Dog's Plot

Garlic Forever

2011-11-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.facebook.com/david.s.warren

Non-stop, Dog's Plot, Scatter-Shot, Orchard crop of November Garlic...... some of which I will keep growing under plastic, some I will eat now, but leave most to grow until the ground freezes...which it hasn't done yet in January....then mulch if it does freeze, and allow it to mature next Spring.

The weeds then will be mostly garlic, and I will eat them. The deer don't much care to. The chickens and cats don't eat the garlic unless it is cooked, and then they love it. And since I eat nothing without a lot of garlic( except for beer and ice cream), the deer and wood tics avoid me.

Great Great Grandfather's Giant Red Wasps , and Other very brief Historical Recolections of the North Country

2011-11-02T10:45:00.000-07:00

Great Great grandfather Noah Davey, second son of Reverend Severn-Keel Davey, dropped out of Harvard Divnity school, and moved into Rose Cottage: the old home of his Grandmother...and he very quickly discovered that Rose Cottage had been taken over by giant, red Wasps, such as you never want to see. The rest is history.

Serious Falls

I have seen this falls on the Oswegatchie River ,with deep snow covering those fallen pines... and a deer path all the way across.

When I was in my twenties or thirties my Dad and I were trout fishing here for the hundredth time. I was standing about where I stood when I took this picture and watched as he slipped on the rock, into the sluice and got washed down to the pool.

He shook it off pretty well and we went on fishing up the river that day ..., but I knew then that he could die, and ten or twenty years later, he did.

How Mule Deer Came to the Adirondacks

Granddad and friends went to Texas and Mexico by train around nineteen hundred.... at a time when our Eastern Whitetail Deer were about extinct, and he came back with a a dozen sets of mule deer horns...which were much bigger than our white tail horns. He also brought a few set's of long horns and an occelot skin. He was an ardent hunter-conservationist, when hunters were about the only conservationists, and helped do everything except backpack fawns into the woods, to help bring back the Whitetails. Now there are more deer there than ever, and turkeys which weren't even there before. Recently, Cougars have been seen in the Lake Bonaparte area.

I myself, haven't been up there for a few years now.

Rhinoceros Hills

2011-11-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

Years and years ago, there was a story with a very long title, after which it got off to a very slow start, so we used to think would never end......which it nearly did. See here:
.

Confrontation in the Basil Patch

2011-09-24T17:24:00.000-07:00

We are being watched by a thousand eyes....only some get very close.

In Olive's Garden

2011-09-20T13:13:00.000-07:00

Why I Married a Chicken

2011-07-02T19:13:00.000-07:00

   When I introduce visitors   to my wife Olive, most of them pretend not to notice that she's a chicken , and are too polite to ask why   I married outside my species. So let me explain.
                    First of all: our relationship is not about sex. Get that out of your mind.   Ours is a marriage of   mutual benefits and general convenience.   Of course it is more convenient for Olive than for me, and unfortunately, eggs are not one of the benefits.   Hens, like other women, are born with a limited number of ovaries to let down in a life tIme - around three hundred and fifty for a hen - but Olive stopped laying long before reaching that limit, no doubt as a result of her abuse by the other chickens.

    I don't know if it was the roosters or the hens who ganged up on her, but   one morning during the first year of the flock,   I   found her lying in a corner of the coop, beaten nearly flat.
She is a Dominker, which is a breed common in the nineteenth century, before Asian varieties were bred into the European stock, and different enough in feathering     and comb that the other   chickens   discriminate, to say the least. Her several brother Domikers had already been driven by the other roosters to the periphery of the flock, where they have not survived.

    I carried her up to the house and set her in a box on the floor by the chair where I write.
         I put her food in a bowl on the kitchen floor along side the dog dishes, but each evening at roosting time she insisted on climbing up over my lap to spend the night on the back of my chair, The gallon can of Olive Oil sits on the shelf behind her. And so, she became Olive.

     After a week or two,   I tried to reintroduce her into the chicken coop....but the hens immediately attacked her, so I brought her back to the house.
          And when I put her out among the ranging hens, she would immediately fly at them in like a hopped up rooster in a cock fight.

        She had less of an aversion to the roosters, and would occasionally offer herself to one of the favorites I sometimes allowed into the house.
She also started crowing occasionally......never the complete phrasing, but two thirds of it, which is more than I have ever heard from the other hens.
         My mother used to say, "Whistling girls and crowing hens, always come to some bad end." But there isn't much I could do about it.
      The crowing behavior first began when I would leave the house.... or even the room.
           She would also crow sometimes when I sang. This first occurred   a couple of years ago when I began doing my weekly video weather report for the Tiny Town Times. She was usually sitting on the back of my chair when I recorded the sitting down portion of the video, so I incorporated her in it, as Olive the Weather Hen.

           I guess that was a good move. Olive became famous, with more fans than me in my role as Davey Weathercock, and she aroused more interest than the substance of my weather comentery.
         For a while , before the economic crash, we made a weekly salary which kept us in chicken feed and wine, for which Olive has developed a taste.   We entertained a number of eminent Olive seeking pilgrims.


   They don't love her any better than I do. Olive is an indiscriminate, serial pooper, but a fussy housekeeper otherwise, and spends hours a day poking around, examining small objects and specks of nothing much, and generally policing the floor. She even caught a mouse in here once, and always grumbles when one is heard gnawing in the walls or when one flits across the floor. Or imagines that she does. We share meals and maybe a nip of wine. When I write, she is at my feet or at my head. Her influence on my writing is obvious.

       Waking mornings, we talk for a while her language mostly, between my bed and her roost. If I don't get up soon enough, she will come off her roost, waddle across the room and fly up onto my stomach.

Then I have about five minutes to roll out and get her some breakfast (chopped cabbage usually) and if I don't, she takes her morning dump on me.
     Sure I have some cause for resentment,and I am quite tied down here by my obligations to her, but it is all by choice and I would have only my own choices to blame. I could have eaten her long ago,   She sheds feathers on a regular schedule and I collect them in a bread bag. I already have enough to make the illusion of a replacement Olive, but of course, a bag of feathers, or even a whistling girl could never replace Olive.

First Truths

2011-06-16T05:01:00.000-07:00

When I was five, the world was round on the bottom, and   flat on the top, with a plastic dome to keep people from going off the edge.
       I stayed close to home , but started an exploratory hole to China. That attempt didn't get further than the hard pan, but I also explored gravity and travel very briefly, by tying on a towel for a cape and trying to fly off the roof of the Bray's chicken house.
Clara Bray, the chickens, and her parents, whom I don't remember ever seeing,   lived up the road on the edge of the village .
           One day little Clara   wandered into our yard where I was playing, and told me    her mom and daddy were not home, and that she knew zactly where her daddy kept his bullets ....... so we could take some out back and splode them.

     The box of 30.30 cartridges was on a shelf behind the door at the top of the cellar stairs.
        We took a few and went way out back , where we put the cartridges on a rock and threw stones at them.
               This experiment also failed, and we wandered on a little further toward the horizon.
     We soon came to hedge row where three kids a little older than us were watching a brother and sister; she on her back and he sitting on top,   trying to push his limp dinky into her girl thingy..... but there was nothing doing with that experiment either.

      Clara went home and   I headed back too, but our family friend, the widow Manie Lyons, saw me passing through her back yard, and brought me inside for milk and a cookie, then walked me home.
          Mom had thought all that time that I was still out in the garden with my grandfather and the dog.

     My grandparents lived next door to our own house, which had been my Great Grandfather's and the location of his medical practice. My mother had been born there.
I didn't understand houses to be built by people, but more like living things which engendered and sheltered humans.
The next year we would move to Ithaca...... a long drive from the center of the world ..... and   I didn't imagine we could move without the house .   I asked my mother how exactly it would happen,   and I was sure for years afterward that she told me a big wind machine would come and blow it the house onto a truck.
I was bitterly disappointed when the day came and we left the house behind.

There had been no preschool or kindergarten in Natural Bridge, so when I entered school for the first time in Ithaca,   I was a slow learner in everything with letters or numbers in it.... but when a teacher with a grapefruit and oranges represented the solar system and the motions of the planets, it made better sense to me than the old half-dome model. And not long after, when another teacher used the same fruits   to show atoms with orbiting electrons and so on, something in me clicked and I realized that the stuff of the world is the same    on the inside, as it is on the outside: a fractal universe,   This made perfect sense of gravity and most everything but sex, death, and time.

Boy With Guns

2011-05-16T13:11:00.000-07:00

   Out of the Closet

Our family guns stood unclothed in the back of Mom and Dad's bedroom closet, and every once in a while I went in there to handle them:    the Marlin, lever- action, thirty-thirty, with which Dad    shot one deer ever; his bolt- action twenty- gauge shot gun, with a safety release so slow that I would never see him get off a shot during the few years we would eventually hunt together; and the little Winchester Pump .22 my grandfather   had taken in payment of a debt. It was the model Annie Oakley used to break clay pigeons in exhibition, and the one they used to have on chains at carnival shooting galleries.   Granddaddy had given it to Mom, who was all he had begotten for a son. After my grandfather died, the closet inherited   his own Marlin deer rifle and   the sixteen- gauge double-barreled Fox shot-gun I would do most of my hunting with.
Four or five cavalry and dress swords and an antique musket leaned in the back corner of the closet.... brought from the attic of our house in Natural Bridge, where they had been stored when not being used in the annual Veteran's Day parade. The gun's stock had four notches which I counted as dead soldiers.
        It was meant to be loaded at the breech with a paper cartridge. Then you placed a detonator cap over a nipple at the breach, under the external hammer.
        I snuck it out of the house a few times to use in   improvisational enactments around the Civil War memorial cannons in the East Hill cemetery.
    On the large pediment behind the two cemetery cannons was the brass statue of a Union soldier, holding a real gun, not unlike our family musket.    A few years later, someone would wrench the gun out of the cold brass hands, and a few years later yet, someone toppled and stole the soldier himself , so   the city replaced it with a stack of bowling balls , meant to represent cannon balls, but two or three times too big for the cannon bore. The two cannons were not plugged flush with the opening of the bore, so you could    put a lit fire- cracker in there, then (very quickly) a bunch of oak leaves and acorns.......which would scatter, splatter on tombstones, and drive a whole surge of attackers all the way back to Dewitt place.

In the heat of   play, I discovered that if I put a wad of cap gun caps in the hollow of the musket hammer, it made a terrific explosion, which would blow the hammer back and shoot flames sideways.     One day when I visited the closet,   I imagined that t if I were to drop a firecracker down the barrel of the musket and then drop a marble in on top of it, I could probably shoot clear across the gorge.
        So I took the gun, a marble, and a firecracker out behind the house to the edge of the gorge, where I lit the firecracker....but the firecracker had a faulty quick fuse, and it went off when I was just about to drop it down the gun barrel.
Streaming banners of blood from my thumb and forefinger, I hid the gun in the entryway, and then told my mother about the defective firecracker. I never told her about the gun.   I hadn't even gotten the firecracker into the barrel, so it was a firecracker incident not a gun incident.

         Sheriff of Lewis County

Every summer the little Winchester went with us and our bee bee guns up to lake Bonaparte to be ready in the rack beside the fireplace , along with all the rods, and canteens, and creels,   My Grandaddy sometimes took the Winchester along when fishing for Northren Pike, because they can rake you badly with their baracudda teeth or tangle you up in hooks and wires if you don't dispatch them before bringing them into the boat. We have a picture of Grandaddy standing in front of our camp with three bass and   a   big Northern Pike, strung between Red Pine trunks behind him, while he holds a spread-eagled Red-Tail Hawk he had shot out of the sky on the same expedition.   Hawks were considered bad guys back then
     Grandaddy had grown up working, the son of a Civil War Veteran disabled at the horrific battle of St. Petersburg, and had done about every job in county. outside of doctor, lawyer, and undertaker. He was a railroad telegrapher when he met my Grandmother, and he was even Sheriff for a term. He didn't get to keep his service revolver after his term as Sherrif, but I still have the holster, and one .38 caliber load, and he kept the ethic.
           One day when I was eight or so, and the rest of the family had gone to town, Granddaddy and I were sitting out on the screen porch on the lake side of camp , when we saw two guys in a little putt-putt   shoot a sea gull right out in front of the island.   A sea gull was not exactly equal to Loon on the protected list......but Granddaddy put his pipe on the copper sombrero, went in and grabbed the Winchester, and.....for some reason...... told me to come along down to the boat house.
The Evenrude and the light aluminum boat were new back then and we caught up with the put put bang gang boys easily.
      Grandaddy cut them off, quoted laws,and cussed them out.   I don't recall that he showed the gun. Mostly I remember our righteous excitement.



   Great Balls of Fire

My   Dad's father was a Baptist minister who died   when Dad was twelve, and probably wouldn't have introduced him to guns anyway. Dad was always more comfortable at the fishing level of blood sport , and he mostly just loved the society of camp with all the tradition and stories. He became a boy scout leader, and he wrote the charter for the Elijah Lake hunting club, of which he, my Grandfather Failing, and my Great Grandfather Dr. Drury, were all charter members.
     Once or twice every summer we would go up on the flat boathouse roof with the Winchester....Mom often included...to throw cans into the bay and shoot at them.....hear the bullets glancing off the water and stinging through the trees.
     At least we didn't deliberately point the gun at anybody, and by age fifteen or sixteen, I did have the actual firearms safety training required to get my hunting license. I joined the high school gun club, and was a marksman on the high school rifle team, which used government supplied amunition to practice one night a week in the old High School Gymnasium. I knew makes and models of guns like other kids knew cars models,
      Since I got my hunting license before my driving license, my mother would sometimes drive me out to the country and drop me off somewhere to hunt grouse with my Grandfather's double barreled sixteen gauge Fox .   It has a thumb-operated safety which I can quickly and easily push to release while raising the gun.       Unless you hunt with a dog, it is always a surprise, and usually a shock when you flush a grouse in cover.        Their stubby wings and pumped pectorals can rocket the birds just about directly upward ....sometimes right out of a snow bank,...... with such a roar that it might cause you to shoot your foot........ and as soon as a grouse is up, it swerves and cuts back, to put a tree between it and you.
     When grouse flew up, I often   shot off both barrels at once in the general direction of the sound.
One afternoon, in grouse cover where it had no right to be, a crow flushed out of a small pine very close to me.....and I shot him. Poorly.
     The crow fluttered down and sat there on the ground cussing me .
     I tried to gather it up to take the thing home and save it somehow........ but the crow wanted nothing to do with me, so I had to finish killing him. Nevermore maybe.

    Dad hunted with his bolt-action twenty gauge.   It had a clip holding a second and third shot, but he needed to take his hand off the trigger and use thumb and forefinger to pull the safety off, which is just one reason why I never saw him even get off a first shot.
       He didn't care that much. "We saw a lot of nice country", he would say. It was a "Pleasure Exertion".   When we went fishing, he preferred to row while I did the casting. He wanted me to succeed.
               One weekend in October when I was sixteen we went up North to close camp for the winter.
        Saturday afternoon, while Mom cleaned out the fridge, Dad and I took the shotguns to hunt along the abandoned road from our north shore of Lake Bonaparte toward the ghost town at Alpina,        I was walking in the left rut, my Dad in the right, when   a grouse roared up just beside the road on his right.......and, before the bird could get a tree or my father between him and me, I snapped off two shots right across in front of my Dad's face....about forty five degrees past my legitimate range of fire.

   The grouse fell like a frozen turkey

         "Great Balls of Fire!" was all my Dad said. Or maybe it was "Great Scott!" or even "Great Day in the Morning"   He could use any of the three great expressions for a wide range occasions.
    Maybe he said all three things that day...... but we hunted on toward Alpina, and nothing more was ever said about the incident.

Shooting the Bear or Not

      If you have met me, I have probably told you some version of this story, and if you have had me over for dinner, you have heard it twice.
      My Dad had sent several law school graduates to Alaska to take jobs in the new state's government, and one of those students, Buzz Miller, suggested that I would see some beautiful country and trout like I had never dreamed of, if I cared to come up to Alaska for a summer.    I could stay with his family while I looked for a job.
     So, after my freshman year of college, I borrowed the plane fare from my dad, and flew to Alaska to look for work.        Maybe a job standing on an outrigger with a huge fly rod, casting a fly the size of a rooster   to catch overweight Salmon   .... but in Anchorage, I discovered that one had to buy onto commercial fishing ventures, and that the only job openings were on railroad Extra Gang living in side track set ups in remote areas....... or camping with a rifle   at the mouth of a salmon stream, to keep fisherman from poaching within set limits.
      R.O.T.C. and Rifle Club didn't hardly qualify me for the salmon guard job, and the idea scared the romance right out of me, but anyway, I wanted to be the one doing the fishing, and railroad tracks generally run beside rivers, don't they?
   I filled out the railroad application, signed away my right to strike or organize, and went for my physical exam with Dr. Merrit Star, a friend of Buzz Miller     Dr. Star invited me to warn him some weekend when I could make it in from the extra gang, and we would fly to a fishing camp he had built back in the bush across the inlet.
    That was good, because there was no fishing where I was going.
Two days after making my application, I took a running jump off the moving train, way out on the line between Seward and Anchorage, beside a river so white with rock powder from the glaciers looming over us, that no fish could survive in it. And most of the time off work for the next weeks, I would be too beat and back broke to walk down to the river anyway.

    No fish, but there were plenty of bears. Three to six of them appeared every evening soon after our cook dumped the dinner leftovers on the other side of the tracks. We came out to watch and may have fed them a cookie or two by hand.... but the Foreman were told there might be a dangerous, wounded bear among them.
     The track patrolman , called Boomer on account of of his unmuffled gas car engine which echoed   half an hour ahead of him, always brought along a .22 to sting critters off the track, in case his booming hadn't already done the job.
        Our foreman said that if he himself wasn't around, and one of us saw a bear with as mean limp   among the regular scavengers   then we should just go get his gun and shoot the bear.

      Alcohol was not allowed out on the line, but guns were. In Anchorage, on my first weekend in from the Moose Pass section, I went to a pawn shop between bars on Fourth Ave and bought a .22 revolver for twenty-seven dollars and fifty cents.    It was not for stinging bears,   and only accurate enough to shoot yourself in the head, but, because the chamber wouldn't take anything more than .22 short cartridges, not powerful enough to kill yourself that way.
       One night as the train rolled by our side track, I fired the revolver out the open other side window of my compartment   and I couldn't even hear the report ..... but could see flames leaping out the sides. That gun was useless for anything , except maybe for display during hold-ups and hostage situations.
On another weekend I flew in a Cessna Flat plane with Dr. Star , and his fishing buddy Ed, to the camp Star had built back in the bush across Cook Inlet....all using materials he had flown in.
   Ignorant, uneducated bears will be curious, and that Spring a curious bear had broken into the cabin when the Doctor was not there. Dr. Star shot the bear when it returned.
     He had nailed It's hide to the outside of the cabin to warn away other bears.

     The bear hide was still there when we arrived, but the porch door and the main door behind itwere hanging open.
          A bear had come in the window , opened the cupboards, bitten and sucked the life out of every can in the place, including the bug spray; then sprayed and shat over the floor, and gone out by way of the doors.

     We cleaned up, went fishing, caught fish, cleaned and ate them, then threw the dinner remains out on the garbage pile down toward the lake, so that no bear would need to come in after them.

   We played cards and drank whiskey until near midnight when it was still hardly dark yet .

     Dr. Star said he had already shot his bear that year, and Ed, who taught at a remote native school, had shot his bear too, so I should be the one slept on the porch with the bear rifle that night...... just in case the bear came back.   The assignment was something between a ribbing and token honor   I suppose, but I lay awake for quite a while, zipped up in my grandfather's mummy bag against the cold lake breeze, listening.
            Before I knew I was asleep, I was startled awake   by a bear , testingly dragging his claws across the porch door screen.
     I rolled over and reached for the rifle, but zipped in the bag as I was, just rolled off the cot, thumped to the floor , and knocked the gun over with a clatter.
     By the time I was out of the bag and at the door with the gun, he was running straight away on all fours over the garbage pile.
I had the gun trained on his butt but Ed had come up behind me and pushed the gun down.    I don't know if I would have shot the bear ,    but   that couldn't have turned out well.

A Gun is a Gun, is not a Gun

Guy Ackerman   had thick trumpet player lips and a sparse beard he had grown while offering trumpet lessons, and half starving through the winter in Anchorage. Out on the extra gang, he would stand out across the track blowing his trumpet, which would get a wild thing bouncing back and forth off the mountain and ice walls. Trumpet players should go to Alaska and get dropped off between Moose Pass and Portage, just to do that.      Guy was not planning to starve through another winter in Anchorage, but he had bet his father that before he came home to Cedar rapids, he was going to shoot a bear.
           One day when the foreman was away and we were watching the evening bears feed across the tracks, one of the   bears appeared to Guy to be limping.... and so maybe it was one made dangerous by having been fired at by the track patrolman.   So Guy got the rifle and shot the bear.
The assistant foreman who was a zoologiy graduate student in Arkansas, helped us skin the bear, and   butchered it for the cooks, then built a fire to boil the head so he could collect the skull. We all stood around and watched it bounce through half the night, telling stories and jokes.....including of course the perennial one about the dumb green horn who is told that to become a real Alaska Sourdough, you have to shoot a bear, sleep with a squaw, and piss in the Yukon.....So he goes off into the bush, and comes back a month later, all tattered and bleeding and clawed up, asking , where was that squaw he had to shoot.
The next evening, Guy and I spent some hours scraping the fat of the hide, then he wrapped it for mailing to Iowa.

    Through the Anchorage classifieds, Guy and I got a ride with an oil worker driving down the Alaska Highway to Seatle.    He said he needed to know if we were carrying any guns, and I told him I had the revolver in the suitcase. That was fine; I should just keep it there, and not mention it to anybody.
On down the highway, Guy and I pissed in the Yukon.
    We crossed back into the U.S. without incident or gun talk.
We hitch-hiked across the country, driving the last half of the way in a car which we bought for forty-five dollars from the guy who picked us up. It came with an M.P, helmet which he kept visible in the back window to prevent speeding tickets.    He didn't have the registration with him, but said he would send it along. We left him off in North Dakota and of course no registration would ever appear, but, with some incidents along the way, but we were not stopped for possessing a gun while impersonating a military officer and evading the police in a stolen vehicle.

    The next year I went to Europe for a junior year, and I took along some fishing tackle, but left the guns at home. I never got around to applying for a hand gun permit.
                                    After my father died, I discovered the main frame of the gun in his desk up on the third floor, and later, found the cartricge holding cylinder down on the second floor in his dresser drawer; so you might say that there was no gun there.

My Last Hunt.

   During my second of year of graduate school, I took a part time job which mostly had me standing at the bow of a Cornell fisheries research boat that was rigged with   a couple of electrodes dangling twenty ten or twelve feet apart out in front of it.   We cranked up the generator and cruised around little Dryden lake while I scooped up the stunned fish we had managed to get between the electrodes..    The pickerel , which are speedier or more sensitive than the bass and bullheads, would shoot right out of the water trying to stay ahead of the charge, and I could sometimes net one in the air. One I netted would have been a state rod and reel record. It was materially, my best fishing year ever.
              Kristal, baby Mnetha, and I lived out Slaterville Road with the watershed forest in back of the house. I hunted for rabbits, pheasants, and grouse back there.    One afternoon an owl flew up from the ground where I didn't expect to see an owl, and I jerk shot him .
        Didn't kill it.   The owl sat on a rock judging me .
   I went back to the house, got a raw hamburger patty and put it in front of the owl....who   stared at me, unblinking.

A day later, I hunted by the same spot but the owl and the hamburger patty were gone.
      I hunted on ..... and was in a maple glen, coming down to the edge of the little creek bed gully, which was maybe four feet deep and eight feet wide, when I noticed a   spike horn buck, head down, picking his way up the gully, only fifty feet away, and never looking up. Deer don't expect anything to swoop down on them from above. That is why people hunt from tree stands. Not even thinking about what I was intending,   I lay down my gun, and waited until the deer was right under me.    Then I jumped down and grabbed him up....his hoofs flailing so wildly that he slashed himself , and blood was splattering on the rocks. Then there was nothing do do but set him down.... which I did, and he clattered and splattered off. I wouldn't need to try that again. I guess that would be the apex of my hunting life.

    On a Saturday two weeks later, my Uncle Curtis was in town to see a Cornell football game with my Dad.
I myself, went hunting out back that day.
            I shot a rabbit and was gutting it in the yard when Kristal stepped out and told me my Mom had called to tell me Uncle Curtis had died at the foot ball game.
                       It was of a heart attack during a kickoff return.
                        A week or two after that, I got a paper from one of my freshmen English section students, telling about how a man died in the stands in front of her while she was at the foot ball game. I remembered again the smell of the rabbits insides. Still do.
                    I didn't make any conscious decision, but I haven't been hunting since.       And after that my father would turn off the T.V. when a football game got too exciting and he before started yelling "Great Balls of Fire ! Great Scott!   and Great Day in the Morning." And we didn't take any long canoe trips, because he didn't want me to have to carry him out of the woods, dead.

     Sheriff of Dog's Plot

   I haven't hunted in many years...... but I'm keeping the guns. And not just to defend against people who would invade my house to get the guns.
     For instance, I needed a gun this winter when a car hit a deer in front of my place, and then another one just yesterday.   I carry an ax in the truck for when I myself hit another deer . A gun would be better for killing, but I don't want a gun in my vehicle, so if I ever kill someone in a fit of road-rage, it will have to be with an Estwing, Hudson Bay cruising ax.
    And then   I have   occasionally had to kill poorly-bred roosters of mine that insisted on attacking me, friends, or little people.
Ever since, if I am carrying Granny's cane, or anything that looks like a shot gun, or even just cradling an invisible gun when I approach, the roosters growl, chatter, and move off side-ways.
     Though I do generally keep my guns locked in the root cellar..... Granddaddy's shot gun and a box of #6 shells have lately been standing close by the kitchen door, ready to deal with the critter that's been raiding here recently,
        In the last few weeks, something has killed two of my three outdoor hens right after they come out of the trees about dawn, and also killedmy most beloved guard rooster Moby Dot, and his partner Whitey. I would kill for Dot and Whitey, maybe even after it wouldn't do any damn good.
       The chicken killer doesn't carry the corpses away, but half consumes them nearby.....and returns to feed on them I think... in rotation with the possum and the cats.   Maybe he never leaves the plot. I am guessing that the critter is a raccoon....maybe the one I rapped with the cane one morning this winter as it ran by me, chasing one of my hens which it had shaken out of the sumac .
            So every morning lately I have been rolling out before sunrise to put the a kettle on, load the gun at the door, and go out to stalk around the driveway until Yellow Foot the last of her little flock comes down out of the sumac... and the shadows slink off so I can safely let the rest of the hens out.
    But it still wouldn't be safe for you to show up here unexpectedly, no matter what time of day.

Key to the Root Cellar


       My intense fascination with guns had long passed   by the time my son Tarka came along, and I never tried to encourage his own interest.... but boys will be shooters, and go bang bang with whatever comes to hand.
Tarka's mother decided that if he wanted toy guns, he would have to make them himself.
       Tarka made lots of guns with the tools and parts in my basement. And I only helped him a little.
            Then his mother said he could have only one gun
         So Takra took his guns all apart, and reassembled a new one from the parts whenever he wanted a different one, guns cycling in and out of existence.

      Tarka and I   made greenwood bows, sling-shots, and cattail stalk arrows..... but I don't think I ever showed him how we used to stand catails on their heads to soak in kerosene for a day,   and then shoot them off the bluff in front of camp at night, flaming out over the lake.


   When he got a little older and insisted, I brought the Savage .22 off the rack; told him about how it wasn't a killing gun, and we fired it at regular targets....not over the water and into the trees, but in a gravel pit.
   And later we went out to the gravel pit with the shot gun, and the thirty thirty so he could make the big booms.
        I took him to a friend's place in the woods where he got to help shoot up an old refrigerator with a mail-order military gun.
      Then his own fascination with guns was bumped aside by bikes, which is all for the good I think, except that down hill mountain biking may be statistically more dangerous than general gunning around.

    One day when he was a Cornell student, Tarka rode onto the scene of a fresh car/deer collision:.
     Patrol car lights flashing, car at the side of the road with driver and radiator steaming. A female officer facing a deer, broken and flailing in the middle of the road. She had her   revolver out, but coiuldn't bring herself to use it.
     So, although I had never trained him in the use of hand guns, Tarka did the service.
      When he graduated, I gave him the Savage .22. and a key to the root cellar here. It is moist down there, so when I am no longer around, he should go down there and oil the guns occasionally, whether they get used or not.

By the Side of the Road

2011-02-24T08:09:00.000-08:00

            Aunt Hazel made this needlepoint for my mother, who always had it hanging by the telephone in Ithaca, and it now hangs on my own wall. I don't claim to be man's best friend, and I prefer to be
alone most of the time, but this house on Pumpkin Hill is close to the road, so sometimes I get involved with the human traffic.

    When you drive over Pumpkin Hill, the trees fall back and the horizon drops   away; when you round the top of the hill at speed, you experience a quarter mile of virtual weightlessness, during which empty Doritos bags and   Poland Water bottles float out the windows; folks slip into cruising gear, insert a new CD, light up, make a call, or maybe resume an old argument. Sometimes they just want to bail out:

      Stitches in Time

         I was out with the chickens one Fall afternoon, when I heard car door and voice commotion down towards the neighbors place;   "you hit me." in a shrill voice that made me imagine a kid   being bumped by a riding mower. I went out the driveway to see.
     A car stood half on and half off the road, the driver side open into road.      An elderly man and a younger   woman were trying to get a kicking and mumbling older woman   into the back of the car.     I could see how maybe these two they hadn't noticed her walking along the road, had accidentally hit her, and were now attempting to bundle away the evidence.        Cars were coming from both directions now, so I closed the driver-side door.

        The two asked me to help get the old woman into the car.
       I could see cuts on her legs.   They said she had fallen at home and would need stitches, so they were trying to take her to the Aurora "Urgent care center"     They said there was a dementia problem
      I am sure they were father and daughter and it was all as they said, but I knew the medical center in Aurora was not open on Sundays, so I called 991 while they packed Mother in.     They were driving away by the time I got the local dispatcher, whom I told they ought to dispatch some one to catch up with these poor folks headed for the the closed, non-emergency center.    I don't know how it turned out for the unlucky lady, or that I was any help at all, so I expect to keep thinking about it.

      I can think of at least one old woman in a restless dementia who did come walking this way along route ninety this way. She did a good twenty miles along route ninety without beging struck or picked up, but she must have been navigating by the lake rather than by the road, because when ninety bends up Pumpkin Hill out of Aurora, she took the old road straight along the lake where cottages are in close neighborhoods and people walk,.....so   was   noticed by someone, and the Sheriff got finally got involved. Had she come over my way, I wouldn't have noticed her passing.

    Innocence Preserved

      I wouldn't want to be aware of everything that happens on my little stretch of highway, and I'm sure I do miss a lot.
   Peter my feed man is an emergency vehicle driver. One afternoon as I picked up some cracked corn he asked me how I had liked the spectacular crash right near my place that same morning. I had been totally unaware of it   But Peter said the car had flipped end for end several times, hitting the ground five times before it came to a stop right side up.   It had happend at nine thirrty when I was siting right here, and I would have expected to hear it.
   The car must have toe-danced so deftly that it didn't make much noise with each touch....and since it landed right side up and not once on the top, the d the jaws of life were not required to extract her from her Toyota.. She walked away uninjured , but she complained of a brake problem,
   It might just have been the fault of the place itself. Maybe Black Ice was responsible.

   Black Ice
         One frozen morning after a misty rain, I thought I heard a rumble of thunder north up the road....but I knew it could hardly be that, so I went out to look.

         From my driveway, I could see a car half on the road up past the next telephone pole. The car seemed to be sitting a bit low.
        I went down there.   The tires were all blown and the roof was a bit mashed, and the two women inside were buckled up, unbloodied, and talking, but the older woman, who had been driving said she, couldn't move her head.     I made the 911 call.
      The two women were mother and daughter and had just gone out to get a pack of cigarettes. They hadn't been thinking about black ice, or black lung I guess. Now they wanted to call home right away and tell husband/ son-in-law that they wouldn't be back with the car, but they couldn't find the shoulder bag with Mom's cell phone in it.
     I found the bag   with the cell phone , and some of the other stuff that had been in it scattered along the ditch. Also a whole lot of none of the pieces larger than a maple leaf. Maybe some of the ditch glass was from previous incidents.     Mom complained of the cold. I put my coat over her until they had cut the car open with the " jaws of life " tool, and moved her to the ambulance.

         The next day, the-son-in-law/ husband appeared, searching along the road for his mother-in- law's wallet.    It had been in the shoulder bag and had her driver's license in it.   He didn't find the wallet, but he didn't seem to disturbed about it all,d I asked about Mom and he said she had NOT broken her neck. That's a miracle, because the car had rolled over three times and gone six feet up the telephone pole, before eventually   landing right side up beside the road .
    I haven't heard if there is a whip lash issue, or if they were ever able   to find the wallet with the driver's license ; but the next time they have to run out for cigarettes, the daughter can drive.

       Have Mercy

You better watch out if you drive over Pumpkin Hill at twilight.
One evening this fall as I sat right here with the doors shut, I heard a muffled clatter from outside, and imagined something was after my hens under the deck. But then from out on my deck I could see a big SUV pulled off to the side of the road only fifty feet or so up here. I went out and across the yard.
      The Stealth black, high wheel-base plastic- grilled SUV had hit a deer about a hundred feet down the road, and driven it half past my place. A lesser vehicle might have taken it through the windshield..
   The car radio was on loud. The deer was in the ditch behind the car, all four legs shattered, struggling silently to get up. . A man and woman stood at the other end of the SUV looking at the radiator. The plastic grill was just about all gone, but the radiator didn't seem to be leaking. We supposed they could drive away.

            The fellow guessed the deer had a broken back.   I offered to shoot it, so they drove away and I went for the shot gun.

    I left the deer in the ditch as a kind of road sign for a couple of days.   Be warned: deer like to go up and over a hill instead of around it, so all ways over the hill tend to cross at the top.
        After a few days it snowed some, so I sledded the corpse back into the brush for the coyotes and crows.
            I hope it's never YOU I have to shoot.

Update on My Imaginary Brother William, Who Started this Blog

2011-02-16T11:29:00.000-08:00

                                                      ( William in Ithaca, January 2001)


After thinking for months that my so called brother William   was off down in the Carolinas   with Missy Hoolihan (or Hooligan) and the Tall Animal Review, I got an email, saying    he   was in Hollywood, California, living on the Universal Studios lot, in a trailer which used to belong to Gweneth Paltrow's cousin or brother.
Willy is....or was, so he says, working as a chicken wrangler for those old-time farm-yard scenes you've got to have in every pre-twentieth century movie.   He had use of a laptop with free Univeral internet;    the cousin had left him a fridge full of diet Pepsi (which Willy complained about)   and there would always be a nineteenth century drama filming on the lot.... and paying way more money than he has any use for.
That was a few weeks ago. I doubt he is there now.   He's essentially too rural a stray for that life....and given his freedom with the truth....he might not have been there at any point, might have actually emailed me from the doublewide home of a waitress in Chisom, West Carolina.
   Nope.... I don't know where he was or where he's gone. And as a matter of fact, I don't know where he came from either....not before the day back in Natural Bridge when I was about six years old, and he appeared in the family garden with our dog Binker.
      Binker was part Spitz and part Border Collie, a former stray herself. She must have brought him home with her. I   remember the scene very well, because I have remembered it so often: William standing there in the garden with his hand on   Binker, seeming, because of his preternaturally short legs, to be a normal, though raggedy boy, standing in a hole up to his knees.
Right away I disliked this   feral intruder, even if the dog had brought him home. Especially because My dog brought him home. Nobody wants to be displaced in his own home or his dog's affections.
     When my mom and dad tried to bring the dirty boy in, I tried, and failed, to hold the door shut from inside, so I ran upstairs and hid in a closet while Mom and Dad took the nameless William to the bathroom and tried to wash the stink off him. They didn't quite manage to get all the stink off him, but he eventually got a name, and I would have to share my dog and my and bedrooms with him.   It helped that he preferred to spend most nights either in the bathtub, or outdoors somewhere.

When I got to be ten or twelve he would disappear for days or even weeks at a time.....and then after we let him go off to stay with Aunt Sammy in Florida.... it was very easy to forget he ever existed.
   So it was always a little uncomfortable for me and the family when he reappeared.

Moon of the Pop Corn Snow

2011-02-12T12:17:00.000-08:00

The pre-Iroquoian Boe-Gae people of the Finger Lakes had a weather-related name for every month of the year....and for them, January was the month of the Pop Corn Snow.
This year the Pop Corn came, as it always does, with a dramatic cold front freeziing the air itself and suffusing everything with an intense, crystal light. Such light, so in advance of the temperatures and in conjunction with the full moon, confused the chickens of Dog's Plot, and severely aggravated Uncle Thread Bear's fly fishing fever.
Davey Weathercock and Olive the Weather Hen reporting:

A Spell on der Ybbs

2011-01-15T18:06:00.000-08:00

Holy Trout

So long ago now that the memory itself has gone sepia , I used a miniature "Spy Camera" from the Johnson Smith Novelty catalog to take this picture of the young John Irving just as we were about to set off on our very strange trout fishing expedition to Waidhoffen an der Ybbs: that river of forgetting.

Twenty years later, the photo appeared in a Time magazine cover story on Irving at mid- career:

"Wrestling Fate into Fable" didn't say anything at all about our trip to Waidhofen , about the fishy business of the Forellen Brudern or about our experiences on the haunted Ybbs.

                 With another twenty years and several twisted rivers behind us now, the whole   story   still hasn't been told.

         And it won't likely ever be ....at least not by me. Way back then my interests were narrow and few, so I was mostly unaware of what went on around me.   And anyway....you never know the big story when you're right in the eye of it.

       What I mostly knew then was Trout. Forelle , in German.
   Before going abroad, I   barely knew Austria from Australia,   but I knew   the Austrian Alps were home waters for the     Brown Trout.    This is not supposed to be a fish story, but    to me then,   trout were what it was all about.....   Salmo Trutta, the European Brown was the god fish.....and the surface of the water, where the trout met the fly, was the place where desire met   truth and beauty.   Naturally, that meeting at the water didn't always go well. At Waidhofen, it almost went too far.

The Fish Fang Brothers

      Along with the Spy camera and a little Remington typewriter, I had brought from the U.S. a Perine aluminum box of home-tied dry flies and my   Pfleuger Medalist fly reel holding a hundred feet of Cortland 333 double-tapered floating line.    I planned to buy an   Austrian fly rod in Vienna and ask the tackle dealer where I should go to find some hallowed trout water.

   John had only recently bought the Jawa and he wanted to take it on a test road- trip before he toured Europe with it that summer.   He   knew New Hampshire Brook Trourt, and had read Big Two Hearted River, but on this trip, he was only going to drive and watch.      One afternoon we rode to a shop on a   back street    between the inner and outer Ring Strassen:   The Brudern Forellen, Fish Fang   Geselshaft,    " Fish Fang" meaning " fish catching........rather than fish tooth.
A painted   wooden trout    with   high forehead like a whale's hung from the Brudern Forellen shop sign.
         .
        The shop itself wasn't too much wider than the door.    Hardly room to test wag a fly rod in there.
   A few tubular rod cases, hung from chamois-horn racks ; reels    under glass, beside a few meershaum pipes.

     I don't know if the pipes were for sale or just belonged to the man with a overhanging moustache and braid-trimmed sporting jacket who stood by the counter.
        He didn't seem to even glance at us.........just picked up a pipe from the ash tray before him and made   three sharp raps on the ashtray....like on a door.
       At which the twin of his moustash   parted the curtains from the back room ....and the other brother stepped in.
     Without the exaggerated mustaches, I am not sure whether or not they would have appeared to be twins or even brothers.

    "Heil Peter", said one or both of them, to each other or to us, I don't know , but I knew that "Heil Peter" refers to the fisherman saint, and is the traditional Austrian greeting when one fisherman encounters another.
            "Guten Tag Gruss Gott." I spoke for us.   My German wasn't exactly a clear, flowing stream, but my accent was good enough that I was often mistaken for a borderline Hungarian who understood German much better than I really did.

I was   able to explain, clearly enough, I THOUGHT, that I had come to buy a fly rod and to get their recommendation of a place to lease a leg   of trout stream,   Leg, ( literally beim in German) being, I thought, the equivalent of our " beat" in trout fishing terms.....rather than "shlag", which is the literal translation of beat, but which I knew means whipped cream in Austira, as in "cafe mit shlag obers".   Although in other situations, "ober " means waiter.
       The brothers   checked their relfections in each other, then unaimiously recommended we go to Waidhoffen an Der Ybbs, which they assured us would be sehr rewarding.

                                      Then we got down to choosing a rod.      At that time, the gulf of Tonkin, where the bamboo with the best resilience for use in building   fly rods grows....really it is really was the only acceptable bamboo for that purpose.... but was the Communists had it and weren't letting it out.
   There wasn't all that much of a choice on the racks......but the brothers were well connected, and I'm sure now now that if they had really thought that I was really there about fishing, rather then for something extremely ullterior to fishing.... they could have brought out a decent, pre-war rod ...... something hiding behind the curtain there....... rather than selling me the limpest fly rod I would ever own.

The Towering Dead

   The Post -War, divided occupation of Vienna had formally ended.    The   Stephans Dom cathedral roof had been repaired, and most of the other visible inner city war damage had already been taken care of, but outside the Rng Strassen were ocassional blocks of unreconstructed rubble.
   I particularly remember   a block not far from the WestBahnoff, where must have been a very large building - now was a perfect pyramid of rubble. Near the top of the pyramid, a small plane was crumpled and partly embedded:   .    I never knew wether it had crashed there during the war, or more recently. Maybe no one had noticed it and the pilot was still in the cock-pit :    a monument in my mind               .
   The real   public and over the top baroque monument to the dead   is   the   Pestaule ( Plague Column): a marble   tower of humanity striving toward a gilded heavens , memoralizing the   Plague dead    at the Graben platz in the olf city center.   I once wrote a story in which John Irving,....in a series quick wrestling moves, during a night of drinking, climbed half way up that pillar of striving bodies,    but that was totally made up by me....... would have surely broken a few marble ears or arms if he tried it,...... and I am sorry for any legal problems my little joke may have caused.

    So on the night John didn't climb the Pestuaule in a sleep-wrestling trance - a few days before he and I left for Waidhoffen - some of us were in    Marco Walshock's room on a totten end street, not too many Pesttaule lengths from the Graben.
Sitting or standing around the stove,   cognac in our tea and a smudge of Austrian national brand cigarette smoke in the air..... we were bored.
            In hopes of making things more interesting, somebody had been eating morning glory seeds for two days , but with none of the intended results....whatever they were.
    Somebody else suggested we try the hyperventilation thing ... you know, where you bend over and breathe way too much and too fast for a few minutes, then stand up and hold your breath while someone wraps around your chest from behind and squeezes ..........until you pass out, maybe not, maybe have a near death experience, a go into a dream. Maybe hit your head on the stove,

        I can't remember how it went for me. Maybe I'm    one who hit his head on the stove.
            I do remember that it was Eric who gave John the big squeeze and eased him to the floor....but John didn't stay down for even a second....he flopped a couple of times and came up quick .........said something that sounded like "French Fries",   but could have been Fish Fang.... or pretty much anything... then he went for the door.
       By the time we asked where he was going.... the door had already closed behind him.

        A half hour or forty five minutes later, John came back.
         He had cut across his eye-brow and his upper lip was swollen stiff.. l
        Hard to understand him talking from just the lower part of his face,   he seemed to be saying he had been set upon by a bunch of people   who had stolen his leg........and he insisted that we had to go back with him to wherever and deal with these guys.
        Four of us went along with him. We didn't find the guys who had jumped him....and,+
were glad we didn't........ we split up, went home, to each his own, and I didn't hear anything more about that night until after our trip to Waidhofen.

   The Ybbs Spell

       I   used to remember   that John's Jawa    had a side-car I rode in ....... but   when I mentioned it a few years ago, he pointed out that, had there actually had been a side-car,   you would be able to see the third wheel in the picture here.
O.K. then: with me on the rear saddle, my sling-bag and rod case over my shoulder,..... the two of us in those G.I. surplus field-Jackets.....    we invaded Neider Ostereich,....and buzzed up the Ybbs Tal, winding toward   Waidhoffen an der Ybbs:   river under a spell.

       Rural Austria hadn't suffered a lot of war damage ......at least we saw no rubble or ruins. All was kempt.
    Invisible hands had picked up all the sticks from under the trees; where the grass was now being cropped t by   red deer.   Old men with brush scythes moved in slow   arcs along the road-side ditches.

        The village of Waidhoffen then was much smaller than it appears to be during a current Google Earth fly- over.      A town square, a few Onion Domes, a small castle Inn.    We checked into the castle and slept in a stone chamber beside the chyrglngk Ybbs, river without vowels.

    Late the next morning we followed directions given us by the Fish Fang Brudern... to the home of the fellow they called the Mayor or maybe it was the Major, from whom we were to pick up the Fish Fang permit .

      The man who opened the mayor's door had   a   moustache so like the tackle shop moustaches that I didn't know whether he was one of the two brothers, or a third man related only by moustache.
"Nur Ein Rod?"   The major scowled and gave us a map showing my stretch of the river that day....from   a bridge right in the center of town, to the Inn a dozen bends upstream.

    Looking straight down on the stream from the bridge, we could see two grayling up against the bank, and several trout rising out in the main drift.

     In any normal town there would be kids under the bridge after the trout with worms and snatch hooks, but the Ybbs valley was under a spell which made the river invisible to people who lived near it..

We Auslanders walked down to the riverside..

      I rigged up with a Light Hendrickson dry fly and, flipping line off my reel m walked right inrto the water up to my knees....no hip boots or waders . I didn't even use hip boots back in the U. S. But back my home streams back in the U.S   were not fifty percent glacial melt water either.

               Around a few bends....and aftrer an hour or three - I had no idea in my tunnel of concentrtion - . I was well over my knees in a long slow run,    occasionally bringing in and releasing a   nine or ten inch brown . From shore, with the spy camera, John photographed me casting.      The poor resolution and my distance from the camera make it so you can't tell whether I was standing in a river casting or kneeling on a road, tyring to wave down a ride.
One of his shots shows me with a small, silvery trout, which you can't tell is actually a foreign invasive Ameirican , Rainbow Trout: , a much flashier, more impulsive kind of trout, which Ernest Hemmingway introduced into to most every mountain range he visited.

     And the last of of John's pictures shows me in the Ybbs, nearly up to my boneless parts .        One pointedly concentrated on....really located in   the looping, floating fly....and entirely numb in the legs as I was....you could just about have amputated one of them   without me noticing.

         I vaguely remember the mayor, if that is what he was,   as he passed us on the other side of the stream.

            Maybe I remember John calling from behind me.

        He says he finally got my attention by catching my backcast and holding on until I came around and reeled in.

          We slogged across a meadow to the Inn beside the road , and sat at a table in the afternoon sun.

     We probably ordered coffee and something to eat. I needed soup.   John has said we gave them some trout they cooked up and served to us. What that is, is a fish story. I think that would be very nice, but i didn't even have a creel and would not have been bringing fish back the castle for the night.

   What l I remember is the shivers and shudders .   We walked back to the castle. I changed into dry clothes and wrapped up in one of those foot thick down dovets and didn't come out until it was time to eat again.

       Next day, we decided to go back to Vienna by means of an upstream route, cutting over to the Danube. I suppose we thought it would be faster.

         A half an hour out we asked directions of some guys fishing at a bridge. They pointed toward the pass,    but invited us to climb off and go at the stream, because the owner was gone and would be away for three days.   We soldiered on and up.

       Before topping the pass or shortly after, we drove through a village....I didn't notice the name of it....but    most of the people, (or at least a good percentage of those walking along the road, were either blind or were leading the blind.

                                                  The Third Leg

      Das Detuches Weinhaus had more stories below ground than it did above : cellars   below basements, below kellers,...... dug through time, and lined with the stones of old city walls. Eric, John, and I went there regularly for Friday night dinner.

                One Friday after our Waidhofen trip, we   finished our shnitzels on the street level of the Weinhaus, and then went down to drink beer in the first cellar.

        We sat a few benches away from a lone man in a green felt hat,   talking quietly to his plate and mug.

            Eric... after a couple of chugs from his mug..... popped back up and went off to the water closet. We were both of us Frequent Shitters, ever since that meal aboard the Orient Express.
      He was gone for longer than it usually took.....but Eric seldom went anywhere at all, without taking a side- trip.

       When John and I had about finished the pitcher of beer, Eric showed up, face flushed and nostrils flaring. . He had gone all the way to the last basement, he said....and down theree saw a bus- boy sitting in the corner and   YANKING HIS WANGER !         Loudly, he said it.   I wasn't too drunk to look around embarassed,,,,,,,,,
   as the   man in the green hat straigtened up and yelled at   me, STOP LOOKING AT MEINE MUTTER.    Of course we all looked at him then, and he yelled more.

   We didn't want to look at his mother anyway, so we got up and John said that since Eric couldn't even go to the bathroom without ending up in the fucking sewer... he himself would go get the pitcher filled.....but we went with him...... and then we took it down to the third level..

        Somewhere during that or the next pitcher,    over clanging student voices John wondered loudly if I remembered the Vilage of the Blind we drove through, on our way home from Waidhofen?    And of course I did.
     Did I remember that one bunch of blinden being led by a one-legged man? THE FUCKING HALT LEADING THE FUCKING BLIND?
       No, I didn't remember that..
               .......and I then I myself wondered out loud ..... what was that   he had been   mumbling that night at Marco's...... about some guys STEALING HIS LEG ?     And by the way, what made him jump of and run off like that after he had passed out.

       He didn't remember then what he had been mumbling, and the first thing he could recall from that night....he was out on the street............ with the image of the the Forellen Brudern shop sign with its wooden fish, dangling in his mind. ..... and no thought but to go there. Like a dog at a bone..

        When he arrived, the shop lights were on but the door was locked.
        Standing there he wondered at last what he was doing...and looked back toward the street. Then he noticed the hairline crack outlining a door on the back of the fish, and    finger hole by which he was able to open it..
     A large door key hung on the inside of the door itself.
          Of course he took the key and used it.

He went past the counters under the chamaois horn racks and though the curtian to the back.   Lights on there too.     In a closet he found two wooden legs, both of them of barrel stave construction, and each with a small door on the inside thigh,   He opened both. One had wads of newspaper between bricks of something wrapped in wax paper and the other had newspaper balls and sasusages.

        But then he heard the front door opening.   And there was no back door.   Crouching over one of the legs, peeking through the curtains, he saw that it was one of the brothers, and that he was going to come right through to the back.....so John waited until the last moment, and, head down so he would not be recognized, burst low through the curtains, leg under one arm, stiff-arming the brother with the other as he reached for the leg.

    And he was out of there.... not that he had planned to steal the leg,

     He ran down a few streets and made a few turns until he had pretty well lost himself, then    stepped in to a bier haus , and sat a rear table tryiing to hide the leg between his own
       Two drunks at the bar had had noticed when he came humping in trying to hide the leg.
   After another round, they came back and demanded to see his third leg...." Only meine Frau mienem third leg sehen kan" he says he said..
       The drunks were not amused and they had already convinced themselves   that he had stolen the leg off a poor organ grinder. One tried to wrestle it away from him, so John let him have it while he threw that guy on his back, but then another guy was on him and while John dealt with him, the first guy ran off with the leg,,,, then some more guys came off the bar...... so that's when he got out of there ......and made his way back to Marco's .

    John didn't know which leg he had taken from the shop.....the one with   the sausage, or the one with bricks of something wrapped in wax paper, and tied with string.   At the time, he thought the bricks were hashish, but it seems more likely that they were cheese, being at that end of the smuggling operation...... because that is what we had stumbled onto here.
            In those days the pitying indulgence granted to they amputee war victims who still limped the streets, made customs easy for those with artificial limbs.   We had seen sausages     changing hands, if not being pulled from out of hollowlegs, when we rode the Orient Express through the Soviet countries. Those places were so poor then, that I bet there was more money to be made selling the ssusage   on board the train   than by distributing the hashish they brought back from Istambul.
        But that was the soft end of that sinister operation.

             The Halt, the Blind, and the Hungry

    One Winter night, several years ago and a few hours after we had pulled apart a rack of lamb in the dining grotto of the Irving cave/ dome home in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire....... we were once again discussing old Vienna and the Waidhofen of trailing memory, when John    insisted that "Blindendorf" as we were calling it, was actually the real name of that village of the blind we rode through...... because he said he had seen the name on an actual road sign.
      Well, I didn't remember THAT.   I thought "Bliindendorf" was just anorther dorfish name we were CALLING the place.

      Then he showed me a letter   from a woman who reported that   her mother and she had very much had enjoyed his every book.    The envelope was postmarked "Blindendorf".
     Now that he is translated into forty three languages and reads i to stadium crowds,    Mr Irving is no longer available to write blurbs for friends or to sign books at his readings..... but he had actually wrirtten back to the woman of Blindendorf, thanking her for the kind attention ,........and asking by the way....... why   DID they call it Blindendorf ?

                      There'd been no response.
      So he suggested   I write to her. I could assure here that he was the real John Irving .

          I wrote to the Woman of Blindendoft , explained our history with the place and asked,   by the way.....why DID they call it Blindendorf.

               There was no response from Blindendorf.

              Later that winter, I did what I should have done long before: I googled Blindendorf.

                                             And I got THREE Blindendorfs!

   it wasn't clear to me which Blindendof was ours, because II didn't recall exactly or generally where in Austria Waidhofen was anyway...... so then I 'Googled Waidhoffen an der Ybbs".

      Before I even made it to a map,   I landed in the middle of G.I. World War II diary, posted by a Vet who had been at the head of the   push to Waidhoffen.
        Waidhofen , he tells us, was the furthest East of the Alied penetration into Austria.... which I suppose is   because that was the Nazi army's furthest retreat. I am supposing the officers were billited in the castle where we ourselves had stayed.

    On the last day's march, as this brigade neared Waidhofen, they discovered a concentration camp , locked and abandoned by the Nazis..    When the G.I.s openened the gates, says the Vet, the still standing prisoners who did not fall at the soldeirs feet for   ration packets, dragged across the road and began eating the bark off the trees. Others began straggling along the road to Waidhofen.
      In the camp the G.I.s found sheds full of bodies, stacked like firew wood, rotting at the bottom, barely alive at the top.
         The diary nearly breaks under the strain of trying to describe the evil smell.

    After getting back on the road to Waidhofen,   the G.I.s passed individuals they had recently freed struggling alone or in small groups beside the road,...and some dead on the   shoulder.
            That    was   enough to get past, that I didn't actually get around to googling Blindendorf again until three days later,

    And THEN, there weren't three Blindendorfs, but ONLY ONE Blindendorf.... AND it was nowhere near Waidhoffen.    I did find two or three BlindenMarkts....... but the nearest was a hundred miles away.

     So is this winking , Blinkendorf thing a clue..... or an upland red herring? Whoever knows can please tell me...... but we had stumbled into the world of Black Medicine. By the early 1960's when we were there,   the one-legged veterans were beginning to die off,d pitiful few new amputees could be found to fill the ranks of smugglers......... and there were plenty of desperate men who had nothing more than two good legs and a passport to make them a living.

With my misconstrued German expression "a leg " on the Ybbs, I had inadvertently spoken code words linked to their , gratuitous amputation station an der Ybbs... whether just outside Waidhofen, or in some portable Blindenorf

It is chillingly clear that if John had not hauled me out of the Ybbs that day when I had been standing numbed in the river... if I had instead followed the "Mayor" up the Ybbs   ........ I would have been on my way to a hollow leg, and a whole other career.   I owe John an arm and a leg for that.

       But the one thing that still bothers me is, what did the brothers do with all the amputated legs? Sausage?   Whenever I think of the whole thing, my legs   shiver and sting, like ghost limbs in distant waters.....if you can have ghost limbs when you still have the real ones.

The Rooster Problem

2010-11-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

Rooster Hummock

Aunt Sammy's voice seemed to come from an enormous radio deep between her   breasts. This was partly due to her professional training and partly due to the Chesterfields she smoked. Aunt Sammy wasn't really anybody's Aunt, but a family friend who had been the northern New York voice   of Uncle Sam's wife for the local U.S.D.A. radio broadcasts, offering   recipes, household hints and chat, in the years before the Depression.
     During the Depression, Uncle Sam quit paying for the broadcasts, and Sammy gave music lessons. She took to spending summers in the north and winters in Florida, always working on a cook book. She was friends with Majorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Florida writer who also had family in the Adirondacks, and Rawlings helped Sammy locate and buy a small island in the Florida swamp lands. The island had only a big storage shed, an abandoned   moonshine shack, and a dock with a john boat.....and Mr LaRoy, an Afro Asian man who helped Sammy convert the still to a stove and fix the place up for her to write her Still Kitchen Cook Book.... and raise chickens Mr. LaRoy supplied.          Most of the chickens were roosters and they were not trained for cock fighting, but all roosters have six to ten times the   Testosterone levels of humans, and so they must be dealt with.
    Instead of killing them for broilers at the onset of adolescence,   Mr. LaRoy visited every two weeks to round up and milk the roosters for the roostosterone.....and he left the next day, carrying the stuff in vials.   We up north knew   about the chickens,   but   we didn't know about Mr. LaRoy's special business.

And we didn't know about the business between Sammy and William.
           During her summers in the North country, Aunt Sammy   visited us often at Loon Island, and little   William took a liking to her    That was unusual, because when visitors were around he   mostly stood off in the bushes or sat in a tree. He was    twelve or fifteen at the time. His age has always been uncertain, as he was not my real brother, and didn't seem to be much older at that point than when he had first shown up in our family garden six or eight years previously.
     So when Aunt Sammy and   William announced   that he wanted to go and live with her for a while on Rooster Hummock (or "Hammock" as they say down there) Mom and Dad were surprised..... but relieved that he wouldn't be spending another season mostly wandering around and sleeping outdoors.

          What we didn't know about Sammy and William, was that during her visits with us, she had been secretly breast feeding him.
   It's not as if you would expect that to be going on, but I suppose access to roostosterone had something to do with the fact that Aunt Sammy, who had never even had any biological children, was lactating at age fifty something.

And of course, wild child that he was and is,William has never complained; and on Rooster Hummock, he was usually out with the hens, sucking   eggs, and rumpusing with the roosters.
He helped Mr. LaRoy with the rooster round-up and each time Mr. LaRoy gave him a quarter, which William put in a sock .

       Until early one morning, he snuck out and away back to the North Country, carrying a favorite hen and a sock full of quarters in Aunt Sammy's guitar case.

     The Three Guys Protection Agency

                My first ever shipment of chickens arrived one cold, early Spring, and included fifteen or twenty unexpected rooster chicks , added   as biodegradable thermal-mass to keep the desired chicks warm.   I had already decided that, besides as a source of broiler meat or roostosterone, there ought to be a natural role for roosters, and that we would work it out. One of the first things to learn about chickens is that they grow and mature but very soon they got to be unruly , aggressive, and unmanageable adolescents.
At that time I knew that my brother    William was wandering around between   Coy Glen and Dietrich's barn where he sometimes slept and read books I had stored there.....   so I caught up with him reading in the barn, and asked him him to come here to help me deal with the chickens.

                   William said he was planning to build a boat right there in Dietrich's barn and then navigate up through the lakes to the Arctic....which you can do on a map, anyway.
       I told him he could build his ark right here at Dog's Plot,
            So he came, and did.

At first he groused about my    keeping so many roosters and when I suggested he milk the roosters, and he refused....wouldn't eventell me how it's done.

      But really the Roosters weren't much of a problem for William. He knew all the   strut and bluff , wing dance, and chest butt stuff. He he took the roosters on one by one.
Occasionally body language was not sufficient and he would humble a rooster by pulling out a tail feather.   If enhanced intimidation was needed, he liked to footbowl the attacker into the pond. Roosters can't exactly fly, and they can't quite swim,, but they can   flop across the water...... which amused William and gave the roosters a moment to remember.
     He had to kill some, just to eliminate the genetically determined assassins. He used the shotgun for the noise effect.
                  By the time there were only a dozen or so left, he could control the surviving witnesses by just carrying a stick, held as if it was the gun .


                 William came out of his Ark each morning and led the three Red Star roosters from their perch on my deck rail, down to the chicken house, where he would give each a small stash of corn or sunflower seeds or whatever, then open the hen house door.

     He needed to stand over them a while, but food is the trick to tipping the roosters into their better natured routine, calling the hens to the food, clucking over a particularly big chunk of something, tossing it , then moving on , calling the hens to foraging, nesting, and dusting places, themselves standing tall, still, and handsome.... Lefty, Dot, and Whitey, in a rough triangle around the unconcerned hens - tails up, or sprawling in the dust.

   When the hens came    back to   the hen house , often before noon,   William would release the unemployed   roosters kept in their own wing of the chicken house.... and then there might be   a wild rumpus, which William sometimes entered, throwing and bowling roosters.

           I gave him my old laptop so he wouldn't get bored with this place, but pretty soon he was blogging about how he was going to take his Ark   up the great lakes.
But the ark turned out to be so heavy   he couldn't even drag it across the   driveway. I don't think it would float either...... even on ice,

        And then, of course, his old girl friend Gee appeared.
                A few months and several business plans later ,   she was gone.
                         And a few days after she went down the road.....William left too,
     I don't know where they are now, might be gone south with Missy Hooligan's Tall Animal Review.

    Disorder at Dog's Plot

         After William   left,   about all I had to do for the chickens was break bread, open doors, and stand around a while to make sure the roosters got off on the right foot..


   And so,   the triumvirate of Dot, Lefty, and Whitey had it covered, we had a period of peace and stability.

   That was until late last summer, when Lefty suddenly got the black shits and died off the rail.

Link to Lefty: http://dogs-plot.blogspot.com/2010/07/i-remember-lefty.html

   When Lefty had been gone a day, Whitey started challenging top rooster Dot.   He attacked Dot. straight on ,    he attacked him from behind, attacked with claw, beak, and spur .....but Dot was more shocked and surprised, than enraged. He didn't defend himself well..
       You are supposed to expect this kind of challenge.    This is how roosters sort things out, and people might not want to mess with Mother Nature or try to introduce democratic values to chickens.

      On the second day....... bloody feathers and streaming wattles...those two were going at it hard, right in front of the house .    Whitey was on Dot, at his neck, chop, chop, chop, and not going to stop.
.
           So I ran out and booted Whitey off....not hard enough to break anything, but not a mere foot boost..... hard enough that he landed on his feet about five yards away and kept on going, flapping and squawling, outraged and humiliated. Maybe too hard.

I was out with my camera when it happened and didn't manage to turn it off, or to include much of the violence, but you can hear Whitey's protest and Dot's triumphant flapping.

   After breaking up the coup, I didn't see Whitey around for the rest of the day.

          That night I went out with a flashlight ........and found him roosting on a carry- beam under the deck.

          The next day he came out from under the house, but if he got too near, Dot chased him off.
                         The two nights following, Whitey sat in the dog house on the deck,

      I gave him some Friehoffer's oatmeal bread and then let him in the house to scooch in the the guest chair.
Next night   Whitey roosted up on the recyclables bin the roosters use to get up on the rail.......
right smack under Dot .

     And the next night after that, he was up on the end rail.... three feet to the left of Dot, half a space left where Lefty used to be.

     Mornings now, Whitey and Dot both accompany me to the chicken house, I set them up, and they range with the hens.   They manage, but it's a two dimensional, arrangement in a three dimensional world. Sometimes the hens straggle out of the pincer   and the two roosters split up with the two groups,   or one of the roosters might   wander off alone to nap, flap, and   crow.

    This year I raised some Americuna , Chilean/Ameircan chicks who started in the house but are now totally outdoor birds. The sleep in the sumachs, and occasionally lay eggs in my tool boxes.      Whitey tries to wrangle them about a lot of the time now, but the Anerunas are wild and agile fliers who easily evade the roosters and me.

One warm day a week or two ago I left the sliding door open and Whitey Came in. He sat in the guest chair, and began to cluck and chuckle quietly, After a few minutes, one of the Aracuna pullets came in.
Whitey chuckled her to the chair, and she got right up and leaned over him with her head inches away from of his, staring into his eye, or maybe his mouth. Perfectly still . Then her three intense sisters came in too, and pretty soon I had to shoo them all out.
Later Yellow Foot ....with Whitey right there and me too... laid an egg on the chair. Small and rounded. They both stared at it..... astounded.... or expectant...its hard to tell what they're thinking..

KRISTAL FOREST, The Dalai Lama, and Me

2010-08-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

   The Disappearing of Kristal Forest

   Kristal Lorraine Forest - to whom I was married for four years in the 1960's - formerly of Ithaca and Boulder,    sometimes residing in India, and originally from Long Beach, California ..... was living with her two Calcutta street-dogs in Campo Verde, Arizona, when she decided that if she moved to Mexico she   could get by on her Social Security payments alone.

   Kristal had picked up and moved plenty of times all alone before, but this time she hired a local homeless man to help.
   After everything had been cleaned out on the final day, the landlord   inspected the place, and handed Kristal a wad of bills for the deposit refund,. Then she drove off with her helper and the dogs.....in the Red Nissan SUV and pulling a UHaul trailer. They were headed for Austin, Texas, where Kristal had arranged a temporary job. She never got there.

           When Kristal's family in California hadn't heard from her for three months, they reported her as a missing person and soon began prodding the police toward a murder investigation.
   Arizona police found   no record that Kristal or her vehicle had crossed the border, but they found her moving helper still in Arizona, and driving Kristal's red Pathfinder.       He had some dubious paperwork indicating that he had bought the car. Whether or not he had bought the car, the papers established that he was a certain Robert Reed.....who had burnt down his own townhouse for the insurance, and had   disappeared while he was out on bail but had been tried in absentia and convicted of arson.

   Reed is in jail serving a ten-year sentence , which is very little considering that there had been half a dozen human beings asleep in the building when he torched it.    He is refusing to talk about Kristal Forest.
   A year and a half later now, whether as a result of family prodding or because of some new information of their own, the police have opened a full-scale murder investigation with a public campaign to determine what happened to Kristal.

   According to Phil Jordan (the Ithaca-area   psychic with an impressive forensic record who is not being consulted by Arizona State Police) Kristal's death involved her neck and a cabin in the woods   within an hour of where they were when the death occurred. In fact, the family tsaya that there was a cabin in the woods which Reed was known to use. I don't know much more, because I am not conducting my own murder investigation.
But of course you don't need a psychic to think you know who did it.   A lot of people get murdered for no good reason other than that they were carrying money and trusted the wrong person. The police need to find Kristal Forest and move justice along. Surprises would be welcome, but there is no big mystery in her death. The real mystery was Kristal herself,   even if you happen to have been married to her for a few years.

Water Pig Fever

    In the Fall of 1963..... a semester before Kristal Forest arrived..... Eric Ross, John Irvng and I were Juniors abroad at the Institute of European Studies in Vienna.   We read Witgenstein, Sartre, A.J. Ayer, St. Thomas, etc. with the young Eddie Mowatt, who had not yet finished his Oxford thesis but had a beautiful way of making all ideologies clear and concise. As an encouraged intellectual protest to something or other, John, Eric, and I conspired to all submit the same quoteation from a Robert Frost Poem in an exam paper we wrote for him. The poem was all about those who stand on the shore facing outwards, but looking neither out far, nor in deep.
In response,   Mowatt invited us to his flat, where we drank something and discussed the issues.    He told us he had chosen Catholicism as a stay against confusion, particularly for the purpose of bringing up children ..... though we were as close to children as he would have for a while.   It didn't seem like a ridiculous idea at the time.
         We three drank in the second basement below the Deutches Wein Haus,   ate Friday night steak and egg dinners upstairs at the same place, and rode go-carts in the Prater. We took coffee in a modern little place just off Kartner Strasse, where the street walkers kept   comic books to read on breaks. John taught us the first stanzas of A Child's Christmas in Wales, and led us in walking recitations of "When I was a windy boy in the bit, in the black spit of the chapel fold..." boldly in the face of the wind and of whatever disapproving old Weiner happened to be coming in the other direction.   Eric and John grew mustaches,   which I couldn't manage to do, so I stopped getting hair-cuts.

      While I was struggling to read analytic philosophy at Cornell, and Eric did impulsive Acting at Marlboro College, John had contended with Hemingway and   Fitzgerald, read and maybe met Frost ......and it could be he told us that Dylan Thomas toured and read at his prep school.... and that after the reading maybe they even got drunk together and wrestled. He never did say that, but you know the sort of yarns I mean.   Yarns from   personal experience involving prep school, hunting, ardvarks, and bears.   Most importantly though, John knew what novelists themselves were all about and what they did other than write novels.
And the main thing.....it still seems to me......is that writers can actually be IN their stories.   Anyway, in that frame of mind, we three structured a Grand Spin for the next summer, involving bull running, trout fishing, and motorcycles, with girl companions hanging on behind. Should be good.

Bernard from Haiti and his literary partner Chuck must have seen by our outfits that we three were writers:. They asked us each to contribute to the Spring issue of the I.E.S. literary magazine, and so we became promising writers.
     In February, we boarded the   Orient Express bound for   Istanbul.......planning to go from there by boat to some unspecified Greek Island, much warmer and brighter than Vienna, and that would be the place where we would be writers, and write.

     I remember that train ride as one long night without real sleep or actual meals, interrupted by a stop or a dream in the middle of snowstorm with no depot visible......peasants climbing aboard , some with feet wrapped in rags, others carrying skis .....a   woman with a baby trying to get into our compartment, the door held shut by the two Turks riding with us at the time.....
         Somehow we zipped right by Greece without my noticing. It was one damn long train trip, though, and from the beginning we had been eating nothing much but hard rolls and cheeses we brought with us.
    But when we were almost to the end of the line, we went for our one real meal in the dining car.
I don't remember the meal...but I will never forget it.
When we had finished and had been still at the table five minutes after the train pulled into the Istanbul station but the waiter had not yet come with the bill......we got up and walked out.   The waiter caught up with us and made us pay. We paid. And we would pay again .

        As soon as the running waiter got his money, a little "Student Hotel" kid hustled us to a taxi where we were led to a sort of efficiency bathroom with tile floor, bunk beds close to a kind of toilet/ bidet with an underbutt water jet and no toilet paper....... a small bath tub so close opposite we could puke in it without getting up, just perfect for us that night. Such was the onset of what we took to calling Water-pig fever, but which would affect us each differently.
    The first night was the worst; after that we dragged through the underground bazaar where we bought meershaum pipes and roughly-used leather vests . Eric says now that he and I went into an opium den in the lowest level of the bazaar, and got so shnockered there.....said that John had to come and pull us out, but I don't believe their memories.

      Anyway, we were not tourists or hedonists, we were journeymen, and had to get on with it..
            About as soon as it could be arranged, we sailed over the heaving sea to the port of Athens, where we disembarked as snow fell into gray Greek water.
We were advised at the ticket office that the nearby island of Hydra would be as warm as far off Crete; so we went to Hydra......... which we never had heard of, but is the traditional home of Greek sea captains, and some very odd characters I will tell you about in private sometime.    The movie Phaedra had been filmed there the year before, and the young Leonard Cohen had probably just left. There were writers too, including a very famous Australian novelist whose name I forget and whom we never actually met because he was surrounded.   We met the ex G.I. who had never gone home again..... Fred....who at the time was trying to make poems on paper which he could bake and eat.
       We were on Hydra to write actual stories, and plenty happened there that one could write about, but such things are distractions when you want to work.    Hydra houses where mostly heated only by cooking (and our one meal a day was   cooked over a Bunsen burner for us by a woman downstairs) si in our quarters it was was just too cold to write; especially when   feeling like shit, and when one is never written anything that wasn't homework .
    John was actually traveling with his little portable type-writer, and he brought it down to the harbor where we took coffee every morning after breakfast in order to sit out in the sun.   He didn't write much though, except maybe a letter home to his girl Shyla........because one day he woke up sicker than ever, and the next day he hardly woke up at all,   barely conscious, puking and drooling into a waste basket.
        So we went asking for a doctor .....only to find that the one doctor ( who was also the mayor) traveled a circuit of the islands every week.... so we had to wait for his two days on Hydra.

   I don't know how long we waited, and I am sure we weren't sitting by John and the waste basket all that time, but after the doctor finally arrived and had administered his cure, he said John would have died if the wait had been much longer.   That may or may not have been an exaggeration, but the odd and undeniable thing is that after having the typhod, or typhus...or the ideopathological Water-pig Fever, John was hardly bothered by the Orient Express Syndrome...... at least not like Eric and me.
Maybe the one disease cured him of the other! That could have been his story for the institute magazine, but, to this day, he hasn't come through with one.    Eric handed in a story about running over a dog, and I handed over one about a disconnected expatriate artist standing on the sea wall of the Hydra Harbor and staring down into a floating mass of fish entrails or seaweed or something, while a butterfly flutters unseen overhead. The butterfly was phony and the artist looked like Fred, but seems to be me.

         Back in Vienna, I hauled my sorry entrails to Dr. Rudolph Faulkner, a Russian doctor of internal medicine, who told me    I had a rare form of dysentery, which I would eventually be able to discourage some, but never completely vanquish. He suggested I give up coffee for six months and hard liquor for a few years, and he gave me some big pills.
    But beyond that, he assured me that my essential problem was a deeply active philosophical disposition which assured   that I would always be aware of the darkness at the heart of things . I don't remember how he actually put it in words, but it felt intellectually validating.....     Dr. Faulkner recommended that I read Fragments of an Unknown Teaching by the Russian Mystic Gurdjief, but I haven't finished it yet. I try to look without staring too much.

CRAFTING THE NARRATIVE

   Peter the waiter from Graz walked into the international students dining hall in Vienna as we were having our regular evening meal.... and he announced that    President Kennedy had been shot.
       A bunch of us, Peter included, decided we should go right then to the American embassy....I'm not sure what we intended to do there, or if there was anything more than a consulate so soon after the war and partition.....and we never did find it.
At the end of the day, I went for a drink with Peter at his place.
    Peter always wore blue jeans...... is probably wearing them somewhere in the USA right now........and back then was more shocked by the assassination then I was.        Opened up by the event, and .probably inspired by some confession of my own......he told me quite solemnly that his own father had died in the trenches during world War II, as a result of a backfire from lighting a fart.


      You never get over much of anything entirely and forever, but as Spring warmed, my digestion improved some. Spring was lush with a influx of American students, half of them   from California, and epitomized for me by   Kristal Forest and Cheryl Nickel, who had met when they both worked at Disneyland ;   one on the moon rocket, and one on the Monorail.   Cheryl....open and friendly.... with the sparkling, laughing, and overflowing eyes;   Kristal, taller by a neck, with   very large eyes   which drifted off when the boys of the institute tried to get her attention. Kristal with hair and skin like olive oil, bleached and tanned, appearing to be maybe a   f North Italian, Egyptian, a Stepp-Gypsy, an Indian of either sort, or a green-eyed Sphinx from another planet.
   None of the Institute boys had been able to get anywhere with Kristal.

    One night in March or April ....Eric and John, with me and some others were sitting around the stove in Marco Walshocks apartment, drinking tea with rum, and discussing the Kristal Forest problem.      John himself was expecting his girlfriend from home to arrive soon enough that he could be disinterested, but after listening a while, he said that there was only one fucking guy who stood a chance with this Kristal, and that was fucking David.

      I really had no idea what chance he was talking about. I had not been in the competition.
          Well then (John let us know) the reason I was the only one with a chance at her, was because I was the only one who had showed no interest in her. This must have intrigued her, he said.                          So all that was needed now, was a   back story for me, which would build on that curiosity, and fire up her interest. I could get interested easily. I had just not considered the possibility..
   The story, according to John, should be that I had recently lost the love of my life,   and had almost lost my will to live....unless...and so on.

      This argument had the force of logic:   it got reluctant acknowledgement from the contenders, and as long as it didn't require that I do much of anything, the plot was alright with me. Besides which   ( as I told no one) it was not a a big lie either:    I had never really recovered from the summer of my sophomore year when I adventured off to Alsaka and my high school sweetheart Carmy Mignano took up with the steady guy she has been married to for forty some years now.

            Eric had already taken up with Kristal's room mate Cheryl, with whom he shared an impulsive nature, so my story was passed on casually.... and within days Kristal and I    found ourselves sitting beside one another at the Marine House bar.
Conversation didn't exactly flow. One thing we did have in common then was an inability to make small talk. At some point, I mumbled something and handed her a small sea- shell I had found on the beach in France, and had been carrying in my pocket since, She said something, or she didn't say anything, but she looked away, closed her hand around the shell, then opened her hand again and looked down into it at the crushed shell as it had mysteriously appeared in her hand. She dribbled it into the ash tray. We ignored the incident. She would not remember it.


     A back story is only a back story, and a present plot was called for to overcome the dysfunction of these two .
         It got to be May when the nearby Grinzing vineyards on the slopes at the end of the street-car line, would be bringing out the new wine.   I don't know whose idea it was......nor do I know that Kristal wasn't just as aware of it as I was....but   Eric and Cheryl   invited Kristal and me individually to come drink the new wine in the wein stube of one of the vineyards, then take a picnic up into the hills bordering the vineyards.   Eric and Cherly would have their sleeping bags to camp out over night, and Kristal and I could travel back on the street car before dark.

      Of course we all, stayed the night n, two to a bag. Bag rolling races down a grassy knob, ambiguous giggles and whispers........ when Eric and Cheryl had lapsed into silence, we two buzzing like two black holes trying not to disappear into one another. Too strange for sex.

    But the central story had all its bones and some detail now:    With our girls clamped on behind, we we would ride the length   of Austria, up over Switzerland,   zipping then to the North coast of France for an ocean dip at Biaritz, and then south across France to Spain, and up   over the Pyrenes to   Pamplona for the annual running of the bulls.....although I hadn't yet read Hemingway   much beyond Big Two-Hearted River .   I didn't know motor cycles either, and hadn't even ridden a bicycle since Junior High School,

Running off the Boars

            Eric had already bought a used Horex of around 450 c.c.s and John   a Jawa. 350....but Kristal and f didn't want to worry our parents about our exact means of travel that coming summer, so we saved our pocket money until, for seventy five bucks each, we bought a Deutche Triumph with three previous owners, and barely two hundred CCs - minus the CCs taken up by the carbon deposits. The more obvious problem to me, was that it had no luggage rack; so I arranged to have something welded on, and picked it up in time to practice driving around Vienna for a few weeks, before the day we all roared off   to criss-cross Europe.

"Saddle the Chickens" we usually said, as we mounted and rode out.          I don't know where we got that expression, but an hour or two after we saddled the chickens and rode out onto the Autobahn, the little old Deutche engine began to cough, spit, and loose power.
When we had been out of sight of the others for half an hour,   Eric dropped back to say that they all wouldn't all slow down for us, but from then on, they would try each night to camp somewhere visible from the road.

     Before long, our machine would still run but wouldn't move unless we got off and walked beside it.
            The sun was already below the mountains and we were near nowhere; so I walked the cycle down the embankment and a little ways off into a little short-grass clearing only a few yards across.   Very convenient. We put   rolled our bags out and zipped them together. Actually, I don't remember any ground cloth. Could it be we didn't know enough to bring one? And could it be that we had no question but that mother nature had specially made us such a fine bed?

    Before it got completely dark, a tall boar hog stepped into the clearing within three or four yards of us. I suppose he was dropping in for a nap, a wallow, or a snack.   A tusker....... he stood half in the clearing, and stomped a foot several times;    gave a snort.   I think he was probably threatening the motorcycle rather than the long lump of us on the ground. Then I stood myself up at the head of the bags, and Kristal   grabbed me around the ankles.

Maybe she saved me from making a cowardly run.   As it was I yelled and clapped my cupped hands several times hard, which was about the most I could do. The boar turned back into the brush.

       Then it did get really dark........and we spent the night right there.    I have no idea how.

         The next morning we pushed up onto the road embankment, where I cranked up the engine. Starting with it cool, we were able to ride along on the shoulder to the first exit. But from there it was up slope ....and we could manage only if we walked beside and I pushed. Engine running and choking, we pushed a mile or so up and into the little village that was going to save our butts.
It was Sunday, so the inn was open but the garage was closed.   There was one of each thing in that   village and we were the one thing happening right then, so within fifteen minutes we were famous in the Inn, and out on in front, where the sorry Deutche Triumph stood.
     A small crowd began to assemble around the machine.
      Several men   squatting by the motorcycle   partially disassembled it. They lay the parts in the gutter, poured on gasoline , and burnt the carbon out of its insides...then put it together and sent us on our way, with implicit thanks for our assistance with World War II.

         We were extremely lucky, whether we appreciated it or not ......and now we had half again as much power as when we had bought the machine, but even that was still not much to carry two people and their baggage over a couple of mountain ranges. We were lucky when we made it to the top of our first Swiss mountain pass just at sunset, at five miles an hour in a snow flurry...lucky that there was an Inn with foot thick down comforters there.    And we were lucky again days later, not far from Geneva, when, we saw our friends camped close the road.

         But a few days after that John and Shyla decided to change their plan, turn back, and go to Hydra.....where they would get married.
       Eric, Cheryl, Kristal, and I continued on tot Biaritz,, then to Pamplona, as per the plan.
      After arriving in Pamplona and drinking several bars with hundreds of people wearing and sharing red bandannas, the four of us rode to the outskirts of a village a few miles out of town and camped beside the cart lane in a well kept orchard with no houses near.

    After the first night in the orchard, Cheryl and Eric decided to pack up and splurge on a hotel room, but Kristal and I didn't want to spend the money, so we left our baggage back when we all went in to town.

Late that afternoon , Kristal and I arrived back at the orchard   just as four or five men in white field clothes were carrying off our sleeping bags and clothing.
     We stood off the cycle, and Kristal pressed up behind me as if she were still riding. She told me to do something. A couple of the looters were carrying sickles.
I clapped my hands and yelled. They laughed, and continued on.
        They didn't leave much. Mostly they didn't leave our sleeping bags.
    As we were gathering up the remains a few minutes later, I saw the head of someone watching us from the little ridge behind us, and so I went up there...but he was gone. Lucky.

    It now seems obvious enough .......seeing as were camped beside the cart lane in somebody's nice neat orchard.......that    these guys were on the job site, very near home, and that we should have looked for the nearest house and done some apologetic begging, especially since this was Franco's Spain. Instead, we went to the police in Pamplona.
     But don't you worry, the police didn't want any trouble with us.
      They sent us to the mayor of the little town we had ignored.
    The mayor was a wide, friendly man on a Vespa scooter. First thing, he took us to try the free tapas treats at the town bar, and than had us follow him as he drove around looking for suspects. He stopped a gypsy wagon, made everybody get out..... asked us if those were the ones, He took is into a reform school dining hall and asked us if we saw the robbers there, and so on, but no luck along those lines.

             Kristal and I had the clothes on our backs, no sleeping bags, and very little money until we could get to American Express in Nice where there was to be money for me. We bought a nylon blanket and Kristal sewed the sides together. That was our bag for the rest of the trip.      Of course, we never did see the running of the bulls.   And a year or so later the mayor would send me a post card in Spanish, saying our stuff hadn't show up, but he would let me know if they located any of it..

              We four rode across dry central Spain and past several big wildfires where there was very little to burn.   As we were entering Barcelona, we lost Eric and Cheryl in a traffic circle. Or they lost us, and If they weren't trying to lose us, they were just lucky they did. We may have already borrowed money from them, or were thinking about it. We wouldn't see them them again on that continent.

               Staying in a not awfully expensive hotel convenient to American Express, we wired the Nice office to have our money order forwarded, and then wandered around for a few days. We discovered the street where they sold nothing much but guitars, and gave up a little more money for a quarter- sized guitar without a case.    After a week or so of waiting for money to be forwarded, we learned that there had been a postal strike in France all along.
        We paid off our hotel bill camped on to the beach, sketched and plunked the guitar.

It was good we didn't have   much luggage now, because the rack I had paid to get welded onto the cycle had cracked under the original load.
          So as soon as some money came from home, we   bought a    novelty jack-knife from the window of a souvenir shop. It was about sixteen inches long when closed, but thin steel and more of a joke than a knife, but we rode out into the hills and I hacked down a sapling to repair the luggage rack.

                  In the saddle again, and half way up the Costa Brava to France, we argued about something unmemorable, and it ended with Kristal walking up ahead to hitch-hike. I don't know if I intended to chase after her, or pass on by, but she got a ride before I even got back on the motorcycle, We found each other the next day fifty miles further on, and Kristal got back on.

                   .

        We rode on up to Niece, where we   quickly learned they do not let you camp on the beach, and anyway we   needed to get back across Europe the long way to Holland for Kristal's ship and my Plane.
The engine was still performing well but that machine had a chain drive, and we had finally worn down the teeth of the drive cog so far that when we tried to ride up the hill away from the harbor and out of Niece, the chain slipped so much we had to give up the attempt..
      The cog it would have to be replaced. And being a foreign machine,   It would have to be ordered, and a high import tax paid. We signed the machine away to a passer by on the street.

The Last Marriage Ever

           After we gave our motorcycle away, getting rides was probably easy for us:    the long legged blond with the little guitar and the boyish companion....... but I don't remember a single ride until we were already through Vienna again and on the Autobahn in Germany. We had been picked up by a World War II Luftwaffe pilot returning from Checkoslovokia where he'd gone in order to fly military airplanes...a privilidge not allowed him in Germany any more...... and the next ride, still on the Autobahn: a younger German, who took us   at aircraft speed, swerving to avoid a pileup in the right lane...... and told us as, we fishtailed on past the sliding wreck, that we were lucky he had used to be a professional race driver.   He gave us schnapps in sample bottles from the glove compartment.

      Copenhagen seemed to be full of students at the beginning of something.    Kristal and I lunched on the free condiments at an American style hamburger bar, and slept on the floor of a Turkish bath which turned us out early in the mornings so they could turn on the steam.

                  I left Kristal at the ship in Amsterdam and a day later, I took the plane from Rotterdam.
I enjoyed my Salsbury Steak flight meal, the first food in some time for which I didn't need my silly jack- knife.

      I   was still wearing the army field   jacket with the ball point portrait of Kristal and me riding on the back of it,   the   folding, cheese and sapling-hacking, sport-utility knife in one pocket, passport in the other.
Customs would noticed that my passport had been stamped in Turkey...... and t I must have   looked like someone had recently pulled me out of an opium den.
As soon as I made it through customs....or thought I had...a couple of plain- clothes men took me by the elbows and steered me to a room upstairs, where they made me empty everything from my bag and pockets onto a table. They were uninterested in any of my grungy stuff, and they laughed outright when I pulled the jokey jack-knife out of my pocket and put it on the table. They told me that   while in New York City, where there were laws about the maximum length of pocket knives, I had better carry it in my bag, rather than in my pocket.

        By the time I got to Grand Central Station I had just enough money left for a bus ticket which would get me to within fifteen miles of Ithaca.
      I don't know how I made the last fifteen miles, but I know I got there, and I slept for two days, with some time off for t.v.and refrigerator. The family was all up at lake Bonaparte,
   After the rest, I was interested only in going up north to do some trout fishing.

        About as soon as I got back from Lake Bonaparte a Kristal called to tell me she was pregnant.
      She flew to Ithaca,   determined not to go through with the birth. The issue was her independence....and anyway..... willing as I might have been to stand up and take responsibility.....   to depend on ME might not have been a good plan.    I visited a doctor or two.     But looking for an abortion back then was like throwing yourself down the stairs, and not as effective for the purpose.
    Kristal flew back to California, and a friend of ours drove her to Mexico, where the operation was done in room behind a drug store, without complications.

     After the abortion Kristal decided to transfer to college in Boston , but applied by mistake and was accepted to little Catholic Boston College, mistaking it for Boston University.      She discovered the difference after she arrived, but somehow managed to jump over to Boston U.
         I visited her in Cambridge more than once.... and very soon she was pregnant again.
      What can you do? We agreed to go ahead with it....and to get married.   I told my parents. They were quietly, gravely disappointed.

   Kristal didn't tell her own parents about the pregnant part of the wedding plans, but arranged to finish her B.U requirements with courses at Cornell, and she started planning a pretty good wedding. She designed our two embossed wedding bands for a Boston goldsmith to produce, and set the ceremony in the back yard at Edgewood place, with the Cornell Library chimes cued to play, as we we marched up to be joined buy the next door neighbor, Rev. John Lee Smith.   She found some traditional Vietnamese rail-dancers who performed on a saw horse at the reception there.
    Eric and Cheyrl had arrived in a Volkswagon Beetle with a brass bed frame on top. John and Shyla were already tied down in New Hampshire with their own baby.    Kristal's Parents were flying in on the day of the wedding, but their flight was delayed so we had to postpone the ceremony for half an hour and maybe the plan had been to get us married before they could find out she was pregnant (and they did) but according to plan, Kristal and I hopped into the the family car and   drove from the wedding/reception still in progress to the save remove of Lake Bonaparte which we had pretty much too ourselves and the plane spraying DDT, as it was prime black fly and mosquito season
    I managed to row us over to Round Island and catch a couple of bass out of season, and we broiled them over the outdoor fireplace. Another day I drove us across the Adirondacks to the   Ausable River I left Kristal in the car by a favorite stretch below Wilmington and went upstream with my fly rod ...........and was gone so long she drove back to Wilmington and bought a water melon which she had time to eat all she wanted of before I drifted back down stream with the reversing air currents of evening.   She was angry, but not   as angry as she should have been. The easy ability I had back then to escape time, now takes a lot of hard work.
    .

      How do you name a child who hasn't been born yet?   Like most other parents, we thought we needed to do that. I can't remember the name for the boy who never was, but for a girls name, we settled without argument, on "Mnetha": the name I got from the Dylan Thomas poem "Before I knocked and Flesh Let Enter", about the experience of being a child in the womb, Now it seems lto me your true and final name is the one your Grandchildren use, even though they call me Granny.
Kristal, Mnetha, and I started out   on the third floor of the family home at Edgewood Place,   sharing the downstairs with both of my parents , sometimes my younger sister Valerie, and with my grandmother   Donna, who was already around ninety years old, but still standing in the kitchen. This arrangement lasted until three women vying to out wait on each other   became two women too many for everybody .

    We moved into the Pleasant Grove married student housing complex and I worked short order at Noyes Lodge nearby when I was not in school. didn't stay most places very long    It seems like where ever we were, Kristal would shift the furniture around every few days, until   the inherent unsuitability of the place became clear, and we would move on.
       More than once, it was a matter of dust. Her allergies were furious and undeniable. All of a sudden, as if struck by a cosmic spoor shower, she would flush with a full body rash and have to restrain herself from clawing at the tangled webs of coagulated mucus which formed on her eyes. I had to   roll up the weby stuff on swab sticks..
              At the Doctor's direction to build her immunity, I gave Kristal regular injections containing regular household dust.......then    cortizone shots when her condition got worse anyway ..... and Adrenlin when it was worse than even that.
      I don't now if it was mostly a matter of time, or or the treatments, but she   battled through, doing hatha yoga , taking dance classes at Cornell, and becoming religiously vegetarian. She gradually became less allergic, and she was eventually able even to keep a cat, as long as he didn't come further in than the basement. .

       In the Summer of 1968 Kristal left where ever we were, and went off to house-sit for her dancing teacher, while I was finishing a novel called Norman Is An Island, in which Norman fakes his own drowning and leaves his wife,   I was also making a short film which opens on Kristal in her wedding gown, In a dream of floating   dead on her back down a slow stretch of Fall Creek,...   gown and hair streaming; a scene from which she wakes with a dissolve into an extremely ambiguous world where fish swim by windows... make of it what you will. I was finishing up my M.F.A. in creative writing.
    Emerson Brown a Cornell Phd who had been teaching down at The University of Puerto Rico had come back up to Cornell because U.P.R had been closed down for the entire year, after the police in Rio Piedras   shot and killed two U.P.R. students who were trying to flee over a wall on which they had been hanging   protest posters. U.P.R. planned to reopen in 1969....but minus Emerson Brown and a few others; so he put me in contact with the English Department there, and I soon had a contract to teach English literature and English as a foreign language. Not that either of us had ever contemplated going down there,   but Kristal decided to give me another one- more-chance, and packed us up for the move to Puerto Rico.

          In Rio Piedras we soon encountered Hally Wood and Sing Stevenson as she helped him in and out between his wheel chair into the low board London Taxi they had shipped to P. R. so she could shuttle him back and forth to classes . He was a seventy-five year old working professor of English and Folklore , and Hally, his thirty year younger wife and former student.    Their affair some years before had    got them kicked out of the University of Texas;    and beyond that, they were told to leave the state of Texas itself.
   Sing had been born Robert C. Stephenson, on a Ranch in California and was a star football player in college.... until he had the game accident that put him in a wheel chair.
        He had once been the North American Chess champion   and he played weekly with a frightened Russian who expected to be found and murdered by the Kremlin. Sing was was still learning a new language each summer, so that he could read this or that. He envied me because I could still look forward to reading the brothers Karamazoff for the first time. He called me Wild Bill Hiccock.
In her student days, Hally   had traveled with the folklorist Alan Lomax, helping with toting the wire recorder and making written transcriptions. Hally played the banjo and the guitar and sang the songs she had colle cted. She was a believer in correct authentic versions. Hally on Banjo, me on harmonica, and Kristal on guitar, we practiced and performed once or twice for the English Department m and at a party or two. Sing Stevenson. could sit up drinking with a crowd until they disolved away....... and the next day Hally would drive him   over to campus to spread enthusiasm, bright and rosy cheeked as always.

     These were also some good whole days for   Mnetha, Kristal, and I, walking the wild beaches, peering into tide pools and picking up shells.
And Kristal got permission to teach modern Dance   on campus.
But after a few weeks of her classes,    the relevant administrators found out it was MODERN dance, and they shut her down.
    At the same time Kristal made trouble by shielding the Vietnamese wife of a faculty member who was habitually beating her - which he insisted was his right.
I don't remember the substance of any of our own conflicts, but I remember her being irritated that I was able to just go off into the other room and write, when there were unresolved issues.
       After Christmas Kristal and Mnetha flew back to Ithaca.

     They moved back to the third floor over my grandmother and parents At Edgewood Place.   She enrolled Mnetha in East Hill School which I had myself attended and was only a few blocks away.    But the city of Ithaca had been making moves toward closing the school to save money. Kristal joined with a   group of East Hill parents who demanded that the school be turned over to them, saying they would do the janitor work and the principal work and everything, plus build a green house on the school roof and maybe raise chickens up there too. They were ahead of our time.

Kristal also joined a group of mostly Cornell people, with overlapping interests in Pscycho Drama, Astrology, and   Mysticism who gathered weekly at   The American Brahmin Bookstore   down on lower State Street.    Lennie Silver: poet, musician, and mystic , then teaching   at Cornell , moved his math class down the hill to the bookstore, and magically transformed it into an astrology course, and himself into the greatest drop-out I know of.
       But the American Brahmin Bookstore was primarily the business and domain of Tony Damiani,   a retired. N.Y.C. longshoreman   and devote of Paul Brunton:   an English Journalist who had experienced a grand realization during a night spent in one of the Egyptian Pyramids,
   The group study at Wisdom's Golden rod in those days wasn't about psycho drama or sitting in Pyramids, but was in the Hindu academic tradition of debate about critical texts relating to sacred writings,....way too dry for me, but Kristal sat with it.
I would have been a very sad puppy, without and Sing downstairs in my building .
   And our old friend Cheryl had recently divorced someone I had never met , or was in hot water about someone,   so she flew down to stay with me for a while, and we had a good time With Sing and Hally....whom Cheryl resembled in enthusiasm and energy level.
But I was pretty dragged out lonesome anyway. Air passage back and forth from Puerrto Rico was subsidized back then, kept down to seventy five bucks, so flew up to visit Kristal and Mnetha in Ithaca around during Spring vacation.
   Kristal was living in Shelter valley up Cayuga Inlet. I caught a few fresh run rainbow trout in Shelter Valley Creek, and discovered morel mushrooms, which were everywhere that season. Without those few days, there would have been no Spring for me that year.   No new Spring in our marriage though.

When I got back the Puerto Rico Cheryl had a new boyfriend living in the apartment. She figured I wouldn't mind, and I didn't. I gave them the bedroom so I could have all the privacy I needed. Our new friend Henry   had been camping on the beach. I liked him. His father was a college president, and Henry himself probably is a college president now.
We cookied for each other, and boozed with the neighbors. Plus I could always go into the other room and write.
       But when they both left, I was miserable again.
   I had been invited to remain at U.P.R. the next year, and I   agreed to stay for double pay through the wicked hot summer session ... but I wanted to go home again, and I could, so I did.

       While in Peurto Rico, I missed the part where Cornell black students took over the student union and were photographed marching out out with some hunting rifles. It didn't seem to me to be on the scale of the U.P.R. real violence but maybe it was close to eruption....and I had also missed Woodstock....... suddenly there was all this weird clothing, social experiments and well intentioned communities out onthe seven hills of Ithaca.......and the American Brahmin Book Store.
         Kristal introduced me to the psycho-drama which was still meeting down there.    The group agreed implicitly to forgo some of the normal social restraints and considerations of privacy ....to get down to what is really wrong .
It was clear very quickly from the reactions to me, that Kristal had been complaining about   me before the group, and that the others didn't recognize the devil she had been describing .    I think they were so pleasantly surprised that I got better treatment than I would have otherwise, and that irritated Kristal.
         I came across as unnaturally quiet, and silently critical....and my new friends encouraged me to access anger.
     And so I accessed anger, but I learned on my own that   getting angry with Kristal was fighting fire with gasoline.

    Surprisingly, the school district allowed the East Hill parents to keep the school open. At Kristal's suggestion I volunteered there    and the parent group soon offered me the chance to stay on as a paid teacher...... but then I got an offer to take on a couple of Alan Pike's over-subscribed writing courses at Cornell.
     I had been practically raised on that campus, and although I had never liked school from the very beginnings at East Hill, and had more than enough it it already, I had by the end of my schooling figured out how to make an easy enough job of it....especially teaching writing, so I took the job     I did it for a couple of years, making more money than I would ever make again,

The last place Kristal and I lived together was a cottage house set back from East Shore Drive, across the road from the lake. In front there was a large   garden entirely of Irises, a third of which I dug out and replaced with vegetable plants.
    In memory, it seems like the two of us weren't both in the house at the same time, and then communicated through Mnetha....but I remember Kristal and I alone, standing in the kitchen at the rear of the house, arguing about something, when I glanced out the window and saw and saw four or five deer standing right there.... not even feeding, but just looking in at us. I stopped   and pointed to the deer, but to no effect.

        Alan and Linda Pike , with David McAleavey, had rented half a farm house out on Perry City Road   , next to the old Quaker cemetery. They invited me to come live there. Lenny Silver and wife Jenny lived in the other half of the house. McAleavey was in California at the time, and I would be on the couch for a while, but then the Pikes would be going to Italy for a year.
    We called it the Old Same Place. David McAleavey, returned from a summer at Berkley   with wild wild hair, wild girlfriend, and music of the Dead.
   There were wandering visitors, visiting wanderers, and a mystic named Ram who was a pretty good intuitive astrologer. He said there was to be some special significance for me in Pinot Noir wine.   Peyote, LSD, and Pot were around. I drank Pinot Noir and cooked elaborate dishes form the Escoffier cook book, Hally had given me.        I dug a vegetable garden between the house and the cemetery and grew one pretty good too tall clump of seedy pot plants. I often had Mnetha on weekends and took over care the little Norwich Terrier   Kasha, which Kristal had bought for Mnetha, but which aggravated her allergies.
     Kristal was also agrivated at a distance by my life and style. One afternoon when I had been asked to deliver Mnetha all ready and packed for an overnight camp , her bag packed , including   some food items for a dinner meal, . so, along with whatever else, I tossed in a can of pork and beans This so outraged Kristal's food principles, that she shouted me down the stairs and threw the can of beans at me when I was at the bottom.

She had a point, and she missed with the beans.. but Mnetha would be witness to many more flying objects, and worse than actually hiting me with a can of beans, she refused, because of my bad food chocie, to leave Mnetha in my care any more.
     So I figured - coolly enough, it seemed to me -that I didn't need to pay HER to do the job she was preventing me from doing,   so I refused to come up with any more child support.
             So she sued for divorce.

                 Our Judge Friedlander disclosed that she had been one of my father's students in law school, which we knew and was alright with us....and advised us in loco parerntis that whatever else went down, we would have to cooperate about the child.
     Kristal did get custody, which seemed natural and obligatory back then, and I was directed to see a probation officer for a while, probably to make sure I was paying child support. I don't remember what were the technical grounds for a divorce, but   I remember standing with Kristal in front of some judge or legal clerk during the process, and Kristal saying at me...."David, you think everything's funny don't you? "
       She did have a point there too. Our history together was definitely   not a romantic comedy.    And I wouldn't say it was tragic marriage either...because I don't exactly regret it.   But it was traumatic enough that neither of us ever tried marriage again.

     My writing got weirder, partly because life was, but also because I wanted it to be far out and in deep.   But the fiction I was working on then never got too far out of one Charlie Peckerstone, who lived all alone   trying to write a philosophy thesis......when he was trying.   His name was the invention of my friend David Rollow, and I don't remember the context, but I thought it was funny.

    Peckerstone himself was more concerned with   collecting retro diner artifacts than he was in writing his Phd thesis.     Purchase by purchase, he had gradually turned his apartment   into a diner, right down to napkins and an institutional food supply.    The bread had to be Millbrook or Wonder in the long loaves, and The tuna had to be Star Kist in the gallon-sized institutional can, with the standard mermaid and the starry sea label,
Of course there were no people but himself in his dinner.... so he never managed to eat more than a third of   a can before the remainder began to smell bad, even in the fridge,
But then he always enjoyed buying and opening a new can.

          Late one night, after having put out the spoiling remains of the incumbent tuna,   Charlie goes to the Supermarket and buys a brace of of Wonder Bread Long Loaves, twenty five pounds of   burger patties, and a gallon can of Star Kist .       He gets home from the supermarket at one in the morning, and right away opens the can.

    And, you guessed it.....what was in there......was not tuna.
    Curled in a cloudy albumin ....... a sort of mermaid...not your tacky Disney scaly tail carp-ass thing with pale skin, plastic blond hair, and waterproof mascara...... but a creature both more human and trout like with a perfectly smooth skin all over shading from fish belly white below, through the   vermilion sunsets of her flanks, to the starry night of her back.
    Unfortunately, though, she was far from perfect for this element we live in. As soon as the air touched her skin, Star Kist shivered and her skin began to crackle and itch.
       Charlie Peckerstone was in love or something...but   Star Kist's exquisite skin was so sensitive to air   that   he had to keep her in the bath tub all the time , and she lived there unhappily singing lonesome songs of the sea, until the location changed without notice.

    Life After Birth

           Soon after our divorce, Kristal left Mnetha with me at my parent's house, parked her car at Wisdom's Golden Rod in care of her teacher Tony Damiani, and flew to India with our wedding rings.
   She donated the rings   to the rural ashram which had been home to   the guru of Tony's guru: the monk called simply, Ram.    Ram was slight, wore next to nothing, and smiles appealingly in his pictures. He was known for his understanding and sympathetic way with animals, with whom he never argued   about the interpretations of critical glosses on sacred texts.
        Kristal stayed at the ashram for a few months to meditate and serve. It was all fine with me.

               But when she got back to Ithaca again, Kristal found that her car engine had seized while in Tony Damiani's care.
She was sure that he had driven the car without bothering to check the oil, and that such behavior was unworthy of a religious teacher. She was unforgiving.

      After the break with Tony, Kristal began associating with one and another of the Ithaca Buddhist study groups.
    Kristal wasn't getting more than some child support from me; but she was expert at getting jobs.    She worked in the Cornell library system, and she   managed Ithaca's first self-service gas station. She could hostess your event, clean out your closet, or remake every dress in your wardrobe. She got Montessori certification and taught preschoolers.
Mostly she was a teacher.
   With me as a cosigner, she bought a house out toward Slaterville, though eventually she turned it over to the bank. Later, she bought a house out in Perry City, and sold that one after a while, so she could travel to   Dharmsala India, home of the Dali Lama and the Tibetian refugee community.

     In Dharmsala   she taught at a school run by the Dalai Lama's sister. After a while she returned to Ithaca for short visit, then packed up Mnetha, age thirteen ....and traveled with her back to Dharmsala.
         Mnetha soon got so sick that Kristal sent her home alone. Maybe some day Mnetha will want to remember the week long train ride across the high hot planes of India...and the rest of it.
            A few months later, Kristal also left Dharmsala.
              Mnetha and I picked her up at the airport in New York and Kristal slept with her head on my lap much of the way back to Ithaca.


     Kristal moved to Neptune, New Jersey, to teach at a Montessori school   and Mnetha went with her to finish High school at the mostly black Neptuene High School. When Mnetha   moved up to SUNY Purchase for her first year of college, Kristal came back to Ithaca, once again.
She dyed and stenciled Tshirts and remade Salvation Army clothing which she sold with her "Salamader" label.
            Kristal was a   sales force of nature.....but Ithaca - hip or not - is not the great market plac of the New Age world.........that would be out West in the Santa Fe, Boulder, Taos triangle. So there she went.

   Kristal was a generation ahead of the New Agers, had knowledge with experience, and had gained a lot of intellectual confidence..   She got her own T.V. astrology show in Boulder.   Kristal was the sort of astrologer who would not hesitate to give dire warnings and concrete advice. She was a good teacher, and probably a good astrologer if she was not too close to you, because like the rest of us, and full of compassion for utter strangers and all animals.

      Kristal   had looked into her past lives and found something Egyptian.     She didn't believe in mere coincidence or random accidents of birth......she believed that we are born and reborn into circumstances we have earned, and will keep on being reborn until we get it right. And , even if it isn't true....it's true..
        She believed birth itself is such a traumatic event that it is a big barrier to   remembering, connecting with, and transcending our imperfect previous lives.... she believed   that if one does not revisit one's own traumatic birth experience with a qualified guide, one might never evolve spiritually..
She went through the guided experience herself, and became a certified Rebirther..

       She was her own authority though.   Along the way there were occasional acolytes   and   younger boyfriends,........but I can't   imagine that she ever again depended on a man for anything.
Any man in her experience, even Tony Damiani, must have had difficulty living up to the patriachial standard   set by her own father.
         Daddy Guy had grown up in New Jersey as Alfred Edward Gajewski, Kaj for short in Polish, or Guy as it became on the football team in college.   He was enrolled in Time Motion Studies, but joined the army to be a Seabee engineer.   Right after the war, he Married the girl he had met in Long Beach...on the beach there. They got married and adopted the last name Forest....being that Gajewski means something like forest ranger, or worker, or person.
      I always remembered from what Kristal told me, that Betty Jean's father, old Knapaw, had been a Gold miner, or prospector maybe, out of Cripple Creek Colorado. This appealed to me.....Gabby Hayes and his daughter Dale Evans on a dirt poor Colorado ranch, but Betty Jean had spent only from her eleventh to her thirteenth year at Cripple Creek. And Knapaw had been more of a railroad man over all than a gold miner. In fact, he had started out as a Gandi Dancer on the extra gangs, just as I did for a summer. He was drafted at age forty four, and he survived. I never met old Knapaw ..... but soon after Kristal had left me in Puerto Rico, I got a letter from him expressing his perfect sympathy.
   I never answered his   letter,... ....and now I AM Knapaw.

          The adoleslcent Cripple Creek experience didn't seem to stunt Betty Jean, Tall and attractive, she did some modeling back in California, but about as soon as she was married, she was involved with the Tool Shop which Guy set up near the Watts section of Los Angelos.

      Then Guy and Betty Jean had a baby girl, beautifully named    Kristal Forest. Kristal would compete in child beauty contests and take dancing lessons.   When she or her younger brother Brent got a cold, Guy would take them to the gym to work it off. Kristal stood or sat up straight....she was Homecoming queen at Long Beach State College. She could have been a Dairy Princess from any planet, and was   a natural for the summer job she got as hostess on the    Moon Rocket at Disneyland..

Papa Guy was a believer not just in rigorous physical culture, but in a strict health food diet, and in Naturopathic medicine.   He employed members of his family, kept working, carrying a gun to work through the Watts riots, and besides the full time business, labored    for many years at   building the family a house in Whittier.
       But it was taking so very VERY long that the neighbors complained and eventually filed suits against the project, and the situation made the Odd News segments of two T.V. networks.
    Kristal was able to plan her own new room, but she never moved into it.....but I didn't sense that was a major disappointment for her. .   Kristal told me that when she first went back to California with the new baby, Papa Guy was up on a step ladder as they came in the door, and he didn't come down. Maybe Guy never wanted to finish . He never did.
As a practical builder and a dreamer, I know that building and dreaming can be the better part of anything.

    When well past the Princess and Beauty Queen stages, Kristal had come to seem less like a beauty queen than a sort of goddess: a fierce goddess.
       Even before that... back when we were still married and she made up for Halloween, it was    as Medusa, the snake-haired para- goddess      She made her own wig, with a dozen or more coat hangers bent and wrapped with cloth to represent writhing snakes....maybe writhing in a box somewhere yet.
           Descended - mortally devolved - from Athena, Medusa was a less balanced, more pissed-off being, But the rage of Medusa is so huge that you have to be very careful   not to look into her eyes, or you will be turned to stone.     Mother worshipers, feminists, and warrior women make use of the Medusa image....as well as misogynists, psychologists, and Kristal.

       She was saintly as mother Teressa, and had fewer doubts. She was genuinely fierce; she knew she could be powerfully scary, and she seldom, or never, apologized for an outburst. She denied their existence. It is not that she was angry all the time...she may have been placid for months at a time.     Peace, after all, was the main goal of her yoga , her studies, and her pilgrimages.
In fact, it seemed like what had erupted as allergies in her twenties, and had later morphed into anger......had eventually faded some.
         I told her then that she didn't seem to be as angry as she had used to be......and she got angry at the suggestion , but not as angry as she would have used to.

       Most everyone except Kristal (even those with the same condition) probably came to recognize that she wasn't just   easily angered and overly concerned with the spiritual and moral state of others, but had a serious problem:   a mental illness which ought to have a clinical name with an acronym, a treatment, and a support group.
        And that might be Borderline Personality Disorder. B.P.D. has had a name and a description since before Kristal was born.    The diagnosis is recently regaining currency, and a place in medical journals with positive findings from random studies and new treatments.    In the time since the term was coined, a procession of psychologists has applied it to a changing range of   behavior.....but then Kristal's behaviors went through some of the same changes during the same stretch of time. In the past it was a dismissive diagnosis, in the present it is seen as within the treatable range of behavior. It is, after all, just borderline, and you may be too.
        There may be some association with brain and chemical differences, or with childhood traumas, and family patterns, but whatever the roots of it, the the basic characteristic of a borderline personality is emotional "thin skin". In terms of behavior, that involves an intolerance of ambiguity, particularly in moral and existential issues.   Such personalities, lack the ability to recognize the several clashing characters inside themselves. Instead, a Borderline tendency is to project all internal battles outside and fight them there.       This becomes a tendency to demonization.   Here is a good introduction to the subject, with plenty of links to the sources:        http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1870491,00.html
       It seems right on, but it is only a description, but it seems to be describing an exaggerated case of the human condition we participate in..

Kristal was one Mother of a mother....a mother of mothers, of women generally, of lost seekers, of the poor, and of animals. In recent years, Kristal had been teaching in native American schools in New Mexico and had made another trip to India.....always rescuing as many creatures as she could.    She had begun signing herself on cards and gifts to her grandchildren as "Madhu " which can mean something like sweet, nectar, or honey, in Sanskrit, but as a name in Hindu mythology, was applied to one of the Asuric deities, which the Gita (16.4) via Wikipedia, says, share the qualities of pride, arrogance, conceit, anger, harshness, and ignorance. I had thought it was meant to convey the sense of Mother or Grandmother, although Kristal had become just about completely alienated from her own mother and daughter, whom she accused of ruining her life. But only her killer ruined Kristal's life.

          Though her body has not been found, Kristal's family in California has already memorialized her in a ceremony at a Buddhist monastery there...... as she would have wanted.    But now, a year and a half after her disappearance., the Arizona police have opened a full-scale murder investigation,   Kristal needs to be located. The family needs this to be settled and the killer needs to be in jail as long as he lives.

      So, where is Kristal Forest?
        "The Crystal Forest" is the title of a German folk tale I read in Vienna, before Kristal herself appeared there.
    I suppose it would be relevant here, but don't remember how the story went, and   I couldn't find   it on the internet....but I did discover "The Crystal Forest" petrified wood protected area and park,    not sixty miles from where Kristal had been living.
I'm not saying she is there to be found, but   Kristal could have hardly been unaware of that place while living in Mesa Verde, and would have attached some special significance to the place ......let her have that. And maybe we would let the person who looked into her eyes and murdered her, be turned to stone himself for a life time or two, before starting over again as a horned toad. There is Nothing we can do about it.
   As of this writing, Kristal's brother and his wife have called off their plan to put up posters and billboards in Arazona, because (they say) I have, with this bitter internet attack on Kristal, I have destroyed all their efforts to get this crime investigated and brought to justice. But they say they are definitely not angry, and certainly not rage blind.

      A Kind Note from the Dalai Lama

      The Dali Lama's North American Seat is in Ithaca.   I haven't seen his seat, but I have seen him, and I like to pretend he's my buddy.   Years ago Mnetha and I did a stucco job on the present monastery. The monks borrowed cups of mortar from us, and used it to butter cracks in the side walk.
But a new monastery and education center, designed by a former employee of mine, is now being built up on the hill beyond the sidewalks.
While writing this, I discovered that the Dalai Lama, who has always been a geek and an early adopter, now has a Facebook page. Hi Dalai!
      Here was his status report on the day I discovered him there:
"We must learn how to identify the opposing sides in our inner conflicts. Take anger: we need to see how destructive it is and at the same time, realize there are antidotes within our own thoughts and emotions that can counter it. So by understanding how negative it is and then by strengthening our positive thoughts and emotions, we can gradually reduce the force of our anger and hatred.

I remember Lefty

2010-07-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Lefty was a horny rooster like the rest of them, but he was a good worker and a pal.
    Lefty's father was a Leghorn and his mother a Rhode Island Red: a combination which produces chicks marked differently, male and female, right out of the egg. Hen chicks for egg farms, rooster chicks to six-week broiler ranches....otherwise into the grinder for feed-back or, in Lefty's case, included in a small, cold weather shipment of chicks to keep them warm .
        At a month or so old, he was one of the resolute roosters who up and left the chicken house after the second time a weasel or whatever it was got in and killed a few of the chickens.
       Led by   the Red Star Dot, the little secessionist flock moved up toward the house, and roosted every night on the deck-rail by my kitchen door.

Red Star roosters are individuals, mostly white with some minor markings to distinguish them.
    Dot is "Dot" for the round, brown shoulder patches. But Lefty was "Lefty", because he sat to the left of Dot.... the ruling rooster here.
Whitey, the least decorated of the three was left of Lefty. Albert the Dominiquer, a damaged character who takes no interest in the welfare of the hens and whom the others don't allow near them was allowed up on the railing with the Red Stars.... but no closer than three feet from Whiitey.
     On the ground, the three working Stars were easiest to tell apart by their combs, each of which had lost a different amount to frost bite.   Although the migrated hens checked back into the chicken house when the temperatures went down into the forties, the house Stars, didn't go back inside except to visit.
   Dot has no comb left at all. Whitey''s has scalloped teeth, and Lefty's was a smooth blade.
      I pal around with them, but these guys are not pets, and they like a little conversation, but not hugs or pats on the back. They are roosters and they can't help it.... with testosterone levels way off the human scale, But they have a job, which they know and do , mostly without my suggestions..
      Sure .... It was a while before the roosters thought their job was to do anything but mount the hens as soon as they hit the ground, but eventually they were leading them to food, and suggesting nest locations.
When the good rooster finds a little something to eat, he will cluck and talk about it, toss it into the air a bit, if necessary to get the attention, and when he had drawn a hen to it, he will move on....without actually eating anything himself.
And when the little flock got to a food trove, some good shade, or a soft wallow where they could stay for a while, the three rooster would stand tall and still   in a triangle formation. around the hens... beautiful, imposing, alert..... and when something larger than a crow flew over or if maybe I showed up in a strange hat, they would raise a ruckus that sent the hens into the bushes. They make me proud.

      A few days ago all of a sudden, Lefty came up staggering and stinking with the coal black runs.. By the second night, he left or fell off the rail,..and crawled off to heal or die.
I looked around and hoped, but by the third day, I knew I would find him only when I smelled him.
Yesterday I followed my nose and found Lefty under the house.   I buried him in one of the little plots out back where a tree I planted didn't work out.

          Since Lefty has been gone, I notice that Whitey has allowed Albert the outcast to roost a little closer......but he is never going to take Lefty's place on the job.    With people dying horrible deaths everywhere, there will be no crying here over spilt roosters, no visiting hours, and no further ceremony, but I'll remember Lefty.

Dogged Day at Dog's Plot

2010-06-20T19:58:00.000-07:00

Dog's Plot has one man, nineteen chickens, six cats, Possums under the chicken house, and foxes under the shed, but presently no dogs.

My late dogs Taino and Deerdra are composting deep under a new garlic bed which is haunted by me and a bunny who's there most every time I visit.

   But the Rat Terrier and the Lap Pug from up the road have been back again.
Last year they killed my rooster Zoro . I hit the bigger dog with my camera sling-bag, which   killed the camera.

I had pushed send on my cell phone this Friday morning , just as all the roosters around this house began a serious vovuzella of alarms .

I gave up the call, grabbed my grandma's cane and got outside in time to see a burst of partridge brown rump feathers, and then I didn't see Oprah.
   I hollered and chased the dogs out onto the highway...... where they were not run over by the eighteen wheeler just then humping Pumpkin Hill past here.

When I came back down the driveway, I found enough Oprah feathers for a small pillow, but no Oprah.

Half an hour later, Oprah appeard from under the house
She is always half bald from the roosters using her head as a handle, and always has a puff of underwear showing at the base of her tail...... she seemed to be mostly all there , never mind the drift of feathers in the driveway.

I call her Oprah not because she is big and brown and talks a lot..... all of which are the case , but because she looks like she's huge one time you see her. ...and the next time she is slim as a rail, all due to the shape shifting magic of feathers.

.
I'll add her sacrificial feathers to Alberts old tail, which I picked up off the drive way after the other neighbor's bird dog carried him away two years ago. He came back the next day and grew another tail in the six months that he spent under the house after that.
   So everybody here is more or less o.k. as far as I know..... and a lot of things turn out kind of alright.

Buckeye Jim Weather

2010-03-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

Cameo's Castle

2010-02-18T15:09:00.000-08:00

"Cameo White " was just her movie name.
And although she grew into the name entirely, she never actually made a movie ...... but maybe that's not so tragic.

She was born "Camille Brown" to a mother (also named Camille) who seems to have become only the husk of herself afterward; there is very little mention of her anywhere. Meanwhile, Camille/Cameo became her father's pet, and mostly his master.
Her father, Elsworth Brown, was a Cornell Engineering graduate who became a Morse Chain design-chief. He bought several properties in Cornell Heights, and after the death of Oliver Fast, when the title to Bridge House came into question, Brown managed to get possession by paying taxes on it before the lingering matter of legal title could be completely settled. It was to be Camille's castle. Bridge House would turn out to be expensive for him, even though he never actually paid for it, but he had his motor-car industry investments to support the real estate.

Camille was still a student in the Art and Architecture school, but as soon as her father handed over the keys she moved right into Bridge House and began renovations.
First thing, she bumped out a studio dormer from the north-slope roof. Here she would, and did, paint highly exaggerated backdrops of local scenes, against which (with a still camera the size of a doll house) she photographed herself and occasional friends in improvised situations from unknown stories. Some of them them a little risky for the time. Most of these backdrops would eventually molder on the walls of Bridge house, or get painted over with graffiti, but several still exist in the university collection. They are kept rolled and sealed in refrigerated, climate-controlled tubes because of the certainty that unrolling them would also destrory them. The new imaging technology now being developed at Cornell and other places may eventually be able to scan and translate the image with the things still rolled up.

Simultaneously with moving into Bridge house, Camille began signing everything except checks as Cameo White. At that time, Ithaca was still experiencing its fifteen years as the motion picture capital of the world, as probably several other tinywood towns which never heard of each other. Cameo thought that Bridge House would make a perfect set for a movie, and that she ought to be in that movie.
The young Cameo often strode down the hill with her wolf hound to walk along the lake shore in Renwick Park, her long scarves flying in the wind as the tall hound on the long leash tugged her past the Wharton Brothers Motion Picture studios.
Among her first renters at Bridge House was a Wharton camera man: a Swiss citizen named Braun. In his spare time, Braun had invented a wind-up, clock-work camera, by combing an Ithaca Calendar Clock with some cast-off Wharton equipment. The clock-works kept the film moving without any of the variations in speed and swaying caused by hand-cranking. It had a big boxy cassette so that the film could be pre-loaded and back packed up into the gorges and glens were Wharton commonly filmed scenes of natural beauty and savage romance. The camera could be operated while it was still on his back, steadied by a third leg which he could drop from the carry case. Braun was still evolving the protoype when Wharton studios discovered California. Or maybe it was just New Jersey, but they left without Braun and his camera.
At some point Camille's mother had apparently become the shadow of her former husk and faded away entirely, without any account of it to be found... and then Camille's father died. He left behind shockingly little cash and deeply troubled assets as a result his over-investment in the Pope Motor Company and its "Waverly" Electric Car.

Camille got another wolf hound, and she changed her name legally to Cameo White. Cameo and Braun formed, registered, and promoted Bridge House Studios Incorporated. Bridge House itself and the Braun Clock Camera were most of their assets, and they planned to make an all-Epochal, local-centric movie, which would start back in fore-shadowy prehistory, with the a scene in which the early post-glacial pre-Iroquoin inhabitants of the Cayuga basin built a fire on the ice of Cayuga Lake, meaning to make the glacier retreat. Braun and /Cameo wrote detailed sample page shooting scripts, and circulated them widely, trying to raise money for the project. The next to last chapter of "EPICATHA" would be based on the true story of Oliver Fast's last days, but would include a seduction, a robbery, a murder, and a lot of resident wolf hounds.
By the time she had three or four wolfhounds, Cameo tended to speak with a slight Russian accent.
Periodically she would make casting calls, produce posters, and have the Ithaca newspapers announce shoots which did in fact get staged, with the camera ticking, and clacking, and small investors playiing small parts.
Braun and White's Bridge House Studios, did raise enough money to more or less support the real estate, as well as themselves, and the pretty expensive fund raising activities, for ten years and more. But they didn't raise enough money that it made any sense to actually use up precious film in their staged publicity shoots.
The fradulent enterprise came to a sudden end with a scene "filmed" on the ice of little Bebee lake , which was supposed to represent Cayuga Lake during the battle on the ice in which the pre Iroquoin Algonquins defeated the small, proud, resident people who believed they had stopped the the advance of the global glacier. The weight of the many student extras broke the ice, and dozens of people went through. Three were hauled out dead. One person was never found: Braun had gone down with his camera on his back.
They didn't have scuba divers for winter searches back then. The body must have bloated up and gone over the damn with the ice-out flooding.

But the camera was retrieved with grappling hooks in the Spring. It was intact and the film feed case was latched, but was discovered to be empty. Of course the film project was already sunk, but now there was scandal, mockery, humiliation, withdrawal.
Cameo White lived on at Bridge house, with no regular tennants other then a carnival woman named Missy Hoolihan, who was away traveling much of the time. Cameo continued to produce back drop after back drop of sceenes from more unknown stories, which no one would ever even dream of. Occasionally Miss Hoolihan would take one with her.
When Cameo needed a figure model, or if Missy had been away for a while and so she got lonseome for human company, Cameo would pull on her tall boots, and flying scarves, to take a hound or three and stalk down into the flats, looking for an interesting unfortunate whom she would engage in a discussion about their fascinating features, at some point handing them A dog leash or two, and then the dogs would pull them them up the hill . Some of these people had never walked up the hill before, and some would stay around for days. A few stayed until they eventually traveled on with Missy Hoolihan, as she came and went. Cameo seems to have brought home fewer strays humans, as her wolf hounds became a breeding pack of seven or eight.
In her later years, she was commonly seen coursing the Cornell Campus and Plantations with the dogs pulling , and she communicating with them like a troika driver, in what seemed to be out and out Russian, but a Russian professor who heard her said it it was pure doggerel. I'll let the dogs be the judge of that.

   And then one day, M. Hoolihan returned from a summer tour, to find the dogs very glad to see her, because ( as she told the investigator) of course they were hungry......and with no water in their bowl and the toilet seats down, they might not even have survived, had they not been able to lick the condensation off the cold stone of the lower basements...... which, according to M. Hoolihan, they had always preferred to the water in their dish anyway.
   Anyway, something smelled very rotten in Bridge House........and up in the studio, she found Cameo, two or three weeks dead, her legs below the knees, entirely missing.
    M. Hoolihan offered to take over care of the dogs, but they were not released to her.
Considering that there was no injury to the the throat or upper body area, the medical examiners decided that the dogs had clearly only resorted to feeding on her feet, well after her death, Cause of death was given as heart failure, which is of course always at least a necessary condition of death. But the dogs had already been put down by some person person unkown.
Missy Hoolihan went to the police department and filed a formal complaint of murder against the executioner of the dogs. But that was the end of that.
M. Hoolihan left again, and it would be a long time before she came back.
If she were actually there now herself, she would probably have to be somewhere around a hundred and ten years old.

Weather Report: Go with the Flow, a Global Warming Oportunity

2010-02-15T17:40:00.000-08:00

Gee's Calling

2010-02-09T08:35:00.000-08:00

I'd known before William did, that when Gee went off to assist at the Pet Funeral and whatever.... she wouldn't be coming back.
I knew because she told me herself.....or to be precise: she told Olive. Gee and I had hardly ever talked directly.

The evening before she left, I was right here in this chair, keyboard in my lap, with my feet up on the footstool and Olive setting beside them and grooming her feathers.
It was already November and I thought I had shut the sliding door to the deck.
Then Gee stepped in.... as if through the glass. And barefooted too.

With a feathery hello, just for Olive - ignoring my feet and the rest of me - Gee swept down and huddled Olive up off the stool, then sat down in the Moris Chair with Olive cradled in her lap. Gee's Garlic Chicken scent sat in the air around me. Gee always smells like Garlic Chicken, not totally unpleasant, but a confusing perfume.
Gee was in her redskin phase, which comes from the sumac and herb baths. You hardly notice her freckles then, but it makes her pale blue eyes look like ice, even as they shoot fire out the sides.

She told Olive that we would definitely not be able to count on Gee being around here any longer for some people to ignore and complain about. She would soon be off to follow her calling,
Back to Bridge house, back to act again with old Missy and the tall animals.
Then she says, Missy would really really LOVE a crowing, singing hen......Olive could be a BIG star with the Review.....wouldn't she like to come along?

Maybe that was a purely rhetorical invitation , but I became temporarily literal-minded, and said something like "nofuggingway!!".... possibly in Capital letters.... but not agressively.
Just very negatively.

Still carefully cradling Olive, Gee stood , set her gently on the chair, then went out the way she'd come.
And I haven't seen her since........ though I occaasionally smell her.

Gee's probably doing a lot of the cooking at Bridge House now, and William is there eating it up.
I don't know how much he is really with the whole project, but Gee had gone through a radical conversion to it in her previous visit....when she had hitched all the way in to pick up some smoked salt for something..... and to just peek in at old Bridge house.

Bridge House is gated and padlocked at the gorge edge. A chain link fence extending fifty feet along the gorge, and it has been that way for many years, including when Gee and William used to resort to it occasionally, but it is easy to duck around one end of the fence and walk along the coon- trail passing just behind it.
According to William, Gee had come sneaking and peeking around the fence, and as she came close by the watch window, a face moved past the other side . The face appeared to her very like the face of Cameo White, in one of the old posters she had seen moldering on the walls of Bridge house . The apparition was so cartoonish that she knew it was only the broad work of her imagination imposed on a faded memory, and the merest glimpse of whomever it had been on the other side. She never did figure out exactly who it was, but inside she found that a few of her old fellow Tall Review travelers, were set up for wintering.
That night they threw a Hoolian especially for Gee..... and before it was over she was sure that she had found her ultimate role. Cameo White .

I suppose she had really had Cameo White firmly in mind well t before that encounter, and I am glad she has moved on with it, but I'm not so sure that Gee is distinguising herself from the role.....which seems important when when playing someone who came to a particularly bad end.

I am in no hurry to describe that bad end, and in fact I will avoid it as much as possible, but I can't much longer avoid covering the subject of Cameo White and her Enterprise ...maybe next time I post, but I have to go out to wrangle the chickens and do the weather.
By the way, as some people are already aware, Olive has not only demonstrated an ability to crow, AND to sing, but recently she actually said her first words : Thank You, when I had just given her three currants.
I expect there will be more words, but there is no way I am going to make a performing animal out of her. Anyway, she can't be commanded, and being taken from Dog's Plot would terrorize her.

Weather

2010-02-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

William Don't live Here Any More

2010-01-20T11:38:00.000-08:00

Brother William's hormonal heat for my high school girlfriend Carmella lasted even longer than my own, but he never got beyond his doggy attempts to hump her leg on the sly during the year Carmy and the Cheer Leaders adopted him as a mascot.

Gee was his first human lover and she was a slightly deeper involvement, but he had still been primitive enough with her, that......... after a few months of fireworks on the Roof of Goldwin Smith Hall, and nymphing though the gorges from Bridge House to Brooktondale......he had been able to walk off without notice or goodbye.

His cool stiff-arm, enabled him to make occasional use of women who imagined they could keep him as a pet, a curiosity, or a cause. But just about always, either he or the woman, one of them would actually fall in whatdoyoucallit with the other, and would either run out in flames or wake up in ashes.

Over the years, William became even more and more a loner.....if to be more a loner was possible for the original Feral Boy of Natural Bone --- who never would have even showed up in our back yard that day a million years ago, if the dog had not brought him home. Solitude really thrills and fills William. You can see it. He glows like a berry when he first appears in town from a month of drinking muddy water and sleeping in a hollow log somewhere.

After a couple of years with me here at Dog's Plot, William had begun to make noise about how he was going to drag his Ark up the to Great Slave Lake ..... and maybe he would have at least headed off that way... but then around came Gee again.
And he got to be uncharacteristically comfortable with Gee here.... but It still didn't seem like he was exactly on fire for her.

So when she left, you wouldn't expect him to go chasing after her.... especially when it means going back to Bridge house: the scene of several sad chapters, including one of his own which had ended unpleasantly.
You wouldn't expect him to go back to Bridge house, but you would be wrong.

One night a month or so back, I was trying to put together a little article on how to make your own private, floating island .
I had the old 35mm prints laid out on the floor and was photographing them with the digital camera, which does a better job than my old scanner.
But then William stepped in from the deck , holding the little red guitar Gee always used as a case for her chef tools.
He stood there {on several of my island prints) his face all twisted, the little guitar face down in his hands.......the door on it's back open . Empty.
Gee's velvet-wrapped French knife, steel, and stone were gone.
.
Did she leave the empty guitar to make him think for a while that she was going to return, or so that he would pack up and bring it to her? I don't know and William didn't say much, but enough said.
Two days later, carrying the duct tape guitar case mummy of what he had taken from Aunt Sammy years ago when he set off on his own, he stalked out the driveway, long pants twisting around his drywall stilts.

This means that now I can set up in the trailer to cut foam and do the first fiber coats on another floating island.

And then maybe Olive could brood some chicks there in the Spring.

Anyway, with William gone, the pretense that he and I are one and the same......is pretty much blown.

I have always had to do a lot of heavy editing on brother Willy's folk-typing ....and I obviously wrote the post about Bridge house entirely after he left.

I expect we'll hear from William before we even miss him...... and we wish him well, but regardless of William, I want to go on in another post sometime to tell about Cameo White: that most famous resident of Bridge House, who was Ithaca's greatest fraud and most frustrated impresario. She seems to be, from beyond the grave but without our needing to get all superstitious about it, still seeking acknowledgement and pushing her film project.
But first I have to crank out this Floating Island article, and here comes the weather to worry about.

Davey Weathercock's Green Revolution

2010-01-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

As on this remote slope in tiny town, most of our midlife houses have standard asphalt shingles, cupped , humped, and cracked by sun and rain. Lichens and moss have found a moist home and scattered fairy ranges of tundra have evolved.
Field flowers followed in natural secession , and then woody plants like these black raspbery brambles.
Next on this roof came Honeysuckle. This one appears to be of the foreign invasive variety, but take it from Davey, if you uprooted it or one of the sapling cottonwoods (which actually may be adding some structural support to the entire system} THEN you and the chimney and all would likely fall into the everlasting darkness.
Here and now, in this rapidly aging world, we have to deal with things as they are, and immediately take care of the obvious chimney problem.

In place of the tree junk and rooted growth which has built up behind the chimney, there should be what roofers call a cricket: a short ridge between two little roof slopes, to shed water each side of the chimney. Nature loves a Cricket and has built one here, but it is not doing a great job of shedding water.

Davey's solution?
It's high time for a green roof conversion, and anyway, the process is well advanced.
So we made a U shaped aluminum trough and stuck into the cricket, to help it drain through. Then another to make sure the water was carried past the receding eaves.
We also gooped the minor flashing gaps at the chimney side, and made sure the squirrel entrance into the cricket was not going to take water and was unobstructed. You do not want to shut squirrels in your roof.
They might try to get out by way of the bath room vent .

And , in case I didn't say this at the very beginning. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO WALK ON A ROOF IN THIS CONDITION. GET OFF OF THERE.

.

Bridge House

2009-12-26T08:13:00.000-08:00

By the turn of the century before last, Cornell had finished building its main quadrangle on what used to be Ezra Cornell's high pasture between two gorges, but the campus was still separated by Fall Creek Gorge, from the undeveloped heights on the North. The side-gorges and steep glens made construction projects a special problem in the Heights, but Cornell wanted to reach across and put some women's dorms over there.
So the University held a design competition for a bridge to the Heights.

Oliver Fast, a post graduate student at the time, submitted a design for a full -span, stone arch, supporting not just the road-way, but also two stories of class rooms and prominent observation posts . Stone stairs wound down through the abutments to more rooms and chambers. Despite seeming archaic, the bridge would have been a feat of modern engineering, using Fast's own twist on the new iron-assisted, fero-cement, construction techniques, which the Ithaca architect Clinton Vivian and others were pioneering at the time.

The Fast proposal was just too new, too old, too crazy..... and to nobody's surprise, the competition was won by the steel bridge you see there today: radical then, but an antique now. They don't build steel erector-set bridges like that any more. And simply maintaining them has become a branch of historic preservation.
The barbed cable , tension core construction, which Fast invented never did catch on anywhere, and the next bridge across that gorge will likely be a spider-tech nano-fiber sequestered-carbon based, double-reflex, tension/ suspension system, which will itself weigh less than a city bus, and will be quickly reeled in for redeployment elsewhere.

But on the same day back when the design competition winner was announced , Oliver Fast wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Cornell Daily Sun, declaring in unprintable language, at unreadable length, and with no chance of having it published, that he would blankety blank go somewhere and build the blankety blank thing himself. for himself, and if necessary, by him blankety blank self.

Oliver Fast never went far, but this was at a time when professors were so poorly paid that they had to be rich already to take on a Professorship. so the exposure got him commissions to design mansions in the Heights. Each of the best Heights estates had its own dwarf-glen, or was a winding eminence between two border gorges.
Portuguese and Italian stone masons left over from the Cornell blue stone boom easily shifted to laying up houses like follies in Jane Austin Country gardens... or like mausoleums in her cemetery.
Homes with hundred yard, pounded cobblestone driveways and stone gate- posts the size of smoke-houses.
And then came the junior-faculty houses, closer to the curb , like ornamentally disguised gate-keeper cottages.

Fraternity houses became his particular speciality . Many Fraternity Trustees payed to go with some kind of fantasy historical theme, often Gothic or Medieval, with secret chapter rooms, and winding stone stairs connecting levels. Fast was good with that. The fraternity work made him rich.
Fast isn't known to have had family, or even any romantic affairs, or any social interactions outside of chess games, but his success allowed him to buy his own land in the Heights.
A deep, dwarf gorge cut through the middle of it.

Fast never drew any real plans for his Bridge House. And there was never even a point where we could say he first started.
Before he could think of beginning, he had to make extensive pick-and-shovel explorations into the structural stability of the abutment areas.
And then he kind of had to install the footings and cassons, so that the exposed shale didn't crack and collapse.
Cayuga Heights , Forest Home, and County Court record show that , although he never did get a building permit, the village boards were not able to stop Mr. Oliver Fast from continuing what he argued was essentially only maintenance of and improvements to natural stability
.
Just the temporary timber frame support for the abutment and the arch must have taken more than one season to construct..... and after that, things only went slower. The unique barbed-iron cable which he installed under tension in canvas tubes for the cement cores he had poured through the stone work, must have frustrated and slowed the traditional mason a lot.
Up the years, as the structure rose to a second story of rooms above the arch, the few stone masons who hadn't moved on or gone back to the old country, died off or became too old to climb. He kept his last old stone man around strictly as a chess partner, until that one got to be too old to stay awake at the board.

Fast finished hoisting and installing the thumb-thick, tray-sized, roof slates all by himself, one dark day a week before the fiftieth Christmas of his life.
He climbed down from the roof the last time that day and walked into the main foyer of Bridge House....into an empty chamber.... on what he must have suddenly realized, was a bridge to nothing....and him with nothing but nothing to do ever again.

Because, within a month of hanging the last roof tile, Oliver Fast attempted suicide by jumping off his bridge. But the scale was too small to kill him. He was lucky that it was early winter with two feet of snow and oak leaves drifted into the gorge. And lucky to have worked so long as his own earth-mover and stone mason, because, although his legs were paralyzed for ever, he was able to haul himself up out of the gorge .

After six months in a sanatorium , Fast still had enough money that he could return to Bridge House, supervise some remodeling, and then spend the rest of his life ( and the money) being cared for by a live-in Scottish nursemaid/ cook/ house keeper, and her husband the butler/gardener/ nurse's aid He had allowed them to bring their little rat terrier at their insistence that it was a working dog. There had in fact been a rat problem, but the dog spent most of it's life after that in Fast's Lap, which was fine with the dog and the man.. The Mrs. was a great cook, and . McRobbie himself was a chess player, and a busy amateur wood carver.
That is all,according to the day maid, who lived down in town and walked up to Bridge House each day. She testified that the two men sat around in front of the fireplace for as many hours carving chess pieces and arguing about books , as they did playing chess. Arguing and waving their carving knives, the men never went for each other's throats. Fast gave the maid and the milk man big tips at Christmass, and Mrs. McRobbie gave them scones and macaroons throughout the year.

In short....they were jolly happy for most of a a dogs age.
Then, following a particularly jolly Christmass dinner attended by the milk man and the day maid ( who were later married ) , Fast died of sudden heart failure .

He left everything to his dear McRobbies, with left overs for the maid and the milk man, although at that point, the real estate was most everything, and it's legal status was in question.

For reasons never made clear, the McRobbies disappeared a few weeks after Fast died. And they never did reappear to claim the questionable estate .

Some things will always be a mystery, and that is just fine, because we have to move on with history, and the point is: here for a time was a happy family. And, whatever you may have heard, happy families are not all the same.

Davey Weathercock and Olive: Cold Snap

2009-12-07T06:57:00.000-08:00

As Davey Weathercock, with Olive the hen, I have a regular gig for Tiny Town Times, improvising a weather report from here on Pumpkin Hill. My nominal brother Davey Warren who edits the blog, used his photo manipulations software to squinch up my face for the blog profile picture so that I look more like the gnome you maybe imagine me to be...knowing I am so very short shanked.
So no, folks, there is no Davey Weathercock. It is only me: William Bonaparte Warren. But let's suspend disbelief for five minutes please.

Her Red Guitar

2009-12-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

Gee is gone off again, but she didn't take her little red guitar with the door in its back. You open the door with a finger hole that has a painted morning glory vine twining out of it. The flowers are the pale blue of Gee's eyes. She pretends to play the guitar some , but mostly it is a portable cabinet for her big French knife, with the stone and steel.

The last time I wrote, she'd gone to Ithaca, just to pick up some smoked salt ... and to look in at Bridge House, she said.
I expected her back that night, but she was gone for a week...stayed overnight with the raccoons and graffiti at Bridge House, then took the rest of a week getting back. She makes a friend and professional contact every five miles.
She says travel is how she focuses.
I'd say even if she goes nowhere, she is always several places anyway. Or several people in one place. She says she's my Muse, but it's Davey who's supposed to be a writer. Why doesn't she amuse him? They ignore each other.
I don't know exactly what a muse is supposed to do, but it seems like mostly she just wants to be in the blog.

Like any aspiring actress in any town, tiny or big, Gee has usually been without a stage, and has mostly worked in the hospitality trade.
The overhead, tray-flourishing, side-steps she performed during her early restaurant gigs made Gee well known in Ithaca as the Zobo Waitress, but most of her acting jobs were with a few up-stairs theater companies which entertained fewer people than they employed, and payed only the land lord. That was before Missy Hooligan came through town.

A year or two after I myself had left town, Gee went off with Missy Hooligan's Tall Animal Review - a funky and eclectic bunch which included pseudo-apes on stilts and skates, a peg-legged, tattoed hog, and a coordinated shoplifting team, and also offered a wide range of theatrical improvisations.
When Gee joined the Hooligans, they began to include the little "dinner theater" productions, in which Gee was the star.
And she earned the two ee's in her name with her billing as the Mystic Miss Gee, the Palm Reader.
She has a nice professional way of taking your hand, while catching your eye with her own eyes - with those pale blue, nearly transparent irises that make you think she could look into your head. because it seems you can look into hers........ and and then she looks at your life line, and shudders at what she sees, turns away briefly and thwn offers a pleasant and vague prediction about travel and friendship. Or at least that is what she did for me. I'm guessing that her regular customers tipped her generously, for not telling them more.

The Missy Hoolahans , or Houlians, or Hooligans ...... by any name and in any era, or current mix of hippy, beat, and gypsy..... are a bunch of fellow travelers you wouldn't likely bring home for lunch: all artists of opportunity. They own very little, and sleep with their chickens , cats, dogs, and children, in or under vans and homebuilt trailers. Mostly, they launder their clothing without removing it. But they were artists and didn't need any license.

When the convoy made camp in some hidden place... often in a well located cemetery..... she could walk up to the door of just about any inn, restaurant, or bar, and talk the management into exchanging some dinner theater, for dinner itself.
She was all sincerity and enthusiasm...still is...without any acting.
Until the final acts, never more than three of the Hooligans appeared in the dining room during their productions. But twelve or twenty would be out back, busy writing themselves into the play, and they would each troop through at some point before the group bow and chow.
They were all charming...or entertaining....or distracting enough that they were usually well thanked and fed......but occasionally they were chased away or arrested, and they sometimes disbanded....for a while.
Once, for a Christian Businessman's fund raiser, they staged a Murder mystery robbery which, as far as the robbery part went, only pretended to be pretend. Not all of Missy's crew were involved in planning the robbery, , but those three got several years each in prison, and the Hooligan's dispersed for five whole years.
That was more than fifteen years ago. They have been seen around here again, only recently.

When they didn't get busted or otherwise interrupted for a long stretch, Gee would tire of that life.
So after the caravan arrived at some place where she wanted to stay for a while...she would just walk up to an Inn and tell the manager that, for no money at all, she would gladly clean a bathroom top to bottom ... as a demonstration..... and what's more, she would do it in fifteen minutes flat as they watched.

She would go over the place on all fours, sometimes plonking around on two inverted buckets with the bales over her feet, and scrubbing the ceiling with her hand brushes . She had a special pair of bushes with leather straps which, as the last step, she buckled onto her feet, then flooded and skated the floor clean This was all done with more ornamental movement than was practical....but she did do it quick as she said, and on the basis of her performance, maybe mostly on the basis of its entertainment value, she could get up to thirty dollars each to clean additional rooms.
I guess most people were so charmed they didn't stop to think that if they paid her thirty dollars for fifteen minutes of work, they were payiing her a hundred twenty dollars an hour.
No problem..... they would soon bring her into the kitchen, and before long hand her the general hospitality functions, and weeks of Inn sitting, especially for inns with multiple, demented and demanding pets.

She looped many times around the country between New Orleans and Nova Scotia, usually taking several years to complete a loop. Ithaca was not in the loop.
Somewhere along there she somehow gained a daughter, who split off on her own, a while back.

Oh I guess I don't want to know everything about her life between then and now.....or even between the time she left here for the smoked salt and when she straggled back.

After that, Gee was here again for about a week.... or maybe it was two or three short ones.
My housekeeping and personal grooming had gone a long way down a steep slope since she'd been away, and I was glad to have her home . it seems like most of the time she was back here, I spent in the bathtub .
This trailer is small enough that one of us has to be sitting somewhere if the other is only going to move around...... and especially when she's cooking or cleaning, launching around on my dry-wall stilts to do the ceiling, or wielding that big French knife of hers.

One day when she had been chopping and mincing for her portable pancake pies while thinking about other things, she powdered her face with some New Hope Mills pancake mix.
I was sitting in the bath with the old IBbook clam shell open on a board I had put across the tub,
When Gee walked in, her face all white with that pancake mix, I couldn't even see the oak leaf tattoo on her cheek.... I grabbed the edges of the tub ......my knees jerked and knocked the board.... and tipped the IBook into the water.

I snatched the clam shell out of the tub, and Gee hung it over the towel rack, but we both knew it was dead.

She was only interested in getting me to guess who she was made up as.
In the dewy, overheated atmosphere of the trailer, the New Hope pancake mix was already rising and bubbling on Gee's face.
She was being who?
I guessed Michael Jackson, which pissed her off. Jackson Pollock; not funny. I guessed Michael Jackson again.

The correct answer was Cameo White. If I hadn't been more concerned with the dead computer, I might have guessed it; she had been talking about Cameo White ever since coming back from Bridge House.

Why exactly Gee would identify with someone who died alone and was partially eaten by her dogs..... I can't say, but she tells me she wants to play the role of Cameo White in a movie set at Bridge House. Not that anyone is planning to make a movie.

Gee went yesterday to help her friend at the inn with a pet-wake they were hosting, and said she might stay over night to help with the breakfast ......then I know she was going to help with some tastings at the winery up the road for a string of wine tour buses coming through.... so I don't know when I will see her again exactly. But I've got the red guitar.

Ghost Herd

2009-10-05T06:23:00.000-07:00

Quick in the Jungle

2009-10-02T06:27:00.000-07:00

Dogless Days and Cupola Nights

2009-09-08T12:42:00.000-07:00

Every morning this August, I went down to the chicken house and called the hens out to range with the three guard roosters - Dot, Lefty, and Whitey.
Some harmonica clucking and a trail of black berries gets them away from the door fairly easily. The native blackberries are the biggest and sweetest here this year I have ever seen in the wild.
But most mornings the hens then went right back into the hen house as soon as they had snapped up all the berries , and I was back in the trailer, having a bowl of berries myself.

The chickens knew that those hot and humid days of Blackberry Summer were going to be like a great big light bulb sitting smack on their backs.

Chickens don't exactly know the future, but they know the weather and are very sensitive to everything that comes from above.
They also sensed that pretty damn soon, molten chunks of glowing matter might just possibly come streaking down from the sky. Because August is the month of the yearly Perseid meteor shower.

Chickens are well aware of it, but humans mostly don't notice because most people are either living inside the regional light bulbs or are still blind from the protracted and overblown fireworks of July. And anyway, most people wouldn't notice a shooting star unless they got hit by one.
As the rate of the meteor fall was just picking up in early August, when there was still a fair amount of water in the ponds, G and I sometimes watched the sky at night from on our backs in the middle of the round pond. Except for picking blackberries a to watch the sky at night, me and G spent as much time indoors as the hens did. We were cooking and tubbing in the day time, and up in the cupola at night... under the the wide screen of stars, with the occasional fucking thunderstorm blowing by.....mostly sound and furious clouds, like stampeding buffalo ghosts.

And with the moon racing through (don't look directly at it or you will be blinded) , lying there was all in all the greatest thrill since flying in dreams.
But Dot, Whitey, and Lefty, roosting on Davey's deck rail, were not amused. They muttered at the thunder, and when an occasional star streaked across their piece of sky, they made the clucking five syllable alarm that sounds like "Jesus fucking christ", and then the roosters in the chicken house would start it up a few beats behind, and they would continue until they all came into unison and then it gradually quieted down to a murmer and to a mere rumor.... until the next star alarm.

Yeah, chickens know that thunder storms and meteor showers and shit from above in general are just dandy until you get hit by something.
And now brother Davey knows too . He isn't quite beaten flat, but he looks like he has at the very least been struck by lightning several times. He has taken some hits. Maybe it is about over now .....the pace of the events has slowed down...and he is starting to come out of doors.

Here's the hit list:
In the dog days of August both of Davey's dogs died; his truck quit; his hard drive died so he lost all the data; a close old friend was put in jail for a few years; he heard that his child hood ex wife - missing since - April, was most probably murdered; one of his three college room mates whom he had not seen in forty years, and who had just in July refound each other.... and with whom he was planning a reunion here in August....died suddenly..... and then Davey strained his loin or his groin or something, when burying the second dog, so now he can't sit still to write.
Of course he doesn't write much even when he isn't thunderstruck . The point is that he has been knocked silly by all this, but I still say that , half drunk and with the flu, I myself could write his biography on an etch a sketch, in about half an hour.
I just can't do everything at once...even if G can.

And what about the trip I planned, hauling and poling the Arc up Cayuga through the great lakes Chain to Great Bear Lake on the Arctic sea? It's not entirely off the agenda, but it is at least a couple of years away at this point.
My work here isn't finished. I think I have managed to get the chicken range under control, but we are without dogs now, so other critters are drawing nearer. The skunks are back living under the chicken house, and that is good because the coons and every other sort of chicken killers will stay back a little, but the chickens, especially the roosters, do not control themselves without some help, and I don't think Davey is ready to get with it..

I wish it would rain, really rain. People think it has rained a lot, but it was only a lot of sound and furious clouds. The water-table is very low by my measure: The dug ponds here are as low as they were during the drought several years back that killed all the bass in the upper ponds. Either it hasn't been raining (however it may seem to sun bathers and container gardeners) or else someone is sucking the water out from under us. Maybe the miles and miles of Cargil salt mines under the lake are flooding . Or maybe the natural gas companies or Nestle company is coming at us sideways for their bottling or fracking water.

A cat came creeping around last night. I saw it. Black and white. The Roosters raised the ruckus call.

G got a ride into town with her friend from the inn, to get some vinegar and hickory- smoked salt She said that while she was there, she planned to peek in at Bridge House.

Name of G

2009-09-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

says she wants me to get a big fancy G, like the bigger one shown above, tattooed on me somewhere.
?Like maybe on the lower forty acres of my back?

I knew the G-on-me tattoo was one of the ideas that would most likely blow right through on its own, but we splashed each other and argued in the tub for half an hour about whether it made better sense as a tattoo for her own left butt hock...... since, on her right hock, she already has a tattoo of fractal stars in the constellation of the Big Dipper . The dipper handle extends down her leg, the north star out of sight. I kind of like it.
Actually I don't want the big G on her either, but until this discussion about the G letter , G had never told me that her real first name was "Virginia".
Virginia Ann Something-Something.
She doesn't go so far as to say what her maiden or married (ex) names are.....but she says they belong to well-known people she doesn't want to be associated with. I don't know for sure if that means she necessarily ever really was associated with famous people of whatever names, but thanks to the Cornell legal aid clinic, and a liberal judge , G is her legal first name. It is a G without a period, pronounced like the letter G but signifying nothing fixed.
Ask anoyingly what the G stands for , and she will say it doesn't stand for shit, and I had always given her that.

So I learn that G's parents named her Virginia Ann, and always called her by the whole Virginia Ann , which made boys of a certain age think of Virgin Aunts,or Ants in bras, so they would make appropriate comments.
She adopted "Ginny" as her name with friends, at school.
But when she was sixteen, she walked away from her home (in another tiny college town she won't say which) leaving with nothing but a shopping bag full of whatever stuff was on top of her dresser, and some compact food from in the fridge, including cheese, carrots, and a head of garlic.
From nowhere, like she gets everything else, she got the idea that chewing Garlic would keep male predators at bay, and as she walked out of town she husked and chewed gartlic cloves like they were sticks of Dentine.
A few prospective rides drove off as soon as they could get the window rolled up, but all in all the idea worked from the beginning, and she arrived in Ithaca on her second or third stop-over.
She stayed around Ithaca for ten years before I ever knew her. I passed though but was in the wild most of that time. She still had the garlic habit when I met her then. But it never bothered me.

Back then G asked herself what she wanted to do in life, and she told herself it was to be in movies. She some how thought that working in a movie theater in Tiny Town Ithaca was a way to start. She worked the concession stand at the Paradime Mall theatre complex until someone complained about the garlic pop corn.

When working or applying for work she usually wore long, kinky, apricot colored hair in scarfed bun, but outside, she generally let the hair fall around and in front of her pale eyes. Her hair has micro kinks in each hair, which has a hallo effect in many kinds of light, and also really holds scents.
The garlic aura kept her out of attempted Massage school too, but the big aura didn't keep her from getting a series of jobs in hippy restaurants: Moose Pie, Apple Blossom, XYZ , Frankie and Johnnies, Uncle Bodie's and the rest.
Using the plumbing at her job and sleeping on group home couches, at communes, and at pet sitting locations , she was tolerated, and protected, and gradually made herself necessary, then moved on.........around and around the ten or twelve hills surrounding Tiny Town. She likes to move. She might want to move me.
Ironically, or what ever you want to call it , she actually stayed a virgin until she met me.
But, believe it or don't, I didn't realize then that she WAS a virgin. That's because I was a virgin too - if you rule out episodes with trees and flowers, melons, and mud banks - not unusual with feral boys like me.

We have both come a long way , and it has been quite a while since G habitually chewed raw garlic, but along with her big Thing about Urine Utility, and her many other Big things, G is still big on garlic......only it is dietary garlic now.
I can go along with that. I will submit to her cooking. I can hardly get the grilled garlic zuchinni out of my head. It sticks to the inside of my head.a
G says that she is trying to develop a menu for a new Bridge House Inn. That again.
I can be easygoing like nobody else you know, but I'll go along with that move just as soon as I get a giant G tattooed on my ass.

Bathing with G

2009-08-31T16:20:00.000-07:00

Early last week G and I had just got into the bath for a long summer night's splash, when I noticed the yellow billowing at her end of the tub. She has obviously been pissing in our bath water as a regular thing, along with always adding the fuzzy sumac clusters, the juniper berries, and the dried pine needles she always puts in. All the herbs and flotsom turn the water to an Adirondack river amber after an hour or so.
We get in a lot of tub time, and G is a real mermaid in the water. Mermaids don't climb out of the sea to piss.
Piss power is one of her nut issues that I don't argue with her. She had already told me more than once that ammonia is the best cleaning agent. And she mixes piss water with vinegar to mop the floor. The former President of India or somebody used to eat gold and drink his own urine every morning.
I'm learning. She explains to me, waving her arms with the floating leaf tattoos. I just take it in.
She has a small red guitar with a cracked sound box and no case, which she pretends to play when she pretends to sing. She says she is writing an "Ergonomic Memoir" all in her head. And she says I might need to help her with the second draft..
Be her secretary maybe.......... but then she says she wants to be my muse.
She thinks she really is some kind of fairy, and she definitely is a witch. She is just like she used to be our first time around, only more so. She looks forty at most, and she has to be sixty at least.
She doesn't act her age. She puts spells on me, but has all kinds of conflicting ideas about what I should be twitched into doing. Maybe building a barn and starting a feral cat rescue and garlic farm here, or maybe moving back to Bridge House, or both. And build a high-heat, Hopi style, adobe outdoor oven in the yard. I put up with the over-stimulation and with her transparent, watery blue eyes . She could probably get me to do most anything. She could sell piss-cola to penguins.

Davey's Problem, and French Canadian Toast

2009-08-10T12:12:00.000-07:00

My editor slash brother Davey's problem........ as simply as I can state it,....... is that , deep in his heart, he doesn't really believe that other people exist.
This is a big problem if you are related to him in any way, and especially if you live too damn near him, Like I do here at Dog's Plot..

Anyway, this morning G fixed me her special French Canadian Toast, using our chicken eggs, rather than the traditional gull or tern eggs.
"Deliciosso," is what she promised, and I don't think that is a French Canadian term, but she was right. G has cooked and chored at all kinds of Inns from the Extreme SouthWest, to the far NorthEast, traveling with a French Cook's knife about sixteen ax-handles long.

2009-08-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

Deer Control

2009-07-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

Where Was I ?

2009-07-31T12:32:00.000-07:00

Yeah. Events have run over me and kept on going...so where was I before the dog died?
Talking about this trailer I'm in :
It's a "Hunter" from the forties or fifties. Years ago, it was parked down near Long Point among the squatter shacks on the strip of land between the railroad track and and the water.

Eventually they built an addition onto the trailer ; and later on, while they were building an even larger addition onto the first addition, they gave the old trailer away to a passing hippy couple in a pick-up truck.
These kids towed the trailer up into the woods in back of a local farm where they already had a little off - grid homestead, and there they attached new aluminum cladding , built authentic looking doors, and put a skylight over the trailer galley..... but then they only used it to store craft materials, , while they continued living in their little house .
Sun, rain, snow...... many moons and years blew by...... the couple split, mice moved into the trailer, the roof began to fail, and the skylight to leak..

Around then, Brother Davey was in exile from Ithaca, and in ruin from his Bed and spectacular Edgewood Place Bed and Breakfast forclosure, Had stuffed himself and his too much of his stuff into Little Nose Johnson's small traveler trailer here on his daughter's property. She has a soft spot for terailers and for him, so she let him haul the old Hunter out of the woods and set it up behind her little house on the hill.
He tried,to stop the skylight from leaking, but couldn't, so he built a cupola right over the skylight. He wanted it to be big enough so he could at least sit up there....so that's how high he made the walls.
But with the arched plexiglass roof over that, an average size adult can stand up in the center of it....and from the road, it looks like two trailers mating . It is nice up here at night though. When I was a kid, I thought the sky was a plastic dome; up here, it more or less is.

In the rear end of the trailer, Davey also built a bath-tub/bed combination....lid down it's a bed, lid up a tub. I have to give him credit for the tub bed. it suits me just fine. I always liked tubs for sleeping, and it's good to have the wet/dry option..
Then......like I said back a ways..... after he lived in the place for about a year , and, when his daughter and family moved out of the main house, he moved across the yard, leaving the trailer once again to insurgent mice and the weasels.

And now, after living for a year the Ark I made, then getting crowded out by rescue hens and living in the chicken house for a few months..... I find myself in the trailer.
But I didn't move myself in. I was moved in while unconscious.

The last thing I remembered., I'd been scything out in the orchard .

And then I was surfacing in the beforementioned bath tub which had been unused and empty of everything but mouse and weasel turds for several years.

My head was so heavy I could hardly lift it out of the water,
I looked up through the bath fog, not at clouds racing past the sun or moon, but at the blond birch paneling and a smoke detector with its mouth hanging open.

I gradually recognized where I was, but had no idea how I got there ......and who it was that I heard grinding coffee and the airy whistling on the other side of the sliding door.

And no, I didn't recognize her as she came through with the coffee.... what with the oak leaf tattooed on her cheek and blue ink maple leaves streaming down her arms .....
She knelt down by the tub and waved her chipped, maroon fingernail in front of my eyes. . Beyond the tattoos, that skin mostly big , pale freckles like shadows of floating leaves on the bottom of a stream. And that pumpkin - chanterelle hair..
She helped me sit up in the tub and she held the coffee mug to my lips.
A raft of fuzzy stuff floated on the coffee.
Rafts of the fuzzy berries in the bathtub too, Sumac berries. And the bath water was slightly pink, as if I had bled some. Maybe I had.
If I could have lifted one hand to feel my head, I would t have found the sharp lump there, but me and my hands were not yet communicating.
Then she says: You'n me........... born to be free."
That crazy rhyming habit. Makes her speech so halting, it drives me nuts.
I didn't smell he raw garlic she used to chew like gum to keep human predators off....but It had to be her, my poetry girl. I couldn't move, or hardly speak, but already I wanted to hug her and to wring her freakin frecklly neck.

Golden Pond Retriever

2009-07-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

I was brought into this family by a dog, and I have lived more with dogs than chickens , or even people, so I have known a lot of dogs, and Davey's old Deerdra was a gifted dog.
Her gifts were her sharp and sensitive nose, her great ears, and her blazing speed. A dog's dog; she was a cross between a Golden Retriever and a Greyhound, with a waist like a wasp, lungs like bellows and the ears, the coat..... and almost the speed, of a deer. Then, no more than six months ago, arthritis took her over all of a sudden, like an ant army. At the same time, her hearing went, eyes clouded, and her rear end seem to get disconnected. She hung on by her nose.
When I still slept in the Ark up by the house and Deerdra could still stand up and walk, but couldn't manage the porch steps any more, and she needed. more and more to go pee in the night........I would hear her whine from the top of the stair.
Davey sleeps very well, to put it mildly, especially after a beer or two and a Victory at Sea video attempt......... so I'd have to come out the Ark and carry Deerdra down.....and back up the stairs later.
After I moved out of the Ark and down into the chicken house so as to make room for the hens rescued from their abusive sisters, I was no longer available for doorman duty, and by then Deerdra could no longer get up without help, or lay down except by falling.... which happened whenever she tried to turn around or back out of a dead -end in the brambles. .
So when she whined in her bed, Davey had to carry her out...and down the stairs...though sometimes she would be whining not because she needed to go out and piss, but just because she was in pain.
Then, she would wander off , trying to find her way out of the dark , until she fell off the path. After a while, she would began to whine and later to yip like a coyote....so even I heard her from the chicken house..
And since G. and I began sleeping up here in the trailer cupola, I can see most of the paths all around and through the high grass and dog bane vines .
I would listen in my sleep, but often enough I just get a feeling that sent me with the plastic sled and a flashlight out to some quarter of the place, where I would sweep the dark with the light until I caught her eyes, then put her in the sled and slide her over the grass back and under the house where the roosters shelter in rough weather . She would then sleep exhausted, sometimes till afternoon. She'd become virtually deaf, blind, and confused. The only blessing being that thunderstorms didn't make her crazy insane anymore, and she slept through the fourth of July fireworks. If Davey would do a better job of keeping the paths, it would help everything, because sometimes, walking the easiest route, she would go up and down the driveway until she accidentally walked right out the other end
.A few nights ago, something made me sit up in the Cupola all of a sudden, so I got the flash light , ran out to the end of the driveway and shined it up and down....and here she comes, forty yards off still, right down the middle of Rt. Ninety.

She escaped death by any texting salt truck driver at that time of night.
But then a few days ago, saying nothing to me, Davey left here with both dogs in the back of the truck, and came back after a couple of hours with Taino in the cab and Deerdra in the back, wrapped in a blanket , dead as a cold burrito.
He took her out into the orchard in a wheel barrow.

Two days later, Davey's old truck died in the driveway, and now Davey himself doesn't look all that good.
He's been quiet ....but soon enough, he'll be crowing at me about the rent again. Anyway, I better hang on here until he' s a little less fragile
. He won't be ready for another dog for a while yet. I ought to find a kitty and shove it into the house some night, but he isn't much of a cat person. Not much of a people person for that matter.
The place could use a whole litter of kittens, or a barn full of cats, so many mice and chipmunks , and baby rabbits around here. Clean em up. Especially if we are going to try and have a food service operation here. But I sense some resistance.

The Glory Egg

2009-07-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

Since my blog has been picked up by the Tiny Town Times internet tabloid , it seems like I ought to post more often so as to not disappoint frequent readers, and Dog knows, there's plenty going on here all the time that I usually let pass because of other priorities....but that doesn't mean they aren't frigging amazing.

Like Frinstance: We get a wide variety of egg colors and even vague patterns from the Dog's Plot hens. And then a week or two ago, we got the most amazing egg yet.
You see it here. It looks just like the Northern Lights. and at the same time, exactly like the flank markings of a male Brook trout in Rut.....and I say this as one who has seen the Aurora Borealis over the Alaska highway, and once over Aurora New York, and who has savaged many a vivid Brookie from the Oswegatchie.

I just hope that we can produce them as a regular thing.
All in all, and all in one, it is a stunning demonstration all over, of the Oneness of all things. From now on I'm going to treat ALL the hens with royal respect, at least until I find out which hen is responsible for what I call the Glory Egg. Basicly, this could be the greatest thing since Joseph Smith went up the hill a few miles from here and came down with seventeen hundred solid gold tablets, inscribed with
a four hundred thousand word, previously unpublished bible fiction, which would have weighed in at at sixteen tons, and would have taken him sixteen days with sixteen oxen to fetch, except that his tablets were only an ordinary half crock of shit, and this Glory Egg is the real fucking thing, pardon my Anglo Saxon. Like where are they now, the golden tablets?
I wanted to preserve the Glory Egg of course, so I dipped it in melted paraffin , put it in one of Davey's sweat socks. which I stuffed it into a yogurt container, and put way back in Davey/s fridge so it wouldn't dry out or go infertile ........especially in case there aren't others and we want to hatch and breed from this one. I checked it once every few days to make sure it's alright.... and when I looked just a few days ago, it was not alright....it wasn't even there.
Davey had cleaned the fridge, which he does like once every three years, and when he looked into the yogurt container , saw his sock....and took a whiff of it, he thought it was an advanced instance of yogurt rot. so he put the lid back on , and he shoved the thing into the kitchn trash he takes to the dump instead of into the compost, where even dog shit is good enough to go.
I suppose I should have used one of his clean socks, but he probably would have been pissed at me then too.
I'll not make a fucking religion about it..... just wait and watch the eggs fall.

Blue Rooster

2009-07-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

How I Got Here

2009-07-09T13:52:00.000-07:00

Last night, I dreamed I was riding again in the cupola of that Alaska Rail Road caboose on the way to Moose Pass, firing my new-bought, pawn- shop .22 revolver out the window.
I saw the flashes out the leaky sides of the gun chamber, but couldnt hear the shots, because of the clackety clack of the railroad track. The train seemed to keep on rocking and rolling through most of the night........ until I smelled the coffee.

The coffee ....I smelled it before I opened my eyes .
Gradually, I noticed G.'s airy whistling from the galley below, and remembered where I was: up in the cupola of the trailer Davey set up and lived in only a year or so before Mnetha and family moved into town and he relocated across the yard, leaving the trailer to the mice and weasels.
It took a major blitz-surge to get the inside under control, and the weasels still chase the mice between the walls at night.
I can hardly believe that, after all we have done to get this abandoned trailer into shape, Davey's asking us to pay rent. To pay him rent, now that I am doing just about all the work of the place outside of writing his memoir....... and it looks like even that won't get done unless I do it.

Propped up on my elbows in the cupola , looking out through the condensation on the plexi like from inside a cloud, I saw the reddish-blond blob of a deer grazing just a few yards off and below, near one of Davey's caged fruit trees .

So many deer. Last night after our mushroom feed and before sleep, looking straight up at the traveling moon, we heard the yippity- yipping of a dozen coyote cubs out back, probably celebrating over another fawn they'd torn apart .
The open state land around us produces as much weight per acre in mice and deer as an acre in Idaho produces potatoes. The lusher the season and milder the winters become, the more fawns are born. And this year is junglly lush, with trees breaking in a moderate wind because of so much leafery, squirlly grape vines crossing the highway on telephone wires, fawns in sandboxes and flowerbeds. It's crazy.

The coyotes don't do much damage to the deer numbers...can't keep up with them, but the deer themselves do a lot of mischief in the orchard....worse even that the roosters.
So wouldn't you know, in late May, about when the pregnant does were tramping out of the woods to do their damage, Davey went up to Lake Bonaparte to fart around and do some dock work, leaving me in charge of everything here at Dog's Plot.
When I walked out back on the trails he had scythed from grafted pear tree to grafted pear tree, I saw that the deer had already been sampling some of the grafted shoots, so I took a lot of the buck thorn brush Davey had cut and leaned it around the most exposed of the clone trees . But I saw that really, the best thing would be to expand the mowing and fudge the trails some so they don't just lead the deer right to the trees.

The machete is my preferred tool for just about everything except driving nails, but it's mostly a one at a blow tool, so I would need to use Davey's scythe.......and since the scythe itself is longer than I am, I had to get out my dry wall stilts too .
In the shed, there was a robin's nest on one stilt, so I moved it to a snow shoe. I don't use the stilts much here at Dog's Plot...mostly just for when I go to town.
I'm pretty good on the stilts....so t someone passing me on the sidewalk might take me for a slightly arthritic but spry person of normal proportions, rather than a the guy with the partially descended legs....... but the scythe was a totally new thing for me.

I got up and going alright though. And the scythe is such a powerful multiplier of effort , that I was soon moving through the grass like a hover craft. Carried away by the tool. Not really the way to mow.

Out by the Black Berry patch, I heard the twittering of what I assumed to be the mocking bird that flits around here doing imitations of crows, finches, and the squeaky wheel on Davey's wheelbarrow......... when suddenly it stopped and a human voice shrilled out "Careful you don't take my head off with that fugging thing." I stumbled, tottered, and fell.
I managed to throw the scythe aside, but I hit my head on something.....I think on on one of Davey;s Buckthorn stumps.

When I came too, I had a pulsing bump on my forehead like a horn about to come through. I was soaking in the bathtub Davey had built into the back of the trailer. From the galley, came the sliding notes of that free-bird whistling and the sound of the manual coffee grinder.
My clothes and stilts were piled in the orange tobbogan sled on the floor beside the tub.
Never mind the horn of pain on my forehead, I was more comfortable than I remember being for years.....too comfortable to move .

Within a few minutes, that coffee scent came snaking under the partition door.
Then the door slid aside, and she walked in with a tray.
With that hair color somewhere between pumpkin and chanterell, With the tattoo of an oak leaf on one cheek, and a fall of maple leaves down her arms.
" it''s me,!" she said, but at first I didn't recognize her.

Stilted, Busted, and Gone

2009-05-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

At the height of my celebrity on campus while I was secretly living in one of his office desks, Alan Pike once introduced me at a Temple of Zeus poetry reading as "a cross between Toluse Latrec, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Rimbaud", but I didn't take it unkindly - my low stature after all was largely the reason for the spell I was able to put on an audience - .and about then Pike showed his real sympathy by showing up one day with a pair of drywall stilts he had bought for me on impulse at Ithaca Paint and Decorating.
At first I only clunked around the Goldwyn Smith. upstairs practicing on them at night. They were no match for the grace and speed of the lost fiber-glass rod legs Doc Howe had made for me, and my girl Garlic said they violated my true nature..... but one foray to the downstairs level established that , when I was mounted on them, people who were more or less familiar with me from the Temple of Zeus readings, didn't recognize me at all....so at least they would allow me to seem somewhat ordinary and stay up with the crowd.

That Spring, Geof Hewit , an editor of the the Trojan Hearse student literary mag, asked me for a poem they could publish, so I gave him the proven "I'm going to hump your leg". But - emboldened by my popularity - I changed every "hump " to "fuck".
The Hearse courageously accepted and published it.
Being a performing poet had gone to my head, but the prospect of actually being published , got me so excited that on the afternoon the magazine came out, I strapped on my sheet-rocking stilts and bell bottom pants, pulled on my pocket fedora, and went down to the Willard Straight student union, where the Hearse staff had set up a table near the front steps and were selling the magazine.

Sales were not exactly brisk, but I stood and watched from across the street, fascinated for almost an hour to see that I existed outside my self, magically and multiply, on paper.

The action heated when two campus police cars arrived and the cops confiscated every remaining copy of the magazine from the sales table..
Later, they also gathered up all the Hearse mags in the Campus store, and all from the magazine office in the Straight.
The campus chief of police who decided to impound the magazines would later became the Ithaca chief of police and gain fame for proposing a preventive detention compound at Stewart Park where young people could be concentrated to prevent them from rioting....or at least from rioting anywhere else. His plan would never go into effect, and his offense against freedom of the press would be corrected when the Cornell president (who had been out of town at the time) returned.... but not before a mass protest the following day, at the scene of the crime .
I was there....more or less invisible on my stilts. There was also a good contingent from the writing side of the English department faculty, including Walter Slatoff, Archie Ammons and old Baxter Hathaway, and also, I think Jim McConkey, the only one of them still living, and who may remember it differently,
But Geof Hewitt, standing up on the Straight Stump, introduced Baxter , who was standing with Archie near the back of the gathering. Baxter didn't come forward, but lit a cigarette. People drew away from him so that he could be seen and heard, or in case it was a bomb he was lighting. He was shaking with some kind of fury, but he didn't speak until he had taken a good draw on his Parliament.
"Note," he said, finally " the offending poem is not a great poem, and it may not even be a good poem, or one could argue that it is not a poem at all. It may be offensive to Mrs. Grundy or the chief police, but it is not for them to edit the Trojan Hearse, or to decide what shall be allowed in print."

Well, those may not be his exactly his words, but they were words to that effect, and the effect on me was to make me particularly glad at that moment to be invisible.
Anyway, invisible though I was, I was obscenely exposed to myself. Also, it was very clear that my residence in the G.S. desk was not going to be a secret much longer.

Afraid that there might be a call of "author, author", I backed away and left the rally right then.
I went back to Goldwyn Smith, cleared out the desk, and then went to Edgewood Place, where I picked up the old guitar case and some traveling clothes. I walked half way to Varna still on the dry wall stilts, then went down by Fall Creek, stowed the stilts in the guitar case and began hitch-hiking to Lake Bonaparte..... once again traveling as the midget musician who always got the ride and usually a meal, even if his guitar turned out to be only a harmonica.
I never even said good- bye to Garlic.

The Scots Pine Stimulus

2009-04-30T08:20:00.000-07:00

Look at this picture of Dog's Plot homestead. What do you notice? Not so much the little box of a come-lately house which now rests on the old foundation..... but rather the mighty Scots Pine which the old folk probably planted even before they started to girdle the existing trees and clear the stones, rocks, and ox-sized boulders out of the new fields

Why is it it is that those hardscrabble immigrants who had to transport their entire households and tools to build and grow what they would need, brought with them seedlings of trees that bore no edible fruit, particularly pines, to a country already prickly with pines?
Recently my friend the park ranger and Adirondack guide who goes by the name Riverheart, told me about some friends of his in the central Adirondacks who have a small business harvesting woodland herbs and essences. For the last several years they have been providing Scots pine pollen to scientists who have been looking into its chemical composition and running tests to determine its effects on certain medical conditions, such as arthritis, and Lyme disease.
The natural function of the pollen, in addition to the fertilization of the female element of the pine, is to act as a growth stimulant, and there is anecdotal evidence that limited doses have the same effect as Viagra. But beware. according The Natural Testosterone Plan; for Sexual Health and Energy by Stephen Harrod Buhner:

"The chemical analaysis has revealed that the
"Pine pollen contains large quantities of exceptionally potent sterols. One such, brassinoloide, is a powerful growth stimulant to plants. The brassinosteroids in pine pollen are also very similar in structure to many animal steroid hormones and produce similar steroidal activity. In addition to these kinds of sterols, pine pollen also contains significant human male hormones such as testosterone and androstenedione and relatively large quantities of amino acids and other essential nutrients. Scots Pine ( Pinus sylvestris) pollen has been found to contain androstenedione, testosterone, and epitestosterone in high amounts.

Cautions: Some people are sensitive to pine products- seed, pollen, bark, resin and so on. Negative reactions can run from mild allergies to anaphylactic shock. If you have a history of allergies to pollen or severe reactions to bee stings, do not use without consulting your health care practitioner. Adolescents should not take pine pollen.."

You can't look at these huge rocks which make up foundations, line the wells, and stud the hedgerows around here without speculating about how those men and boys moved them. There is a lot to be said for the sheer determination of the Scots Irish, and for the clever use of levers, inclined ramps, sledges and oxen, but there is also every advantage in having a gigantic testosterone and steroid producing plant looming over your home. It is no surprise that the Scotts and Irish who had been driven off their land by the English who destroyed most of the pine forests and put sheep on the land, would gather up some seedlings and take off across the water.
The presence of the big pine here helps explain some of brother Davey's bone stressing over-enthusiasm with the digging bar and shovel, such that he made some efforts his bones could not really support, and it also explains the supper aggessiveness of the roosters here, not explicable in terms of roostosterone alone.
Last year I decided to stop marketing Roostosterone on Ebay not only because of the occasional wattle and comb effect on customers, but also because of the difficulty of harvesting the stuff. But with the Scots pine.....which will be pollinating in May, there will be no such problem . I'll just shake the catkins in a bag....and as far as intended or unintended effects....well it is a natural substance to which we are all exposed to some degree, and it is up to every individual to manage what she puts in his mouth and visa versa. Anyway what could be worse than arthritis and Lyme disease, or maybe cancer?
For better or worse, I expect to be gathering pollen this Spring. It should provide a good boost for me pulling the Ark when I haul off to the Great North....so I may not need to get the Yak I have been considering and can't really afford anyway. Also, I could maybe sell some along the way to finance my travel, but, I'll leave the mail order marketing to the people a Woodland Essence: http://www.woodlandessence.com/

So don't bother me about it. And for Cripes sake, be careful. Note especially that, although this may actually be beneficial to some women, it is not for the allergic sort of person, and particularly not for adolescents.
I wouldn't even want to be around an adolescent stoked on the stuff, unless maybe he was at the bottom of a well or harnessed to a sledge.

Something Ugly this Way

2009-04-24T18:38:00.000-07:00

Love on the Roof

2009-04-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

It wasn't generally known around the English department that I lived under a desk up in the junior faculty office garret , but only the most abstracted prof wouldn't notice me - barely four feet tall without my prosthetics - as I shuffled around Goldwyn Smith Hall, sat in on writing workshops, or appeared among the plaster casts of broken statuary at the Temple of Zeus open readings.
When I stood on a chair that first time to recite "Tripod, the Three Legged Dog" , people bent lower and fished in their coffee cups, but at the first line - " I'm going to hump your leg "- Archie Ammons let out a big country guffaw, and immediately the place echoed with laughter which resurged each of the three times in the poem's six lines that I threatened to hump their leg. It was a lame poem, but a few months later, crudely revised and worse yet, it would make me so infamous I would decide to disappear.

After that first reading, there were those who called me Tripod and made the obvious third-leg jokes, but Tripod was a real dog, truly famous on campus in the fifties, and long forgotten before most of them had appeared there. He was a malamute -half wolf- sled dog who had lost a front leg to gangrene as a result of a fight injury. He was useless as a sled dog after that, so some student had brought him back from a trip to Alaska, but it was not all that hard for Tripod to become top dog on the soft-dog Cornell campus.
At that time Cornell was an institution where it was a matter of pride and unofficial policy that any dog could attend any class. Dogs walked to campus with their fraternity boys, stayed and strayed all day, and hardly created more than a ripple of chuckling when they flopped down beside the lecturn or mated in the back of the lecture hall.
The beginning of the end of the dog years came when Tripod killed a couple of other dogs and was deported back to Alaska , but still in the early seventies when I was living in the desk , If anyone had suggested that you should not let your dog outside unless you were attached to it by a leash and that you should pick up its turds with a plastic baggy, that someone would have said, "pick up turds with a plastic baggy? What's a plastic baggy? What do you want with dog turds?

I wandered with a frisbie and Pike's dogs during the day, and I became a regular at old Professor Cole's introductory Geology lecture class they called "Rocks for Jocks." I liked the big story of the geological landscape, and the ecstatic phrases that rolled through it, like " glacial erratic boulders" .
I wrote it down in my tablet and drew pictures of glacial erratic boulders on page after page , some the size of houses and with pine trees growing on the top.
A slight girl with pumpkin colored hair was sitting two seats from me and because of her powerful aura of garlic, everyone else was at least three seats from her. I had also noticed her at the Zeus readings, and around about when I was throwing the frisbie for the dogs . I always sat fairly close to her in the Rocks lectures because there was always plenty of room around her ...anyway I have always been a dog for strong smells, so we were alone frequently in our private garlic bubble.
She wasn't more than five feet tall, with that pumpkin hair and big freckles mostly covering her pale skin like leaves on water. She was thin and superficially ethereal.... except for the heavy smell of garlic. She ate it by the whole clove from a Cracker Jack Box.
Her eyes were so pale green or gray that it was hard to see where they were directed, but she had obviously been watching me and my doodling .
One day before old Professor Cole had finished shuffling the notes that he never looked at because he had been giving the same scintillating lecture for years, the garlic girl, who had sat down only one seat away from me that day, tore this poem out of her notebook and pushed it onto the writing arm of my chair:

" That Glacial Erratic is nothing ecstatic,
or a god-egg that fell from the sky.
But it's not so mundane as if it fell from a train:
a garden stone imported from Shanghai.
Its purely symptomatic of ice in the Arctic
Which built up in the Great Bye and Bye."

It was very cute , but all I could say was thanks.
She offered a grin and a garlic clove from her cracker jack box. I put it in my shirt pocket instead of eating it right there, and that is all that passed between us until the class was over, but the deal was done, and after class, we walked out in our private bubble of garlic mist.

The garlic, she would tell me, was to keep predators off, and Garlic was the name she went by. She never told me her real name, but she said her father was an ornithologist, a specialist in raptors. I never heard about her mother. Garlic said she could see that I was no predator. This was true....a scavenger , but not much of a predator, certainly not a sexual one, and at that point, I was a twenty-some year old virgin who had never humped anything but trees. Garlic took me down to a place in the gorge where she kissed me and told me that I was an elf or a fairy.....in the magical sense......we took garlic together and she came with me to my desk lair. We pulled out all the drawers to make more space and that evening she discovered my General Dinglehammer - she was the one who came up with that name for it.
From then on Garlic sat with me in Zeus, called me Pan the Man and Boneypart in public, was with me privately every night, insisted on climbing with me on the rope rigging through the skylight to the G.S. roof where, ecstatic, we rang the dingle bells in the copper valley , held on and came through it , even as we slid half way to the eves and scared the shit out of me.

That outrageous behavior didn't have consequences or get noticed, but we were becoming conspicuous. Davey said I should stop bringing Garlic to the office...maybe some envy involved. I doubt any girl ever told him he was a magical being. Anyway, I think some of the other junior faculty up there were beginning to sniff around and talk. Global forces were at work. Erratic love had to go.

training the working domestic rooster

2009-04-19T20:24:00.000-07:00

The Blow Gun and The Sky Light

2009-04-12T11:38:00.000-07:00

I'm a motherless child who's had at least half a dozen pretty good mothers and old Alan Pike was one of my best mothers of all. When I limped up onto the Arts quad, he took me under his brawny wing and saw to it that I was fed , then put me up in the junior faculty attic office he shared with my brother Davey, and did his best to administer an emergency Ivy League education.
Before he invited me to camp under the spare desk in their office, Pike had known me mostly from Davey's exaggerated accounts of how I used to climb with the raccoons, and sleep up in the pines, or float the whole night long out on Lake Bonaparte. Pike had something of the feral romantic in his own nature, and also I think that as a fairly short man, he felt especially comfortable with me - a really short one..... though with my legs on, I would be taller than him.
You might not notice that he was a small man. He didn't wear lifts or talk really low, or really loud, or punch you in the nose, or use any of those cheap little-man tricks. What you noticed was a figure like a tensed railroad spike which seemed like at any moment it might suddenly flip end over end through the air and thunk six inches deep into the wall, just to make a point.
He was a genius, knew that he was, and acted the part to distract, entertain, impress, and to teach . On top of that he was extremely self critical, and generous with others to the point that he suffered fools.... and he was a lot more delighted than Davey was to have me living in their office.

When he brought me a doggy bag of Chinese carry-out for the second time that first week, he also left me a bottle of Chianti.
And when he discovered during his office hours the next week, that I hadn't half finished the wine, he stayed around after hours until I wandered in, and then he helped me drink it.
I had never been a very good drinker : if I didn't guzzle, puke, and pass out, I just became a stump, not able to do anything but listen. So I listened, and Alan told me a lot about wine, and then he told me about technical climbing, and he told me the little story about his awakening as a genius.
He had taught himself to read at age three, but he was not all that extraordinary as a kid until he took the I.Q. test at school and his parents told him that he had scored at the high genius level.
With that knowledge, and from that moment on, he became the expert on everything, the leader of every activity, the president of his class and of everything else.
If he had decided to, he could have been the first Jewish President of the American Baptist Convention. He was a competition High Diver in high school, a Yale scollarshp Wiffenpoof with perfet pitch, then a Navy Seal, underwater demolition expert.
His tastes were wide and his and appetite for literature , music, food and wine was huge and contagious: He liked the cheap Italian wines, but he talked a fine line of French Vinifera too.
So after a very few evenings with him, I was aware of a whole lot more distinctions than I could taste.

As with wine, I didn't have much taste in poetry, and at that point, I had never even been drunk on it. I remember telling Pike I liked stories and useful information, not stuff like apple blossoms falling softly on cow dung, and he said that wasn't bad at all..apple blossoms falling on cow dung....that I should sit in on one of his writing classes, that there was all kinds of poetry - even informative poetry.
For an instance of that, he brought out the poem where James Dicky describes how he'd made a blow gun using a length of aluminum electrical conduit, and made darts from straight sections of coat hanger wire he sharpened by dragging the points over the asphalt of his driveway .
Well I wasn't about to attend poetry classes but I thought that was a pretty good poem and I said so.

So the next time Pike came in, he had a piece of conduit, a box of cotton balls, a few coat hangers, wire cutters, wrapping thread, and a brick for sharpening the darts on.....and we did it up as in the poem.
We hung a doggy blanket between some chairs and we set foam coffee cups on top of the inverted waste basket, then shot at them for probably a couple hours.
Pike had those Whiffenpoof Seal lungs, and I have a good pair myself, but mainly good blow-gunning is in the technique. It's is like woods-=whooping, or attacking a hill on a bike, or blowing a trumpet: a fast intake which radically expands the lungs, the diaphragm, the chest cavity and the cheeks, as if you had been blown into..... and then the quick bounce back.......
Fwhack ! Very satisfying.

Sometimes the dart would go right through the blanket, clatter against the wall, and leave the cotton ball to fall on the floor.
We filled a lot of plaster chips with tooth paste in the next week...... and eventually we got a dart board.

Davey had told Pike about how we had once used a bow and arrow to get a climbing line over the house at Edgewood Place, so that gave Pike the idea how we could use the blow gun to to get up through the sky light of the office.

He bent the end of a dart into a loop, tied monofillament to it, then pushed the dart about a foot up the tube packed several yards of nylon monofillament behind it, letting it trail out to loops on the floor. The floor end of the mono was joined to twenty five yards of heavy cord, which ran to one hook of a treble boat anchor with tennis balls on the points. He had tied a hundred feet of climbing rope to the anchor eye.
About one A.M. on a cloudy , but not so cold night in November, when there was likely to be nobody around to see us, or frolicking dogs to get hit with the dart, we pulled my desk under the sky light, Pike stood on the desk, stuck the blow pipe out and whooped the dart over the ridge of the building.
He went out to locate the dart, and I stayed in to manage the ropes, but he came back in after twenty minutes saying he hadn't been able to find the dart. . So we went out together and after a few minutes of sweeping the air with our hands we still hadn't found the mono, nor stumbled on the dart.
I picked up a doggy stick and went around waving waving it to extend my reach, then up the steps to the statue of the seated Goldwyn Smith himself.... and there was the dart, right at the feet of Goldwyn Smith, with the mono draped over his shoulder.
So, I went back to the office , got up on the desk and, when I jerked the line to signal him, Pike proceeded to hauled on the monofilament . I made sure the knot and the cord tied to it flowed through it, then with a broom, helped ease out grappling hook...... the climbing rope followed easily..
Fifteen minutes later we were up on the ridge toking on Pike's corn cob pipe, and he talked l about K2 and the Hindu Kush .
I still have the blow gun. I keep an old fly rod tip section shoved down into it, so that I can roam around using the tube as a walking stick, or a rooster whacker, until such time as I want to whip out the rod, and fly fish or blow darts.
The skylights are gone now, and Pike never made it to K2, or wrote his impossible thesis on the impossible Pynchon, or finished the story he was always mulling, which changed as he mulled it, and was as last I know about a recluse who lived in an abandoned bus with a dog pack.
but there were enough adventures ahead that there were some to look back on, only one of which was with both Davey and me too: a canoe trip, which was mostly carrying the canoe, and mostly the two of them doing it, along the old Alpine road to Indian Lake,
I'm no help carrying a canoe: too short without my legs, too bouncy with them. It was June, which means mosquitoes, black flies, and vicious punkies.
We smoked weed continuously to keep the bugs off, got bloodied anyway, and deeply stoned in the bargain. We caught half a dozen bass, which we ate half-raw, and with great pleasure. Stoned or not, I remember it all well.
We talked in the cooking smudge and into the night; we recalled the climbing of Goldwyn Smith and Pike pretended to argue that the dart had landed exactly where he aimed for, but given the complications and the distance and his frank newness to the blowgun then, the place he had aimed for logically would be the last place one ought look for it.... or otherwise he would have found it himself.
He explained that for the same reason, if you are going to celebrate by shooting a gun up into the air, you should try to aim it exactly straight up, because the last place it is going to come down, is into the top of your head.
He said, If a drunk Albanian gypsy shoots off like that , every one in the encampment who has managed to keep his head so far, runs to stand as close to the gunman as possible.
Matter of fact, said pike, when I had found the dart, he had been just about to look for it in Goldwyn Smith's Lap .....he had actually aimed for the lap not the feet, but it probably hit there and clattered down to his feet where I located it.
Near the place we camped on narrow Lake, Alan did find - lying a few feet from one another close to the shore , a pair of muskrat jaws bones, but with no skull or other bones near.

One day late that summer, after I had been out behind his place picking blueberries, he gave me f the muskrat jaws, which he had wrapped together at the hinge ends with the teeth pointing at each other, and strung on a raw hide boot lace.
I still have it right here. A minor work of genius.