The Redwood Coast

Volume 16, Number 3 Review Summer 2014 A Publication of Friends of Coast Community Library in Cooperation with the Independent Coast Observer fiction

Nothing Much Happens There

Pamela Powell i Antrim

thousand other towns in Midwest- ern farm country look like Antrim, A right down to the petunias planted in the triangle where two secondary roads meander across each other. Those other From left: Herman Melville, Nelson Algren, Arthur Miller, Meriwether Lewis, Emily Dickinson, Wendell Berry towns have similar choirs raggedly sing- ing the same brave hymns. The weekly newspaper chronicles the same predictable events. Even the houses are much the same. Scribes Gone Wild The houses are suited to the prairie: square and low. They face the tar and gravel American writers and wilderness street, which gets hot enough in August to burn children’s bare feet. Each house has a front porch and one tree to the left and Jonah Raskin one to the right. The sidewalks are broken and stained with mulberry. The only dif- ot long ago, I left home with My newfound neighbors in Siskiyou water in the Klamath, on the fish popula- ference between the houses in town and a suitcase crammed with were happy to hear my views, but they tion and the greedy farmers who pumped those on the farms is that the farmhouses paperbacks and not much told me that I was in the wrong place if I the river dry to raise four crops of alfalfa a have bigger yards and rustier cars. else and drove to Siskiyou wanted wilderness. A luxury home with a year. I grew to like her and the place I was The few people who drive through County about six hours from well-manicured lawn didn’t qualified as living. Before long, I felt an emotional Antrim think that nothing much happens Nhome. I had read many of the books in wild. A herd of tame goats didn’t fit the attachment to it. Whatever it was—a there. The few people who live there high school, college and as a teacher of traditional wilderness paradigm, either. frontier, perhaps, or the remnants of a think pretty much the same. American literature. Now, I wanted to Conversations with the Indians, ranchers wilderness—it rubbed off on me. reread them away from civilization. Two and environmentalists reminded me that I liked the cabin and the trees that put Chicago friends offered their rustic cabin wilderness is in the eyes of the beholder, me in the frame of mind to reread the clas- ii in the “wilderness,” as they called it, and I that it has always been contested terri- sics of American literature. I knew from Hazel accepted. I’d have the place to myself and tory and that nothing takes hold of the an 1850 essay that Herman Melville wrote that suited me. When I arrived, however, I American imagination more than it does. that the woods of New England enabled Anyone living in Antrim knew that Hazel couldn’t find it. Sorely puzzled, I stopped Going into woods and forests—pioneering him to appreciate Nathaniel Hawthorne’s was a Hoffman. She not only signed the the car, got out, walked into the hills—and —has meant going forward in space and short stories. Throughout the nineteenth- name for seventy-six years, she looked still no cabin. backward in time. Leaving woods and for- century, readers like Melville, Emerson the part. Tall and spare, she carried After talking with a year-round resident ests has often meant leaving one’s youth and Thoreau felt that the literature of the herself straight as a silo. Her cheeks were who lived at the foot of the dirt road and behind and accepting aging and death. United States was nurtured by the conti- prominent and her nose was bigger than it who gave me sorely needed directions, I The wilderness of the imagination still nent of North America itself and espe- needed to be. Usually, she looked severe, realized that my Chicago friends didn’t thrives in American literature, as in the cially by its wildness. Creativity seemed but kept a twinkle in her eye in some se- share my idea of a cabin or the wilderness, lyrical writings of the Kentucky farmer, to spring from the woods; images sprouted cret place, ready in case she needed it. either. The cabin turned out to be a two- fiction writer and essayist Wendell Berry, from trees. In fact, she looked like an old maid story structure with modern conveniences. who argues in The Unsettling of America country schoolteacher, which was exactly When neighbors asked why I was in their (1977) that we must have wilderness rowing up on Long Island, I walked what she was. Before the county adopted neck of the woods, I told them I wanted as a “standard of civilization.” In much Gits length and breath, from Brooklyn the fad of graded classes, she ruled over a to be in the wilderness and read and write the same way that Germans wax mysti- to Montauk, imprinting the landscape in series of one-room schools. She grew up in solitude. “You mean the wilderness of cal about ancestral forests, Berry waxes my mind. The local poet, Walt Whitman, on a farm with nine brothers and sisters, the mind?” one cheeky fellow asked and romantic about the wilderness of myth and wasn’t accepted by townspeople, but that so knew all the tricks her students learned promptly sold me a quart of goat’s milk. legend. After ordeals in the wilds, Berry only pushed me to read all of Leaves of growing up on their own farms. The only The wilderness, I explained, was the argues, Americans—he means men—go Grass and to make a pilgrimage to his things that made her different from the quintessential American space more than home to farms, families and wives. For birthplace not far from my home. students was a knowledge of spelling and the city, country, farm or garden and per- Berry, The Odyssey is the great wilderness In college, I became a student of Amer- punctuation, a memory for literature, a haps the most troublesome of American book with the sea serving as the quintes- ican literature, listened to lectures and re- mastery of the intricacies of geometry, spaces, too. The French don’t have a word sential untamed place. alized that professors played favorites. We and the ability to pronounce the names of for it; the closest they come is la foret My Siskiyou neighbors belonged to read Emerson but not Thoreau; not a word faraway places. sauvage, which isn’t the same thing. A a small community in which everyone was said about nature unless one took a When Hazel wasn’t in school, she was mirror of the American mind, a trope and clamored for a piece of the wild, a part class on the Romantic poets who were out usually on the farm. She kept house for a narrative, too, the wilderness has never of the river and a corner of the forest. A of favor just because they were romantic her bachelor brothers, who farmed the stopped morphing even as forests have feisty young environmentalist—the River and loved Nature. During my junior year, Hoffman place, and read every word in the disappeared from swaths of the continent. Keeper—kept a close watch on the flow of I discovered D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in weekly Advocate. After retiring, Hazel One fictional wilderness—Puritan, tran- Classic American Literature (1923), still started feeding songbirds and growing scendentalist, modern, post-apocalyptic among the best books on the subject. sunflowers that she admired greatly. She and more—piled on top of another to form Melville, Emerson Lawrence made the study of American drove the three miles into town on Thurs- an archeology of the wild. literature fun and deadly serious, too, as days for groceries and the post office and For centuries, Americans have liked to and Thoreau felt that when he complained that American tour- on Sundays for church. think of themselves as a people who go the literature of the ists did “more to kill the sacredness of Sometimes, her nieces and nephews into the wilderness to convert, conquer, old European beauty and aspiration than brought their little ones to sit on her find God, beat the Devil. They have often United States was nur- multitudes of bombs would have done.” knee and stare solemnly at her rather neglected to see that we have also come Perhaps only an outsider could write so pointed chin. The little ones were well out of the wilderness. While American tured by the continent insightfully about American literature, acquainted with the twinkle that so eluded writers have mapped the wild, the wild of North America it- though in the 1920s American critics such her students. Whenever one of the little has also mapped them. An ecosystem as William Carlos Williams and Lewis ones said something especially clever, her unto itself, wilderness has usually been self and especially by Mumford also wrote brilliantly about mouth would move from strictly horizon- viewed as the antithesis of civilization. To the fiction and the poetry of their own tal to slightly crooked at the edges and understand it means juggling words like its wildness. Creativity country. the lines around her eyes would deepen “savage” and “barbarian.” Settling the seemed to spring from Lawrence’s book showed me that slightly. That twinkle never lasted long, wilderness meant exterminating “sav- the critic had permission to say almost but it was there in those years. ages,” a horrific enterprise that prompted the woods; images anything even if it was only tangentially After the bachelor brothers and all the both Herman Melville and Mark Twain connected to a text. “Men are free when sisters died, the nieces and nephews came to think of civilized folk as barbarians in sprouted from trees. they belong to a living organic, believ- trousers and silk shirts.

See NOTHING page 6 See wild page 4 Page 2 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2014 editor’s note So Long, Mr. Chips: Democracy, elitism and the arts Stephen Kessler

ne of the best things to happen priesthood or privileged class of tastemak- to me when I was in graduate ers but an aspiration toward excellence: the school, way back at the dark effort to create, in whatever medium, not end of the 1960s, was meet- necessarily a “masterpiece” but as strong a ing Norman Harms. I had manifestation of your talent and your vision Obeen exiled by the literature faculty at UC as you can achieve, using the old masters Santa Cruz, due to bad behavior in seminars not as slavemasters but as examples. W. H. on critical theory, to a TAship in the core Auden, the English-turned-American poet, course of College Five (now Porter Col- as an undergraduate at Oxford, was report- lege), whose emphasis was the arts. I was edly queried by a snooty don, “So I under- to assist the newly hired Harms, an artist stand you want to be a poet.” “No,” Auden from Berkeley, in his woodscrap sculpture replied, “I want to be a great poet.” workshop both by participating in “the I guess it is greatness that I miss in the activity,” as he called it, and by assigning leveling of the playing field where every- arts-related readings to the undergraduates body’s a poet or artist of some kind, all enrolled. I would help the students with people are creatively equal, art is reduced to their reading and writing, and Norman therapy and mediocrity prevails. Medioc- would guide them in the art of woodscrap rity is mathematical—the law of average- sculpture. ness demands it—but that doesn’t mean The only problem with the class, apart that excellence should be ignored, or worse, from Norman’s utter unsuitability to an scorned. Some of the most inspiring work academic environment—even one as rela- may be what we do as amateurs to show tively freewheeling as UCSC in 1969—was ourselves we can do it—for me, domestic that woodscrap sculpture, by design, was pleasures like cooking or gardening—but I not a “fine” art and did not require instruc- am most inspired by things I know I could tion. The whole point of the activity, which never do so well, like Vivian Maier’s street Norman may not have invented (Louise photography (the work of an amateur), Nevelson was a master of this medium) but or Paul Cézanne’s oil painting (definitely did attempt to popularize, was to prove to professional), or the poetry of Rainer Maria people, or give them permission to prove to Rilke (an elitist for sure). Witnessing great- themselves, that they did not need to consid- ness makes me want to improve my own er themselves artists in order to discover the game, even if I can never hope to play in the artist within. By taking variously shaped S tephen K essle r same league as Emerson, Yeats or Kafka. scraps of wood that had been reclaimed Norman Harms, early 1970s, at the Watts Towers One of those bossy professors I had in from furniture factories and pattern shops in grad school told me that he had wanted to deepest industrial Los Angeles, and gluing College Five was to be carved into lots for be a writer but when he read Dostoyevsky them together with Elmer’s glue, anyone student family housing, Norman was one of he realized he could never be that great so could create their own piece of improvisa- Mr. Chips’s project the leaders of the protests against such land- he quit his own literary ambitions. What an tional sculpture. Art, for the evangelical Mr. mutilating construction. He wrote inflam- idiot, I thought at the time; he should have Chips (Norman’s nom de guerre), was not was to turn people on matory pamphlets and printed and distrib- taken Dosty as a role model and written those paintings on the wall but the creativity to their own creative uted them (a great American tradition dating novels of his own instead of promulgating in everyone. Because everyone, as far as back to the Founders). He angered black the latest French metaliterary-critical-theo- Chips was concerned, was an artist. potential and encour- students by distributing a screed called “The retical fashion. Norman had come of age in the heyday Student as Nigger,” which encouraged un- Another legendary UCSC professor, of Abstract Expressionism, had trained as age them to do their dergraduates to revolt against the oppressive the art historian and painter Mary Holmes a fresco painter with Hans Hoffmann, and corporate regime that was reducing them to (whom I met only long after I had dropped was a very accomplished abstract painter thing in their own powerless slaves. out), once told me that she taught art history himself. A big silvery-blond man with a way with the most Needless to say, his contract was not instead of painting because she didn’t want well-waxed handlebar mustache, of Nordic renewed. to have to look at students’ work all day; she ancestry from Wisconsin, Norman was elementary materials: But our one quarter together, before wanted to keep her eye on the highest stan- large in gesture, loud in voice, vehement the gates of academe were slammed shut dard, so that she would absorb those values wood and white glue. behind both of us on our way out, was the into her own work. “Bad images drive out start of a twenty-year friendship that had good,” she said. Mary was the warmest a tremendous impact on me and my ideas person imaginable, and was supportive of The Redwood Coast in his convictions, on fire with ideas and about art. Norman was then the closest anyone who felt called to become an artist, practically exploding with revolutionary thing I had ever had to a mentor, and he but when it came to “art appreciation” she enthusiasm. He told me that the Abstract was eager to impart his wisdom. His ideal wanted to look at, and talk about, only the Expressionists had thought of themselves work of art was the Watts Towers, Sam best—not just the latest but the best of all Review as revolutionaries, radical overthrowers of Rodia’s sculptural-architectural creation in time. Stephen Kessler the status quo, but had been turned by the South LA, composed of bits and pieces of Editor art establishment into commodities. Wild discarded, abandoned and found materi- hose work that is determined to be, geniuses like Jackson Pollock and Mark als: scrap iron, glass fragments, broken Wand who decides, are political ques- Daniel Barth Rothko had painted themselves into a com- tiles, wire, pottery shards, rusty tools, auto tions, but also personal ones. If we can’t zARA rAAb mercial corner, and their only escape was parts, junkyard crap of no useful purpose, discriminate enough to establish our own Jonah Raskin self-destruction—which only increased the constructed by Rodia, a tile setter by trade, personal canon or pantheon, how will we Rebecca Taksel market value of their art. into a monumental work of urban “folk” art. ever accomplish anything? How will we Contributing Editors For less gifted and visionary artists, the Chips took me there for the first time and know who we want to hang with in eternity? great masters like Leonardo and Michelan- gave me a major lecture on its importance. How will we know who to imitate in order Linda Bennett gelo and Rembrandt were tyrannical over- Rodia had demonstrated that people who to learn the tricks of the trade, develop our Production Director lords, hanging judges, elitist icons, over- make no claim to be artists, who don’t turn chops, sharpen our artistic wits? While I bearing role models, totalitarian taskmasters their talent into inevitably corrupt careers, still appreciate Mr. Chips and his populist The Redwood Coast Review is published brutal enough to intimidate anyone. can be the greatest artists of all. quarterly (January, April, July and October) creativity crusade, as I age I crave more and by Friends of Coast Community Library in Mr. Chips’s project was to turn people on I believed it, having escaped a very Yale- more to invest my time and attention in the cooperation with the Independent Coast to their own creative potential and encour- centric literature program where hierarchy enjoyment and appreciation of excellence, Observer. The opinions expressed in these age them to do their thing in their own way of accomplishment, whether in poetry, because being around works I most admire pages are those of the individual writers and with the most elementary materials: wood criticism or the academic pecking order, was makes me want to join them with some- do not necessarily reflect the views of FoCCL, and white glue. He staged “glue-ins”— paramount. The professors I hated most thing of mine, and this desire stimulates my the ICO or the advertisers. Contents copyright where anyone and everyone was invited to were the authoritarian know-it-alls who imagination. © 2014 The Redwood Coast Review. All rights participate—at Ghirardelli Square in San attempted to impose their intellectual vision Access to such models of accomplish- revert to authors and artists on publication. Francisco, in public parks around the Bay on uppity hippie poets like me; I felt a stron- ment is not exclusive. Everyone these We welcome your submissions. Please Area, and in front of Bookshop Santa Cruz ger connection with the redwood groves send essays, reviews, fiction, poetry and letters days has access to pretty much everything, on what was then the Pacific Garden Mall. than with their whiteman’s curriculum. So to the Editor, The Redwood Coast Review, c/o ICO, at least in virtual form, and that is para- PO Box 1200, Gualala, CA 95445. Manuscripts It was there, I believe, that some adventur- I was ready to hear Norman’s eloquent rants doxically part of the problem. Like one should be typed, double-spaced, with the ous UCSC faculty recruiter discovered him about the art police and the need to reclaim of those 12-page deli menus that turns author’s name, address, phone, email and and offered him a job. Chips’s inability to authority for the creative spirit of free ordering lunch into an existential crisis, the word count at the top of the first page. Postal adapt to the culture of even such a seem- imagination. Though I had been initiated proliferation of cultural artifacts (and arty mail only. A self-addressed, stamped envelope ingly progressive ivory tower (or “City on into poetry the old-school way, by reading fictions) at our fingertips is surely more than is required for our reply. a Hill,” as the campus was called) was only rhymed and metered English poems, and anyone needs or can consume. But if in the On the Web: stephenkessler.com/rcr.html a foreshadowing of the university’s gradual writing my own pale imitations of them, I cacophony we can find what has proved en- Friends of Coast Community Library is a eradication of the experimental humanis- had finally come around to “free verse” in nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization. during, we can tap into some of that staying Tax-deductible donations may be sent to tic vision on which it had been founded. the effort to expunge my inner conservative. power and use it to fuel our own creative Coast Community Library, PO Box 808, Point Universities are corporations, corporations Forty-five years later, having survived enterprise. This has nothing to do with Arena, CA 95468. The library is located at run on money, and the big money is in the the sixties and managed to spend my adult self-expression or self-esteem—though both 225 Main Street in Point Arena. Telephone sciences, not the arts. life doing what I like, which is writing may be side effects of plugging into such 707.882.3114. and engaging in cultural intercourse with energy and doing something with it—and Thank you for your support! hips lasted but a single quarter because my community, I confess to being a bit everything to do with serving your muse as Chis insurgent fervor was not confined to nostalgic for the discredited notion of “elit- truly and devotedly as you can. art. When the rolling meadow to the west of ism,” which to me implies not an artistic Summer 2014 The Redwood Coast Review Page 3 culture & memory Famous and Forgotten Thomas Fuchs

ou know,” I said to Nicky, my grand- queline Susann, Althea Gibson, Louella Parsons and Hedda son, who was born in 2003, “that guy The memories of a generation Hopper. used to be a very famous actor. He The failure of young people to recognize figures we older didn’t just own a food company.” I was end with that generation, and folks know so well is no reflection on them. They have their pointing to the picture of Paul Newman even people who had enormous own concerns, their own history to live through, their own “Yon the label of a bottle of Newman’s Own Ranch Dressing. figures to admire or despise. The lad nodded in response, that nod which is somehow si- impact in their time become In sports, I think the name and image of Babe Ruth will multaneously polite and dismissive, employed by him when remain iconic among Americans for a long time to come, Grandpa once again dispenses useless information. mere figures in history. but to any younger person without a particular interest in I don‘t brood over little Nicky’s opinions, but this the subject, how long will it be before Muhammad Ali is as particular instance caused an idea to crystalize which had guess the occupation of a guest—a female judo instructor, a obscure as Joe Louis? In other fields of human achievement been rattling around in my brain for a few years. Now that diaper salesman, an industrial chemist whose duties include —Charles Lindberg, maybe, but Richard Byrd? How about the blasting roar of the twentieth century is receding to the testing the effectiveness of underarm deodorants. No, what Sergeant York or Audie Murphy? point where one can think about those years rather than just intrigues me are the Mystery Guests, people so famous that Of course there is the odious Hitler, so famous that even respond to them, I sometimes find myself wondering, of all the panel must be blindfolded for their appearance. actors with no resemblance to him are understood to be the thousands who became famous in that time, who will be What has begun to catch at me is how obscure almost all portraying him if they slap on the mustache. His Fascist remembered as the new century absorbs our attention? these celebrities have become. Many are actors, singers, contemporaries have faded from the general consciousness, The phenomenon I’m talking about certainly occurred comedians; some, outstanding figures from other fields. except perhaps in their own countries—Mussolini, Franco, during the twentieth century with respect to the nineteenth. Anyone near my age will recognize just about all of them, Tojo. Outside of the former Soviet Union and China, do That hundred years was filled with titanic events and saw but when, at a recent family gathering, I ran clips from the people recognize Lenin? Mao’s image may endure for some changes which have had lasting impact, but for most people, show for my children, both of whom are intelligent, well- time. He is still promoted in China, and for some reason, only a few famous names endure from the nineteenth other educated and under thirty-five, I got admissions of ignorance perhaps having to do with that Warhol portrait, his image is than, say, Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln. for, among others, Gary Cooper, Edmund Hillary, Everett sometimes used in Western ads, though what’s chic about a So, who will endure from my time, my century? I call Dirksen, Jack Benny, Ava Gardner, Rosalind Russell, Jac- man who caused the deaths of millions escapes me. it my century because I was born in 1942. Indeed, thinking Churchill’s image will endure, certainly in the Western about it, I’m startled to realize that I lived through more than world, but it’s sobering to consider that the only reason he is half the twentieth century. famous is because of his opponent. Has Harry Truman, for example, already lost the status of Closer to home, what about American presidents as general, instant recognition? He is the first President I re- global iconic figures? JFK comes to mind, and maybe FDR member. In my mind’s eye, I can still see my parents sitting (though a surprising number of people seem to have him before the radio, their excitement growing as the votes came confused with the Roosevelt on Mt. Rushmore). And that in and it became apparent that Truman, despite predictions, is an instructive pairing. FDR led the nation through more was going to win a second term in 1948. In a few years, I than a decade of particularly turbulent history, much of would feel a personal connection with him, when I had to which he himself made, while JFK was, tragically, unable start wearing glasses. My father, who felt far worse about to accomplish much, and almost none of that survives. The this than I did, consoled me by pointing out that the presi- kind of fame I’m talking about isn’t something that occurs dent, too, wore glasses. for concrete, predictable reasons. But the memories of a generation end with that genera- Ronald Reagan may fare well for some years, and it’s too tion, and even people who had enormous impact in their soon to tell about Clinton, but most of the others, including time become mere figures in history. Or so it has always Nixon and Johnson, seem destined for the obscurity that has been. My century differs from all those preceding it in that already enveloped Wilson, Taft, Hoover and the rest. it produced a super-abundance of images. Photography was I’m not talking about the most influential people of the invented in the nineteenth century but the mass reproduction twentieth. A great many people, particularly in science, of photos in newspapers and magazines didn’t become com- technology, and medicine, made contributions that changed monplace until the twentieth, soon followed by cinematog- the way we live, but even Edison’s image isn’t particularly raphy and then, television. Surely, my century produced well known today. Henry Ford? Didn’t he invent the auto- more people who will remain famous than the centuries mobile or something? Alexander Fleming? Jonas Salk? preceding it. Certainly, Albert Einstein will retain his fame even though most of us, including me, don’t really understand aybe not. I’ve recently became fascinated with clips Relativity. In fact, Einstein’s fame is now established in MI’ve found on YouTube from What’s My Line?, a 1950s law. A US District ruling in a case about the use of his like- television game show I sometimes watched. I have no inter- Clockwise from top left: Jack Benny, Harry Truman, Edmund ness found that Einstein “is the symbol and embodiment of est in the major portion of the show, in which a panel tries to Hillary, Althea Gibson genius. His persona has become thoroughly ingrained in our cultural heritage.” Other than Hitler and Einstein, the question of just who will retain the status of instant recognition a hundred years from now is a matter for highly subjective speculation. Everyone will have his/her nominations. Gandhi? Picasso? Martin Luther King? Elvis comes to mind. I don’t know of any Court ruling confirming his fame, but the fact that no one reading this will think, “Elvis who?” suggests his identity will endure. The Beatles? If you’re anywhere near leppo inter my age, you remember the tremendous excitement they gen- A W erated. Who could have imagined they would begin to fade within a generation? Others? Maybe Humphrey Bogart because of that picture of him in his white Casablanca dinner jacket. Possibly the Barrel-bombs and indiscriminate slaughter. Memory’s meat Little Tramp, although only hard-core movie fans sit through Mid-winter. Refugees fleeing across borders. We eat and keep Chaplin’s films, even the shorts. John Wayne, but then he Nothing but gnawing hunger anymore. Repeating. was so much more than an actor. On some half-conscious, irrational level, people seem to believe that he really did win Horses in rank stalls families hide in Decades later, reading in Malaparte’s Kaputt the West and World II, in both cases many times. Marilyn Feed on more Of a winter night in farthest Finland, Monroe may have made it into the global gestalt, though it’s Than their children will, The Germans’ shelling sent a mass flight not clear whether as a symbol of sexiness or as a parody of it. And if fame is nothing more, finally, than a cosmic joke, And homesickness worsens horror Into the lake, the heavy guns driving them on the proof would be Lucy and Desi. I Love Lucy has been in Of the present to yearning for their past The very night the lake freezes over. continuous, global television syndication for over fifty years. Apprehension but less terror. Soon all fixed in place, a thousand By report, the daffy redhead and her exasperated husband are known by people just about everywhere in the world, I remember my mother saying, for her as a girl Frozen faces as if sliced cleanly by an ax with, I suppose, the likely exception of North Korea. Aleppo winters were like being caught in a Caught in last living grimaces of terror and river torment— ll in all, it’s really enough to give one pause and per- Rising and night growing cold as marble On Lake Laduga’s vast sheet of white marble Aspective. With very few exceptions, nothing and no one rested lasts for long. The turbulence of the twentieth century was Freezing you in place, absorbing, frequently horrifying and sometimes hilarious, And every place in you was everywhere A thousand cavalry horses’ but recognition of the transience of all things has its consola- Ice. She liked her talk like her cooking spiced. Heads stuck out of the crust tions, particularly as one grows old. Of ice. Maybe I’ll put a copy of this essay in an envelope and When I once asked why she always expected give it to little Nicky’s parents to give him when he goes off The worst. “I don’t expect the worst,” to college, with instructions not to open it until he turns fifty She said, “I expect the expected.” or maybe sixty. It will be about time by then for him to hear from Grandpa again. Of course, by then he’ll know a lot of —Jack Marshall things Grandpa didn’t, including who remains famous from that long-ago time, the twentieth century.

Thomas Fuchs is a writer living in West Hollywood. Page 4 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2014 memoir

Waiting for Alone in this room with my poems, the the Muse table, my computer, chair and bed, I am Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard trying to exorcise fear. I am uncertain f primary importance is the land. It is so still that at first it about my writing. seems like background. Gradu- Perhaps it is that the ally, however, it takes hold. Like low music, it insinuates poetry lies in the self Oitself into my subconscious, moving through me like the deep notes of the bass viol. In without work or fam- the distance are the Blue Ridge Mountains, ily, age or country. but they do not hold the quality of distance. They are incandescent above rows of dark evergreens. Heavy clouds emanate from the houses thin out and farms open their their peaks and surge across the fields pages. A blue line of mountains rises above towards my stu­dio. Outside my window, a the fields. The road closes in once more hawk rises and falls in stately undulations with oaks, honey locust and elms enmeshed

and the fields circle below, wrapped in their in shrouds of jasmine and kudzu. The wind isman

yellows and browns. The land has its lights E y blows and blows sending a swirl of light and ind and the supplicant winter shadows are like M shadow around me. There is no one on the Giacometti figures.­ The earth breathes and road, but a pair of bluebirds flits among the turns before me, exhaling patience. This two windows, a table, a bed and a book- stealth as the land does. As he describes his branches. I am still waiting for the words quiet has its own immensity, greater than the shelf. It’s anonymous as a blank canvas. house, the sparrows on the telephone lines, to spring out of the brush the way they did Atlantic boiling along the coast, vaster than How can I fill this space? I am new to the I feel myself beginning to open up. I drop a few years ago when I brought back the the night sky. The land streams by carrying world of artists’ colonies. the book, pull my chair close to the window, poems the way I brought back the leaves our lives to the sea like the Zambezi. It fills The first day I panic. I try to read, but the perch my feet on the desk and stare out the and twigs clinging to my shoes and coat and my silences, knocks against my breast like words dance before me as something apart. window at the clouds. the wind tangling my hair. words struggling to emerge. I cannot take them in the way I take in the I have hung a pastel painting of a forest I arrived in my studio carrying my life land. I read one of my favorite poets. She is fternoons I take walks down the road on my studio wall and a delicate ink draw- like a sack of boulders. It weighs me down such a crafted writer, so strong and assured Abehind the barn. I pass small jerry-built ing of two weeping trees and a man and until I can no longer see beyond it. But now that I begin to feel incompetent.­ I turn from houses with dogs barking and howling in woman embracing. Blanche Dombek lent I long for chores just so I can escape this one book to another, then pick up William front of them as if they were guarding pal- them to me for my stay here because I fell alienation from self. There are no obliga- Gass’s In the Heart of the Heart of the aces. They leap around me trying out their in love with them when she was showing tions waiting for me here, just a room with Country. He knows how to take one in with fe­rocity on the all-too-rare passerby. Then me her latest work. “How do you do it?” I asked when I first saw her forest exhaling humidity and sound, the light falling among the trees like copper blades. “It’s automatic wild from page 1 drawing,” she replied. Her hands build up the colors in layers until the form emerges. ing community,” he wrote. “Not when they quest for resources ripped apart the natural She doesn’t stew over things the way I do, are escaping to some wild west.” Lawrence Settling the wilderness world. Between 1964 and 2014, Americans has learned to let the art take her where it understood before anyone else the pivotal increasingly lost touch with the rugged he- will. This forest on my wall, with the earth- place of the wild and the wilderness in was an enterprise that man wilderness of Roosevelt and Muir. For colored trees, its pungent lime greens, its Whitman, Cooper and Hector St. John de prompted Melville and the most part, families wanted the wild to be rods of light, is presence. Crevecoeur, the Frenchman who noted that tame and much closer to home than Yellow- So is the wind blowing heavy clouds “the American” was a “New Man” born of Twain to think of civi- stone or Yosemite. Moreover, ersatz wilds across the mountain tops over the fields and the wilderness. replaced genuine wilderness. If backpack- the studio. It wrestles against my studio In the century after Lawrence wrote lized folk as barbarians. ers and hikers went into the desert or the door as I open it to head for the kitchen. It Studies, the study of American literature mountains it was often to recharge batteries pushes the door against my hands as I strug- turned into an industry with hefty textbooks amok. In 1956, when he was married to and heal psychic wounds. gle back inside. It blows the clouds across that contained more pages, more writers Marilyn Monroe, Miller was investigated as At nineteen, I turned not to wilder- the sun so that light and shade alternate in and more cultural diversity, too, but fewer a subversive, found guilty of contempt of ness but to American literature as a kind rapid succession above the fields like slides insights, it seemed to me, into what made Congress and sentenced to prison. The ver- of religion, and pledged allegiance to the in a dissolve show. I remember the dining American literature distinctly American. dict was reversed and yet Miller was deeply members of the Beat Generation who traced table in a brigantine sloop I once sailed. The By the twenty-first, Americans had largely hurt. “I was out of sync with the whole their roots to Whitman and Melville. Jack table remained level with the horizon while lost touch with their own literary heritage. country,” he explained. He added that he Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg were liter- the boat moved around it and our chins rose Hawthorne, Poe, Dickinson and Melville had written himself “into the wilderness.” ary older brothers whose books dared me and fell above the table. My studio is level had become aliens for a generation raised on to cut loose. In 1952, after eating peyote, while the clouds sail up and over. It seems Facebook and Twitter. merican playwrights, novelists and smoking marijuana and listening to Charlie as if I am un­derwater while giant freight- That summer along the river and in the Apoets—Melville, Dickinson, Zora Parker, Kerouac explained to his friend John ers, aircraft carriers and cargo ships scud wilds of Northern California, I reexamined Neale Hurston and Richard Wright—have Clellon Holmes to say that he was going overhead. the books that seduced me when I was habitually written themselves into the to write a novel in the manner of Fyodor My dreams come in with me this morn- nineteen. More than half a century later, I wilderness. As British short story writer and Dostoyevsky. The form of the book was as ing. Always when I am away for a period of talked back to Lawrence and used his ad- literary critic V. S. Pritchett noted, when an important to him as the content. It had to solitude, I dream of my parents. They loom ages to amplify writers he never considered: American resisted the “totalitarian” regime keep pace with the beat of his “wild heart” above me in fragments or we come together the Puritan heretic, Roger Williams; the of the Puritans he “found himself alone in a and it also had to have “wild form, man, for half-finished scenarios. Last night my flaneur of the prairies, Washington Irving; wilderness.” One Puritan regime followed wild form.” father was reading aloud and I was sitting the sassy daughter of the bourgeoisie, Emily another, as H. L. Mencken pointed out in Kerouac’s “wild form” can rarely be very close to him, my shoulder at right Dickinson; and the darkly satirical Mark the 1920s as a generation of writers rebelled glimpsed in the pages of English literature. angles with the letter he held before him. Twain who raged against the machines of against Puritan traditions and yet couldn’t Only an obtuse Englishman like Matthew He was absorbed in his letter, reading aloud his day—and invented a few, too. I collected entirely shake the Puritan legacy. Arnold could say that Americans “were the in a language I couldn’t understand. Then I and sorted wilderness tropes: the “howling From the earliest days of the United English on the other side of the Atlantic” was in a room with my mother, amazed to wilderness” of the Puritans; the “dreary wil- States, the American wilderness was about and that “we are all contributors to one great be with her since in the dream, I knew she derness” of Meriwether Lewis; the “peopled the “Other” and about chaos and order. It literature—English Literature.” Not surpris- had died and I was aware of her fragility. wilderness” of Cooper; the “moral wilder- was political territory for Thomas Jefferson, ingly, uncouth Mark Twain declared his The room was filled with other people. Then ness” of Hawthorne; and the “neon wilder- Thomas Paine and Thoreau, who urged the cultural independence from Arnold and the it emptied out all of a sudden, the wind that ness” of Nelson Algren. As a metaphor, the creation of public parks. In the midst of the English, though he also traveled to Oxford blows some flames in, others out. wilderness went wild in America. Civil War, an event as destructive to the to receive an honorary degree. Like Twain, Alone in this room with my poems, the At the public library—which Thoreau environment as any in American history, Americans have long refused attempts to table, my computer, chair and bed, I am called a “wilderness of books”—I found President Lincoln set aside a majestic parcel “sivilize” them, even as they cannot resist trying to exorcise fear. I am uncertain about more wildernesses than I anticipated. Curi- of land in California that became Yosemite the temptations and snares of “sniviliation” my writing. Perhaps it is the nakedness ously, the word wilderness appears just once National Park. Later, Theodore Roosevelt, —as Herman Melville called it—whether that troubles me: the poetry lies in the self in Eugene O’Neill’s 1932 romantic comedy, John Muir and Aldo Leopold posited the at Oxford, in the towns along the banks of without work or family, age or country. The Ah, Wilderness, where’s there no real wil- wilderness as a kind of sacred space that the Mississippi or the thickly settled hills of fields outside my window need no justifica- derness, only an unspoken nostalgia for it. would, they insisted, miraculously save San Francisco. Like Huck Finn, we snivel tion. They journey beneath clouds and red- One character recites the famous lines from civilization from itself. at civilization and enjoy the comforts of a tailed hawks. The mountains know their the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: In fact, the 1964 Wilderness Act pro- cabin in the woods or a raft floating down a height because of them. Birds plunge among tected pockets of the American landscape mighty river. the stubble. But poetry must continually A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, from destruction. For Stewart Udall, then reinvent itself. I begin to strip myself down A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Secretary of the Interior, the United States shred by shred, let go of all my moorings Thou needed wilderness to counterbalance Jonah Raskin, an RCR contributing editor, until there is no line between inner and Beside me singing in the Wilderness. “vanishing beauty.” Parks proliferated along outer, until I begin to really see. with armed rangers and yet the environment will teach a workshop in creative nonfiction at the Catamaran Writing Conference, to Leap ahead to Arthur Miller’s moral wasn’t immune from the ills of civilization. be held in Pebble Beach, August 13-17. For melodrama The Crucible, set in seven- Citizens celebrated Earth Day and watched more information see http://catamaranliter- Marguerite Guzmán Bouvard is a poet and teenth-century Massachusetts, where the the Earth take a terrible beating. Tankers aryreader.com/nonfiction-with-jonah-raskin/ author living in Wellesley, Massachusetts. wilderness howls and where Puritans run spilled oil. Rivers burst into flames and the Summer 2014 The Redwood Coast Review Page 5 Writers & Writing Gatekeepers Secrets of the Iowa Writers Workshop Cecile Lusby

s one who has attended writing workshops for metaphor, which Conroy advises to use seldom, if at all. more than eight years, I respect Iowa’s role in Bennett doubts whether we should give that much emphasis making rules to produce a climate for creativity. to grammar and syntax. Those of us who like to read novels The Iowa Writers Workshop process is demo- about character wish we could upset Iowa’s ideal pyramid, cratic in the best American tradition. Everyone or stand it on its head, so to speak, so that character or meta- Agets a copy of the work, the writer reads aloud, while the phor is the major driving feature, the main substance, not the other participants listen and read along before writing a sugar sprinkles on the top. response. Finally the writer of the piece listens quietly to Now picture an inverted pyramid. Here we have the reader comments. I value this give and take aspect of Iowa’s renegade “character-driven” model, with character the broad training, and so does essayist Eric Bennett. base at the top, and syntax and grammar at the bottom, In February 2014 I read Bennett’s long piece in the showing its lesser importance. Bennett reports that Iowa Chronicle of Higher Education, “How Iowa Flattened Lit- directs its students to write with and inhabit a small voice erature,” which examines the intellectual underpinnings of and not to aspire to a novel of ideas or erudition or “full the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the nation’s fore- throttle experience.” Neither Engle nor Conroy believed in most writing program. He also names the CIA as providing abstractions, thinking maybe if you started out with one or that program’s original funding. The workshop’s founders two abstract ideas, who knows what readers will be clamor- had hoped their students’ stories would present an alternative ing for next? to the Marxist point of view during the Cold War. To pursue this goal, Iowa made a decision to back away from both the rom all parts of the country MFA programs state similar edgy and the eggheaded. To describe this standard, Bennett Fbeliefs. Bennett cites Wallace Stegner, who directed the asserts, “The Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s aversion to novels influential Stanford creative writing program, as one who and stories of full throttle experience, erudition, and cogni- thought that a true writer was “an incorrigible lover of con- tion—the unspoken proscription against attempting to write crete things . . . an artist not ordinarily or ideally a general- them—was the narrowness I sensed and hated. The question Frank Conroy I wanted to answer, as I faced down my dissertation, was whether this aversion was an accidental feature of Iowa dur- Among the topics covered is moment to herself. When I was twelve I began reading all ing my time or if it reflected something more.” her books, starting with The City and the Pillar and The Well Bennett wonders if he just imagines Iowa’s aversion, or if the surprising story of how of Loneliness, decoding but not understanding the homoerot- it is the heart of the matter. the CIA came to set up and ic references. I read Archie and Mehitabel along with Studs I survey my bookshelves to see if my books offer “erudi- Lonigan and felt those texts were clearer. I did not stick with tion and cognition,” and see that they do. I still have Doris finance the Iowa Writers L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. Lessing’s Four-Gated City and The Golden Notebook, By age eighteen, I began to visit my father in Berkeley, a E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and The Book of Daniel, and Workshop; the agency want- union man and working-class intellectual who spent his eve- John Irving’s A Prayer For Owen Meany. All are concept ed Iowa to influence Ameri- nings reading, drinking, and hacking away at his typewriter. or character-driven works. The idea behind The Four Gated He had quit high school in his freshman year to be a bike City was that the violence of war has diminished us. The can culture to prevent the messenger for Dupont and earn money to help out the fam- Golden Notebook showed the inadequacy of the novel form ily. At eighteen he found a job at Robelen Music as a sales to represent modern life. Doctorow in both books describes spread of communism. clerk and music teacher, having learned to play trombone the US as an empire builder, limiting freedom along the and trumpet at St. Ann’s in Wilmington. You may wonder way. John Irving’s work shows two remarkable characters, what his story has to do with NYC vs. MFA. Johnny and Owen, from childhood to the day they face the izer, nor a dealer in concepts.” I read Angle of Repose and My father discovered art, music, and literature on his draft in the Vietnam War. Each makes his own decision (one found Stegner’s saga of a pioneer family boggy with details own, without college. His reading patterns reflected an open- goes to war and the other escapes to Canada) but the reader of moving west and taming the wilderness. I much preferred ness to new ideas. When I think of my father’s bookshelves sees both sides of the issue. I believe a concept- or character- John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, also a family saga, but one in Berkeley in 1960, I remember a stack of New Yorkers, driven book helps us understand life in a moral universe and that questions human nature and our capacity for evil. The John Hersey, Konrad Lorenz, and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady see characters evolve. Iowa disagrees. character Lee, a Chinese immigrant outsider, works as a Chatterley’s Lover in the Grove Press unexpurgated edition. With the exception of John Irving, the authors in my caregiver to orphaned twins and probes the depths of scrip- His literary idols were Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Wil- library did not study at Iowa. Marilyn Robinson, whose ture in his time off, questioning a word in Genesis: Timschel liam Styron and Gore Vidal, then appearing on late night TV books I’ve read only recently, taught at Iowa and is one (thou mayest), a term outlining the human capacity to make to promote themselves. The common topic here was Ameri- author Bennett mentions as a good writer who works within moral choices. Surely this is an abstract concept, and I prefer can experience, life and politics without reference to an the Workshop’s guidelines. Surely Robinson in her novel Steinbeck’s approach in East of Eden to Stegner’s in the alma mater. The nation’s center of intellectual life was New Gilead is a writer of spiritual and “eggheaded” matters. handling of serious ideas. York City. My father, a Chevron electrician, wrote every What Eric Bennett objects to about the Iowa Writers Among the topics covered in Eric Bennett’s essay is the night after work and sent his manuscripts to NYC publishing Workshop is: surprising story of how the CIA came to set up and finance houses. He showed me his rejection slips, just as his friend 1. The lack of transparency about Iowa receiving CIA the Iowa Writers Workshop, noting that the agency wanted Philip K. Dick had shown him his in the 1950s. When Phil, a funding. Iowa to influence American culture to prevent the spread UC dropout, found success, my father felt a ray of hope. 2. The power Iowa has over writers to limit topics and of communism. Bennett discusses the various schools of Vince Lusby never expressed regret for missing out on treatments and worldview. American literature since World War II, tracking trends in college; he maintained his own rigorous reading schedule. The CIA spent its money to buy that influence. the last half of the twentieth century as an outgrowth of So when Bennett writes about Iowa or MFA programs pos- Iowa’s leaders, first Paul Engle and then Frank Conroy, Iowa’s role as gatekeeper. The Post-WWII categories the ing barriers to publishing or limiting the worldview of writ- had a way of representing what aspects of literature were workshop recognizes as worthwhile are: ers, I hold up my unpublished father’s memory as a wound. I most important in every work and in what proportions. 1. Modernists like Alice Munro and Denis Johnson. see him as an alien outside the gates of the city. Picture a pyramid. At the broad base, we show the syntax 2. Warmer, chattier (sic) writers like John Irving and grammar of language as the bulk of the text. Next up and Marilyn Robinson. y father never had the benefit of a writer’s workshop. in importance we have concrete details for the reader’s 3. Magical realists like Paul Harding in Tinkers. MHis generation believed in the magic of the first draft. comprehension and delight. Near the top we show charac- The category not accepted by Iowa is: You typed away, and voila: it was perfect the first time or ter, indicating a minor portion of the text, and last we show 4. Postmodernist work or everything else outside the you had no gift. I am grateful to have found good writing three categories above. Here one might find feminist or teachers in Sonoma County: Robin Beeman, Mimi Albert multicultural books. Bennett places his writing in this and Susan Bono. I have made a little money and been fourth category, claiming to have added his controver- published occasionally in North Bay papers, but mostly I sial material on the CIA as a ploy to get attention to enjoy the back and forth of reading, reflecting, writing, get- work that Iowa would otherwise have ignored. ting feedback and reading the critiques. I relish the process The essayist describes both his own frustrations with and feel I am somehow extending a family tradition: my this new path to publication and the tale of the CIA’s mother’s lively reading habit, my father’s writing. role in establishing the funding and the philosophy It was curious to read stories about how Paul Engle and for Iowa. In 1967 Paul Engle took seed money, about his successor, Frank Conroy, directed writing styles that $10,000, from a CIA front called Farfield Foundation to have come and gone. To get published in New York today, start a program to attract would-be writers at home and writers go to MFA programs, getting a master’s degree to abroad. More money flowed from the Asia Foundation, learn and be prepped, and so Bennett presents his notion of another front, as well as the State Department. Engle the distorted influence of MFA programs on current Ameri- got involved in the O. Henry Prize contest and soon can writing. There are online opportunities, but they are of- became its judge, further shaping literary standards. ten unpaid. Ironically, Eric Bennett is now doing rather well. Bennett will publish another series of essays this His manuscript has just been published by the University of year titled NYC vs. MFA to show the shifting influence Iowa Press. and evolution of styles, from the New York City–based­ publishing world of the last century to the new push and pull of the numerous MFA programs designed to relieve students of their money and deliver them to a Cecile Lusby lives in Santa Rosa. changed literary landscape of content providers and unpaid internships. So we have a transformation from urban intellectuals writing gritty survival stories to the young millennial generation describing their reduced Volunteer at circumstances. Bennett’s discussion of post–World War II novels Coast Community Library brings back memories of my parents, long divorced by 1950. My mother had been my guide in my early years, 707.882.3114 Paul Engle a heroine with a book in her hand whenever she had a Page 6 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2014

NOTHING from page 1 v Hazel to the farm less often, for shorter visits and without the little ones (who had grown into The pain came fiercely. Hazel gasped rather pimply and silent creatures). Most of before dropping onto the couch in the front her students led solitary lives on scattered room of Abel’s house. When he came in farms or had abandoned the county for from the yard, Abel simply sat next to her better jobs. The farm became quieter and body until almost dark. Hazel seemed to somehow shrink. The Advocate printed a nice obituary for Hazel, complete with high praise and gram- matical errors. The guest book at the fu- iii neral home was filled with the names of her Abel former students. The nieces and nephews were there, wondering what would happen Abel Gruber lived on the corner now, in his to the farm. Abel was nowhere to be seen. square house. After his sons moved away to Chicago and St. Louis and his wife died, Abel surprised no one when he sold the old vi farm and moved to town. He learned to Abel tend a small garden and kept chickens. To his secret embarrassment, Abel talked to Abel moved from his house on the corner to the chickens and thought they were better Hazel’s farm, living his last years with her company than most people he knew. In the said “How do?” at the post office and after songbirds and sunflowers. When he came to morning, he listened to the farm report and church. Naturally, these two knew each town, he rarely spoke. He stopped shaving to Paul Harvey. Of an evening, he listened Antrim was the sort other. Even in a town like Antrim, two on Monday, Thursday, and Sunday. Then he to the ballgame and shouted at the umpires. old neighbors could pass the time of day stopped shaving altogether. When he died a Sometimes, he worked crossword puzzles of town where people at the post office without raising anyone’s few years later, his snowy beard reached the long into the night. Abel went to Chicago eyebrows. As time went on, their simple said “How do?” Nat- third button on his faded shirt. for Christmas and St. Louis for Easter. “How do?” became surprisingly important The Advocate printed a nice obituary for He looked forward to the trips, but found urally, these two knew to each of them. Later still, they compared Abel, complete with the names of his two his daughters-in-law oddly distant and the songbirds and chickens, sunflowers and wives and the (sometimes misspelled) names grandchildren baffling. each other. Even in a vegetables, and unsatisfactory grandnieces, of his sons and grandchildren. Everybody Abel walked to the post office twice a grandnephews, and grandchildren. Abel town like Antrim, two wondered what would happen to the farm. week to collect circulars and seed catalogs. starting coming to Hazel’s for Sunday Once a month, he went to the bank. He old neighbors could dinner, and they were not unhappy in each always shaved on post office and bank days, other’s quiet company. vii and on Sunday before church. His beard pass the time of day One Saturday, Abel shaved and walked Antrim didn’t grow much anymore, but the nicks the few blocks into town. That same day, at the post office with- on Abel’s face were a sure sign of Mon- Hazel picked a bouquet of sunflowers, then The Hoffman land went to the town for the day, Thursday, Sunday, and the first of the out raising anyone’s drove herself to town. As agreed, they met new graded school. month. Other than those days, there just at the parsonage, married, and went home to Nothing much happens there in Antrim. weren’t that many occasions that called for eyebrows. Abel’s house. In the morning, the preacher a shave. caused quite a stir when he announced their marriage to the suddenly attentive congrega- gone mad from the farm’s solitude. But tion. the jokes and winks eventually subsided. Pam Powell is a retired safety educator and iv Abel began to shave every day, and Hazel’s Hazel and Abel Antrim suddenly had a new and fasci- technical writer and editor living in Anchor nating subject for conversation. The men twinkle became not quite so rare. Bay. This story took first place in the adult wondered how Abel fared with his old maid And seasons changed, and time passed. division of the 2014 Gualala Arts Creative Antrim was the sort of town where friend- bride. The women wondered if Hazel had Writing Contest. ships lasted for generations and people Summer 2014 The Redwood Coast Review Page 7 President’s desk B i b l i o t e c a Library Lines 10 Years On News and Reviews from Friends of Coast Community Library Wally Is at Alix Levine lives in profound ways. Human beings are not the sun other animals revolve around, the Wheel we are simply one more life form on this n November, the Friends of Coast extraordinarily diverse planet.” This les- Community Library (FoCCL) will be son, so simple to read, seems nevertheless Julia Larke Icelebrating the tenth anniversary of the an impossible one for our species to learn. move to our building in the heart of Point We will not learn it, and we are a fair way Arena after many years of fundraising to f you haven’t yet heard the news, toward drowning or burning ourselves and Mendocino County Library now has an buy the historic old Gillmore’s general all the other species with us because of that store, and many hours of volunteer labor Iinterim Library Director, Wally Clark. refusal. He replaces Mindy Kittay who resigned and materials donations to remodel the Moses is greatly influenced by Buddhist space into a welcoming and light-filled in late March after serving approximately thought. About her fear of spiders, she sixteen months. Wally is a good choice; library and community gathering place. quotes Buddhist teacher Sylvia Boorstein, Much has been done since then to he is familiar with the ins and outs of the “Fearlessness comes from benevolence and Mendocino County Library because he has improve the setting and services of Coast goodwill in the face of whatever oppresses Community Library. been a successful branch manager at the you.” Moses is able to apply the lesson to Fort Bragg Library for nearly two years. He In the Children’s Room, FoCCL has built her arachnophobia, to move from fear to additional shelving, obtained a grant from grew up in Southern California, received a friendly feeling to fearlessness. Elsewhere, BA at California State University Fuller- the Community Foundation of Mendocino she writes, “Buddhists say that the condi- County for an AWE Learning Station ton, a Master of Library Science at UCLA tions for happiness are always present in and for over twenty years has worked at computer for youngsters and added books, Tai Moses our lives, if we can learn to recognize them DVDs and audiobooks for children regu- public libraries in the Pacific Northwest, . . . The hawk, the wild turkey, the monarch most recently, before his Fort Bragg Library larly. Dedicated volunteer and retired chil- butterfly—these are my conditions for hap- dren’s librarian Marilyn Alderson continues position, as Bookmobile Coordinator for the piness.” Meridian Public Library District in Idaho. her wildly popular Storytime for preschool- About those wild turkeys: Moses’s ers with adults. Songs, puppets, finger play In Their Wally is a great advocate for public description of them is one of many gems of and other activities enliven the participants’ libraries and has jumped right in with observation in the book: “Before I saw a strategic planning for the county library. enjoyment. Just recently added is a ceiling wild turkey, I thought of the color brown as fan to cool the room when summer sun Backyard Residents of Mendocino County have a somewhat dreary and uninteresting. But the chance to participate in shaping the strategic blazes through the big front window. Just assorted brown plumage of the wild turkey this year FoCCL won another grant from vision for their libraries, and in order to Rebecca Taksel is a kaleidoscope of woodland colors: rich have a strategic plan that reflects views of the Community Foundation to help with the bronze, soft chestnut, and burnt umber with purchase of an Afterschool Edge computer the entire county, Wally is organizing com- Zooburbia: Meditations on the Wild creamy ivory stripes. When the sun hits munity meetings for the South Coast and for older children, which will be going into their feathers the turkey shimmers like a the main library as part of a homework/ Animals Among Us Round Valley, two regions that were left out by Tai Moses vision . . . Looking at a wild turkey is like of the community meetings that took place study area with some craft space for projects looking at a winged forest.” and creative activities. illustrated by Dave Buchen in Ukiah, Willits and Fort Bragg in March. Parallax Press (2014), 272 pages Elsewhere she speaks of an unexpected I encourage residents of the South Coast to In the main library the Friends have encounter with another large bird species. added shelving for display of new books, attend their community meeting scheduled bservation, properly done, with “One night I left a movie theater in for Thursday, July 24, at 6pm at Coast Com- and have funded the purchase of many new downtown Oakland, and as I was stand- books, DVDs and CDs, as well as purchas- our full attention, is a medita- munity Library. The meeting will provide a tion. Observation rendered ing there blinking under the streetlights, I forum for public comments on the types of ing and building of suitable shelving and looked up into a tree that was filled with display for their easy access for the public. clearly into writing is in turn services and programming people want from a meditation for readers. Tai night herons. I was in the heart of down- their library and what they envision as the A teen corner has been set up, filled with town . . . and here [was] a congregation of the latest Young Adult materials, including OMoses’s lovely book Zooburbia is aptly future direction of the library. subtitled Meditations on the Wild Animals blue-gray shorebirds roosting like feathered graphic novels, as well as classic favorites. fruit in a sidewalk tree.” A selection of magazines of teen interests Among Us. To pick up the book and read here is good news to report on the sta- has been provided, and on the other side of any of its brief chapters, beautifully illus- Ttion vs. branch issue which became a the magazine shelves FoCCL has provided trated with Dave Buchen’s block prints of Her house borders non-issue when the County Civil Service a selection of magazines for the general animals, is to be invited into a moment of Commission recently approved a Human public. The seating area by the magazines meditation on nature and art. an expanse of dry Resources proposal for a job classification has recently been enlivened by the purchase “Zooburbia is what I call the extraordi- of Library Branch Manager at each of the of snazzy new leather armchairs to replace nary, unruly, half-wild realm where human eucalyptus- and branches. The concept of stations that offer the original furniture, which had become and animal lives overlap,” Moses explains. tree-studded brush. limited services never did apply to any of worn and grungy. A new coffee table came A journalist and editor who has also worked Mendocino’s wonderful full-service librar- from a volunteer. as a veterinary assistant, Moses has been In this landscape she ies. Thank You, Human Resources. The Community Room has been upgrad- widely published in the independent press. “Paws to Read” is the theme for this ed with a big whiteboard, a screen, audio- She lives in Oakland, “at the end of a dead- has managed a genu- year’s Summer Reading Program. Until visual equipment, and further improvements end street in a woodsy ravine less than five ine, subtle fusion of August 13, we’ll offer animal-related pro- are in the works. FoCCL has sponsored miles from downtown.” grams for elementary school aged children continuing education programs, using Her house borders an expanse of dry global thinking and on Wednesdays at lpm. Jeanne Jackson, DVD instruction by respected teachers and eucalyptus- and tree-studded brush. In author of Mendonoma Sightings Throughout facilitated by local volunteers in subjects this landscape she has managed a genuine, local action. the Year, will give a slideshow about baby both scientific and artistic. Sundays at the subtle fusion of global thinking and local animals, and Daniel Murley, of Ranger’s action. The animals and plants she lives Log fame, will give a program titled “Bears Library has become a favorite institution for Moses does not shrink from the suffer- presentation of programs of a wide variety with and near, the ones whose habitat she in the Neighborhood!” Daniel is also plan- maintains and encourages, are indisput- ing inflicted by both nature and humans on ning an adult program about animals of the of interest to our community. This year, so many animal individuals and species. as usual, the Summer Reading Program, ably individuals, sources of wonder and IL’mena, a Russian American Trading com- amusement and love. When she talks about She praises friends who rescue dogs from pany ship that wrecked near Point Arena in sponsored by the Friends in conjunction lives lived horribly at the ends of backyard with the County Library system, will offer particular creatures or plants, Moses is a 1820. miniaturist; but her little stories have a way chains; she notes that her neighbor Barbara, We’re looking forward to programs by fun, learning, crafts, and snacks for children the local “crazy cat lady” who traps, spays and newly added Summer Reading activities of opening out into a larger narrative stream Jennifer Ketring and Lani Bouwer of Windy and touching on matters of universal reso- and releases feral cats, is not crazy at all, Hollow Farm, Terri Peters’s Zumba for Kids for grownups. but perfectly sane and very compassionate. FoCCL has added a non-voting youth nance. For example, the idea of planting event, and Kathy Silva’s origami workshop. exotic, non-native plants bordering water- Moses also admires the “poet gardener” Wild Things, Inc., a nonprofit wildlife res- representative to our Board, Garrett Gun- Benjamin Vogt, who calls gardening “an heim, whose input resulted in the offering of hungry but ecologically and esthetically arid cue and education organization will present lawns seems just plain crazy when Moses ethical act—a protest.” She herself does live animals native to North America for an SAT prep course. much to create the conditions for life and Book sales have become more accessible points out that a particular animal, bird, or our final program. I want to thank all of the insect is chased away thereby. to help the creatures who live on her land, local businesses who year after year provide and orderly with the purchase some years but she recognizes the limits of human ago of rolling bookshelves to stock and In one charming passage, Moses ob- snacks for the children, and the fantastic serves the squirrel she calls Rufus meticu- intervention. In one of many humorous Friends of the Library who help sponsor the display our wares for the regular weekend passages, Moses observes a deer systemati- book sales every other month. A large col- lously planting seeds with “her little hands program. splayed flat,” and then goes on to remind us cally nibbling the petals off the wild irises The Mendocino Coast and Point Arena lection of “special price” books has acquired on the hillside: “I knew I should scare the shelving near the public access computers. that squirrels plant seeds too heavy for the Stornetta lands now have the distinction wind to carry. They are thus the creators deer away, but I was too exhausted to get of being ranked by The New York Times This enables the sale of donated books of up. Also I found that I didn’t really care . . . more than average value as part of FoCCL’s of landscapes studded with hazelnut and as third out of fifty-two top destinations walnut trees. sometimes you have to let things fall apart. around the world in its “Places to Visit” list fundraising efforts. They’re going to anyway.” At this time FoCCL is working on devel- Moses does her research, and she never for 2014. The library is seeing an increase allows sentimentality to distort her findings. In true Buddhist tradition, Moses gives in visitors from afar and nearly all of them oping of a literacy program to enable adults us in this book many opportunities to do to learn to read or to improve their reading She loves hummingbirds, but “the mosquito, ask to use our internet computers or wifi which I detest, is a significant source of what she does in this meeting with the deer, access. I’m following the progress of an abilities. or when she is out riding and is able to And, of course, FoCCL volunteers con- protein for the hummingbird, which is an e-rate funded proposal to AT&T to establish important pollinator. Hummingbirds also smoothly take the reins of a runaway horse: a high-speed fiber cable network between tinue to work at the circulation desk, shelv- “I remember the sensation of being perfectly ing, mending and covering books, cleaning consume aphids, gnats, mites, and fruit flies, the five branches that was left unfinished none of which I am very fond of. If all poised in the saddle, as if [the horse] and when Ms. Kittay resigned. With our current CDs and DVDs, maintaining the building, I were a single being, fused together. I setting up programs, bringing refreshments these vexing insects disappeared, so might low download speeds of generally <2 Mbps the hummingbird.” remember thinking, So this is what it feels it is frustrating to know that AT&T is now to events, and all the myriad tasks that keep like to be alive.” Coast Community Library in the heart of This kind of thinking leads Moses to an providing high- speed fiber cable broadband our community. inevitable conclusion: “Whether or not a to Point Arena schools and that a fiber-fed creature was useful to me was not the way AT&T office is located up the block from to measure the value of its life. Animals Rebecca Taksel is an RCR contributing edi- the library! and plants shape our lives and each other’s tor living in Pittsburgh. Page 8 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2014 Readers’ letters books able with the tepid religion of his youth and is impressed by the rich grandeur of French Catholicism. He is an American who sees He is an American in France what so many Americans have who sees in France a Searching glimpsed there: a life of style and passion. And he emerges from his Parisian experi- life of style and pas- ences a more mature person, ready for for a Self marriage, prepared to begin a distinguished sion. And he emerges career as an American professor of French from his Parisian Marc Hofstadter literature, and having found a new spiritual identity as a Catholic. experiences a more The process through which Oxenhandler Wilder than Chandler Looking for Heroes in Postwar grows from malleable youth to mature adult mature person. France: Albert Camus, Max Jacob, is subtle, and it is difficult to say which Before I start dishing out compliments on Simone Weil shapes him more, the experiences he has or the latest Redwood Coast Review I want by Neal Oxenhandler the ideas he encounters. The books he reads epiphanies and converts to Catholicism. He to ask why the photo of Billy Wilder [left] University Press of New England (1996), are not mere cognitive exercises. When relates to her as to a “twin sister”: “I know on page 7 is identified as being a photo of 234 pages he reads of the murder Camus’s first hero Weil’s face, her body type, her anxieties, her Raymond Chandler [right]? Are you trying Meursault commits (in L’Étranger), he can’t changes of mood, her gaiety and depres- to hoodwink the rustics who congregate at his remarkable book by Neal Oxen- help but think sion.” Like Weil, the author suffers from mi- the Coast Community Library? If so, this is handler, who died in 2011, is at once of the German graines, and associates it in both their cases a cruel prank, therefore, a good one! Tan intimately personal and intellectu- teenager. He with discomfort with sexuality. By the end I learned of Wanda Coleman from my ally powerful memoir. Set mostly in Paris struggles with of the book, Oxenhandler has married and wife Chris, who—when she began to get in the late 1940s and early 50s, it evokes a political, moral divorced, then married again, a relationship serious about her poetry, which is very good world in which art and intellect are pursued and religious in which finally he finds peace and happi- poetry—took a class from Austin Straus. with as much passion as food and sex. The issues vicari- ness. His experiences in France have issued They gathered for class at the Straus- author, an American who has just served in ously through into maturity and self-acceptance. Coleman house, which, I gather, was no World War II, at one point killing a German Camus, as did This brief summary can give no idea of mansion! Stephen, I think yours is by far teenaged soldier and traumatized by the many people the incredible richness and subtlety of the the best of the three or four obituaries I’ve incident, is a young student at the Sorbonne right after the psychological, literary and religious insights read of Wanda C. You picture her as a real at the same time Jean-Paul Sartre and Sim- War. When in this book. Anyone who has struggled person instead of merely an icon, as a real one de Beauvoir are the reigning Parisian Camus leaves with body image and sexual guilt, read and friend instead of a spokeswoman for her . . . intellectuals. He is sensitive and vulnerable, been influenced by literary or philosophical Neal Oxenhandler, 1940s the Communist race, generation, gender, geography, etc. . . . unsure of his sexual identity, questioning his Party, so do figures, confronted God and church, will although you also do explain those quali- Jewish roots, and in love with France. He is many of his followers. Gradually Oxenhan- find in it echoes of his or her own searches. ties for readers who’ve not encountered her “searching,” and he finds his way with the dler’s admiration shifts from Camus to Max As an American who loves France, a Jew poetry. help of three French intellectuals, figures Jacob as an icon. Jacob who, like Oxenhan- who has given up Judaism for Buddhism, I love the words of the Eel River poet whose literary characteristics are examined dler, was born Jewish, converted to Catholi- and a poet who has had his own literary [Zara Raab], particularly those about “Billy with as much depth as in a work of criti- cism, and had homosexual experiences. predecessors, I found the work a prism Gawain.” And the Proust essay was interest- cism, while it is shown how personally their And, since Jacob had been killed by the through which to view my own struggles ing and has almost (but not quite) tickled writing and example influence the young Nazis in 1944, his death forces the young and identity. It is a powerful, evocative me into diving into Remembrance of Things American. Jew to confront issues of anti-Semitism and study of a mind with great relevance to our Past. (What will eventually convince me? We see Oxenhandler drinking coffee in identity. Oxenhandler’s lie to a Sorbonne own time and place. Perhaps the next personal confessions of the Parisian cafés where thinkers and artists professor about his Jewish identity cuts him someone who’s read the novels.) congregate, taking classes at the Sorbonne, “loose from (his) past and (sends him) pros- wandering the streets of the capital drink- pecting for new identities, ethnic, religious, Marc Hofstadter is a poet and essayist based Lee Quarnstrom ing in their color and verve. He is young, sexual.” in Walnut Creek. His most recent book is La Habra experimenting sexually with men as well Simone Weil, another Jew who rejects Healing the Split (essays). as women, searching for a relationship that Jewish religion, becomes the perfect role feels right. He is a Jew who is uncomfort- model for this young man who has several

Some Recent Arrivals @ Coast Community Library

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and the complexity we enjoy here on earth. Rather than Something vs. Nothing running down, the universe, he says, is becoming more interesting. Hilda Johnston Smolin begins an ear- lier book The Life of the ’ve been reading about fractals, self- with others exactly like them. We don’t Cosmos with a quotation repeating forms, growing in scale, in notice this because of “particle replacement from Leibniz, the philoso- Ia kind of stutter that becomes a fern, a symmetry.” Goldberg quotes the comedian pher of reflecting monads: coastline, branching veins of a body. After Steve Wright, who says, “I woke up one “Each simple substance has reading about the fractal nature of nature, morning and all of my stuff had been stolen relations that express all the it’s hard to eat broccoli or cauliflower and replaced by exact duplicates.” others and consequently is without feeling queasy. Thinking about The subtitle of Goldberg’s book is: How a perpetual, living mirror of the tireless repetition in these vegetables is Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality, and he this universe.” It is Leibniz like thinking about the bubbling universes devotes a chapter to the mathematician and not Newton who carries imagined by some physicists—from every Emily Noether, a contemporary of Einstein the day for Smolin, who black hole, a new round of stars. The man who also left Germany in 1933 because of describes space and time “as who named fractals (from Latin for broken anti-Semitism. She obtained a position at participants in a relational or fractured) is Benoit Mandelbrot, a Jew Bryn Mawr College but died a few years world rather than the stage in from Lithuania, who narrowly escaped the later when she was only fifty-three. Her an absolute world.” And “be- Nazis as a child only to meet them again first theorem stating that “every symmetry cause in nature it is always in France, but he managed to continue corresponds to a conserved quality” pro- some particular moment,” studying with a false ID and a good French vides the math, says Goldberg, “for much he believes the universe can accent. Later, in America, he escaped the of the standard model of particle physics.” never be “captured by an scientific establishment to apply the math Like Noether, the Russian Mathemati- equation or a geometrical that intrigued him to different fields, even to cian Sophia Kovalevsky, had to leave her construction.” economics, and to formulate what is known country to find a university position. Alice Lee Smolin Not frightened by what as the Mandelbrot set, or as I like to think of Munro brings her to life in the days before Pascal called “the silence of infinite space,” it, the almond bread set. her death at forty-one in her story “Too he sees a galaxy as “an enormous self- Of course a Mandelbrot set doesn’t ex- Much Happiness.” Munro takes her title organized system of great complexity and plain why anything is there in the first place. from the mathematician’s dying words. The beauty.” The ten thousand years it takes for Why the world exists, even a fractal of it, is source she credits is a biography of Kova- Physics & a star to form is a day in galactic life. In a question that Jim Holt sets out to answer levsky called Little Sparrow, which I found this ecosystem large stars have a shorter life by interviewing philosophers and scientists. at the UC library. The biographer draws on span than small stars. A massive star 30,000 In the beginning, physicists seem to agree, Kovalevsky’s own memoir with its lively Metaphysics times brighter than our sun will live “only a “riot of virtual particles ceaselessly wink descriptions of Dostoyevsky courting her about 10 million years before exploding as in and out of existence,” that is, electrons older sister—stories within stories that will a supernova and enriching the interstellar (matter) and positrons (anti-matter) an- disappear along with our libraries, the inter- Either the world is in essence mathemati- medium.” nihilate each other with the odd electron net and the world itself, leaving only eternal cal or it lives in time. —Lee Smolin Even as the infinite feels more familiar as escaping to become our world. “It is simply forms to again be discovered by temporary a series of nesting ecosystems, what Pascal a matter of quantum chance,” physicist Ed minds. Tryon tells Holt, that our universe “popped hat we seek in our private lives— Smolin describes into existence out of the void and ran away some sort of equilibrium—is not with itself.” Wa good thing for the universe. space and time “as But, says Holt, any purely scientific Hilda Johnston lives in Berkeley and pub- When the universe reaches equilibrium, explanation is doomed to be circular. Even lishes often in the RCR. or the point of highest entropy, there is no participants in a re- if it starts “with a cosmic egg, a tiny bit available energy to carry the experiment lational world rather of quantum vacuum, a singularity—it still further. Say you’re sitting with your cat on starts with something, rather than noth- your lap, and you’ve mopped the floor, and than the stage in an ing.” Nevertheless, the explanations of the Benoit B. Mandelbrot, The Fractal a soup is simmering on the stove; this only physicists make good reading: the battle of ist: Memoir of a Scientific feels like equilibrium as you and the cat are absolute world.” electrons and positrons, the big bang—that Maverick, 2012 highly organized creatures, metabolizing “cascading festival of light and matter,” Jim Holt, Why Does The World and breathing, the soup is changing heat to called “the nothing of which we are made” black holes, and pocket universes, are more Exist?, 2012 steam, and the table holding your cup of remains mysterious. We know we are made exciting than the platonic idea of goodness Dave Goldberg, The Universe in the tea is buzzing with atomic energy. What a of the same atoms as rocks and stars and we or the pure mathematical forms offered by Rearview Mirror: How Hidden memory a simple table would be at the end have named many of the particles that at- the philosophers along with a cup of tea. Symmetries Shape reality, 2012 of time were there anyone left to remember. tract and repel each other inside and outside Holt ends his search where it began, in Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness, But according to physicist Lee Smolin, the space of atoms. But what is space at its the dark, on a bridge over the Seine smok- 2009 author of Time Reborn, we no longer have most discreet? “Quarks and electrons,” says ing a cigarette, recalling a radio discussion Don H. Kennney, Little Sparrow: A to think of the universe succumbing to Smolin, “are still absolutely enormous com- between a physicist, a priest and a Buddhist disorder or entropy. Taking his metaphor Portrait of Sophia Kovalevsky, pared to what we expect should be the truly monk, the monk the most cheerful of the from biology, he sees the universe as evolv- 1983 elementary things in the world.” Whatever three, speaking of emptiness rather than ing, self-organizing into galaxies, planets the bits or strings, space, he suggests, is a nothingness and of form that has no real dynamic “network of connections.” What solidity, a theme the New York Times sci- we perceive is only an emergent property as ence correspondent Dennis Overbye takes water emerges from molecules or heat from up on reading that the Higgs field (producer the motion of atoms. of the Higgs boson) could “drop to a lower Once a string theorist himself, he regrets energy state like water freezing into ice, that this mathematical theory, which has thereby obliterating the working of reality A Night of One’s Own led to dimensions beyond experiment, has as we know it,” and leaving, he quotes become academic orthodoxy. He is open to Shakespeare, “not a rack behind.” This alternate theories, but on the many-worlds event wouldn’t happen for l0 to the l00th Make a wish and a dandelion explodes. solution to the uncertainty of quantum power years, but “it would be as if we never measurements, he quotes an artist friend existed at all,” laments Overbye, losing, he There is no precedent for this. who says: “To postulate an infinite multi- says, “his Zen detachment.” plication of the world because one is unable On the other side of this lament is won- I smoked my annual cigarette in January. Virginia rolled her own. to resolve a problem is like moving and der at the prodigious forms of existence and purchasing new kitchenware because one that you of all people are here to observe Some words can only be written at night. doesn’t feel like doing the dishes.” those twists of clouds, this persimmon Smolin writes well and in the curious tree, its orange fruit and light green calyx Two boys tucked in a redwood cathedral. Slow breaths on the cliff of sleep. looking-glass world of modern physics is rendered over and over with only slight a friendly guide. But as a cosmologist in variation. The realization that the world Paper sucks ink like blood into sand. The process. the field of loop quantum gravity, he travels exists can be as disconcerting as the thought back and forth between the very large and of its extinction. Dark chocolate. Pinot noir. More please. the very small; this, I admit, made me quite dizzy. I couldn’t help wonder which way ince matter, as Einstein proved and Holt I could drink a case of Joni. the cosmos was going—from the galax- Sexplains, is “frozen energy,” we can ex- ies that provide atoms for our bodies or pect all form to be impermanent. According Candlelight viewed through a steamy shower door. Midnight lantern. the other way around, from the quantum to the physicist Don Goldberg, every year activity that makes the world appear in the about 98 percent of your atoms are replaced A clutch of barn owls clamors for food. My basset hound sleeps. beginning and for all time.

I take odd comfort reading even pages. —Hilda Johnston WRITE TO US Virginia wrote only in purple ink that even the Ouse could not fade.

The RCR welcomes your letters. I ache for sex, as night moves over bodies entwined. Write to the Editor, RCR c/o This is what I tell myself whistling in the dark, singing to the moon. Lee Smolin, Time Reborn, 2013 ICO, P.O. Box 1200, Gualala, Lee Smolin, The Trouble With CA 95445 or by email to Why would I ever erase this? Physics, 2006 Lee Smolin, The Life of the [email protected]. —Kelly Cressio-Moeller Cosmos,1997 Page 10 The Redwood Coast Review Summer 2014 personal history adne r y Br a K My Mother’s Sailor Mike Tuggle

he war in the Pacific was over and We chose a jolly-looking sailor, who hopped into the Mother’s eyes were glistening and there was the sweetest, my dad was due home in a month or so when the front seat beside baby Jackie and put his duffle bag between softest, dreamiest smile on her face. woman from California called. My older sister his feet. We knew immediately we’d made the right choice. Marcia had overheard Mother telling Aunt Em Eddie was charming and funny and sweet. There was a That evening when we arrived at the Naval about it. twinkle in his light blue eyes and he learned each of our Base in San Diego, we parked in the parking lot and inquired T“She told Mama that Daddy was coming home to Cali- names right away, putting us at ease. He took turns with about Dad. He was on guard duty and it would be awhile fornia, not to Tulsa—to her, not to us!” she said in a hushed, Mother driving and bought our lunch that afternoon at a before we could see him. We wrapped ourselves in blan- choked voice, a tear making its way down her cheek. diner in a truck stop. He was Irish and a very good singer. kets and went to sleep in the car and late that night were She paused and shined her big brown eyes deeply into He and Mother sang “Oh Danny Boy,” “When Irish Eyes awakened by someone tapping at the window. A man in a mine . . . “Our Daddy has a girlfriend and he might not be Are Smiling” and “Over in Killarny,” we children join- white cap, carrying a rifle. It was my dad and I didn’t even coming home!” She swallowed a sob and bit her lower lip. ing in as best we could. He delighted us with stories about recognize him. “They had an affair before Daddy went overseas and that’s leprechauns and fairies and taught us to sing “Mairsy-Dotes” We got out of the car and after all the hugs, still half why we had to go live in Ramona! Because he was keeping and “The Clown Went Up the Ladder” and a song about asleep, stood there and watched as he performed the it a secret from Mama!” a man who became so skinny he fell through a hole in the Presentation-of-Arms, hup-hupping in place and snapping “What’s an affair?” I asked. seat of his pants. We sang many rounds of “Row, Row, Row and twirling his rifle around in his hands from one position “That’s what a man and a woman do together when they Your Boat” and all the Christmas carols we knew, then he to another, his white cap and white leggings and white belt, fall in love. And that woman told mama that she and Daddy and Mother told each there about their lives, talking nonstop his deep blue sailor suit dazzling in the moonlight. are very much in love and not to expect him home . . . And for what seemed like hours while we children listened and Housing was scarce in San Diego, so Dad managed you know what, Mikie?” dozed and dreamed. to find us a little cottage fifty miles north of the city near “No, what?” That night when we stopped at a little adobe motel, Eddie Ramona. He hitchhiked back to the base and came up on oc- “That California woman is a blonde!” slept in the back seat of the car. It had been cold and damp casional weekends, when he could get a pass. At first I’d been upset mostly by my older sister’s anguish and it felt especially good to crawl into bed and snuggle un- Our cottage rose up bare and treeless from the middle as she told me what had happened. I was six years old and der the covers. As usual, Mother slept between baby Jackie of a dead grape vineyard which spread part-way up the unprepared to believe that our dad could be taken from us by and Terry, myself between my brother and Marcia. I felt mountain behind. There was an outhouse near the back anything other than the war—by a blonde woman in Califor- sorry for our new friend sleeping out in the car and hoped he porch and an old stone water well farther up the incline. The nia of all things—and closed it off in the back of my mind as wasn’t cold. water wasn’t drinkable but we drew it up for our baths. We one of those possibilities too unbearable to think about. collected our drinking water in milk jugs across the highway I didn’t notice any changes in my mother’s behavior, but The clouds were drifting over a at the pump beneath our landlord’s windmill. Mother cooked I’m sure the phone call must have been alarming. I sensed on the wood-burning cookstove, in which we burned dead intuitively that she believed in her heart, as I did, that Dad bright moon as I crept out the grapevines, and when it was cold we kept that stove going would come home to us and everything would be all right. around the clock. She seemed neither angry or unforgiving. Men would be door and partway down the Coyotes yipped at night up on the sides of the mountain men after all, and the intensity of wartime made everything stone steps, and stopped in a and we felt as if we were truly in the wilderness, though we more urgent and a little crazy. Thinking of Eddie perhaps, were only a mile or so outside of town. Mother and I loved it she could understand how easily it could happen. deep shadow of the building. and never wanted to leave. I never did find out how my sister knew the California I turned six that fall and we stayed until late winter, when woman was a blonde. Dad got his orders to ship out to war somewhere in the Pa- My mother had high Cherokee cheekbones, large hazel Sometime in the middle of the night I woke cific. That last weekend, he came up and packed us all into brown eyes and was beautiful like no one I’d ever seen was up and had to pee. Relieved that I hadn’t done it in bed, I the car and drove us to the San Diego train station, where we beautiful. Coming of age during the height of the Depres- crawled headfirst out of the covers as carefully as I could bought tickets back to Tulsa. sion, she married my father when she was nineteen, having and went to the bathroom. When I started to climb back We cried when we said our goodbyes, then found our never traveled out of the state of Oklahoma. Her first sashay into bed I noticed something was amiss. Baby Jackie was seats on the train where we could see him right outside and out into the big world would be thirteen years and four safe and sound asleep, my brother was snoring and Marcia below our window. We cried again when the train pulled children later, when, at the age of thirty-two, she bought seemed to be soaring in dreamland. But there was no larger away and we left him standing there waving. an old blue cloud of a Packard, talked my Uncle Gene into form under the covers where my mother should have been. Aunt Em and Uncle Gene took us into their home—a teaching her how to drive, got her driver’s license, sold our Sudden panic. I stood there for a moment feeling aban- large flat in North Denver. We lived on ration stamps and little house on a bucolic tree-lined lane at the outskirts of doned, on the verge of tears, before I remembered Eddie out the small government allotment. I made some friends in the Tulsa and lit out for California. Ostensibly to be near Dad, front in the car, and knew, instinctively, that my mother was neighborhood and started first grade and I remembered the who was in training in San Diego, but also because she was out there. friends but almost nothing at all about that entire first year restless and wanted to see a little of the world. The clouds were drifting over a bright moon as I crept in school. out the door and partway down the stone steps, and stopped Jackie Sue, the youngest, was two and a half, in a deep shadow of the building. From there I could see The war in the Pacific ended that next sum- my brother was three and a half, I was five and Marcia was the car and—when the moon broke through the clouds for mer, and in September my mother got the phone call from eight. a moment—my mother in it. Sitting in the back seat next to the woman in California. I was in the second grade now. I don’t remember much about the facts of the trip but I Eddie. My homeroom teacher was a bristly old first sergeant of a remember sensations—small vertigos of gladness of a flock Then the moon disappeared and I could see only the cold, woman who treated us all like little soldiers. The first time of blackbirds changing directions just above our car . . . how dark shape of the car. Resisting the urge to run down the I ever saw her smile was one interminable late October certain landscapes seemed to arouse me, stir my soul, give stairs to them, crying, I turned and made my shivering way afternoon when someone out in the hall caused a commotion me little erections even . . . back to our room and under the covers. When I woke up in by pulling himself up on the transom and peeking into the We slept five to a bed at the motels, lying sideways. the morning Mother was safely there in bed with us, sound classroom for a moment. I hadn’t seen it but several of my Mornings we’d get up, get dressed and find some breakfast, asleep. classmates had, and the teacher. then hit the road. I admired how my mother could drive and We parted company with Eddie that next day when we “OK, now whose father is a sailor and has returned home keep on driving, leaning forward in her seat and aiming that reached Los Angeles. He gave us little Christmas presents from the war?” she asked. hunky old Packard down the highway as intensely as if she he’d bought along the way—a ping-pong paddle attached to I knew immediately who it was but was too shy and were sighting a gun, no matter what was taking place in the a small rubber ball by a long rubber band for me, a bag of embarrassed and overwhelmed to own up. back seat or barreling up the road outside. marbles for Terry, a package of paper dolls for Marcia and a When the bell rang my dad entered in all his sailor-suited Christmas was near and servicemen on leave were hitch- coloring book with crayons for Jackie. I remember we were glory, and all the children cheered. He picked me up and hiking along the highway in both directions. When Mother standing there holding our presents on the sidewalk near a hugged me to him without a word and I rode all the way asked us to keep an eye out for a friendly-looking sailor, my busy intersection next to our car saying goodbye. He hugged home on his shoulders. brother and older sister and I stuck our heads half out the each of us and when Mother gave him a kiss on his cheek window and stared at the faces while mother drove slowly there were tears in her eyes. by. As we drove on south a hush seemed to settle over every- thing—we children, the car, the air itself, in which a trace of Mike Tuggle, a former Sonoma County poet laureate, lives in Eddie—tobacco, his aftershave, his man-smell, still lingered. Cazadero.