Skykomish River Running

Aware that summer baked the water clear
Today I came to see a fleet of trout
But as I wade the salmon limp away,
Their dorsal fins like gravestones in the air,
On their sides the red that kills the leaves.
Only sun can beat a stream this thin.
The river Sky is humming in my ear.

Where this river empties in the sea
Trout are waiting for September rain
To sting their thirst alive. If they speed
Upstream behind the kings and eat the eggs
The silvers lay, I'll pound the drum for rain.
But sunlight drums, the river is the same
Running like old water in my ear.

I will cultivate the trout, teach their fins
To wave in water like the legs of girls
Tormented black in pools. I will swim
A week to be witness to the spawning,
Be a trout, eat the eggs of salmon--
Anything to live until the trout and rain
Are running in the river in my ear.

-Richard Hugo, 1959

I'm 67 days into my year of daily photographs (see also here), which is not especially far when you're aiming for 365. But it's been interesting in that it forces me to look at my own photographs, and also sometimes to take photographs I don't really like at all and send them out into the wilds of the internet. It reminds me, in some ways, of how my endless revisions of my thesis proposal are forcing me to look at all the individual sentences in a way I don't, normally (I'll admit: in my 17 years of formal education I never really learned to revise), and the whole thing expands before me like a fractal; with the idea of the whole reflected in the ideas presented in individual sentences. Ideally. I'm not really there, yet, but I think that's where we're going.

So taking pictures every day is sort of like writing the same paper repeatedly for two years (which is basically what writing a thesis is), and also not at all. Mostly I wanted an excuse to link to these photographs from Rebecca Norris Webb's book 'My Dakota', but my segue turned rather graceless, there. Regardless, looking at these images pushed at something in me, because these are photographs of the prairie, and the prairie is where I am, part of what I've been photographing. Webb has got it distilled to an essence perfect and strange.

On a Picture by Cézanne

There’s no description in the braided stone,
the pear, the stone in the pear, the birchbark,
bread hills on the snowfall tablecloth.
The dog of work gnaws the day’s short bone,
snarls a mountainside into lavender and green.
In the mind where objects vanish, almost is all.
Element of pitcher, sky, rockface, blank canvas
plastic and vast in one off-center patch.
To copy what’s invisible, to improvise
a soul of things and remake solid life
into fresh anxious unlifelike form.

-W. S. Di Piero, 1995

Why do I think we read this poem in high school? I'm not sure, because I'm pretty sure the poem we read was about a painting by Magritte, not Cézanne. Still--it would've been sophomore year, which was the year my English grade dipped as low as a D due to sheer laziness before I made a desperate scrabble towards mediocrity. I still had to cry in Ms. Kuhl's office to get permission to take A.P. Language the next year--and this is why I don't reminisce about high school. Sophomore year was an especially strange one for me; maybe the only redeeming feature was meeting the best car in the world (oh, I'm sure there were other good things about that year--but my memories are hazy, and one of the big ones involves me breaking my nose).

The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever

To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,

to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,

or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah —

If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?

They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma’s cotton dhoti;

archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.

Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi,

likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.

More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers’ rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors’ and branch bankers’ rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.

Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.

Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.

The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less.

To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.

Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts or similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.

Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,

shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!

Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind’s Sabine acres
for product and subsistence.

Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,

to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,

to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further topics.

-Les Murray, 1996

This picture above's an old one, from the summer of 2010, when I was newly graduated and raising cranes. I took the picture right before (or after?) I kayaked the Baraboo River--it was running high that day. It's hard to believe that that was two years ago, now. I'm attaching it to this poem even though it's out-of-date because there's my dream of wearing shorts forever, I guess: with an old boat and an older car, in the summer, in a picture that's out of focus, but the colors are bright anyway. You could say that about a lot of pieces of my life, actually: out of focus, but the colors are bright anyway.

Maybe my last couple posts gave me away, maybe they didn't, but I've been on vacation this past week. My parents flew up and we've been traveling across western Canada in fine style (which is to say, in my car), hitting Prince Albert, Jasper, and Banff National Parks. That list is in chronological order but also probably in the order of park visitation rates, lowest to highest. No matter.

The picture above is of Peyto Lake in Banff. You might be able to tell from the picture--it's a beautiful lake, fed by glacial meltwater, colored an implausibly rich blue. What you can't tell from the picture is how many other pictures exist that look almost exactly like it, but give Peyto Lake a google, and you'll see: it's a place people take pictures of. And it photographs well--some things seem lost when they're transcribed onto film, but the pure blue of this lake doesn't. On the other hand, though, the character of being there--the snow melting on my toes, the golden mantled ground squirrels on the rocks, the other tourists photographing the scene--all of that is lost, and all of that is what makes my experience of the place not precisely the same as everyone else's.

There's a quote from James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the strange exercise in photojournalism he produced with Walker Evans: "If I could do it, I'd do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game." He says what I am trying to say better than I ever could, I think. Photographs don't convey the whole experience, and my words don't fill the gap between the lived reality and the reflected image.

On the other hand, that's okay. On vacation I rather brilliantly managed to shoot 24 exposures of a roll of 35mm film I had not loaded properly (which is to say, even though I was looking through the lens and releasing the shutter, no pictures were exposed), and misplace one or two rolls of 120mm. My foolishness--and it was foolish, and probably due to the fact that I brought no fewer than five cameras along for the trip--didn't make me enjoy my vacation any less. But it was a lost opportunity, not just to record the things I saw, but to make something new out of them. As an object of record a photograph might not be whole, but as a photograph it always is.

My photograph of Peyto Lake is nothing new, though I don't regret taking it. But here's a photograph of Lake Louise, another place that's often committed to film (or, you know, the nebulous digital equivalent). It's no high art. It's just a picture of a Clark's nutcracker in the right place at the right time, and it doesn't capture the entire mad bustle of the dock at Lake Louise, or the funny way Clark's nutcrackers hop, or our quick getaway from the scrum of tourists and the reminder that we ourselves were tourists. That's okay. It's not supposed to. It's tied to a memory for me, and for you--well, it's a piece of something, here it is, make of it what you will.

Some Boys are Born to Wander

From Michigan our son writes, How many elk?
How many big horn sheep? It's spring,
and soon they'll be gone above timberline,

climbing to tundra by summer. Some boys
are born to wander, my wife says, but rocky slopes
with spruce and Douglas fir are home.

He tried the navy, the marines, but even the army
wouldn't take him, not with a foot like that.
Maybe it's in the genes. I think of wild-eyed years

till I was twenty, and cringe. I loved motorcycles,
too dumb to say no to our son—too many switchbacks
in mountains, too many icy spots in spring.

Doctors stitched back his scalp, hoisted him in traction
like a twisted frame. I sold the motorbike to a junkyard,
but half his foot was gone. Last month, he cashed

his paycheck at the Harley house, roared off
with nothing but a backpack, waving his headband,
leaning into a downhill curve and gone.

-Walter McDonald, 2002