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Month: March 2010

Shangri La

When my wife was growing up in Orange, Texas, Shangri La was a mystery. In the 1950’s, it was Lutcher Stark’s private garden, which he opened to the public. After it was destroyed by a snowstorm in 1958, Stark let it go wild and it became a dark and wild place walled off from the outside world. R has told me of the legends that grew up around the place and the stories people invented for what went on inside.

It seems that what was happening is that birds were nesting, alligators and snakes were thriving and nature was doing its thing. A few years ago, the Stark Foundation reopened it as Shangri La Botanical Gardens & Nature Center. It’s no longer much of a mystery, but it’s still wild.

American alligator (juvenile)

We visited last summer when the egrets and roseate spoonbills were nesting, and I even got some decent shots of the spoonbills and their nestlings from the bird blind. This time, since it wasn’t so hot, we were able to see more of the area. One of the first things we saw was the above young alligator sunning on a pond near the nature center. I’ve seen the adults in the wild but never a baby and didn’t realize the young sported such a brightly contrasting tail.

Osprey

The boat tour through Adams Bayou gave us a look at an osprey that kept circling over the water. I’ve only seen these guys a few times and never when I had a camera on me, so I tried. I was hoping he would dive, but he seemed content to circle.

Eventually we came to the outpost where there is a massive beaver pond that’s unconnected to the bayou. The beavers moved away a few years ago, but their pond remains, the water thick and covered in a layer of very small fern that from a distance looks like a perfectly planed layer of mud.

Beaver pond

While the guide was describing the ecology of the region, the boat driver was busily collecting snakes. It was a little disconcerting how quickly and easily he found a water moccasin and a Texas rat snake. He released the moccasin so we could get a look at it. Its bold pattern surprised me, but he explained that this was a juvenile and they grow darker and lose the contrast as they age.

Water moccasin

After the trip up the Bayou, we walked through the grounds toward the heronry. The fish crows were conversing in the trees and as we walked closer we could hear the sqronks of the egrets and cormorants.

Fish crow

Nesting season really gets going in April and May when you can see anhingas, cattle and great egrets, roseate spoonbills and double-crested and neotropic cormorants by the thousands. Things were still getting underway for this year and the first spoonbill had only arrived a few days earlier (we didn’t see him), but it was a thrill to sit in the blind and watch these beautiful birds. I didn’t get any decent shots this time, and in all honesty, I didn’t try too hard since I think it’s good to sometimes just watch and be.

There was a volunteer birder working in the blind to talk about the birds and their lives. He told us that in the summer many of the egrets and spoonbill nestlings fall from their nests and since they can’t swim, they’re quickly snapped up by the alligators that lurk below the nests. I thought back to that baby alligator and couldn’t help but be reminded of the old saying “the bigger they are the cuter the ain’t,” which certainly applies to alligators even if they are just doing the job assigned to them by nature.

Old house by the heronry

This is the only shot of the heronry that I liked. The wrecked house in front is from the early days before that snowstorm in ’58. Those white things in the trees behind it are great egrets sitting on their nests.

Four and Twenty and Housekeeping

Two things:

1. While I was out of town last week, I forgot to link to Four and Twenty, where one of my haiku was featured as the “Four and Twenty of the week.” Check it out.

2. You may have noticed the type on my site is larger. Ever since I redesigned the site in Jan 2009 to ditch the 2nd sidebar and widen the content area to accommodate larger photos something has bugged me about the font. I’ve tried different fonts but after reading iA’s The 100% Easy-2-Read Standard (h/t Dave for the link), I realized that what was bugging me was the size of the font relative to the expanded line length.

I tried a larger font, and I like the results. How does it look out there in blog land? Easier on the eyes?

Odes to Tools

There’s something enchanting about old tools. Not power tools, but rather the ones that require maybe a little sweat, a little swearing and more than a little skill to use. They’re the ones that live in sheds or hang in garages like old mysteries gathering dust and perhaps a little dulled but still so useful to the hand that knows how to wield them.

These tools are relics of a time when people still made things and made them well. In some cases, these tools made things and kept the world running before I was born. Made things I’ll never see and yet when I look at them and sometimes play with them (because that’s all I really know how to do) I imagine a world in which we didn’t throw things out the moment they broke.

My first hammer

There’s solidity to those old tools hanging around and still ready despite the shiny power tools that can do a job faster but will themselves be recycled long before they’ll ever be passed on. These are the tools I was given as a kid and the ones I inherited from my grandfather and my dad who I’ve assisted (because that’s all I’m good for when it comes to carpentry) on a few projects.

Dave Bonta’s new chapbook Odes to Tools (Phoenicia, 2010) has gotten me looking at and appreciating these old tools in my garage all over again. The poems originally appeared on Dave’s blog Via Negativa (you can still read them there) but in book form they become like the tools themselves, somehow sturdier in their stately analog elegance.

My favorite in the collection is the ode to one of my favorite tools, the coping saw, a tool I’ve used, misused and loved longer than most others. (What a glorious day it was when I learned I could replace that rusty old blade!) In Dave’s writing, this most space-hogging and least dense of tools becomes a jumping off point for examining ideas bigger than the tool itself, and the coping saw’s sturdy flexibility becomes a near-Taoist metaphor for the strength found in yielding, a certain wisdom in emptiness. From “Ode to a Coping Saw”:

Perhaps because it is flexible
& maneuverable

[…]

or because it encompasses
so much empty space

somehow
it copes.

It’s a fine collection, well worth multiple readings, and like the tools it celebrates, I suspect it will never stop working no matter how long it may sit on the shelf between reads.

On March 1st

The grackles opened
Like gates in the trees
Shadow birds, eyes glistening
You could almost imagine
These noisy shades
Abandoning tangible birds,
Parking lots and steel dumpsters
In their odyssey through
Suburban woods,
Clacking and creaking
Like machines or clocks
Ticking away the last
Hoarse seconds of winter.

A Minor Head Injury (or So They Tell Me)

January 1991.

After the emptiness, the biblical chaos of time before creation, movement or matter, there was a light and it was blue.  It was good.  Bright deep blue. The screen thrown up by a failing hard drive.

The blue overflowed my eyes and filled my senses like sparkling water on a Caribbean day.  The blue flickered and popped.  It sometimes disappeared and then flared back across my vision like a tin of paint tipped sideways.  Occasionally, a solid cloud—yes, clouds so we must be dealing with sky—chiseled like marble suspended by invisible tethers would appear to break up the infinite beauty of blue.  The periods of blue were short and often replaced by longer periods of black in which there was no sound, only the nauseating sweep of free-fall.

“Trailers for sale or rent,” my voice sang.

Black.

Blue: “Rooms to let, fifty cents”

Black.

Blue: “phone, nor pets; I ain’t got no…”

Black.

Blue: “cigarettes.  King of the Road.”

Treetops appeared and disappeared on the searing edges of the blue.  Snow covered pine tips stood out against the azure sky like sterile needles rushing overhead.  I wondered what the bottoms of the trees looked like.  I closed my eyes.

“Killington, Vermont,” I guessed.

“I don’t know where that is,” a voice said.

“No, wait… Colorado?”

Blue: “I don’t pay no union dues.”

I was flying now, the trees nothing but a blur.  I attempted to sit up, but a thousand hammers crashed on my sternum and I fell back, gasping for air like a landed fish.  The lights went out.

When I heard the sound of an engine rattling, I opened my eyes again and stared at a group of men and women, scraggly and bundled in flannel, who looked at me through the dim gloom.  I couldn’t make out what lay behind them.

“It’s a Willie Nelson tune,” one of them stated with authority.

Uneasy laughter, then: “No, no, it’s that guy… Roger Miller.  Y’know, ‘King of the Road’”

“I ain’t got no cigarettes,” I said as if stating my name.

A woman leaned over and I stared up at her red face as she peered into my eyes.  I didn’t like the red cross emblazoned on her cap, nor the words ‘SKI PATROL’ stenciled underneath.  Again, I tried to sit, to swim for the beckoning surface of lucidity, but I was pulled down into the muck of half-remembered country lyrics and confused notions about who I was before I could break that glassy surface.

When my eyes opened, I stared up at the florescent tubes humming their official song of cold efficiency like a nest of bees contained.  I watched the tubes and listened to the hurried voices that came from remote lands around my scattered perception.

“Get out the way!”

“Hey, I need a hand!”

“STAT!”

It’s never a good situation when people are saying, ‘STAT’.  I waited for the word to be finished: STAT-ue, STAT-istic, STAT-ic.  But it was always just, “STAT.”

My head flopped to the side and my eyes focused on the gurney’s shiny chrome railing.  Beyond it, a familiar face.  Eric’s eyes were open and there was blood and ice in his blonde hair.  I watched him but I was afraid to speak. He stared back at me.

“What’s happening,” I asked with increasing alarm.

I waited for a flood of memories to come back, but instead I got nothing more than a shallow creek.  I came up against the black wall that curtained off the parts of memory that might give me answers.

“We’re hosed,” he whispered.  “I can’t move.”

Suddenly, I was moving.  I watched as his head disappeared, then his lift tickets attached like badges to his blue bib, then his socks… where were his shoes? My gurney rushed through the ER, confusing the sounds and blurred images of hurried people and intercom imperatives with the Doppler trails of scurrying doctors.  I felt sick. I gave up.

Black.

Blue: “Every door that ain’t locked when no one’s around.”

“You shouldn’t let yourself go out when you hit your head,” a gentle voice said, echoing through black veils.

“I can’t help it.”

“Try.”

I knew the voice from some hospital TV show.  It was Hawkeye.  I smiled.  I knew I would be in good hands with the best chest cutter in Korea working on me.  I would be getting a purple heart and the Army would be sending me—

“Sit up,” Hawkeye said.

I opened my eyes and found myself disappointed to be staring at an old pale-faced doctor with thinning red hair.  Not Hawkeye.  Not even Alan Alda.

“Feeling better?”

“My chest,” I mumbled.  I realized I was able to sit and stay awake at the same time.

“You and your buddy crashed into each other on a little connecter slope.”  His tone said, ‘stupid tourists.’

“Is Eric okay,” I asked.

“Concussion.  Same as you.  I’m giving you a prescription for Tylenol with codeine.  Don’t ski tomorrow, and don’t sleep more than two hours at a stretch.”  He smiled, but it wasn’t pleasant.  He obviously thought I was getting what I deserved for skiing recklessly on his slopes.

Two days later under the bright Colorado sun, I rode up the chairlift as if for the first time.  The codeine-altitude combination created a euphoric spinning sensation as we glided to the top where I put my skis down into the powder and coasted off the lift.  I turned a hard right and followed my friends down a connecting slope to a second lift, which would take us higher up the mountain.  We rounded a wide bend and skied down a ridge to a small place where a sheer rock wall rose thirty feet above us.  The other side of the trail dropped fifty feet to the snowy treetops below.

“Right here,” Jason said.

“What exactly happened,” I asked.

“You guys came flying down that ridge and nailed each other in the air.”

I shook my head and looked at Eric.  He shrugged.

I looked at the wholly unfamiliar place.  The codeine temporarily kept me from dwelling much on it.  I pushed on my poles and continued toward the chairs that would ferry me higher up that mountain that still exists in my mind as a dark crag upon the range of my otherwise clear memories as if a storm permanently dwells over that one spot.  It is a piece of my life that, like childhood, only exists in the memories and recollections of others.

More than anything else, I realize how desperately we need our stories.  Oh, we may (and will) edit them, polish and rewrite them for general consumption, but the fact remains: our stories are the truth of who we are.  Just as a writer cannot abide a blank piece of paper (or a white screen), neither can our souls bear a blank spot on the endless recorder of our memories.  We must fill those gaps with something whether it is pure invention, or fragments cobbled together into a narrative based on stories told us by trusted friends.  Without our stories we are lost.

Proof:  A medical bill and a photo of me, greenish from the low Kelvin light of the hospital tubes.  A photo of me staggering uncertainly through a Colorado ER, a frown on my face and a middle finger stuck towards the camera.

Louie Mueller BBQ in Taylor

Texas flag at Louie Mueller BBQ

A smoke-filled room and shafts of sunlight from gaps in the black paint on the windows and skylight greet you as you walk into Louie Mueller Barbecue in Taylor, TX, one of my favorite corners of the Barbecue rectangle surrounding Austin.

When I used to teach out in Taylor, we’d sometimes go to lunch at Louie Mueller on teacher workdays. It was easy to tell who had gone because they smoke their brisket inside the building so you walk out even after a short lunch smelling like a barbecue pit.

We went for lunch last week, which was the first time I’d been out there since I quit teaching at Taylor High and since then, the Food Network has featured Louie Mueller on Diners, Drive-ins and Dives so they were more crowded than I thought they’d be what with the SXSW crowd who’d made the drive out of Austin, but the line moved reasonably fast and the wait gave more time for anticipation and a little iphone photography of the flag above and the business cards on the wall, browned by years in the smoke.

When you reach the front of the line, they cut you a piece of brisket to sample before you order, but my decision was made: brisket sandwich, chipotle sausage, potato salad, slaw and iced tea. It was as good as I remembered.

Some things never change and that’s a beautiful thing.

Business cards at Louie Mueller BBQ

Sentences and Corrections

The guy from the attorney general’s office
blamed the nouns, sources of all trouble—
people, places, things.

Combined with certain verbs—
assault, distribute, trespass and possess—
these nouns form gangs of complex sentences,
fragments of lives half-lived and run-ons
rambling through the detritus of car crash lives.

The simplest, though, tell of kids locked up,
looking out at the free, positions of attention
in the parking lot, half-listening
to mockingbirds refining their own syntax
as they mimic the ringing fire alarm
while we wait to go back inside
where we’ll try, again, writing

sentences that don’t mimic the past,
sentences that aren’t destinies.

The Lost Book Club: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories is the book Desmond was reading on the plane in the Season 6 opener “LA X.” The scene occurred in the alternate reality timeline, and the book provides some insight into what is going on.

Haroun’s father Rashid Khalifa, The Shah of Blah, is a master storyteller, but when Rashid’s wife leaves him for another man, he loses his ability and desire to tell stories, especially after Haroun disparagingly asks, “What’s the use in stories that aren’t true.” One night, the water genie Iff comes to disconnect Rashid from the Source of the Stream of Stories by a P2C2E (Process Too Complicated To Explain) but before Iff succeeds, Haroun steals the genie’s disconnection tool and demands that his father be allowed to continue telling stories.

Haroun joins Iff on a journey to Katani, Earth’s hidden moon, where the Ocean of Stories (from which the streams flow) has been contaminated by the cult master Kattam-Shud who leads the silent Chupwalas and their shadow warriors against the good story-loving Guppees. Haroun, Rashid, Iff, Blabbermouth and Butt the Hoopoe must stop the cult master, rescue an annoying princess and purify the Streams of Story so that Rashid can have his gift back.

The book, which was a thoroughly enjoyable work of magical realism aimed at young readers (Rushdie wrote it for his son), provided some interesting insights into Season 6 of Lost, though it would have been more helpful to have read it sooner.

The main thing I keep thinking about is the idea of pollution in a stream of stories. The flash-sideways reality we’ve been seeing on Lost all season is a version of reality that isn’t quite what it should be, a situation similar to what Haroun finds in the various polluted stories he encounters. Ultimately, his adventures take him to the source of the Streams of Story from which all stories originate. If he can prevent Kattam-Shud from plugging this source, the stories will cleanse themselves and all will be right again.

This is a notion strikingly similar to the idea of the universe course-correcting, a notion Lost has been playing with since Desmond slipped out of time in Season 3. At this point, I’m thinking that the flash-sideways reality is a stream of story that will probably correct itself when Locke, Lost‘s own Kattam-Shud, cult master and lord of shadows is defeated. Perhaps the island is some kind of spacetime source for various realities and existences. Or something.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories is at heart about the balancing of opposing forces—speech and silence, light and darkness—and how that balance is necessary to life. Lost has played with these ideas since its very first season and while Anti-Jacob/Locke has thrown the Island and possibly the world out of balance, it seems likely the rest of the series will focus not so much on destroying Locke but on balancing out his penchant for destruction in much the way that Jacob maintained the balance prior to his death at the end of Season 5.

The only other thing that leapt out at me was Haroun’s question to his father about the use in stories that aren’t true. That’s one that many of us viewers, confused by the role of the flash-sideways storytelling, have asked this season. It’s a fair question to which I think Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever has presented the best answer thus far in his excellent analysis of last week’s “Dr. Linus”:

Seeing Flash Sideways Ben choosing Alex’s well-being over gaining power for himself reminds us that he did the exact opposite the first time we saw him faced with the same situation. Seeing him making friends with Arzt and having a – well let’s call it “decent” – relationship with his father makes us realize just how alone he is on the Island right now… which made his breakdown scene with Ilana all the more powerful. He gave up everyone and everything for the Island – and look where it left him. Alone and lost in life (pun somewhat intended).

In short, the Flash Sideways actually served to make the On-Island storyline better, just like the original Season One Flashbacks did. By learning about our Survivors’ pasts, we understood their presents much better. Likewise, by seeing “what could have been” with Benjamin Linus this week, understand his present condition much better.

Which is, I think, the “use of stories that aren’t even true.” Perhaps that’s why “Dr. Linus” is my favorite episode (so far) of this season and one of my favorites from the series.

Next up: Deep River by Shusaku Endo.

Be sure to check out the rest of my Lost Book Club posts.

Friday Hound Blogging: Walking, Becoming

Joey, Wolf and Phoebe.

They’re tired from walking, probably. Tired enough that Joey isn’t growling at Phoebe for touching him while he tries to sleep. It seems we’ve all come a long way and I’m not just talking about walking.

We started taking the dogs with us on some of our long walks up and down the neighborhood trails lately. This is new for the pups. R and I walk the trails, but in the past the dogs have typically been too afraid to proceed too far into the teeth of whatever dragons lie on the county regional trail that our neighborhood trails connect to. There could be monsters. Greyhound-eating monsters.

For years we’ve accepted their trepidation and stuck with short walks around the block, but a few weeks ago—to our delighted surprise—Joey and Phoebe were willing to accompany us for several miles and they did this with no tail-tucking or application of the greyhound brakes. This is a far cry from the time I had to carry all 65 pounds of Phoebe half a mile home because she got spooked by a leaf blowing across the street.

We’ve taken them on more walks since, and they’ve been eager to go and enjoyed being out and about. I realized we’d been letting them be the pups they were when we got them and we’d somehow forgotten to recognize how much they’ve run away from being scared (and scarred) ex-racers to becoming just normal dogs. As normal as a lazy stubborn skinny needle-nosed speed pup can be anyway.

Sometimes it seems those changes, those moments of becoming, happen so gradually those closest can miss their occurrences, allowing ourselves to get stuck in the way we’re used to knowing the world. Fortunately for us, we’ve realized how willing they are to adventure out of their normal walks because there’s just something primal and wonderful about a good long walk with a dog whose enthusiasm and simple awareness of the world makes time spent outdoors that much sweeter, something I haven’t experienced since my days hiking with Zephyr.

It’s good to have walkin’ dogs again even if it does make them lazier than ever before. Something I hadn’t previously thought possible.

[saveagrey]