Finding Our Place

Today an old friend is surveying our property. At dawn, he began three blocks away, where he and his partner found a known point, a spot marked and recorded, or geo-referenced in the GPS lingo. Setting bright orange cones around this known spot, they place the tripod just above it. One man shoots a laser beam from an instrument perched on the tripod to the other who stands by a metal pole adorned with a prism mounted at the top, like a wizard wand. The laser beam strikes the prism, which separates the light waves that then bounce to the laser instrument. The two men shout numbers back and forth, like secret code. By nine thirty, they have found a line emanating from the known point to a metal pin half-buried in asphalt in the street in front of our home.

“It all starts from the point,” the man shooting lasers tells me, “and everything works from that point outward.” He moves his hands in an expanding circle to emphasize the radiant nature of finding one’s place. I think of the axis mundi, the ancient and enduring practice human beings have for locating themselves in reference to earth and the cosmos.

Our old friend walks to an unremarkable spot in our front grass and waves another wand over the ground. The yellow box on top, the wand’s talisman, begins to whine like those plastic pipes that make whoo-whoop sounds when children pull the metal rod.

“I found it,” he says and takes a shovel and begins to dig. Two feet down, he hits a rusty ½ inch pipe poking up through the damp rich clay soil.

“There it is,” he says in the clear language men who work their hands use. He found one of the property markers that another man hammered into the ground in 1954. He unearthed another under the Chihuahuan sage that was just setting an after-rain bloom. By noon, we will know our place in the world.

Weird but True

Coffee this morning was accompanied by a litany of strange facts, one of my son's favorite topics. He told me that a pet hamster can run up to eight miles each night on its little metal wheel. I quietly kicked myself for skipping my two mile walk yesterday. Then he said that if a person bicycled none stop for three years they could bike to the moon. I quickly calculated the odds that I've biked to the moon in my lifetime, to temper the guilt for being more of a slouch than a caged rodent. My dad taught me to ride a bike when I was five. Here's an excerpt from a long poem I wrote called "The Bicycle," about learning to ride:

I learned to ride on a gravel road,
dad running alongside, promising to hang on.
The day I turned five we walked the blue Schwinn
out of the house, across a wooden foot bridge
onto the dirt road that wove like water through the woods,
where rattlesnakes sun themselves,
poison oak softening the edges. I walked with my dad---
the air smelt like drying pebbles,
hung like a shawl
around the shoulders of the afternoon.
Woodpeckers tapped a metronome beat.
Dad's breath even as he lifted me onto the bicycle,
placing a hand on the seat,
the other on the handlebars,
we began to roll.

At first I dangled like a string,
scared I wouldn't learn, scared I would.
Dad made jokes, chuckling even before
he spoke. Eased by him
I reached for the bars, my feet on the pedals---
riding began to overtake my fears.
My sisters zoomed past, turning to lift their arms to the sky,
their endless way of saying
look what you can't do.
"I can't; I won't; I'm too little," I shouted, then
leapt from the bicycle and ran back to the house
leaving my dad standing like a still life.

I can still hear the powdery soil beneath my tires
that blew like flour down mill pipes the day my dad
let go. Spring waxed into summer,
no rain since April, the road dried to a soft talc---
"Good for falling on," he thought. I pedaled off
accustomed to him trotting beside me. Over the weeks he shifted
behind. I only felt his breath, his steadiness.
"He's always there," I thought, his voice fading away
like a man falling into a hole. Like distance.
I turned my head, the tapping woodpeckers seemed to go quiet, and I saw him
standing, hands on hips, so far away.
"There you go," he shouted;
I fell to the ground.

From then to now, I would've had to average 1.6 hours of cycling a day to be standing on the moon today.

I leave you with this fact: a caterpillar has more muscles than a human being.

A Breezy Ramble

When Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park, they created a section called the Ramble, a hilly woodland with meandering footpaths meant to allow park visitors to escape the hustle and bustle of city life and let their feet and minds wander. Olmsted believed in the restorative powers of nature and the importance of mental escape. In contrast to the Promenade, the  razor straight road in the park designed for social intercourse that was chock-a-block with benches and given ample width for carriages, the Ramble paths were designed to wander through a thicket of trees that masked views to the city. The Ramble was designed for walking. Walking in a particular way, a way Henry David Thoreau, who said "It is a great art to saunter." would have endorsed. Or Jules Renard, the French writer who noted that in walking "the body advances, while the mind flutters around it like a bird."

Rambling has purpose.

I want to yell this at the editor for whom I was, until last night, revising a piece of writing. If I were reading the emergency instructions for what to do if my child accidentally wrote on his eyeball with a Sharpie, I would want it written like the Promenade, straight and to the point. (FYI, a long saline rinse and time seems to do the trick). But if I wanted to escape from the toils of my days, be transported away from my own world, I may take a ramble. I delight in following the mental paths of other writers, through the wooded thickets of their own design, seeing how they sculpt the views, revealing glimpses of the world I may not have noticed otherwise.

He said I should remove my "too-breezy" voice and  the "ramble through [my] own stories, places of youthful discovery," and replace it with more clear and backed up historical reference. More mile markers, less unmarked forks in the path. He wants a promenade. I gave him a ramble. The choice: stay on the meandering path I created or blaze a straight line through, so the journey from point A to point B is clear. Hmm, I wonder where this foot was going? I don't care, I just want to follow it.

 

The Name of the Lizard

I love knowing the name of things. Plants, animals, towns, rivers, continents, gardens, mathematical theorems, stellar constellations, old dead philosophers. . .With the name, I can begin to trace its origins, its story. Despite Shakespeare's famous quote: "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." So says Juliet from her balcony whilst (Shakespearean for while) the love-struck Romeo looks on (Romeo and Juliet II, II, 45-46).

True, names start wars, names do hurt, sometimes more than sticks and stones, but I still love the naming of things. Today I found the name of the lizard that I saw fighting in the botanical garden: Desert Spiny Lizard (Sceloporus magister) and now I can learn more about this native species, its penchant for eating ants, and sometimes small lizards. Though I haven't found references to the habit of biting the sides of other Desert Spiny Lizards.

Walk In and Drive Out of Bliss

One reason taking pictures of plants is so satisfying is they don't have legs. They stay put, allowing me time to take the lens cap off, focus, set my aperture (if I'm using the DSLR), and frame the shot. Plants are patient subjects. No so with critters, which is why I usually get blurry snaps of their rear ends.

I just got home from a walk in the botanical garden, just around sunset, and these are some of critters who were kind enough to sit still while I fumbled with my point and shoot. I was thrilled, especially when that bad ass looking lizard had a fight with another lizard of his species. I missed photographing the brawl that went on for many seconds right at my feet on the trail. I don't usually like fighting, never watch boxing, but I've never seen a lizard fight.  It was one of those moments when the whole world shrinks down to one point of focus. Nothing existed but those two bad boys biting one another's sides while they swirled around in a circle and me watching.

Then I saw the bunny. :-)

As I drove out of the parking lot, I felt completely relaxed.

Then I got flashed by a photocop while I was driving home, writing in my head, a habit that distracts me from things like speed traps.

Then I got stuck behind a bus, my zen spilling away. Once it's flowing away, it's hard to get back, except by writing and looking at pictures of bunnies, and reliving lizard fights. Ah, bliss.

Virginia Woolf and Walking

A year or so ago, feeling that I should improve my knowledge of the classics, I decided to read Virginia Woolf, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Bible. Actually Chaucer's Canterbury Tales was on the list too, but I couldn't finish it, despite the images of my father's face in rapture when discussing it with me. Maybe I'm too much of a feminist to read Canterbury Tales. The depiction of women was so distracting I couldn't get carried away in the language like my dad seemed to have been. Discussing literature with my dad is always bittersweet, because he has a magnificent memory and in every conversation he will at some point tilt his head up, as though he were browsing a high shelf in the library, take a breath, and quote from whomever we are talking about with beautiful inflection. No matter that he read the words as a freshman in college (about 50 years ago) and hadn't seen them since. It is an awesome thing to witness, though it makes me wonder why I can't do it. Did growing up in the sixties give me brain damage? Or was I just not passed on the gene of awesome literary recall. Or do I just not practice enough? To my dad's credit, he used to keep himself entertained while driving a tractor by memorizing all the lines of Hamlet. Yes, all of them. And I am one of the billions on earth who can't get past "To be or not to be." Okay, I can remember to "outrageous fortune," but that's it.

Anyhow, I couldn't undo the sixties brain damage, nor recode my genes, so I thought maybe I could improve my brain with classic literature. Here's a quick review:

The Bible: really long, took me two years to read, and in truth, SPOILER ALERT I was appalled at how many people die in it. I had no idea. There's the hopeful beginning, but after that it's centuries of death, mostly fighting over the number of gods there are, one or many, and whether or not gods should be worshiped on high, no if one, yes if many. Thank God for the new testament or the whole thing would be a downer, like a really long version of The Road (SPOILER ALERT, no happy ending there). Actually, the Song of Songs is beautiful. The happy abridged version could be Genesis, up to but not including the expulsion, the Song of Songs, a few Psalms, and the New Testament up through the resurrection. True confession: I still haven't read Revelation. I've seen too many horror film villains borrow lines from it and that creeps me out.

The Odyssey: great romp. Loved it.

Beowulf: kind of a thin tale, though the original text sounds awesome read outloud. Big brave guy kills a monster. Odysseus rocks over Beowulf.

Which leaves Virginia. I read Mrs Dalloway, because I felt I should,  and A Writer's Diary, because I love reading other people's diaries. I have two older sisters and, growing up, reading their diaries was one of my only forms of revenge for whatever mean thing they had done to me. My oldest sister had a very active and creative mind, so she was the interesting diarist.

Now I'm reading Moments of Being, Woolf's memoir writing. She reminds me a little of my dad, in that she is obviously really smart and has a way of making me feel a little dumb by comparison, but in such a lovely way that I don't feel resentment. Here's something I recognize in myself and in both Woolf and my dad: personal drive. When she takes on a project, she doesn't tootle around with it. She digs deep and hard, driven by a desire, it seems, for perfection and by an intense habit of self-criticism. My dad doesn't talk much. Neither do I. I imagine that Virginia Woolf didn't either. Sometimes this quiet is perceived as snobbery, but I think it is because we all have (or had) intense internal dialogue going on and can't (or couldn't) get a word out edgewise. My internal dialogue is almost completely self-critical, or impulsed by my intense trepidation about speaking. I plan my comments three moves ahead, like playing chess. And then replay the conversation and critique my performance. It's very time-consuming and can leave a person looking distracted and preoccupied (which looks a lot like snobbishly bored)

Now to the point: Perfection and self-criticism have this to do with walking. I have tried to resist my impulse to become obsessed with my new activity. When my dad took up running, he was soon running marathons and eventually ran from Kansas City to Boston. So I've been walking for about three weeks, trying to take it slow and make it fun. Yesterday, I went to REI and bought $90 walking sandles, a new BPA-free water bottle, and a book of all the hiking trails in town. Then I down-loaded a pedometer app for my phone. I can now be reminded everyday that my BMI (body mass index) is 26.4 so right above the little body graphic (a well-built male figure) in my app is the word "overweight." I paid $1.99  for that information. And when I walk, my phone counts my steps, calories burned, distance traveled, and progress towards my goal. Occasionally it beeps at me. But my goal was to enjoy walking. My phone can't measure that. I wanted to be more like John Muir ("I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown; for going out, I found, was really going in.") and a little less like the hyper-critical side of Virginia Woolf ("Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?") and get my LDL count lower in the process. Should be as easy as a walk in the park.

Dog Heaven

Our golden puppy has learned to walk on a leash, no longer laying down and refusing to move when she feels like it. We've been walking along the irrigation canal, which was running high yesterday evening. The park was getting its share of irrigation flooding and looked like a calm lake. The puppy loved it after our hot walking. The sky reflected in the water all around her.

Robin54

When I was a freshman in college, I had one requirement to sustain a scholarship into the next year: write a one-page essay at the end of the year to illustrate how I had enriched my educational experience with the funding. In retrospect, I should have written about the classes I took, my great grades, and how much more I could study since I didn't have to get a job. That was the obvious no-brainer essay, but the obvious is not necessary to write about, since it's so, well, obvious. So I wrote about the baby bird my roommate's cat brought into our apartment during finals week. Let me explain.

People who have cats know that cats like to bring their providers presents, usually dead critters. . .mice, lizards, baby bees. People who don't have cats probably don't for that very reason. But my roommate's cat had a habit of holding critters in his mouth in a way that kept them alive. At the beginning of finals week, he plopped a hatchling sparrow on the living room rug, looked up at us hunkered at the kitchen table, cramming for final exams, made a loud meowl, his way of saying "looky what I brought you." We lookied. From that moment, studying for finals became secondary to our round-the-clock feeding schedule for the sad little baby bird. It was in that ugly stage of infancy, when only a mother finds its baby adorable, all beak and bald wrinkled skin like an old man. It ate every two hours from a dropper. We would tap the side of its beak, the universal signal for myopic baby birds that mom has a worm or some barf to tamp into their gullets. Caring for the baby bird, I explained in my essay, gave me a renewed perspective on my schooling. Specifically, it made me realize that spending a year with my head buried in books had made me forget that life is happening, or struggling to happen, right outside my front door. I had decided, I wrote, that I needed to have more balance, study less, live more, that sort of thing. I sent off the essay, the bird died, and my scholarship was not renewed. Despite the outcome, I hung onto the idea that life is more than just getting more, more knowledge, more funding, more sleep. It's about giving.

On my recent trip north, I was reminded of the baby bird lesson, when a juvenile robin smashed into the big picture window of our cabin. At first it lay on the deck, too stunned to get up. I held it for a while and when it started looking more alert, I set it down. Often birds that hit windows will fly off after the initial shock wears off, but this one was clearly injured. My son, whose a fellow bird lover, and I got a box and kept it alive on droplets of water (since we didn't know what to feed him and couldn't google it since we had no wifi) until it was time to go home. After a few phone calls, I found what I was searching for: the little old lady bird rescue network. As far as I know, there is a kindly old woman in every community who takes in injured birds and nurses them back to health. We drove the bird to Wilma's house on our way back home. Wilma was probably in her eighties. She carefully placed the bird in a cage and made notes in a spiral notebook by her front door. Our bird was now Robin54, her 54th bird in 2010. I didn't have as strong a life-changing response to nursing this bird for two days, as I did when I was younger, in that I won't be quitting my job and embarking on a three month back-packing tour of Europe like I did after my freshman year, but I was reminded of the effect of caring for others and of the opportunity to pass this sense onto my children.

How to Live in the Desert

After living in a desert for nearly twenty years, I've learned a few survival tips, but this one is the most useful and effective in keeping me alive: follow smart critters north. Long before air conditioning, cheapish hydroelectric power, and couch potatoism, people who inhabited the desert regions of the world were migratory. They followed the smart critters north to cooler climes. When I first moved to the desert, I was told by the man who convinced me to leave the coast (yes love makes you do crazy things) that I would eventually get used to the summer heat. For the sake of love, he lied and, for the sake of love, I believed him. But after a few seasons of triple digit heat, love wasn't enough to maintain this delusion. I started to pay attention to what people who had lived in the desert for generations did in the summer and discovered they were all semi-migratory. Since then I have also become semi-migratory.

In a perfect world, my family and I would close down our desert home in early June and travel north to our cabin in the woods and stay there until August. But we don't have a cabin in the woods. So we rent one for as long as we can afford: four days. The rest of the summer we either look forward to our four-day jaunt or try to hang onto the memory of it. We just returned from our escape from the heat. It's 109 degrees and this is the last time, I hope, that I will ever have to endure the mind-numbing buzz of vuvuzelas as the World Cup final game plays on the television. I'm sweating and trying to hold onto the cool feeling of creek water on my feet, the gurgling sounds of the stream, the calming effect of having green all around me, the presence of butterflies. . .

Walking North

Looking forward to walking in cooler weather. It's hot, hot, hot and walking in Birkenstocks because shoes are too hot gives me blisters. Yesterday I walked for forty minutes and saw almost nobody at all. Of the handful of people outside during the day, I was the only one walking. I could have been the unsuspecting stranger in  one of those eerily-deserted-town films who stops for gas (though I should have been carrying a gas can to make this image work) only to find that the entire town has been infected by a terrible virus and everyone has become flesh-eating zombies. Needless to say, I never walk at night. But it's not a zombie virus, just a case of too much sun and not enough water. So I'm walking north, but I'll be back before the antidote to desert conditions has been found and get back to wandering alone through the neighborhood.

Here's one way to respond to too much sun and not enough water: be a cactus, all plump and fleshy on the inside, extra scary and prickly on the outside, and then, just when your type of pollinator buzzes by, pop out an outrageously gorgeous and seductive blossom.

Pomegranates

 Along the small canal near my house, a canal I know is cat-jumpable since watching a long-haired turtle-coated cat bound across it, the pomegranates are swelling.  The pomegranate is the original apple, the fruit that some think the serpent used to lure Eve to the dark side in the Garden of Eden. Let's examine this possibility. Eating a pomegranate takes patience. The leathery skin offers little entrance beyond ripping at the fringe where the ruddy orange flower had earlier in the season shriveled away. Once penetrated (always a sexy word), the innards reveal a matrix of interlaced bitter white membranes that shroud the shiny red fruitlets that are packed together with the tight efficiency that makes the pomegranate one of nature's finest examples of  mathematical beauty. It also makes the fruitlets hard to separate. Each tear-shaped bead of fruit latches to the white membrane, which must be the fruit's version of mammalian placenta (yummy).

So Eve, seeing that the fruit is way too much trouble to get into, hands the pomegranate to Adam. He works it over for an hour or so, finally holds a tiny bead of fruit pinched between his fingertips and hands it  to Eve, as proudly as if it were a whole gazelle. She pops it in her mouth and for one glorious moment, like when storm clouds open for a split second and cast a sliver of warm sunshine onto a weather-beaten cheek, she tastes the sweet juice. She smiles and is about to lean towards Adam and tell him it was all worth it, when her teeth break open the inner seed, releasing a bitter tang.

Lesson: sin takes effort to get into,tastes sweet for a split second, and leaves a bitter aftertaste in your mouth. Yeah, it was the pomegranate that taught  that lesson. Any type of regular apple is just too easy and rewarding. Imagine trying to kiss up to a teacher by setting a pomegranate on their desk.

Walking Take Two

After committing to walking daily, and then committing to writing about daily walking, I immediately thought "what a stupid and boring idea!"

Who wants to hear about the blister I got on the ball of my left foot? No one. (Fear not, there will be no macro shots of it either.)

I am still walking, but I can't tap notes into my phone as I walk. It's too distracting. As I walk around the neighborhood, I like to carry on conversations in my head, and I can't do that and write at the same time. Multi-tasking, I am happy to say, is currently being scientifically debunked (note to self: Google a reference for this later). Turns out Gerald Ford was not such a dork for being a crappy multitasker. Walking and chewing gum at the same time is in fact, according to science, hard to do.

Okay, it's World Cup soccer time, and my husband is a soccer fan, so the T.V. is blaring the vuvuzelas like a swarm of killer bees. I think a goal must be eminent. The swarm is mounting. Time to go for a walk.