Notebooks from the Emerald Triangle

Edition

Four And Twenty Blackbirds Baked In A Pie

The following adventures happened a long time ago when we were all blackbirds.

Map from Watershed Poetry Mendocino

I wanted to become a writer, so I could become a good reader, so I would know great writing when I saw it, to see the armature, the slant of light, to understand how texture casts shadows, to be someone for whom the whole earth of language was quite round.

Once again it is spring and poison oak has gotten all over my eyelids and my nuts. It’s in the blood. Once again it is spring and my system is infected with poison oak. This time on the edge of my right ear, the ear I tug when I’m thinking about the river, the passage, the water hawk’s search, the otter, the nest. This kind of stuff, trying to weave it in, make it current, solve the puzzle of rent by understanding the angle of drop, by keening the terror from above. Trying to fit it in.

After all, they all buggered off before I could ask any of the real questions. I mean I buggered off first, at seventeen, to the city where I worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber, and went to dances at night, where factory girls went, and we all dogpaddled together though a primordial stew made of equal chunks of Catholicism and curiosity. Dark and sweaty.

Once again it’s spring, and poison oak has got all over my eyelids, my nuts. It’s in the blood. It must be. Must be in the blood, poison oak. The drug store has fifteen creams to deal with the surface. Nothing to deal with the blood, not amongst the notions behind the glass case of theatrical jewelry. In the blood with the rest of it, the mystery of paying the rent.

At night I itch. It’s spring now. It didn’t rain much last winter, a pissant fog most of the time. I surely hope this doesn’t become a pattern. But now the sun has come out and so did the poison oak. The next thing after the question of the rent, can you go the distance? Have you got the stamina? Can you scratch and pinch and rub and squeeze this irritation until it is silent? Can you revel in it? Drop your knickers, kick up your feet, expose your bare backside to the devil poison oak. Then drink a cup of the yellow urine of swine, a cure they say in some quarters. Celebration of what’s in the blood. That’s what I’m thinking about this spring day.

*    *    *

The elk are out and in the river meadow. Four sisters, two are not speaking, one stands off by herself. Three elk and one elk stand in the river swale. They eat the grass with red tips. They are crotchety. They are ticked off. The bugs bug them and there is no wind, the day is still. The wind does not blow the bugs away and the elk are pissed. Eight ears twitch and curl and make themselves ready for an attack on the unknown. It is spring and a guy with poison oak walks with a dog through a river swale, thinking about how to pay the rent.

Four pissed off sisters lay curled in grass nests, hoping for a breath of wind. Drive those bugs all the way to the east. To say in the spring that love is bad, to say in the spring that love is lost, to say in the spring that even when all things are considered, to say in the spring that poison oak can drive a man to pinch his ear, to squeeze it to numb, to no longer think, to say in the spring, to no longer think, to meet four killer elk in a river swale, four heads sticking out of the long grass. All eyes are slanted yellow and angry, their senses are alert. To say in the spring, where is the dog?

*    *    *

I have created all the most wonderful pieces that make up an elephant but I have no idea how to sew them together. Which piece goes with which piece to make an elephant? I wrote a really terrific trunk part, set it over there next to a fat leg and a wee growthy thing. My elephant would be beautiful, every part hand-stitched, colorfast, experienced and guaranteed. Also, for those who require value added, a costume, a decorative piece, a noodle cap of fine rare silk with long tassels that get in the eyes, bright yellow with a satin sheen. And the camelback, doublewide doohickey thing, where you’d sit, if only I could get the elephant assembled.

As I say, I wrote a very good trunk, the drowning of Enid, found under the ice by fishermen digging through the snow and lake surface to fish. A short trunk story but I found it sturdy enough to hang onto while I hunted for my glasses. Perhaps that’s all I need to find. All this searching through metaphysical jungles for the lost battalion, when all I need to make an elephant is to find my glasses. Encouraging, no!

*    *    *

Because we called them the money trees, we treated them with great respect, encouraging fifty dollar bills to sprout out the side of a puny little plant on the wet side of a hill, in rocky red soil and under constant bombardment from predators: gophers, wood rats, slugs, deer, cattle. Beararrow, who doesn’t eat but sits his big bum right down on the grow bags, doesn’t care if a couple of fifty dollar bills drop to the ground. He spends my money as if it wasn’t his. And what could he possibly be doing, sitting in a small vale, under the sun, leaning back, a fat fur ball enjoying associating with big money.

*    *    *

The P.G. and E. Guy Works the Domestic Garden Variety

I’m the meter reader for the patches. Not the coal patches, the marijuana patches. I speed up the gravel driveways. Twenty-seven paces to the meter, out back, by the washing machine. Twenty-nine paces and I’m dawdling. I wear blinders, eyes down, counting the paces. I open the redwood box, look at the meter, write down some numbers. And twenty-seven paces back to the truck. I’ve known this bunch a long time. Eleven years I read their meter. I remember before. He was at the mill. She was okay, two kids. The dog was Fargo, a small sheep dog, a smiler. Fun was happening. Sometimes it took me fifty-nine steps to go one way.

Now there’s no one around, ever. Yet the cars are here. I saw both of them at the Moose dance in December. He couldn’t get his jaw unlocked. She looked as if another pair of eyeballs were strapped over her own and the whole show was choreographed by a hideous mirror. They asked me what I was doing these days. I told them I was the meter reader. They just froze, two red glasses. The dog’s called Guillotine, now. I’m allowed twenty-seven steps, two steps at the box. Then twenty-seven steps back. The dog is counting.

*    *    *

Help me out, pal, the story has slipped athwarts. It has been said that God only made two mistakes with humans, knees and eyes, and it’s the eyes of ants that I need to see behind my back. I do see well on the linear plane though. I see long sad stories developing; way too many trips to the bathroom in way too short a time. When they release the mad balloons at celebratory events, they rise with dignity at first, each comfortable with its place of rank and order. Bales of balloons bobbing in the sky, then the wind takes hold of these and each balloon sails off by itself, looks its own fate in the face. A single room for you, Mr. Balloon. Yes, the usual is available but do you mind if we take out the linen? Things being as they are, you do work lower and lower on the food chain.

*    *    *

How different we would be if we could see behind our backs. Then I would see you old matey, my friend the owl, just back on the trail, feathered leggings and eyes that can see behind the back. I ask you to keep an eye out for me. Come on your mystic wings, silent. Deliver your bare-chested hoot as to the number and nature of any pursuers. Otherwise, silence on the trail is imperative. My main chance of survival is I will hear you before you hear me. Once my heart pounded so hard, I was sure the passing cattle and their drovers could hear my blood. Duck down, dub luk, dub luk.

*    *    *

In the world of outlaws it is important to mingle with persons of the same kind. Information is crucial. Gossip, who’s gone bad, is dangerous to us. Lost our pledge code, become vacant, asleep in the afternoons, unable to push the Harley up into the back of the truck bed anymore. This is the kind of torpedo that can sink you. Mingling is essential. Basically the code is a handshake and a sawed-off shotgun.

*    *    *

Smoking pot allows me to escape to another place where I create ornate streetcars but I don’t know where to take them. So I line them up in the garage and sit amongst them imagining fantastic journeys where I get to clank the bell and leave standees on the street corner, still waiting. Next car, I yell. I’m out of service.

*    *    *

The wonderful thing about the ant eyesight is the two-time focus. You can look someone in the face but you watch that guy, there at the back, near the door. It could be a cop, a mingling stranger, an eavesdropper, who sees the lonely souls, enters through their veracity, their face, their worth with us. In my racket, honesty, punctuality, industry, that’s the bar. If you limbo under that one, we believe you, lonely or not. For we are lonely. None more lonely than the gambler.

*    *    *

The first few years I came and went into the hills during the daytime. But after the foot race where I’m battling along ahead of two rancher kids whose truck had broken down up on a hillside above my exit path, and not knowing they were there, I wandered out into their field of vision and the race was on, me heading for cover and these two guys, huffing and puffing along after me. I wasn’t growing on this ranch but I was using it to get back into the hills. After that escapade, I came and went in the dark, in the morning before the logging trucks were out, and after dark, under the moonlight, I’d head home.

But when I was moving about publicly, in the day, I used various forms of camouflage. I had a changing room about a mile from the highway where I would change my outfit. Take off my entering outfit, a Stanford baseball shirt and clean pants and put on my work gear, dirty and ripped as it was. If I was spotted in this outfit I was sure to be asked questions.

When I was exiting during the day, I would end up walking to the pickup spot along a backwater highway for a spell. Usually there wouldn’t be much traffic but if I heard a vehicle coming, I would pretend to be a power walker, a geezer guy, going for an agreeable ten-minute hike and passersby would think, look at that nut, arms flinging forward and back, vigorous high leg kicks, as if this was the most exercise I would get all week. I was dead meat in reality. I’d just hiked out of the hills for a couple of hours, slipped and slid, drank a half gallon of water, changed my clothes, and now was marching in some goomba step to pass as ordinary.

*    *    *

The Wethering Zone, the place where nature designates where you will begin the release, if release is to come; the jump-off point for all things that need to be let go. The Wethering Zone, it was once above the tailbone.

On deer antlers this is a round rough spot, usually at the stem of an antler that has been shed. A knotty deal, quite rough and reliable, this spot disconnects every spring from the whole. I find deer skulls in the woods, mountain lion victims. Young male deer, antlers clean, their release points not yet formed. They did not live, I find their skulls.

In the Wethering Zone I don’t do patter. Although they’ll say later, he had moments of brilliant eclipse. I am about the Wethering Zone, the place where things leave us, always the same spot, always the same way, a renewal, a birth, a leaving. Goodbye, take care to eat cake, and have a nice reliable Christ.

*    *    *

I knew this was going to happen. Writing in pencil, the lead gets flat. It becomes harder to read. Then there is the rain. The paper is disintegrating. The story is fading into the paper, story by story, stone by stone. That last bit gave me the chills.

*    *    *

Adrenaline … harsh drug, very emotional. It can make you fly but it has a comedown, a huge vacant blank hole-like deal develops in your epicenter. A depression can set in if you don’t find some other avenue for the release. I can tell you with the authority of experience that white powder helped us get by the fear. You can hear a rustle in the bushes, a human rustle and you don’t know whether to rush forward and confront rip offs, or to turn and creep back under the underbrush ‘cause it’s the cops.

The adrenaline rush is necessary to get to the job site, to leap out of the Volvo before dawn is up and to run from the highway, up and over the fields to the top of graveyard hill. To cross a hundred acres of sloping hill, past sleeping cows, past lame ones and dead ones, to finally sit by an old graveyard fence and watch dawn come up and spread westward over the ocean that lays before me. I watch the logging trucks zoom north, lights blazing, and I focus on the idea that my ship is coming in, it’s out there somewhere on the Pacific coast, I think of my ship many times as I climb graveyard hill.

*    *    *

I told him you have to be crazy to try to earn a living gardening