She was always laughing. (Not so, my mother.) The two would sit in the kitchen for hours, preparing Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, occasionally conscripting me or my sister to peel potatoes (never the boys or my father). I would stand on a kitchen stool over the sink, peeling and listening, trying to understand the conversation of two aging women quietly denigrating men, marriage and menial chores. If only I had understood more….

After I married, I used the potato peeler often, and the pastry cutter as well, baking pies from scratch and other delectable goodies that my husband hardly took time to smell before consuming. I baked my own bread for the twelve years that I was married. After becoming single, I didn’t bake bread for almost two decades. Now I do again.

And I’m cooking again, at least when I have guests over. (Seems to be a lot of trouble to go to just for me, so most days it’s frozen vegetarian dinners for me.) A few years back, when I began to entertain and cook for others, I thought I should replace some of my utensils, get some nice, shiny new stuff in case one of my guests offered to help with the cooking. At Target, I found myself staring at a wall of bright utensils, wondering if, when I bought new ones, I’d be able to toss out those things Mom had given me so many decades ago. When I realized the answer was no, I turned and walked away.

Old stuff, Part I

When my daughter was in junior high, flannel shirts suddenly, for some strange reason, became popular. Shali was stylish and fashionable (unlike her mom), and somehow we ended up buying her a really cool flannel in a sky blue and pale green plaid. The predominant bright blue color brought out the crystal blue in her eyes, and she wore her shirt proudly over various t-shirts. It was such a cool shirt, in fact, that her little brother was known to snag it out of her closet (or off her floor) and sneak it to school in his backpack so he could wear it himself.

Eventually, Shali moved on to other trends in fashion, and the awesome flannel shirt became a cast off. No doubt it would have been donated to Goodwill, but I claimed it. And I wore the heck out of it, throwing it on over t-shirts on cool autumn and spring mornings when I went out to walk the dogs or work in the garden. I loved the soft warmth of it, and wearing it reminded me of an innocent and happy time in my daughter’s life.

She’s 37 now. After I moved to the mountain, the shirt got a lot of wear. But the frequent washings took their toll, and in recent days the fabric has become so worn that the collar has frayed and there is little warmth left in it. I need to discard it. But how can I? With every passing year, it has meant more and more to me, even as its colors have faded, the once plush flannel has become a gossamer version of its once sturdy form.

I feel the same way about a lunchbox the kids gave me many years ago. It was made of a soft, foam-filled vinyl of some kind, and Shali, Ezra, Sam and Jo covered it with their signatures in puff paint to decorate it, then gave it to me when I started teaching. I used and washed the thing so many times that now the vinyl is torn, the foam padding has all but disintegrated. But how can I throw it away? When I mentioned this to my daughter last year, she bought me a new lunchbox—an exact replica of the black metal ‘Thermos’ box my dad used to take with him to work. I love it, and now I use it every day, while the old one sits atop the fridge, collecting dust.

I’m not a hoarder by any means; I’m pretty good about tossing out or donating anything I no longer need or use. But these old things… I have a need for them that transcends utility, and I count them with my most prized treasures.

On Veteran's Day

I think the happiest days of my mother’s life slipped by while she was serving in the Women’s Auxiliary Corp during WWII. I have sat with her in the past and gone through photo after photo taken back then. In every single one, she is smiling like she just won a million bucks. And for all that, she looks like a million bucks, with a stylish hairdo, tasteful cosmetics (including the bright red lipstick of the 1940’s) and a neat, trim uniform. Before she enlisted, she was somewhat transition, drifting around in the Midwest and stopping to work wherever she found a club with a house band that would let her sing along. Once she found her way into military service, she settled down into the routine of daily work—either doing clerical work or servicing military vehicles—and nightly play. In many of the photos from that time, she is sitting with handsome men around tables littered with beer bottles and cigarette butts. In my lifetime, I never saw her that happy.
My father’s story was a different one altogether. As a strong believer in patriotism, he felt it was his duty to serve his county. In 1942, he kissed his new bride good-by and told her he’d be home in a year. Then he picked up his army issue duffle and headed overseas. With the bombing of Pearl Harbor, his orders changed, and he wasn’t able to return home for five years. By the time he returned, his wife had annulled their union and had married someone else. The child she carried when he left had died before reaching the age of one. My father never got to see his firstborn son.
All soldiers make sacrifices. War is hell and most individuals return to civilian life different, in one respect or another, from the person they were when they became ‘military issue.’ I have old friends who served in Vietnam—both were marines—who have never talked about their experiences to anyone since returning home. Neither man was wounded. Both bear invisible scars.

Occasionally now I have former students who have graduated return to campus to show me their dress uniforms, to announce they’ve made it through boot camp and are shipping out to places we know are dangerous. I see in their eyes the zeal of the uninitiated. Experience will teach them much, I think, and my fervent prayer is that each will return to homeland, family, and friends as a whole person, sans scars of any kind. I know they may be embarking on one of the greatest times of their lives. Or they may be required to make sacrifices they could never have foreseen.