Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We're keeping busy —
This way, that way, we're making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

-Gary Soto, 1995

I wrote a very long blog post last night. This is not part of a new thing where I write very long blog posts.

Here's a picture from the Bart's Cobble visitor's center, where I answer tourists' very pressing questions about the locations of waterfalls (we're in a township called Ashley Falls, which does not actually have any significant waterfalls) and bathrooms while surrounded by dead animals (secret: I like it).

Solid Sound was this weekend.

It's a music festival at Mass MoCA, curated by Wilco. It is, technically, three days, but I went yesterday and yesterday only, with the rest of the family, and we sort of ambled around and ate popsicles and waited out a thunderstorm in a tent made of umbrellas (also, poked one another in the head with umbrellas while trying to maintain tent integrity) because we were too lazy to go inside or something.

Actually, we might have been holding our seats for last night's Wilco concert in the umbrella tent, but that's semantics.

The Wilco concert, though. The first and last Wilco concert I went to, before this, was in 2006 at Milwaukee's Summerfest, which is an alcohol marinated jukebox on the shore of Lake Michigan. I had just graduated high school, I had just gone to Bolivia for two weeks, and this was probably only a few days after my arrival home (sans luggage--thank you, Air Boliviano). After we got back from the concert, I slept for fifteen hours straight, until three in the afternoon the next day. That concert sticks in my memory as the first time I realized I liked the song Hummingbird, which they played as we were walking out of the park, leaving before the concert was completely set, as my family tends to do.

So move back in time, to when I first listened to Wilco, some time in Dad's car (we were pulling out of the driveway, 1626 Robin Court, or maybe pulling in), and then move forward slightly in the timeline and you'll find me, with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in my grey and orange clamshell Sony discman while I set in the back of the school bus. This is circa 2003. I was a sophomore in high school. The bus route is still mapped in my mind, and I remember listening to Radio Cure as we wheeled through one particular loop of houses. The window would be cold, and I probably had my forehead pressed against it, so I felt every jolt in the road. I was trying to listen to my music, and not the bus driver's radio.

So back to North Adams, last night. I was sitting on a damp dropcloth in a field, and then came the opening bars of a familiar track, and I remembered. I was a sophomore in high school, riding the school bus.

In yesterday's present, the audience rose to greet these songs like old friends (everyone singing you were right about the stars, each one is a setting sun while Jeff Tweedy remained silent). It was a reminder of the strange way music accumulates meaning. For me, there's a string of memories attached to those Wilco songs. And there's other music, all it which I'm incapable of hearing without remembering. Maybe that's less than ideal, the wrong way to listen to music because I'm not just listening to the music, because it's playing in sync with some past iteration of itself (maybe I should take James Agee's advice about Beethoven's Seventh, turn it up all the way, lay lightly on the floor, listen to it loud: "You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.").

But the things I remember remain, and they'll layer one atop the other with the music in the present:

Heavy Metal Drummer, the second song in the encore at Wilco's June 25th concert, Solid Sound, 2011. We are leaving. I stop and splash mud off my boots in a puddle. In 2006, this was the only song I really wanted them to play (they did). And here it was again. It's a lot like pop, a lot like summertime, that one song that my 18-year-old self wanted Wilco to play live. They are playing it again now. And then they start Passenger Side, and we can't leave just yet, because Mom and Dad want to hear this one, just one more, and we're sharing a trail mix cookie from that co-op in Williamstown, and it's late and I have work in the morning, but right now we're here, music is playing, this is it.

Night Journey

Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While the others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens in the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.

-Theodore Roethke, 1940

This post is overdue by a couple weeks, but now seems as good a time as any to note that I finally escaped my nearly six month stint of unemployment. The Trustees of the Reservations, a group I've been volunteering with, hired me as a seasonal ranger at Bartholomew's Cobble. It's not a bad gig--thus far I've been working in the visitors' center, pulling garlic mustard, mending fences, and helping with canoe trips. I also live on the grounds of one of the Trustees' historic houses, Naumkeag (pictured), during the work week (I commute back to north county on the weekends).

More information on all of these things to come, probably-maybe. But for now, that's a new thing in the general landscape of my life. It keeps me busy.

Poem

I don’t belong in this century—who does?
In my time, summer came someplace in June—
The cutbanks blazing with roses, the birds brazen, and the astonished
Pastures frisking with young calves . . .
-------------------------------------That was in the country—
I don’t mean another country, I mean in the country:
And the country is lost. I don’t mean just lost to me,
Nor in the way of metaphorical loss—it’s lost that way too—
No; nor in no sort of special case: I mean
Lost.

Now, down below, in the fire and stench, the city
Is building its shell: elaborate levels of emptiness
Like some sea-animal building toward its extinction.
And the citizens, unserious and full of virtue,
Are hunting for bread, or money, or a prayer,
And I behold them, and this season of man, without love.

If it were not a joke, it would be proper to laugh.
—Curious how that rat’s nest holds together—
Distracting . . .
---------------Without it there might be, still,
The gold wheel and the silver, the sun and the moon,
The season’s ancient assurance under the unstable stars
Our fiery companions . . .
------------------------And trees, perhaps, and the sound
Of the wild and living water hurrying out of the hills.

Without these, I have you for my talisman:
Sun, moon, the four seasons,
The true voice of the mountains. Now be
(The city revolving in its empty shell,
The night moving in from the East)
—Be thou these things.

-Thomas McGrath, 1972

Witness

Sometimes the mountain
is hidden from me in veils
of cloud, sometimes
I am hidden from the mountain
in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue,
when I forget or refuse to go
down to the shore or a few yards
up the road, on a clear day,
to reconfirm
that witnessing presence.

-Denise Levertov

Camping Out

I watched the nesting redstart
when we camped by Lake Winnepesaukee.
The tent pegs pulled out in soft soil.
Rain made pawprints on the canvas.

So much clings to the shoes,
the old shoes must be discarded,
but we're fools to think that does it:
burning the scraps.

I listened for the rain at Mt. Monadnock,
for the barred owl on a tent peak
among scrub pines in Michigan.
I can hear my father stir

and the cot creak. The flap opens.
He goes out and never returns
though the coffee steams on the grill
and the redstart sings in the alders.

-Edwin Gladding Burrows, 2001