Gratitude Day 1

Inspired by real life needs and a beautiful gift of compact words set in a tome, I am sitting here with an idea of gratitude. If there was a time for it, it would be now, when storms in the mind stand out like tornados on otherwise calm waters. Maybe, writing with gratitude in mind will make those storms seem more like eddies, doing whatever eddies do. 

I am thankful for my job. I can't deny that.  Let's begin with that. I work with students and have spent most of my time on the job thinking that I could be doing such a better job of it.  Wait, that is not a gratitude entry. Why am I thinking about this and writing it? Oh, I promised myself I'd do that, do what I ask my students to do.  Just write. They ask me how. I don't know, I say, don't you? Am I doing the right thing - I am, right? Doing the right thing? - by putting the questioning back on them?  I heard that was a good idea.  It usually comes out ok. But I often have to correct the track and take over the conversation to make sure I know where it's going. See, I am grateful to be a teacher. They tell me they are grateful for me. I don't know what that means. I don't know that I do for them what I think I would be grateful to me for. It's like catching fish when you were only trying to catch the bait to lure them. I think. I am a little confused.  And that paragraph had more to do with me and my thinking than anything. So, there that is.  Am I satisfied being a teacher?  No. I want more.  But to take away teaching takes away an essential connection... so, let's call it the desire to evolve my teaching into something not just in the classroom or under the auspices of a local school district.

Gratitude doesn't require thinking.  I think too much, so I may seem ungrateful. Much of life can be spent thinking about yourself.  Wait... I spend much of my time thinking about myself.  Me, not you, necessarily, but if this chimes with you, cool.  I think I am becoming some guru on letting go, but then I realize that is me thinking about being a guru and therefore it's not really a goal but a thought which can also be let go.  I've been instructed to consider my inner voice like a roommate in my head that yaks all the time, and that I am the one who is listening to it. If I first identify that I am not my thoughts and emotions, then that's the path to self.  I've been instructed to constantly be looking to live in the present, to know that pain in the body from anxiety is a set of reactions from the past, and to find the self that listens and focus on that quiet observer... then I sit at the seat of consciousness.  

See, I wanna be great at that. I am grateful for the knowledge now that I know how to let go of anxiety when it builds up into balls of barbed wire in the belly.  Maybe that's magic.  But it's all breathing, connecting mind to breath and body, and the results are instant. Maybe that's all thinking still.  See.... it gets confusing, until you let it all go and realize You are still there.  It's like a game you can always win if you just keep letting things go rather than hold on to them.  You don't lose anything; you just don't take on anything more.   

I am grateful for healing from internal pain.  Truth is I don't have body pain, and that is because I am lucky, and I ate lots of veggies and have apparently-awesome healthy genes. I am grateful for feeling that I can understand what to do to help myself instead of being helplessly thinking and walking in circles or long blocks or just driving and always thinking, always processing...something I know and have done and am done with.  Overmixing the batter, adding more thoughts, sweeter thoughts, some alcohol, some subsequent mental vacations... it's a place to be, I tell ya... relief is so wonderfully pleasant you may want to just keep on floating. But I don't really want to float anymore.  My life has changed significantly, and through that change I have changed.

I am grateful for change and what is to come, and to be at a point in my life where I can grow from where I was planted while growing where I am currently planted.  I will have to face certain realities but I can do that without a fearful mind. The problems can be manageable when you aren't so busy managing you fear of the actual problem. So, I am in a constant place where I am letting go of the feeling of anxiety that comes with the problem, and the problem is outside me but the anxiety is within me. The problem isn't going away... but my fear of it is going away.  The world will always present itself and I have learned that letting it flow on through me is a revolutionary act for the self.  

I am grateful for being alive, recognizing my pain, and making it my life's work now to grow. I am grateful that I feel OK writing about my insides and exposing them to other's opinions (none of which I am entitled to know let alone do something about). I am grateful to know the part of my inside that has always been me, who was ignored, and who now has a chance to grow in ways I never could have dreamed.  I am grateful for the knowledge that every day I can let go and it is a good thing.

I am grateful for Love, a new human in my life who seems pulled from my past unfathomable dreams of possible connection and who stands firmly next to me around the hearth we create between us, together, with whom I get to practice reciprocity, responding from the heart(h), and a Knowing that can only come from what happens when someone was made in a lab just for you, when the old pictures of her and her life told a story I have felt meant to be a part of the whole time.  Such gratitude leans into a daily commitment that the time left on this planet will be spent with Love I didn't know was possible, that Love is her and is me, and our love is worth shouting, screaming, singing, sweating, laughing, romping, and writing about. 

In a sea of problems, gratitude is a buoy with a light in the ever-present fog -- always there even when you can't see it.  Just keep moving, and the moving will take you away from the stagnant solitude inside and eddy you back to the light where you belong. 

The First Month for Emilia

The countdown continues to June 14, 2015, Emilia Caledonia Rhea Avanzino's first birthday...

What were we doing this time last year?  We were expecting a baby any day now, of course.  The days leading up your birth were harrowing to say the least, but as soon as you yelled your big "HEY!" to the world, we had yet to know the true meaning of "life turned upside down."  That first month - Baby Boot Camp, indeed - changed your mom and me.  You made us into parents.

It's common knowledge that new parents will be in for sleepless nights, piles of diapers, constant drool and spit-up wiping, and general personal havoc while they adjust to focus on the new life in their lives. Luckily, your mom had planned ahead (Oh Baby!) so that the trailer, all of your necessities, many of your possible wishes, and even our prospective schedules were in place before we even left for the hospital.  We really had it dialed up and were going to start right!  Then came a few unknowns.

Unknown #1: You would quickly became all there was.  I had no idea how centered on myself I was until you became totally reliant on me and your mom. All that mattered each day was whether you had pooped or peed and how frequently, how long you were feeding, and how long you could nap and where would be best for that?  Did that work?  How about this!  OOOOO this works well... oops not anymore.  To physically and emotionally center awareness around you is something I couldn't explain or fathom before you arrived, and still can't.

Unknown #2: Clocks cease to matter. Days literally become one series of events (most of them listed above) that seems to have no stop or pattern.  Following the move of a single grunting and helpless being becomes a required obsession, constantly trying to establish a routine, prognosticating about who you will become as a result of our decisions, then relaxing about that last part, deftly adjusting and adapting everything for you based on what just worked, falling asleep when possible and waking up on the cusp of REM sleep. Absolutely the most delirious I have ever been... drunk on baby.  It was the worst best craziest peaceful endless month of my existence.

If I could relive that month, I would again and again.  We lost our minds in you.  But that's love.  

Grunties

Grunties.  It's more than just a British word that's fun to say and has to do with what you may think it does.  It's also more than the chuckling middle of a Monty Python sketch involving silly people that you may have heard already.  Rather, "grunties" will always be Emilia's first phase of vocalizations for me, though they will never eclipse the great big HEY! she yelled to her Ma when first she made her appearance in this world.

Emilia, you made grunties, non-stop, starting shortly after you were born in the summer of '14. For us, that little esophageal burst of air accompanied with a even quieter noise, over and over and over again for weeks, became so ubiquitous we had to give you the nickname. We'd pick you up in your cocoon swaddle, and you'd turn into Grunties as your head swiveled to follow the moving scenery. We'd change your diaper, and Grunties emerged with each contortion we put you through.  Head on shoulder napping, lounging in bed eating, resting in the hammock under fruit trees, your every life move required a sound from Grunties.

This #14 is dedicated to your first summer, up there in good ol' Eureka, when, among the moving boxes and general stirring of our life, Grunties serenaded the horse pasture trailer as we prepared to depart it. You grunted outside while the trees waved at you and the sun danced through their branches.  Grunties joined the bird song and the sound of wind through pine, poplar and willow, and helped break the beautiful, long country silences.  Grunties will also always be the first new and exciting thing you did that we watched you grow out of.

I'm thankful you were born into a place and time where nature touched your senses more often than traffic or technology.  I'm also thankful you responded so gruntily.

Dear Sasquatch Monkeyface, in your fifth month

Dear Sasquatch Monkeyface,

November is here, making it about five months since the last time I wrote in the treehouse.  I know that because also five months ago today you finally showed up.  Five months is too long not to write, but ever since you arrived and made my world your whirled, there is no sign of the elongated stretches of mental freedom I associate with writing a thoughtful entry on the Treehouse walls. I've hammered out random sentences in my leather journal and some semi-coherent reflections on random acts in my teaching journal, not to mention the thrown-together half-salient lesson plans that my students work so hard to endure.  So yeah really, baby, you've redefined the whole idea of "me time." Just like they all said you would.
If you weren't so joyful to watch while eating a book, or so very good at precision toothless smile delivery, I could focus enough to sit and compose scores of sentences revealing in detail the several years of experiences wrapped into these past four months and how all our uprooting and then settling-in time went by without the requisite reflection.  I would regale my Treehouse walls of stories about my paid frolic in the national forest during your infancy while your mom remained trailer-bound sharpening her new mommy skills.  Vats of vowels await use in describing the attractive tract of land we purchased in Kalispell, the move... that excruciating move an hour south into hobo and black widow spider battles and leaky faucet flood control.  Floodgates of story I could devote to the satisfying challenge of teaching completely new classes and writing new curriculum in a new city with new colleagues in the only IB school in Montana, of joining the only choir in the area and getting my chops back, and of strumming on the birthday banjo and my classical guitar that I can finally play F and B chords on. I can speak long diatribes detailing true delirium at having no sleep schedule, not using the homemade desk enough and the dog not walking enough and how he misses wide open country fields. There are, of course, the weeks upon months of 2 hour sleep chunks, frighteningly frantic mornings, the ensuing clueless days, the return home to start it all again, plus endlessly rocking cradles and rhythmic pats on bottoms, sore and stretched arm muscles from devotion to holding that one position that seems to put you to sleep, at least that one time. The couch nights and floor nights require less telling, but they are funny in their helplessness.

They pile on, all the small stories that dovetail and never cease now more than ever, each new one burying an older one beneath it like a few more fall leaves.  The stories I scrawl I realize, now, always scream about me and my perspective as I navigate life from the Treehouse poop deck.  Now, suddenly but gently, like a vapor plowing through a quiet room, I realize all the stories that matter now revolve around you.  Every story now seemingly watches out for signs of you, steps lightly over but picks up your growls and shrieks at some point, awaits your entrance.  And no story seems as good without you as it is with you.  How did you do that?  You are now so obviously the point, the reason. You are slowly and deliberately pushing yourself out of my brain and into the only story worth reporting: the story of how you are doing and who you are becoming.  Hmm... sounds familiar.

Sunset on the Tobacco River - last few weeks in Eureka

As good a place as any

We're in a bit of a kerfuffle over here.  That's right, a kerfuffle.  See, we've got this baby coming, and we've responded to the new member of the family with a barrage of improvements to the EHPT (Eureka Horse Pasture Trailer), ready to get settled into for the long haul.  A long desktop and three sets of spacious shelves were built and have been settled on and into.  Books have congregated all in one place for the first time in our relationship, a monster king size bed welcomes us for almost everything except bathing, and a softly colored nursery has been ready for almost a month.  Everything has taken its natural angle of repose, and it's perfect.

Both in and out, I see this as the place where It's gonna happen.. For each day of growing green or louder buzzing of bees, shortening of shadows or vanishing of snow in the mountains, life is growing into what it will be when it meets this Big Thing of a new life form in a few weeks.  I see now that this Big Thing, this momentous, dreamed-about moment, will happen in a place I never imagined... in a small town, a beaver board trailer, surrounded by more animals and trees than humans.  And here's as good a place as any.


Driving along the windy back road home and seeing my students walking in the ditches cleaning up garbage (voluntarily, not as court-mandated community service, though I teach those kids, too) sent me wondering for the next mile or so how many years they have known each other, been in the same groups together, doing this service project.  Then, how long have teachers been teaching these same families, teaching sons and daughters, then grandkids... and on and on.  As someone born into the relative anonymity of a large city, you don't have much of that here.  The people come, a lot of them leave, and a few stay to be rooted, and everything and everyone becomes familiar.  Borrowing from Kathleen Norris' book Dakota and her thoughts on staying put in a not-so-flourishing region, I can see how stability comes more from the land than the people, and the stories of that people's success and struggle form most of what others usually think of the town itself.

Gratitude abounds when you look at everyone as a gift, but few strangers stay in towns like this long enough to see and value those gifts.  You don't understand a place going highway speeds just passing through with eyes on the road ahead. You also can't really understand anything about a place until you've sat and stared out from its front porches.  Illinois, Tennessee, Washington, and now Montana, we've gravitated to the country our whole lives.

Turning into my driveway, I feel the pull of a possible third year here, realizing we have become familiar trees here now.  With that in mind, eyes pause on the sun pouring onto the front porch and warmly resting its light on the pillows of the chairs.  The dog greets the open door and backs up into a  living room now lined with homemade furniture.  I set my keys there.  The groceries go there. And that's how roots plant, whether deep for generations or just in the topsoil while we keep one foot out the door of a place.  But to plant roots seems to really be all about planting your foot more firmly on top of the memories you are creating daily.  Like moss.  You can pick it up and move it all you want, but it flourishes when stepped on and pushed into the ground a little more, then left alone.  Transplanted moss takes time and care, but it can become permanent.


We've taken the unusually long winter as a sign we need to suck the marrow from spring and summer.  Deep cold and pregnancy allowed us to slow down lately, emerging like a deciduous tree blossoming from the cold, and we've seen some notably quiet moments in and around the EHPT.  A tree blooming once more and the wind not taking away all its blooms.  The birdfeeder that stays full because it's not sunflower-eating time, but then there's the woodpecker with an insatiable appetite for creamy suet blocks and the way it braces its large self on the tiny feeder.  Grass that grows a half foot every couple of days mowed by a balding and grunting feller on a riding mower who appreciates how I've pruned the trees around the yard because those branches used to slap him on his bald head after they pushed his cap off.  The frisbee golf course that's sprung up, and how the dog runs after the frisbee knowing full well that I know full well he will never bring the frisbee back, making him a perfect golfing buddy.  Hummingbirds buzz around the cherry blossoms knowing the bees arrive just before the lilac bushes bloom their golden tubes of nectar.  Birds and bees compete for blossoms in nearby bushes until the bees win and settle into the lilacs and trees, then make nests.  The first light gets earlier -- now it's at 4:00 -- so that you're fully awake by 6:00, ready for the second part of the morning.  Paint-shipped porches with morning sun only, enveloping hammocks under fruit trees, regal lounge chairs hovering over dandelion grass.  Deer roaming game trails in our backyard.  The ever-present mountains greeting us at the driveway, silence all around you save the blowing wind you can hear miles away and the bird calls bouncing around the valley every five seconds.

We've borrowed this place and called it ours for almost two years, and now we're looking at having to give it back after a final green and blue summer here, heading back down the road for a new teaching opportunity.  It's only sixty miles away, barely an hour's drive.  You can bridge that gap with people you miss, but we're struggling most with leaving this place, particularly the wide open silent expanses that we claim as ours.  I know I'm too new a resident of these drumlins to write anything about this Eureka and the Tobacco Valley, but I can speak to what it's like to be travelling through here at 65 mph, then 45, then 35 and 25, and to stop and sit a while on a few front porches, then prepare to drive away a little slower.

Oh Baby!

Ohhhhh baby.  Baby baby baby.  Say, baby in the belly, do you have any notion of the craziness you are embarking upon by setting foot out into this world and into our arms?  Yes, there are political boiling points, religious wars, and hatred all over the place (we call it the globe, but it seems flat... I'll explain later), but are those really reasons to not give you a shot in it ?  Plus, you would miss all this music.  You will not believe the beauty of a major chord turning into a minor chord then into a diminished and then we flat the octave and add a ninth, and then wow, you can pretty much carve up the harmony after that, add some rhythm with your mouth (we'll work on that together) and then you become an instrument!  Then there's mud, and bugs, and livestock poop.  And WATER!  Holy cow, water is really something to see and feel... the tap is great but when you see it outside when it comes from the sky and hits mountains and... wait, MOUNTAINS!  See, you will love those, especially when you have water at the base of mountains.  Add trees, those bugs and that mud, and you have, well, the area immediately outside our little Eureka Horse Pasture Trailer.  That's only the tip of the iceberg.  Oh, wait, ICEBERGS!  We'll have to go to Greenland for those... I've never been, but maybe you'll take us?  Funny that Iceland is green and Greenland is icy... oh, so much to talk about.

But first, let's talk about how you are turning said Eureka Horse Pasture Trailer upside down.  You see, our room is becoming your room, and Mom's office is becoming our room, and the living room is becoming our office.  My bookshelf is becoming your bookshelf, and my desk (which once was a sewing table in another life in someone's house in Seattle) is becoming your vanity-bookshelf-thingy.  Mom's bookshelf is becoming my bookshelf, and Mom's taking over the our family bookshelf in the living room.

So, Mom just painted her-now-my bookshelf a darker blue than our-now-her bookshelf.  Look how pretty it is... the official color is Alladin's Wish, chosen to compliment the blues in both our couch and in the trout picture on the wall.  We hope you like it, and that you don't throw up on it.  The bookshelf, that is.


I'm almost done building our new desk, a nine foot long set of boards thirty inches wide sitting on three sets of shelves I also built, all made with wood from around here that your mom hand-picked from Landlord Lundeen's big old barn. Yes, the one you can see from the road.  Isn't it lovely so far?  The desk, that is.
This, too, doesn't need to be thrown up upon.


So, once the desk is ready and the shelf is ready, we're going to throw Mom's old desk out, find a new home for our old bed, and drop the big new luxurious king size dream bed leaning against the wall onto the floor of our new room  move the painted shelf and the new desk into the living room, then send your vanity and your shelves into your new room.   Then we'll be done moving, and when that all happens we will probably start to cry a lot, not just because we are sharing a desk and that'll be weird, but mostly because we'll finally have a place called Your Room, one that we can walk into with anticipation and wonder, fill with girly things, build your crib, paint over the beaver board walls, and so much more.  It will also be lovely to have a holding place for the hoards of awesome things coming into our life because of you, things that are piling up in odd places.  It will be epic, and it will never stop for the rest of our lives, crazy lives in which we are busy building space for you, and we can't wait to fill it with the tiny warm actual gift of you.  You will inspire poetry and songs in several languages.  Your friends are being born this very moment, and your husband or wife is beginning their life or is about to.

All of that makes each morning right now pivotal in some unknown way, important and significant for reasons yet unknown.  You are also a pain in your mom's ass right now; literally, her sciatic nerve is killing her gluteus maximus, and it's your rutabaga-sized self that is the cause!  But don't worry, she's a strong woman very much in tune with her body and your little body within it.  We got this.  We got you.  Just listen to the music and the rhythm we tap, respond to it with your dolphin kicks.  We love that.

A Snowed-in Story

Even though the snow fell too fast to stick and melted a while ago...

The thought of my pooch (who, by the way, needs more video time because he is entering the prime of his cleverness, cuteness, and awesomeness) stuck at home alone most of the week kills me, especially knowing that he watches through the windows as deer frolic lazily across the back hill, woodpeckers alight with a thud on the feeder and gorge themselves, and turkeys waggle their waddle in frenzied lines, pecking at whatever the woodpecker dropped.  The knowledge that the sun rises and sets without him feeling it on his hairy black back makes my stomach twitter.  And it was that guilt alone that drove me to leave during my prep period one Wednesday in order to come home, play with the trailer-bound dog, and brush my teeth, all before my 4pm dental cleaning.

It was all planned perfectly.  However, it had been snowing hard all day.  That snow, blizzard-like and falling thick, proved to be the bane of my existence. Well, the bane of my existence as it pertained to the 2-wheel-drive Chevy Impala rental with the oh-so-Montana sun roof.   I jump into its leather seat and hit the seat warmer button, luxuriate in the warmth crawling up my back, lock the doors and start the windshield wipers.

Eureka being a town laid out without much leveling, its streets undulate with the rolling hillside and stop at odd points, like the "street" the sedan is about to turn onto that requires one to stop, turn, go about 25 feet, and stop again, all on a fifteen to twenty degree slope, and without much else in the way of options to avoid using said silly street.  Naturally, the Impala stubbornly refuses to continue to the top of the slope, its wheels spinning and causing the car to turn in an ungraceful sideways motion, leaving me horizontal and halfway blocking all the roads.  The clock ticks on my window of dog/tooth-brushing time.

Behind me, two cars pull up and I embarrassingly see my students behind their wheels, ecstatically encouraging me to just back up and start over, a feat I realize I am totally incapable of doing.  So as they wait in a short line, I surf my ton of Florida retirement white sedan-ness on the white snow, slide down the slope, uncontrollably, narrowly missing a dumpster, until I finally nose the Impala back down the road.  I wave at my students in their four-wheel-drive trucks and plan a second attempt.  This involves not doing a 360 at the intersection but rather driving nearly out of town to find a safe, non-conspicuous spot to turn around in case others are watching. Five minutes later I make my way back to the same spot, eyeing traffic in every direction and, seeing no one through the blizzard, roll at about 25 mph through a stop sign, turning left, sliding up the slope, thus successfully navigating the second left turn at the intersection and, of course, not stopping at the second stop sign this time either.

Ahhh.  So, meandering along the serpentine road, snow falling even harder and now afraid of any incline or sharp turn, I come to another hill, the big one that leads to our home and, again eyeing traffic and seeing no one, I turn and momentum-push up the hill.  I get twenty-five feet and spin and sputter again, the sedan wheels refusing to grip any powder because they don't really know what to do with powder, forcing me to slow to a crawl in the half-foot snow, stuck once again.  Behind me, a school bus stops at the intersection I just blazed through.  It turns the other way, perhaps hearing my curses and seeing my precarious position in the middle of a long road up, but most likely filled with students wondering who that was angled in the road so weirdly. This time, I back down the road, pivot toward the road I came from, and sadly cancel my ticket to the dog-walking/tooth-brushing festival due to the utter futility of trying to go any further up that blasted hill.  So, I choose to drive to the dentist's office early, the thought of nature magazines in a waiting room somehow dissipating my disappointment.  Back down the roads I go, fortunately using all the downhill roads now, all of which end at the thoroughly-plowed main highway which, thankfully, also leads me to straight to the dentist's office.

Approaching the office driveway, my heart sinks as I see it has another fifteen-degree slope, and as I turn into it with momentum, I once more turn/surf/struggle and finally skid to a stop, revving the tires uselessly and stranding the Impala once more in a driveway, six feet from a row of parked cars, ten feet from the turned heads of waiting dentist patients, and about 20 feet from the ever-moving and rubbernecking cars rolling down the highway.  Now an A student of the Impala+snow=futility equation, I reverse and glide-slide down the driveway back to the road, almost as if I had planned it that way the whole time.  I turn left, find a parking spot in the laundromat about a hundred feet away, park the car, almost incinerating it with hate from my heart, and walk along the highway in the falling snow, arriving in the dentist's office right on time--a wet, sloppy, foul-mouthed mess--plopping myself in the chair of the way-too-smiley dental hygienist.  

She begins with some x-rays, and she asks me to open wide.  I stare straight ahead with a look of indifferent loathing at the snow out the window.  I open my mouth, receive the weird plastic cardboard thingy, calmly wait for the digital buzzing of x-ray weirdness to finish, open up, and deftly dislodge the plastic thingy from my clenched teeth, presenting it to her on the tip of my tongue.  So helpful on the outside am I, but my eyes staring straight ahead hide the death wishes I am exclaiming within.  Another round of x-rays go the same way, with me hoping the hygienist doesn't beg answers to any of her exuberant and well-meaning questions.  As she leaves I close my eyes and shoot daggers at random objects while my stomach does somersaults.  She returns to tell me that I take great photos.  I grunt with a slight smile, then close my eyes to receive the ice pick to my bocal bone structures.

Funny thing happened in that chair.  A dental cleaning brought peace to my troubled mind.

As you may know through unfortunate experience, there is an unusually helpless feeling found in in failing to command a large and reliable hunk of $20,000 metal up a fifteen degree slope or control its rapid sideways decent down said slope, with lives and cash and insurance claims helplessly falling into the tenuous balance with every misstep and spin.  To be at the mercy of such nasty weather makes one want to curl up, give up, pack it in, and seek the nearest possible comforting place.

In this case, laying back in the dentist's chair, following in my mind the ice pick as it stabs at the calc deposits on my teeth, explores every edge along the tender gum line, rakes between teeth with the sound of chalkboard fingernailings... all this focus on physical feeling (even nasty tooth scraping) took me away from thinking about the myriad, cumulative problems of lesson plans, assessments, ruminations on best practices for achieving Common Core standards, prom committee deadlines, yearbook deadlines, late work policies in winter sports seasons, and overall lack of motivation from my students.  All of this should be a shared responsibility with my students and colleagues to solve, but instead I put it squarely on my shoulders for some reason day after day in order to figure out my new profession in this new place.

In the end, analogies (i.e. a well-intentioned and perfectly capable car failing to make it up an easy hill coupled with the obvious solution of having the right tires to fit the road conditions and/or taking the path of least resistance) present themselves as long, extended, perfectly-placed metaphors.

Eurekatude

I think the silence is the first thing you'll notice.  Around here, it's all wind through the leaves, echoes of chirping birds, and rumbles of civilization and life in the distance sounding from anywhere rolling around the valleys and bouncing off the hills like a pinball. The silence is an essential part of Eurekatude, the way nothing really matters until it comes your way, be it a buck, the weather, a car, or a friend.  There is no constant hum of man-made life gurgling around you to distract from what is happening right now.  Which is nothing, really, except every gift of nature you can imagine and the peace and time to do whatever you like.

We have a band of filmmakers, musicians, artists, and writers, farmers, brewers, and chefs, firefighters, folks with three jobs, a bunch of guns, and a plethora of those who aren't afraid of mud.  They believe in the value of land and the freedom to do what you like on it, living quietly and joyfully, playing games, bringing their dogs everywhere, playing on lakes, and killing their own meat.  Many come from somewhere else, have lived in big cities, and have  traveled to other countries, but they always return to the collection of homes on the edge of Canada, in a valley shadowed by mountains and nestled within a few national forests.  They are content to have Kalispell be where Costco is, Whitefish be where all the nightlife is, and Missoula be the closest thing we have to a Big City Having It All, because getting to all these places requires a drive of at least an hour and maybe three through unmatched scenery and land unspoiled compared to so much of the world.  It's a fact that Montana is full of best places, maybe hidden treasures, and the Tobacco Valley has secured its place among them.  Having almost turned around halfway through the fifty mile drive the day of my teaching interview, if only because I felt like we were driving from the middle of nowhere into epicenter of nowhere, I know what apprehension feels like in terms of moving to a place even tinier than the tiniest place I ever lived in.

Hidden gems, small victories, enough space to try and fail and work on everything over and over again till you get it right, without the pressure of civilization bearing down on you... I think that's only part of what keeps everyone here and draws the bold few to keep on driving all the way down the road, exploring the backroads all along the way, and having faith that it will all work out.

Forestation

A deer antler shed is a rare find.  Here,
I'm demonstrating proper celebration.

When you live in the middle of the wilderness, the opportunity to venture deeper into the woods meets you every day.  Mountains tower above you or line the horizon upon leaving your driveway, rising around every turn and outside every door.  Tree-lined roads beckon you to turn down them, gravel roads await your dusting, and paths encourage you to stop the car, get out, and explore them. Recently, the opportunity arose to get paid to venture deep, very deep, into them thar woods.  Add one awesome Super Duty Ford and a smattering of young adults, and you get Youth Conservation Corps Summer 2013, of which I was the fortunate leader.

It all began on June 10 when five high schoolers - one recent midwest grad, 3 locals, and half a pair of twins - met in a small white room in the back of Murphy Lake Ranger Station in Fortine, Montana.  And there they waited, for an hour, until their leader waltzed into the room late, ill-prepared in short pants and a shirt with short sleeves, and fairly bewildered by everyone's amazing earliness on this first day.  My supervisor met me, briefed me on my first-day errors as he handed me some pants, introduced me to the crew, then to our white Super Duty truck, and finally told us all to get in and get down the road to spend the day mucking the ice-blue water's edge of nearby Dickey Lake.  Since then, we six have met in this small white room four days every week at 7am (maybe 7:05) to await instructions for the next 10 hours of our lives together.  But we always know where every day will start... Da Rig.

Good ol' FS 5868, aka Super Dooty

Our Super Duty truck has become our daily rig into whose bed we toss toilet paper, rakes, pruners, shovels, garbage bags, sand, igloo coolers, red and green backpacks, bamboo, trash, and a mysterious biodegradable mesh whose nasty name will be mentioned in the next paragraph, and into whose twin cab we sardine one coffee-breathed leader and five teenagers with their mp3 players, all on a journey that only the two boys know anything about since they always have been where we are going.  Frank's Lake?  Or just Frank Lake?  Barnaby.  Bluebird.  Chain of Lakes.  Graves Crick (not Creek).  Weasel?  Big T and Lil' T?  Wolverine. Up Beaver, on the way through Ant Flat.  That one place with the amazing elk hunting.  That road off that other road. "That lake we went to that one time when you almost crashed your car, dummy."  Maps are plentiful in our truck, but seldom used due to the local knowledge crammed into these kids' heads.  There was a moment, after driving along the banks of the lake, where we truly came to understand the power of Super Duty.  The water line across the doors and the bent radio antenna left us all with nodding heads of approval upon arrival back at the station.  With its superior speaker system, V8 engine, comfy cab, and spacious side compartments, the Ford Super Duty is the highest rated truck among teenage seasonal government employees for overall bad-assed-ness.  And whenever you plow through a pothole full of water and the flume spurts above the car window, when a gravel road dives down suddenly into a crevasse-like pothole unavoidable, when a shoulder becomes a cliff edge all too soon but you manage to get back on flat ground, when a washboard in a turn reduces your truck to a one-ton toboggan, one must say "Super Duty" the way Peter Griffin says "Roadhouse" or a surfer says "Kowabunga." 

Webb Mountain Lookout, with the
butt of our Super Duty truck

After a week of orientations and introductions, our first set of marching orders came from Recreation who had us daily traveling to places to clean them.  Whether finding all the campgrounds in the 800K acres of forest or driving up old logging roads to mountain lookouts, we cleaned them all.  Especially fun was making a 26-point turn-around on exposed rock atop a foggy Webb Mountain.  As the fog burned off on a scorching Montana summer day, our lookout-cleaning and wood-chopping duties were treated to a spectacular view.  Soon after we had become adept at cleaning remote places, we were given a second set of orders, this time from Silviculture, and this is where that word that cannot be mentioned will be mentioned.  Vexar.  There, it is written.

Young larch in vexar

Silviculture is the study, maintenance, and manipulation of forested areas for diverse needs. I believe its true goal is to survey every inch of land in an area and know what all the trees are doing.  Right now, "silv" is all about the white pine and its 80% mortality in Montana from pine beetle infestation and a few other nasty diseases.  So, in our ranger district there exist logged-out areas replanted with white pine saplings in need of protection during their early years when their nitrogen-rich bodies are a tasty treat for animals.  Enter vexar.
It must stand erect on the hillside, must be threaded twice through by a bamboo stake tacked firmly into place (uphill if possible) around the sapling, and should not have any tree needles sticking through its meshiness when you come make your yearly walk-through maintenance treks.  Vexar maintenance is a  pathless, backcountry bushwhack whose results won't be seen for decades.  Upon arriving at one of the plots, you find vexar in a variety of conditions.  Most of the existing vexar is just fine, making the job seem like a walk through a field of upright cocoons.  The occasional sideways vexar always requires restaking and righting, while the more occasional "leaner" is sometimes left to lean one more year at least.  Some saplings have somehow escaped the vexar altogether and need to be re-surrounded.  Some saplings have been exposed to so much lovely sun that their immense prosperity is tinged only by their dried-up vexar cocoons disintegrating upon touch.  Still others have clearly outgrown their vexar and are ready for vexar-removal, the final liberation. Inevitably, if we happened to return the next day to the same field, we would find vexar we just righted to be leaning vexar because the forest animals bumped it overnight, which renders your work somewhat frustratingly useless.  However, the biggest issue with vexar comes from attempting simply to organize humans in lines among random points in an 80+ acre field in order to achieve 100% vexar maintenance.  To explain that I would require a white board and many colored pens, and you would require some caffeine source of your choosing and consumption.

Driving home from these plots of land set deep into hill country and forest land, each of us felt a great sense of relief coupled with a great wonder as to whether any of it truly mattered in the end.  We'll see if we were successful in 30 years, because another aspect of Silviculture is the pruning of 30+ year old growing white pines, aka the whittling away of up to 50% of the lower branches on each new tree to help avoid an environment ripe for diseased fungus.  For a few days, we played white pine barbershop, shorning up to 25-foot tall former vexar protectees on a hillside and bathing their lower trunks in healthy sunlight.  If all goes well, and if the white pines avoid all of the factors contributing to their blight, then our crew will have played a small but ongoing part in the rehabilitation of a beautiful species of tree.

Abandoned duck eggs a-go-go

Amphibian surveys near Bluebird Mtn.

Once Silviculture let us go, we became the daily/weekly grab bag of the ranger station.  One day, Fire sent us trekking in the truck on an all day scavenger hunt for wooden Forest Service signboards, replacing posted fireworks signs with campfire signs and trying to spend ten
hours doing so without stapling ourselves to a tree or to one another. The next day, Recreation sent us back up the lookout mountain to help lay the foundation of the Greatest Toilet Atop a Mountain Ever, hauling gravel all the way up, mixing concrete with sand and lime on-site, and pouring it into a rebar-faceted frame amid biting flies and swallowtail butterflies.  Yet another day, Wildlife took us to help them monitor bird boxes.  Ahhhh, I could check bird boxes all day.  Set around a lake and up trees, 3-4 boxes per lake stood awaiting our eyes, a few with eggs in them, cold and abandoned but blue and lovely, and a few with tiny broken shell fragments signaling a successful hatch.  Bushwhacking through soft grass is a pleasure and makes the sound of tossed eggs splashing into the lake and breaking a much easier reality to accept. We even spent a day with them counting amphibians in lakes, a task in which one diligent 6th grade fisherman from Wyoming actually surpassed us by finding more frogs and salamanders than we Forest Service workers.

The little cherubs of YCC
Murphy Lake and Eureka
Ranger Stations frolicking
among the cedars

After two weeks of glorious wedding time off, I returned to guide YCC's final two weeks, all with the much celebrated Trails crew.  Armed with axes, trowels, rock bars, pruners, chainsaws and gas, we joined the mountain goat-like, 3-person crew in the molding of paths previously alder-filled, brush-obscured, or otherwise non-existent.  We brushed over a mile of the Pacific Northwest Trail in one day under thundering skies and literally carved a half mile of a dirt bike path from scratch over two days, pulling up kinick kinick, rolling away rocks, and flattening the natural landscape in a four-foot long swath up, around, and down a few rolling hills.  On our last day, the Trails crew brought a dirt bike up that hill and let us each try out our new course, with the caveat that as much fun as riding DOWN the slope would be, you had to ride that puppy back UP for the next person.  Yeah.  Nearly toppling head over heels riding down the path and hitting rocks I had personally left in the path for 'texture', the entire experience reconfirmed for me that dirt bike trail riders are pretty awesomely crazy.
Add a pair of rewarding free days at the end, including treks into a several-hundred-year-old cedar grove and along slightly younger Kootenai Indian trails, and you have a perfect ending to a fairly luxurious and productive 10-week stint of outdoor government work.  For me, I found a myriad of exploratory avenues into our new home, nooks and crannies worth exploring, and a new found desire to turn off the pavement and onto gravel, to venture deeper into the world surrounding our next year of life in Eureka.  I was also left with a great appreciation of the skills, strength, and natural wisdom of these teenagers.  School smarts are one aspect of intelligence, but I learned so much from them this summer that I enter this next school year with a valuable respect for what all of their young minds may be capable of achieving.  So, sorry Eureka, my expectations have been raised and my plans have altered.  It's going to be one awesome school year.

Incidentally but not to be overlooked, our work this summer was unofficially subsidized by Spitz dill flavored sunflower seeds and lemon-lime Gatorade, and we also were a running advertisement for Ford's Super Duty ability to glide through five-foot mud puddles and up 45-degree rocky slopes with the greatest of ease.  But we really should have looked for sponsorship from a major sunblock/bug repellent company, a foot massage clinic, and various country and pop music artists whose tunes (specifically and repeatedly including "Truck Yeah", "something about Moving On", "a Minaj song where each line ended in "UUUH!(thanks Garrett)", "The Thunder Ro-o-olls", and  a very mellow version of "I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles") were the major soundtrack of a ten hour day, unless I managed to sneak in some Japanese folk music, Schoolhouse Rock, Mozart, Prokofiev, Yonder Mountain String Band, Martha Scanlan, or Beatles.  Nice.
  

Thanks for a great summer 'Kenzie, Garrett, Mikal, Louisa, and Ashlen.  

A Post About My Roadhuggers

Having had only a pair of cars, I'm naturally quite fond of each of them.  And now, on the eve of my last week as a bachelor, one Chevy Lumina decided I would enter married life without it.  So with all the sentimentality found in other blog posts focused on my graying hair and lost articles of childhood, for example, this is a blog about the Olds and the Chevy, a pair of white road beasts I pampered as I drove them into the ground.

I owe it all to my dad, who treated his cars with great respect and passed them on to me to do the same.

Olds at Field's Point Landing, waiting for hippies, c. 2000

The Olds rolled me to college and waited patiently every day in parking lots during the seven years I chose to take to graduate, upon which it merrily pranced north into the Cascade mountains and life at Holden Village. It gained freckles of oxidization from sun exposure, its blue interior reverse-tanning.  Olds rested on the banks of Lake Chelan, absorbing snow piles on its vinyl cover and taking on its first real winters, waiting for passengers.  When they arrived on the boat, they were lovely dirty new friends who borrowed it to drive the heck out of it on logging roads, bringing dirt and mountain funk to Olds' floorboards and seats.  Olds and me saw our first Big Wu show together, then our first Phish show together.  It carried around my first girlfriends and parked in many romantic spots along the West Coast.  The Olds ran across the country at least a half dozen times, including hauling family to Montana for the first time.  When I decided to move to Germany, and when my sister's family's "Suburban"  turned into a "Subground-level" it moved down to Fresno.  After that, it seemed to breathe its last, having up to then survived all those drives but suddenly (of course because of my absence) gave up on all its parts. Without an Advanced Directive, 300,000 miles after it was born, it apparently broke down, and then was broken into while abandoned, then hauled away to the car morgue to be cremated.  Gone but with a very present spirit, that Olds is still running up and down Highway 101 and across 90, looking very unlike your typical "Father's Oldsmobile."  

Chevy's dimple, with cover-ups,
minus outdated Hillary sticker, since she lost.
The sticker's subtitle stated: "Democrats put
on rear bumper, Republicans put on front!"
I put it on the side 'cause I voted for Obama.
Ok, this is a long caption.

Meanwhile, my parents' Chevy Lumina had become older than they liked and they purchased an Impala (not an Ibex), and after I returned from writing my Bavarian story, I inherited Chevy and its dimple. The dimple came courtesy of some aggressive punk who kicked the front in when he thought my dad had followed him too closely on one of San Francisco's slopes. Upon receiving Chevy, I immediately started courting my fiance who promptly bought me a political bumper sticker ('Run, Hillary, Run') to cover the dimple, to which I later added a Northern Exposure sticker of Fleishman's office and a GNP (Glacier National Park) sticker.  The political sticker plus the GNP sticker prompted someone to honestly ask if it stood for Gay National Party.  

The Chevy took me to Kelli's side and our first meeting at the Sequoia National Park where I accidentally left the keys in the car, prompting me to mangle the driver window parts as well as the passenger door lock, breaking them for the rest of Chevy's life (this would be very ironic because I wouldn't be able to open the door for my new woman again nor be able to roll down my window to order her Taco Bell meals...classy). Chevy carried me up and down California to woo her, and finally led/trailed her red Ford Ranger as we trekked north to start a life together in Seattle. After living in the Chevy a few weeks, I found a home and then a job hauling lovely dirty Democrat activists around Seattle knocking on doors during the 2008 political season.  Chevy brought home two crazy feral cats and a warm new bassador who have become our most precious resources. It then hauled a flour child back and forth from Grand Central Bakery to graduate school. Chevy signaled the presence of a new teaching intern to an urban middle school and trekked across the country several times to catch glimpses of its future Montanan home.

Not one of Chevy's greatest moments, but it was totally not
its fault!  (somewhere along the Seeley/Swan, c. 2011

After experiencing a few cold but snowless winters, Chevy began to show its signature: the Big Peel. It began at the dimple, then on the hood, a likely place given all the frontal driving hits it took for a few years.  But soon it spread conspicuously to the doors and to the roof, an illogical pattern. I chalked it up to rain frozen by Seattle gray weather, which blistered the paint and caused it to break off.  Flying down Seattle highways, large chunks of Chevy skin would flake off and flutter behind like snow, in July.  A significant amount of door paint had peeled to resemble a SHERIFF or POLICE decal, providing me and Chevy with ample respect from other cars that would suddenly brake when seeing us.  By the time we moved to Montana, Chevy acquired a gray bald spot and became more recognizable than me among my students, several of whom daily ran up to me and said "Were you at _______?  Cuz I saw your car and I was all HEY MR. A!"  It also became a conversation piece among my students who used it to bond with me after I reprimanded them. They would saunter up to me later and after a minute of awkward silence and almost like an apology, say "You sure have a cool car, Mr. A."  I'd say thanks, and all would be normal again.  And that's how I like it.  I am my cars.  

"Coexist my ass!" - some guy outside
a  gas station in Montana...

Chevy, at 260,000 miles old and balder than its owner, saw me safely through bachelorhood, picking up where Olds left off.  Chevy cranked its last in Polson, Montana, two weeks before my wedding.  Its final successful start came after my thwarted attempt to find the Glacier Brewing Company on a hot day.  Chevy kicked butt in everything it did despite all its problems, just like its bachelor owner.  It will donate its organs to other deserving Chevies and live on.  We'll say goodbye to each other on Monday July 23, with my parents and my fiancee in attendance.  We'll hug one more time, and no doubt a large swath of paint will peel off as we part.  Thanks, Chevy.  You done real good.

Git On Board Lil' Chil'ren, There's Room for Many'a More

Deep in the recesses of my lexicon, I seem to stumble spelling words like recesses and lexicon.  Since when did being an English teacher mean I spend less time than ever writing?  How on Earth can life in a trailer be so full (and full of what?) that there's no time for practicing music?  These and other questions abound as we step on board the Gospel train, it's rollin' down the track and it's time to testify.  Enough of the silence, the train is full of steam and needs to sound its barbaric, leaden YAWP.

On the face of it, being a teacher is a rewarding and privileged job.  Like a very natural-looking ordinary rock or stump, when you pull back  the face of it you find that the real business going on underneath is cacophonous, murky, endlessly absorbing, and too alive for comfort most of the time.  So, it's best to replace it and get back to admiring the face of it.  Well, in the Treehouse, faces last only so long.  

My first year of teaching has been akin to walking into my classroom, ramming my head into a brick wall repeatedly for seven hours, driving home, nursing my bloody head, and falling asleep afraid of the next day's beating. So, why do I do this?  Well, there are the callouses.  They deaden the pain with repetition.  Perhaps I hope to see the callouses through the wounds, but I'm not quite there yet.  Certain shocking realizations about students' learning habits and abilities become norms you face each day, which may sound like a recipe for lowering one's expectations, but really it's about adjusting your internal compass to match your point on Earth on a daily basis, which I think tends to keep the brain pliant yet exhausted.  As for the wall, teaching so far has been all about adjusting how you actually hit the wall, learning to ricochet, to absorb a hit, to find the most forgiving spot, and then over time to finally realize that the only wall is the one you yourself have been putting up between you and your students.  Duh, you might say.  Indeed, I say.  

In education school, you learn about all types of sorcery and you practice them on your fellow masters' degree students.  Yeah.  They don't tell you that you need to first know alchemy to be a successful sorcerer.  More importantly, your students must come with the same raw materials readily available and the motivation to help you make the magic happen.  The magic tricks themselves are predicated on the fact that those students actually have been trained to know the same basics you expected them to have and, most importantly, they must have a desire to achieve what you want to achieve with those basics.  In the end, compliance or motivation?  What are you going to teach for?  (and does it still matter whether or not you end a sentence with a preposition?  Does the word 'preposition' even matter now?)??  So many question marks.  

I guess that's the sign I'm in the right profession. All those question marks keep coming. When you are sitting in the muck, or the wall rubble, or deep in the pit with no escape route... are your gears still turning?  I think back on when I was working at Munich International School, surrounded by International Baccalaureate whiz kids with three languages under their belts and dreams of not just university but the Oxfords and Princetons and Stanfords, who conducted themselves like the budding and critically-thinking adults we want all our students to be, but who could and would still screw up like any kid.  That was about the time I knew I wanted to teach, to be a part of that level of thinking and that culture, though I hadn't stepped foot into any one of their classrooms to see how or what they were being taught.  I counted all their teachers as my friends and role models of wisdom and still do.  I sat in steam baths and saunas and biergartens with them, through four hour dinners and episodes of Lost and on long train rides across borders with them; but I never really dallied into their pedagogy or the theory behind how or what they were teaching.  Now, I feel this great disconnect between that community and my present.  Even after I went through my education program and ran off with my masters, I hadn't really stepped into a classroom.  Now, I think I'm living more of the reality and that Munich was the dream.  The struggles are the norm, and we have to be prepared for the non-idealized, value-scattered, social media-mimicking microcosm to be the standard, all without lowering our high expectations and not getting in the way of those bound for greatness because, really, there are far more paths to a good life than the few I've known in my life.  

Perhaps I'm too idealistic to be theorizing, too young a teacher to be trying to put it all together into a neat idea, too hard on myself to recognize my strengths and my successes, too hyper-analytical to be musing in public and airing my laundry for all to see (then again, this is my treehouse).  But I will end with this:  I have mentioned all of this, all that I've bared to you here, to my students at some point.  When things are mucked up, I stop and have them weigh-in on the good, the bad, and the ugly of their first-year teacher's role in their education.  Thankfully, they are very forgiving, receptive to honesty, and are fully capable of discussing some of the systemic problems than we may give them credit for.  That gives me hope.  My deep desire is that they take a role in crafting their education and learn to have some significant responsibility for themselves and for each other.  Even deeper, I hope I never forget to listen, to always keep my gears turning, and to encourage and help others do the same.  

Meanwhile, I could really use a sauna and a four-hour dinner and a chinwag with some colleagues, like, on a daily basis.  

Back to the Treehouse

I've been writing on the side of life (smatterings and bits, really) for a long time, with nothing being thrown into the treehouse.  Lots of changes recorded in many facebook status updates, but for now I thought I'd share a pair of the smatterings that were singularly important to me for a while.  Like, when my Apple Powerbook G4 died:

... I'm comforted to have known a computer to old age.  Not elderly.  In laptop years, I'm thinking seven and a half is probably more like retirement.  Retirement itself could be lounging on a shelf with a view or, perhaps, housing all the old games along with some early Adobe and Office software, and a place to stick a flash drive and escape to your outside office.  Cell phones may have become sleek fighter jets compared to their early propeller-run models, but they all share a two year average lifespan anyway.  So, how rarefied can it be that a laptop hits old age or maybe just retirement?  My own magnificent titanium swiss army knife of a Powerbook caved its lil heart in, eyes still working but the ticker toasted...

Then, there was this small town I wrote about for a while and all of a sudden left.  I love to romanticize my memories of places in order to give the past a frame I can return to over and over again and perhaps also in fear of memories being pruned far too quickly.  So, I set to writing about Whitefish and our cabin abode there for two years:

...Weird that a small town can be hard to say goodbye to.  Especially when you’re moving to a smaller one.  

Another town begins to slide beneath my feet.  I know it’s the old story of a town and a person bumping into one another and parting, and it repeats itself across the world each minute.   This particular one’s from the eyes of a city boy who has counted vulture carrion roadside feasts among the expected sights on a 60 mile daily work commute and whose preferred office space is the wrought-iron table in the backyard shaded by a Spaten umbrella with a soundtrack of hummingbird buzzes and crow wings flapping over five dialects of bird calls.  When I told my father two years ago that we were moving here, the ensuing phone conversations  for weeks after usually consisted of a) worries surrounding some aspect of small town life and b) Dad asking quickly and loudly “Now where is it you are moving to again?  WhiteWhat?”  Whitefish.  “Whitefish... whitefish...” he trailed off, and  I could imagine him tapping his index finger against his oval shaped mouth, wondering, as he let out another “Whitefish... Whitefish.... Huh...Hmm!....” raising his bushy eyebrows as his brain searched the many road maps in his head and came up empty.   To this day I still wonder about Montana, myself.

Montana’s residents speak of it like a friend or a family member, to you.  Let’s begin at the homestead, and specifically in this afterthought of a backyard of ours, because chicken wire nailed to posts around a field of dandelioned grass seems to give more of a suggestion of defined space than any working boundary.   With a small forest to the North, a glade of cottonwoods to the East, and a hedge of wild berries next to a small stand of young aspen to the South, our deer friends can attest to it being a hot spot for escaping the main road in front of us and the backroads behind, and a nice place to eat crabapples.  Magpies land on thin bare birch branches and wild turkeys strut under cottonwoods. Squirrels run full speed along their arboreal interstate from branch to branch to tree to tree and stop only to scream at the top of their lungs yepyepyepyepyepyepyep.  Yellow jackets search slowly and carefully for something to latch a new hive to, ignoring me completely and spending many days surveying a certain bump on the gray paint under the roof edge. Then there’s  the 9-foot tall moose I saw in the backyard through the kitchen window: me holding a pair of chickens ready for roasting, staring dumbstruck at a Northern Exposure moment literally playing out before me, and her playing hopscotch with the backyard fence as she meandered through town on her way into the northern forests.  

In my backyard alone, I get Montana.  

There was more to write about Whitefish, like the commute among the mountains to and from work, or Glacier National Park being in our backyard, to name two of hundreds of writing-worthy experiences. But most of all, I realize now after moving from that small town to an even smaller town that I was only starting to 'get' Montana back a few months ago, that new and important layers of the term 'diversity' are unfolding before me in ways I couldn't have anticipated. And there was more writing than just those thoughts and more thoughts now to add to them, but right now I have to go take my garbage to the dump a few miles away and then shop for eight things at four different stores in two different towns. So, more to come.

Gray Matters, Part 2

Listening to a recording of Bela Fleck strumming banjo rhythms to a soaring woman's voice, and I'm awash in sentimentality. I was thinking today of the homestead in San Francisco, a place many of you have visited many times. My, how that home has collected some things, and my, how that house has eaten up some of those collected things without a trace, akin to the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. So, here's the start of a growing list of things I wish I knew the location of:

My 3" square (non-bendy) floppy disks that I used with my LCII and Quadra Macs. Does anyone use the word Macintosh anymore? Included in that set will be the New Haven/San Francisco Connection disk containing many-paged Word docs between me and Kevin Fox when we were in college. We sent the disk back and forth, and priceless Top Tens, side-splitting stories and some things we wish would remain buried would emerge... would be priceless, if found. (update in 2023: FOUND!!)

My View Master disks and the projector (as well as the red hand-held viewer) through which my 3-10 year old self would gaze at 3D versions of movies I had never seen, including Herbie the Love Bug, Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, random Flintstones episodes and about thirty other lovelies all on little disks with gear-like teeth on the edges. Even if most of them were Disney, they were a big part of my childhood and may (literally) be priceless, if found.  (update in 2022: Projector lost.  Discs FOUND!)

This one old, small, pinkish 33RPM record player, with some detachable speakers that may have been more like ginormous echo chambers. With it, in a box, should be a record collection of stories with booklets accompanying them, the kind where you listen to the record and follow the story and you'd turn the page when you heard the sound (usually Tinkerbell's magic wand) brrriiNGGGGG! Classic Disney tales plus Chicken Soup with Rice, Where the Wild Things Are, and some others that bounce around my memory. Then there was GI Joe, but not the modern GI Joe, just a guy named Joe who was a GI. He'd go on crazy adventures all around the world, pre-Indiana Jones, and do battle with mysterious cultures while stealing artifacts. My favorite was one involving a mummy, a dune buggy, rock n' roll, and a bunch of warriors yelping.  (update: GI Joe recordings FOUND on YouTube, but record player LOST)

There are more. All of them will have one thing in common: I never thought I'd be without them. Not that I'm dying to watch my Viewmaster right now, but I just never gave the OK for those certain things to disappear. Those 'things' are not unlike memories, and I'm someone who spends a lot of my waking time with my memories. I hoard them by stubbornly refusing to let them go, searching for them in my mind as if to just check in with them, see that they're all there, and go on a rescue mission if they are missing. Memories wallpaper every room in my mind and keeping those memories has been effortless. Every family vacation, every concert tour and camp, every football postseason in the 1980s, every note in every song every year... that's just the start. So, I'm sort of writing to file a complaint with someone, because I'm finding this very new sensation of my memories being pruned to be a little disconcerting. Which is also a reason why I will always write, journal, blog, scribble. To preserve what I know while I know it well.

Gray Matters

I was sitting in my car the other day, shaving for the second time in a row in my rear view mirror in the middle of the woods, when I pondered the single threads of white curling through my multi-Fall-colored facial hair. I thought back to October 2000. Nikolai and I were entering the 2nd month and final week of our meandering road trip out of Holden Village and along the 49th parallel of North America. In his native Milwaukee, we had borrowed a compact blue car to drive down to Illinois to see my family. In Chicago, heading for the Shedd Aquarium and therefore stuck in thick traffic, we had time to evaluate our ever-growing mountain manliness. Long beards framed each of our faces, begging for a comb, his a golden blond with white and mine a mysterious hodge-podge. So, on the sunlit gray dashboard of the borrowed blue car, we plucked and placed curly two inch long beard hairs one at a time, arranging them according to their place on the color spectrum. My contribution included midnight black, dark brown, just plain brown, light brown, red, straw blond, and barely-yellowed white. "Cool," we agreed, and moved on with our day.

Now, after two years of grad school, some of those seven colors have decided to usher in a new color. Let's call it ghost-white. And since September, an increasing number of those original colors have kindly given up their original identities and joined the ghost-white team. I'm writing this to show appreciation for my facial hair which has been growing with me since I first shaved it the fall of 1987 just after my 13th birthday. But I'm also writing to celebrate with tongue in cheek (my left cheek, where all the ghost-white friends hang out) and to welcome this eighth and final color. In the end, I'm writing to own my growing age, which up to this point had always been a building-up process and which now stares me in the face every day. It's inevitable, weird, yet a right of passage and therefore worth a write. I love my beard and its eighth color. And for those who know me very well, you won't think that a blog post about hair is weird at all, will you?

here now

The other night I went out the kitchen door and into the little mud room exposed to the elements by a torn screen on the door leading outside. The dog followed me as I closed the door behind us, waited while I placed my hand on the door ledge in the screen and pulled it open, and ran down the outside stairs to sniff at the wooden gate leading to our massive backyard. We both marched into the dark and the ground crunched beneath my feet. The dog ran off to sniff at every icy smell and run toward every sound, falling frozen leaves rattling against icy branches in the cold night. Above us, a million (not yet a billion) stars dotted the black sky in familiar patterns, including our good old friend Orion. And I turned my body north to the Big Mountain a few miles away and saw only a gray milky mass spreading from east to west rolling slowly south to engulf the dark and the stars in its path. A wave of unknown and unannounced weather silently bearing down. If it has even an ounce of moisture in it, there will be snow on the ground in less than an hour. Once inside, as I sat on the couch, I felt like something outside was happening that was glorious and ominous and beyond my understanding. Montana. It's big.

It's been around two months here in Montana. Silent I have been on the blog circuit as I grow accustomed to life in a small town in a big state in the left-middle of North America. I live in a ski town where people have transplanted themselves from other places and loved it so much they couldn't stand to leave even when they tried. The Alps of America, where Costco, Walmart, and Best Buy couldn't build unless they agreed to place their stores far out of town and sink their massive parking lots down below the horizon so as not to obstruct the mountain and countryside view of the cars driving along Highway 93. The best part of shopping in that one stretch of highway between Kalispell and Whitefish is the exiting of each store, where you walk out to view mountains with clouds painted all around them. It's a gentle jarring feeling of city within country, and a sign of change coming to a quiet place.

Moving here was wet and filled with various kinds of cold metal, including a long car trailer and a relative shoebox of a moving truck. Seattle celebrated the week of my departure with non-stop rain. The days before the actual move saw the apartment slowly turn into a mausoleum, with Kelli and the Cats gone ahead to Montana and the Dog off to his auntie's for a week of pampering. With no one there, everything froze while I worked my mornings at the bakery. Returning home to see everything in its exact same place as I had left it, after a menagerie of activity for close to three years... my home became someone else's, and the city seemed to turn off and wait out my leaving. On the final night, after my friend Colm the Moving God had helped me and left, I sat with my newly returned basset/lab in a space on the living room floor we had never sat on before, feeling utterly alien. He must have felt far worse than me, having left his home a week before with it full of everything he knew, and returning to a post-apocalyptic void of all except his Dad. There was some tail wagging for me. As for the trip the following day, I'm sure he hopes I'll just knock him out next time I want him to ride shotgun across two mountain ranges for sixteen hours in a truck with no CD player.

Whitefish put its holiday decorations up around its streets, and the lamp post at the end of our gravel driveway is bedecked with a large blue lighted snowflake on it that never turns off, and since we live on the road north out of town and on the way to the Big Mountain (that's really what it's called, Google it), and if you decide to visit, we live at the eleventh snowflake on the right after you pass the intersection across the railroad tracks. But downtown, the twelve square blocks that constitute 90% of all commercial activity in town (and all in two-storied old, mostly wood buildings to boot) now looks like an Alpine village in non-stop holiday celebration. You expect sausages and bread and mulled wine to be sold on each corner, but you'll have to settle for one of our dozen or more restaurants and bars where everyone knows your name or at least pretends to.

So, there it is,
and here I am.
... and here's Coal,
awaiting your visit.

We have room for you in the house
and for at least three RVs on the front lawn.
The deer will keep us company till you arrive. :)