April and Honeychild

Don't Think Too Hard

2011-12-03T16:38:00.001-08:00

In my experience, having an adventure is as easy as speaking before thinking. We're not taught to speak before we think; quite the opposite. We're supposed to measure our responses before verbalizing. But if I had considered the ramifications of a journey on horseback before agreeing to participate, I may never have said yes. And if I'd really spent time consulting my bank account and worrying about sunburn, I probably wouldn't have ridden a bicycle across the country with Andy last summer. If I'd thought long and hard about the risks of traveling through India alone and had tried to develop an itinerary beforehand, my plans would have withered from the start. All of my adventures have started with impulsive commitments to things I knew nothing about.

Once I make a commitment, I am typically steadfast. I don't even consider bailing, unless things are looking really positively dangerous. And then, it's usually too late to bail, anyway, so it's only ever a fleeting consideration, nothing more.

Yesterday Andy and I watched a documentary called "Ride the Divide" about a group of cyclists participating in the annual 2,745-mile self-supported "Tour Divide," a race along the continental divide from Banff, Canada, to the New Mexico/Mexico border. Andy decided immediately that he wanted to do the race. I thought I'd probably have to spend a year or two mountain biking before making an attempt, since I'm such a roadie, but agreed it looked outrageously appealing. Snow drifts, grizzly bears, gravel slides, herds of cattle, rain, injuries, wilderness, isolation, you name it. The winning time is usually 17 days and change. And half of the participants usually drop out. The documentary showed cyclist after cyclist collapsed alongside the road weeping. We also saw some mean looking blisters and wounds. The cyclists who go fastest don't carry tents and ride 15-20 hours per day.

Andy and I thought about the race all day today. Somehow, it wasn't until we were eating dinner that the stupendous realization dawned.

"ANDY!" I gasped. "WE COULD DO IT ON OUR TANDEM!" He looked at me with widening eyes and grinned. I launched myself across the table at him, almost overturning our soup bowls, grabbed his shoulders, shook him, and yelled again, "ON OUR TANDEM! WE COULD DO IT ON OUR TANDEM!"

From there we sprinted to the computer to Google the race's website. We clicked on the "contact" link and wrote a quick email to the race organizers. "Would we be allowed to participate on our tandem?" we asked, and clicked the send button.

Then we decided to take a look at past race results. There on the 2010 results page we saw a tandem bicycle listed -- the first and only tandem bicycle team to complete the Tour Divide. We would be allowed! We were psyched. We could take a train to Whitefish, get a ride to Banff, haul ass on our bike to the Mexico border, and then rent a car and drive home. We could leave our family in charge of our business while gone. We could do the whole thing in a month. We could save every penny and dime from now until then to pay for our emergency chocolate milk fixes and super-insulated sleeping bags.

And then we saw the date of the race. It's supposed to start the second Friday of June. And June 23rd is the date we're supposed to be hosting that big wedding party at our house. As in, our own wedding party.

Back while the soup was simmering before dinner, before I thought of riding the tandem, I spent a few lazy moments scanning over Facebook. I clicked a link somebody had posted to an article about the five most common regrets people express in old age. I've been worrying about mortality lately, so I had to take an indulgent peek. One regret was not living a life true to oneself; another was not making the conscious choice to be happy. A common regret men expressed was working too hard. Andy is always talking about working harder and making more money, and I'm always telling him it's far more important to do the things we want while we can.

After dinner, I told Andy about the article I'd read. "We shouldn't worry about taking time off from work or about whether or not we can afford it. We'll never regret it." Then I reminded him how happy we were when we rode across the country. "We were saying all the time how we wouldn't rather be doing anything else!"

"But what about our wedding?" he asked. Fortunately we were already married in Tennessee in October. But we were going to have a big party on Midsummer's Eve in Pennsylvania, with all of our friends, and even be legally married again.

"We can change the date," I said. "We can get married whenever we want."

He stills seems hesitant.

I think that if we think about it too hard, we'll decide it's too much trouble.
So I think we should just go ahead and commit. We can deal with the complications as they arise. The important thing is the blind, impulsive, happy commitment.

I'm ready to go.

To Keep Up or Not to Keep Up?

2011-10-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

A crashing downpour replaced the patches of sunlight in the time it took me to trade my pajamas for my gardening clothes this morning. The poppy transplants will have to wait for another day.

I've been thinking about technology more than usual since Steve Jobs died. I began using computers at the same time the American mainstream did, I think. We didn't use a television or video games in our household, but we did get a word processor in the early or mid-nineties. I remember learning how to type properly, and I remember setting up an email account at least a year or two before starting high school. I got a cell phone shortly after I started driving. I passed my cell phone on to my younger brother when I started college, and didn't have a cell phone again until around the time I got my car, about half a year after graduating from college. I didn't register on facebook or begin my blog until 2008; both were preparations for my long distance horseback trip.

I feel like I kept up with internet technology for a little while, at least on the dragging tail of the curve. By the time I was in college, however, I was beginning to resist the speed of developments. I learned how to use some basic programs I needed to use to get through college, like Excel and PowerPoint. When I arrived in Oregon and began working in a bookstore in 2008, I had to use a computer again. We used Constant Contact for our store emails, maintained a webpage, and started blogspot, facebook, and youtube accounts during my employment. By the spring of 2010, I was back on the road again.

Now I have a very plain pre-paid cell phone which doesn't work very well and is usually powered off. I can't take, send, or receive photos, but I can and do send several texts every month for ten cents each. My computer is the same as I took to school -- a 2003 mac laptop. It hasn't been able to connect to the internet for years, so I use it solely for photos, music, and word processing. All of the writing I've done over the years is stored on this computer, but I haven't backed up my documents or photos very consistently. Mostly I use Andy's computer; I don't know how to describe it. We still don't have a television, and I have trouble controlling them when I do encounter them.

I listen to NPR several mornings and several afternoons during the week. Because I listen pretty consistently, I feel fairly caught up on the current major global news events. Every several days, however, I hear stories focusing on specific information technologies. This week there's been considerable discussion about Blackberries. Apparently, they weren't working this week. I'm not exactly sure what a blackberry is or what it's best at doing. I understand that they are preferred by many business people for security issues. I don't know if it makes phone calls or if it's just a data storage device. I think it uses the internet, because I think the recent problem had to do with the devices not being able to access the internet.

Andy had an android phone for a few months last winter until I accidentally broke it and we couldn't afford to replace it. I don't know what "android" signifies. I know that it wasn't an iPhone, because Apple makes iPhones. I also don't know what a "smartphone" is. I would assume "smart phone" could refer to any phone that has a big screen and can do "smart" things like use "apps," but I think I must be wrong. A few days ago, during a meeting, I surreptitiously asked Andy if there was a difference between a smart phone and an iPhone, and he gave me a long look and whispered "we'll talk about that later." We haven't talked about it, yet.

I've also harbored a longstanding confusion about the relationship between the terms "mac" "Apple" and "i---." I think I finally have it figured out. Apple is the company name. Its computers are called macintoshes, which I think is kind of funny, since macintoshes really are a kind of apple, usually used for pies. I think that Apple now names its products with names beginning with a lowercase "i," including its laptops. Does Apple still make desktop computers, and are those still called "macintosh computers?" I can think of iBooks, iPods, iPads, iMacs, and iPhones. I have not owned an iPod, but have used them. Programs also have lowercase "i" prefixes, like iPhoto and iPhone. Does the "i" stand for "internet?"

I understand the concept of twitter but haven't used it and don't really know how it works. I'm barely able to use facebook.

My concern is that I'm already behind and that I'll be hopelessly behind in a few short years if I don't make an effort to keep up. Furthermore, my children will dismally behind unless I expose them to this technology. As a prospective business owner and parent, I wonder what elements of IT (information technology) I need to keep a handle on. At the same time, I don't want to expose my children to cell phones or computers until they're approaching school age. I don't really even want to expose myself. I believe that filling a home with electronic devices is unhealthy in tangible and intangible ways.

Last week, Andy, my father, and I rode a shuttle to the airport. The bus was pretty full of people, and most of use were sitting elbow to elbow along the sides. I was sitting across from Dad and Andy. I looked around at the other passengers and noticed that most of them had their heads down and their hands on their laps holding various miniature communication devices -- their thumbs and fingers were all jabbing away. I thought this was pretty funny, so I pulled out my own cell phone, which is quite small and old-fashioned looking, and held it out in front of me like everybody else was, and began pushing buttons very quickly with my thumbs as if I were perhaps sending text messages or surfing the internet. My phone was, off, of course, like usual. When I looked up to wink at Dad and Andy, they both pretended not to know me.

The rain has passed and I see patches of sunlight again. I'm heading out to plant the poppies.

Settling In

2011-10-14T04:40:00.000-07:00

Andy and I have been talking about what we want to do to become more involved in the world. We're comfortable in our little corner, but I feel as though I've been taking a lot without giving much back. I know this is the standard model, but I don't want it for myself. I guess I'm thinking of my relationship with the world, and I want it to be conscientious and reciprocative on my part.

It has seemed, lately, that anything I want is available for the taking. Country roads, cities, transportation, disposable commodities. Commodities, particularly. I keep asking myself, "where did all of this come from?" And, of course, it's all been manufactured somewhere on earth from some combination of materials found on earth. And if all I give is a few dollars for whatever I want -- I'm paying a person, aren't I? I'm paying for labor, but I'm not reimbursing the original source, and I can't, directly, with paper currency. At this moment I'm surrounded by wood, sheet rock, paint, plaster, slate, glass. I'm sharing a room with a piano, a computer, dishes, tables, shelves of books, a bicycle, a dulcimer, a guitar, light bulbs. And I can't escape the underlying feeling that I'm living amidst stolen goods. Or, more kindly, as though I'm living amidst unreciprocated gifts. All of these items were acquired fairly according to our cultural guidelines. So, in the human realm, all is well.

Yet I must have taken advantage somewhere along the line, because how could I possibly have acquired all of these belongings for nothing more than dollars? I feel I owe something to the forest where this lumber was cut, and the quarries where this stone was mined. Is there any place on earth where communities are saying "look how comfortable we have made our lives, and how easily; let's reciprocate by planting some trees, cleaning up our waterways, respecting the cleanliness of the air, and behaving responsibly and conscientiously from here on out?" Instead, it seems the default behavior is to fail to recognize the true origins of our goods, and to return, instead of gifts and caring, landfills, oceanic islands of trash, and global pollution. If this relationship were modeled by two people, we would describe the relationship as appallingly abusive.

I don't wish to under-appreciate human creativity; I realize that when I buy a table, I am paying for craftsmanship. When I buy a computer, I am paying for ideas, components, and assembly. But it seems wrong to me that my return payment stops with the designers, manufacturers, and marketers. What do I owe the earth for a computer? What do I owe the earth for a house? What about food? What about water, and air?

I've been trying to imagine how I can most significantly contribute to the planet. Andy conceives of a distinction between behaving as a humanitarian and an environmentalist, and feels pressure to choose between disparate paths. I feel it's possible to fulfill both endeavors on the same path. My simplistic example to Andy, put irreverently, was to preach family planning worldwide and to encourage small, late families.

Many very easy lifestyle decisions can reduce our demands on the earth. In today's world, these are all decisions we're able to make for ourselves. By tomorrow's world, I hope these decisions will have become default behaviors. These are some major, fairly obvious, not terribly difficult, high-impact personal lifestyle decisions that stand out to me:

1. Diet -- preferring, local, vegetarian foods, and mostly abstaining from seafood. We'll be way healthier and require less health care and pharmaceuticals. We'll save energy by abstaining from meat, save fossil fuels by eating local foods, and save our planet's lungs by keeping the ocean alive. Local foods are often unpackaged and fresher, saving food from being wasted and packaging from going to the landfill.

2. Where we live and how we get around -- remodeling instead of building, and choosing to live in a place well located for self-sustenance or alternative transportation. Andy and I feel that if we choose to live so far in the country, we need to find ways to seriously reduce our fossil fuel dependency. I drive a grease car, but still spew particulate matter into the air. We've discussed renting a prius or something similar. We try to combine our errands and use our bicycles, but we have a lot of improvement to make. We both feel very nostalgic for our downtown lives in Corvallis, where we were far less dependent on vehicles.

3. Family -- let's move average childbearing age up a few years. Let's have three generations span a century rather than four. My grandmother was born in 1919; I probably won't wait until 2019 to start my family, but it might be close. Both my grandmother and my mother waited until they were around thirty to start families. And, yes, I've dreamed of having half a dozen or so kids. Instead of having a gazillion children to help me with farm labor, however, I think I'd rather just live next-door to my siblings and their kids; that way I'll just feel like I have fifteen kids, but they won't really be all mine.

4. Be healthy -- let's grow our own food and trade with our neighbors. Don't eat more than we need. Be physically active. Stay outside. Keep our kids outside. Stay healthy and keep our bodies strong so we can take care ourselves.

Andy and I are talking about ways we can participate on a larger scale, beyond our own personal decisions. Last year we volunteered with one of the local 5th-grade envirothon teams, and we're thinking of doing that again this school-year. It seems like a pretty small gesture of thanks to the planet, though. We also heard about a fellow in town who collects bicycles throughout the year and tunes them up to give to children for Christmas -- we're planning to help him with some of that mechanic work. But really, we keep saying, we'd like to actually bike around with the kids.

So much needs to be done, it's silly for us to waste our time trying to decide where to jump in. When we married last week, our vows included building a peaceful, compassionate home, and nurturing our family and fellow humanity. Now that we're contemplating our vows for next summer, when we'll be remarried in Pennsylvania, I feel we should include a mutual vow to share a simple, globally conscientious lifestyle.

Honeychild

2011-09-22T05:17:00.001-07:00

Garden

2011-09-22T05:08:00.000-07:00

Summer in Laurel

2011-09-22T04:54:00.001-07:00

Joe and Yen-Yen Take Tea

2011-03-29T02:17:00.000-07:00

(Yen-Yen cracking up)

Today

2011-01-27T06:33:00.000-08:00

The slate and stone steps leading from the patio to the garden

Heavy snow broke the sour cherry tree

Yesterday

2011-01-27T06:29:00.000-08:00

Baby leeks, and snow on the woodpile.

Day 17: North Dakota, Here we Are!

2010-07-28T17:19:00.000-07:00

Two days ago we had a great ride from Harlem to Wolf Point, MT, a distance of 120 or so miles. We didn't even start our ride until after lunch (Andy had to hitchhike to Havre in the morning to buy a new bicycle tire for our rear wheel), but the wind was with us and we both felt strong. We cruised! We made it into town before sundown with our highest-yet avreage miles-per-hour (17.2).

Today was something of the opposite... with a strong wind in our faces, we spent the majority of the day battling our way from Culberston, MT, to Williston, ND, a mere 47 miles of pedalling. Our day's average speed was the lowest yet (10.5mph), even lower than the day we climbed mount Washington. Oh, we were exhausted, hungry, and grouchy when we rolled into town. Upon parking our bike in the city park, we immediately went into emergency resuscitation mode, which involved forcing graham crackers, chocolate chips, and water down Andy's throat, before taking him to the recreation center (yes, re-creation) for a shower and then hitting up the grocery store for a quart of chocolate milk and two corn dogs. He's in the park, now, rubbing his tummy and boiling brown rice (our real dinner) as I sit in the library across the street, uploading photos.

Let me go back a few days in time...

Last Sunday, just three days ago, we were merrily powering along toward Dodson, our tentative camping spot for the evening. We were in a bit of a hurry, because the sun was falling fast and we still had another 20 or 30 miles to go. As we cruised past Harlem toward the Fort Peck Reservation, Andy noticed a wallet on the side of the road. We went another thirty or forty feet before angling the tandem around and going back to investigate. As we pedalled back on the opposite side of the road, we saw a credit card, which we stopped to pick up. When we opened the wallet, we found several other ID cards with the same name as the credit card. Down the road a little further we found two more credit cards, a Fort Peck Reservation card, and, finally, off in the grass, a social security card.

We put all of the cards back into the wallet and stood by the road wondering what to do. We were already a mile past the town, but we didn't want to carry some stranger's wallet thirty miles before turning it in in the next town. After brief deliberation, we concluded that the only option was to go back and turn it in at the Harlem Police Station.

In town, we found two policemen vaccuuming their car across from the station. They accepted the wallet and told us the owner had reported it missing some months ago. Turning our noses back toward our destination, we pedalled down over the a low curb back onto the road. We hadn't even travelled a block before Andy pulled over. The rear tire looked completely lopsided. We pulled into the city park and Andy took the tire off for closer inspection. He concluded that our tire was worn too thin: when we rode over the curb, the air ballooned out on the side, where the tire was worn through the thinnest. It was too worn to continue using, so we hobbled back over the the police station and pitched our tent in the front yard.

We were fairly discouraged. Examining our maps, we saw that the closest bike shop was in Havre, whiched we'd passed through forty miles earlier. No more bike shops until North Dakota! We were stranded in a town of a few hundred people, and chances of finding a replacement tire in town seemed slim.

We thought we might have to take a few days off, but, as fate would have it, everything worked out in our favor. Andy caught a Fort Peck Reservation shuttle at 6:45am the next morning which delivered him to Havre at 7:45. He found the bike shop, which didn't have regular hours but did have a cell phone number posted on the door. The fellow arrived promptly and sold Andy a tire. The return shuttle to Harlem didn't leave until 11am, so Andy decided to give hitching a try. He stuck out his thumb and waited. After about thirty cars passed, one pulled over and offered him a ride. The two young women in the front seat were registered nurses on their way to a conference in Billings. They settled him into the back seat next to a baby in a carseat and gave him two homemade cinnamon rolls. When they dropped him off in Harlem, they both got out of the car and came over to see the bicycle. I was at the library, so I didn't get to meet them.

Andy fixed the bike and went looking for me. The librarian told him that she'd just given a blonde girl directions to the post office, and that's where he found me. We packed up our things and headed out of town.

Now we're in Williston, ND, preparing for tomorrow's 130 mile jaunt to Minot. Depending on the wind direction, we'll either make it or we won't. We might end up pitching out tent half way there.

Three states down, eleven to go!!!

~April

Day 16

2010-07-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

Well, we've concluded our first two weeks on the road. We're in Wolf Point, MT right now, half way through our day--50 miles beyond Glasgow, where we slept last night, and 57 miles away from Culbertson, where we're hoping to sleep tonight. Tomorrow we'll cross the border into North Dakota.

We're both doing well. We go back and forth between feeling strong and fresh and achey and exhausted, depending on how much rest, protein, fat, and sugar we're able to provide ourselves with. Last night we didn't get into town until almost 9pm, so we ended up getting burgers at an empty bar down the street.

We did have some nice adventures on Monday, but I'm too spaced out right now to relate them. Instead, you can just enjoy the new photos below.

Bike Ride

2010-07-22T21:54:00.000-07:00

Tennessee to Pennsylvania to Oregon to...

2010-07-04T11:39:00.000-07:00

Three weeks have passed since my last update.

Near the late-middle of June, I loaded Honeychild on a trailer and sent her ahead of me to Pennsylvania. My father met her when she arrived in the late night at our neighbor's farm up the road. Honeychild stayed in the paddock for twenty-four hours until I arrived on a bright Sunday morning and led her out into her new slice of heaven: eight acres of rolling, grassy, green hills; a huge spring-fed watering tank; long lines of strong, straight fences; tall stands of shady trees; and the companionship of 23 hair sheep, owned by a local Amishman.

Each successive morning I arrived with a nosebag of oats which I fed to her in the small paddock before turning her loose again. The plan worked, and by the time I left Pennsylvania one week later, she was eagerly waiting at the gate each morning for my mother, father, or Bob (the farm owner) to meet her with oats. I can rest assured she won't go wild in my absence; she loves her oats too much.

I was in Pennsylvania for one week, and I think I spent most of the time in the garden. Or perhaps I spent most of my time in my room, dusting and sorting my things into piles: things that used to be important, and things that were still important. Working in the garden was the more enjoyable of the two tasks. My mom had warned me many times before my arrival that she was behind and that she felt she wasn't keeping up with the garden.

Of course, she exaggerated: the garden was beautiful and I was amazed at how many beds were already full of vegetables and flowers. She must have invested dozens and dozens of hours in the spring. We went to a garden nursury one day and bought some herbs and flowers. Her vegetable garden is impressive enough, but she also has flowerbeds, trellises, fruit trees, and a little stand of beehives. Down at the train station she and my father have window boxes, hanging baskets of flowers, and even six long planters of flowers along the edge of the bridge.

My mother had started a garden for me in the yard of the train station since I'll be living there this fall. While I was home I planted sunflowers, amaranth, and zinnias along the wall of the train station. At the bottom of the porch steps I planted lavendar, basil, parsley, and sage. In the sandy soil along the top of the creekbank I planted sweet potatoes and watermelons. I started some pumpkin seeds to plant there, as well. Just beyond the evening shade of the sycamore I turned a patch of soil just big enough to accomodate three tomato vines my mother had saved for me. I mulched them with the bamboo leaves we'd clipped off the fresh poles we'd cut for trellises. We transplanted big clumps of black-eyed susans to the front of the guard rail leading to the bridge. Over in front of the gazebo I began guiding volunteer trumpet vines up a prexisting metal framwork to form a shady arch. I meant to plant some winter squash for myself before I left but didn't get the seeds started in time. At least my mother will have a crop to share up at the house.

I left Pennsylvania on a Saturday and arrived in Corvallis late at night. The next five days were an exhausting blur of sorting, packing, recycling, distributing, and trashing the entire contents of the house I'd leased for the past year. I had "inherited" the lease from somebody who had "inherited" it from somebody else, and I was left with several year's-worth of at least a dozen different tenants' discarded or forgotten furniture and knick-knacks. The process of cleaning the house was a chore from hell, but it was aided, at least, by Andy, the one remaining subletter. Thankfully, he'd begun getting rid of furniture months beforehand, and had already made several trips to the dump.

On the morning before the landlord came to walk through, I swept every room, wiped down walls and sills, vaccumed the stairs, and hand-mopped every floor on my knees. I scrubbed the refrigerator inside and out until it shone so immaculately white that I felt I was gazing upon something from another world. We swept and dusted the basement, carting out a decade's-worth of dirt and grime. I wiped down the washer and drier and emptied the lint traps. In the kitchen I washed every shelf and every cupboard door. I scoured the stove burners and ran the dishwasher. I scrubbed the bathroom with bleach and polished the mirror.

Once the house was finished, I locked the doors and went into the garden. Andy helped me empty the last of the compost around the roses and then he rolled up the wire and put it away in the garage. I pruned the rose bushes and weeded around the garlic. I swept off the front and back steps, hosed dirt of the side of the house, and raked the yard. I swept the garage and put the few remaining items into their places.

Andy spent the day running our final errands (good will, recycling, the co-op, the hardware store) and carefully packing all of his belongings into the back of his truck. Once his boxes were packed, he managed to tie our tandem, his commuter bike, and my motobecane onto the top and over the bumper. The resulting sight was something so purely country we were almost embarrassed to drive out of town.

The landlord arrived and took our keys. We showed him the sketchy wiring in the basement and the broken light fixture upstairs. He offered us the roll of aluminum foil we'd left in the pantry cupboard. We admired the mimosa tree in the front yard, he shook our hands, and we headed off to our truck. "Have a nice life," he called after us. "Thanks," we said, as we climbed in.

The truck engine started without complaint and we drove out of town looking straight ahead of ourselves.

Three Photographs

2010-06-13T12:42:00.000-07:00

An apple pie I baked for Yellow and Papa Joe last week.

Papa Joe and I went to watch the Music Country Grand Prix in Franklin.

I biked past these signs several weekends without understanding why I should be at risk. Then, one morning on a work day, I biked through while the men were present and understood: they were all dressed in horizontally striped black and white uniforms.

Storm and Sky

2010-06-09T18:56:00.000-07:00

Today two storms raged through.

The first hit early this morning while I was cycling back into town with my neighbor. We'd been watching the dark horizon for a good hour, and then suddenly the lightening was overhead and the rain was crashing down and we were totally enveloped. I knew we were inviting danger but I laughed the whole time. We pulled over once we got back into town and waited it out under the awning of a store displaying frilly pink costume dresses for little girls in its windows. We were soaked to the core and were stiff and cold when we got back on our bikes to ride the last several miles to our doors.

The second storm came just after Yellow and Papa Joe and I arrived at the optometrist's office for Papa Joe's appointment. Yellow and I were working on a crossword and I asked her to give me a seven-letter word for "not kosher."
"Look at the rain," she said.

When it was time to head back to the car, we hung back in the doorway. The rain had subsided a bit after the initial downpour, but now it was getting heavier again.
"We'd better wait," said Yellow.
"Can we make it?" asked Papa Joe.
"There's an umbrella in the trunk," I said, "I'll run get it."

"Oh, no," said Yellow, "it's raining too hard."
"Maybe we should sit down and wait ten minutes," said Papa Joe.
"I can get it," I said, "it's not far."
"No, no," said Yellow, "you'll get wet."

"Am I a chauffer or am I a coward?" I roared into the wind as I bolted from the awning toward the car, pressing the open-trunk button on the keychain as I ran. The trunk popped open and I thrust in my hand, blindly seized the golden handle without even a glance, pivoted on my toes, and sprinted back toward the building as I unfurled the umbrella above me--a wind-whipped standard of classic yellow and white pie wedges, like something out of a beach scene.

I put my arm around Yellow's waist and held the umbrella over her head as I led her to her seat. The rain was torrential! Papa Joe braved the water next, clutching his bag of complementary eyedrops to his chest. Finally we all three were safe in the car, gasping and sputtering.

"I've been rained on again," I said, "I'm wet. It's the second time today."
"We'd better wait to go," said Yellow, "until it eases off a little."

********

After dinner we took our walk. The storm had brought a large limb down from our neighbor's tree. "That branch used to brush our heads," said Yellow. The Tulip Poplar leaves all down the street were frozen sideways, as if stubbornly determined to point out the direction the rude wind had blustered off in. The Petunias echoed the leaves, each tiny face turned down pathetically in the same direction, away from the storm's onslaught. I thought of herds of horses in the rain, when they all turn their tails to the wind and bow their heads.

Once Yellow and Papa Joe had settled back into their lawn chairs, I took my second round. Traveling up the block in back I found a sodden birdnest collapsing on the sidewalk beneath a tree. I gathered it and settled it up against the edge of the grass. Just beyond I found fragments of bright blue eggshell, and the greater part of an egg, washed perfectly clean by the heavy rains. I put the shell back into the nest and continued on.

The sky was incomprehensible. I passed a woman with a dog and I said "look how strange the sky is." She turned to look behind her, where I was looking, and said "oh, yes, it's beautiful."

I kept watching the sky and I began to dawn upon the realization that it was verbally indescribable. What could I say? That it was "cherubim?" That it was "layered?" That I saw "pink spires?" That I didn't understand what it was telling me?

Several years ago I read an old book called "Finding Your Way on Land or Sea." I think I found this book on a shelf in the train station. One thing the book described was reflections the sea and landmasses cast in the sky, and how you can read reflections in the sky when you are out at sea. This idea changed my perception of the sky. Even though I cannot read a sky, I know that some people can, and even more people probably could a long time ago, when they paid closer attention to such things. I imagine there is a kind of sky language, written in moisture and colors, and it can be read, perhaps, the way one might read animal tracks or ocean waves, seeing trails and signs and possibly predicting what will follow.

I think I don't know the sky well. Maybe I move too much--it is so different in different places. And I think I know why I can't describe it. I can describe an ocean because I've been in one. I've seen it. I've touched it. I've smelled it. I've tasted it. I've heard it. I haven't spent my life next to it, but I've been immersed in it for very short periods of time. And so I have lists of concrete words waiting for me to cast into it from the shore: gray, foamy, rolling, clear, loud, cold.

But the sky... I've spent so much more time with the sky than the sea, really -- I see it every day. Perhaps I could even go so far as to claim it's the only constant sight in my life and even the lives of my ancestors. What else accompanies us day and night? Trees fall down and rot, rivers change course, landscapes change. Mountains may seem constant during our lives, but even they are something we can walk away from: we cannot walk away from the sky, it's with us day and night.

I can't go into the sky. I can fly in an airplane, but I can't fly into it myself. I think if I flew into it, it would recede anyway, like mist. Sky is something we look through, rather than at, I think, anyway. Perhaps we look at clouds, because they stop our eyes from looking beyond them--they are so dense with water.

The sky might come down to us, on occasion, on those autumn mornings we wake up and find ourselves in a wet, white cloud. And on summer evenings when the mist layers a foot off the surface of the fields. It comes down to us when we're floating on our backs in the water or lying out in the grass in a wide open field. We can climb mountains and go into the sky that way, I think, or at least come nearer to it.

But for the most part, it's untouchable. Strange, that it's so distant, when it's always with us. The sky remains; it's inevitable. The sun rises each day; it's inevitable. The stars show up each night; it's inevitable.

Three Weeks and All is Well

2010-05-25T18:51:00.001-07:00

Today was beautiful. After dinner Yellow and I pulled Papa Joe outside for a walk around the block.
"We'll eat chocolate muffins when we get back," we told him.

As we headed up the hill, we saw our neighbors Mark and Patti coming out with their golden retriever to go for a walk as well. We called hello across the street and they waved back.

A little further along we passed a man mowing his grass with one of those muscle-powered, engineless, whirring machines.
"You have such a nice lawn mower," I told him, and Papa Joe and Yellow paused with me to watch. He stopped at the end of a row and wiped his brow.
"I have a very small yard," he said.
"It makes a lovely sound," I said. He smiled.
"And I don't have to walk behind in the gas," he said. "Some guys in a big SUV stopped to watch me a few weeks ago; I think they thought I was crazy."
"Well I think it's a pleasure to see," I said as we started walking again, "I appreciate it."

A few houses beyond we paused again to see how the oriental lily buds were coming.
"Just another day or two," Yellow said.
"Maybe tomorrow," I said.
"I'll have to come snatch it," Yellow said.
"Oh no you won't!" Said Papa Joe, "you've got to leave off at that!"
"Every time I see petunias for sale," I tell Yellow, "I almost buy a pot because I figure if I plant them in our front yard, maybe you'll stop going next door to pick the neighbors' flowers." Yellow chuckles and Papa Joe shakes his head.

Across the street we see a father carrying his son around on his hip. His son is probably six or seven. The father calls out to us:
"I don't usually carry him around like this--he just wants to see what it looks like from this high up!" We laugh.
"That's great!" I yell, remembering all of the times I've climbed onto tables and into trees to find a new perspective, "it makes a big difference."
"He can see the tops of the bushes from up here," the father yells back, "he's never seen them before."

When we get to the corner, Yellow and Papa Joe congratulate each other on making it to the top of the hill. We turn and cross to begin our descent along the southwest side of the block. I look over to the white house opposite to see if the dogs are in the upstairs window. Every time I pass I see two little dogs in the window, peering down. The shutters are closed. The owners of the house are sitting in lawn chairs outside their garage.
"Your dogs," I call, "they aren't in their window! I always see them in the window!" The woman hops up and looks up at the window, too.
"Oh, the shutters are closed," she says, "but they're in there." She waves and we continue.

As we round the third corner and see our garage peeking around the curve in the distance, Papa Joe shuffles a little faster.
"Almost home," he says.
"Chocolate muffins," I say.
"Yummy for the tummy," Yellow says.

I gasp.

"Hey guys, I'm pretty sure I saw a container of cool whip in the freezer. I think we should put it on our chocolate muffins tonight."
"Ooh," says Yellow, nodding.
"Unless," I say abruptly, "the container is actually full of tomatoes." Papa Joe doesn't like tomatoes, and he often laments the dozens of little containers and baggies of frozen homegrown tomatoes that have been (for years) taking up freezer space.
"It probably is," says Yellow bursting out laughing. Papa Joe and I laugh too, and since our collective balance isn't that good, we all sway a little and weave as we shuffle along.
"I bet we look pretty pickled," I think to myself, using a new descriptive I've learned from my grandmother.

We pass a driveway full of bikes and rollerskates.
"A four-bike family," says Yellow. Some neighbors poke their heads of of their garage to say hi.
"We might need to borrow a bicycle," calls Papa Joe, "we're not sure if we can make it home or not."
"No bother," says the lady, "just jump in the back of my car and I'll drive you."
We wave goodbye and keep moving. We're getting pretty close now. We cross the street, walk across the driveway, and Yellow sits down in a lawnchair at the edge of the garage.
"I think I'll sit here a little while, Joe," she says, looking across the lawn.
"Don't forget we have those muffins to eat," says Papa Joe, leaning against the car.
"Look at that moon," says Yellow, "it's full!"
"Not yet," says Papa Joe, "it's still got a lump on one side."
"Fireflies!" I exclaim, seeing one rise off the lawn. "The first fireflies!"

I tell Yellow and Papa Joe how Andy has never seen fireflies and how I was trying to describe them to him one day and discovered that he didn't know they blinked. I guess he thought they kept their lights on all of the time. "No no," I had explained to him, "they blink. Usually they flash while they're rising up in the air. It's really beautiful when they're really dense over a field, because all of the blinks are rising up, and you can almost confuse them with stars."

A woman comes hurrying across the darkening street. She's carrying a magnolia branch with an enormous white blossom nestling in the waxy green leaves. She bends down to Yellow in her chair and hands it to her.
"Cut the stem off and put this in a bowl of water; it will open tomorrow. It smells fantastic. I'm Carolyn," she says, looking at me and offering her hand. "I'm from next door."
"I've heard lots about you," I tell her, "especially how much you--"
"--love gardening," she finishes, cutting me off. "Yep, I love it."
"I'm April," I say.
"She's our granddaughter," says Yellow.
"Nice to meet you," says Carolyn, "we love Joe and Ann. Great neighbors." She hurries off to finish pruning.

I see the neighbors are putting out the trash cans, so I walk around the corner to get ours just as I hear a fellow call out: "You guys have trash this week? Need a hand?"
This is Carolyn's husband, Randall, and he comes over and introduces himself and then he and Papa Joe tease each other for a while until he heads off to pile more brush along the curb for Carolyn.

"Ann," Papa Joe says, "you can keep sitting there, but April and I are going to go inside to eat our chocolate muffins. You can watch us if you want, but we won't make you move."
"I'm coming," says Yellow, "I'm coming."

************
I put a muffin and a scoop of whipped cream on each plate and put the plates on the table. Papa Joe is in the bathroom, so Yellow and I dig in.
"I don't know what I was thinking," I say after a bite of spongy cool whip. "Why did I scoop out cool whip when we have ice cream in the freezer?"
Yellow looks at me.
"We have ice cream?"
"Yup."
"What kind?"
"Chocolate chip and strawberry."
"That sure would be good," she says.
"Yes, it would," I agree.
We pause and look at each other.

"Umm... do you want some?" I ask. She gives a Yellow giggle.
"Yes," she says, nodding, "I think I would."

I'm just opening the lids when Papa Joe arrives at the table.
"Which flavor?" I ask Yellow, "or do you want a little of each?"
"I'll take both," she says.
Papa Joe decides he'll have both flavors, too.
I figure I may as well join the majority.

*******

This afternoon we went to a doctor's appointment and all three of us sat down to fill out paperwork. Yellow looked over at us.
"What is today's date?" she asked.
"The twenty-fifth," said Papa Joe.
She hesitated, and kept watching us.
A moment later, she asked again, "What is today's date?"
"May twenty-fifth," I said.
She looked at me with a rogueish twinkle in her eye before clarifying, slowly and deliberately, "what year?"

Gruel for Dinner Upon Request

2010-05-20T17:47:00.001-07:00

Tonight's dinner was a little wild, in a kind of unwild way. I came in late after delivering a load of hay to Honeychild. A fellow in the neighborhood agreed to haul the hay in his truck for me, but he had to drive my bales through a muddy ditch and across a small stream, and he (unfortunately) idled in the muddy spot while waiting for me to open a gate. Luckily I am 90% muscle (right?) and 10% bone (think crowbar) and I pushed him out and got very spattered with black mud. I am relieved, though, that Muley has another dozen bales stored overhead.

So I came in late and mudspattered and had to clean up a little before starting dinner. My grandfather had eye surgury today, so we joked that I'd better feed him something really easy to eat, like gruel. I decided I'd make some split pea soup. But what to go with it? I wanted to make scones, but I used our last half pound of butter (yes) making cookies last night and again this morning (yes). So I sat down with my favorite cookbook, "Best Lost Recipes" from NPR, and began perusing. Quickly, because it was almost 5:00 and I usually try to have dinner on the table by six o'clcok.

One of the first recipes was for a deviled egg recipe called "Angry Eggs." I'm not sure why, but boiled eggs seemed to make sense to me alongside split pea soup, so I hopped up and got six eggs boiling. Then I got my peas boiling, too, and sat back down. A few pages further I found a recipe for kichel, a Jewish sweet cracker I'd never made before. This recipe called for lots of grated onion. My grandfather loves onions, and I like onions too. Done. I had vegetables, meat, and bread. Well... peas, eggs, and crackers. Close enough.

I immediately started on the kichel. I was in a blazing hurry. First I had to grate an onion, a tearful job. Once the eggs were done boiling I cooled them off and set them aside (the peas kept boiling away) and got back to my crackers, which involved, eventually, lots of flour and rolling with the rolling pin. And parchment paper and cookie sheets and brushing them with sugar water and salting them and finally sticking them in the oven, right about the time I noticed the peas were done, eek! I hadn't been able to remember the source of my usual pea soup recipe, so I'd used the closest at hand: a vegetarian version from Mark Bittman. Peas, water, salt, pepper. Done. Ok. Thanks for making it easy, Mark. I whisked it up and let it sit.

The deviled eggs were the quickest deviled eggs I think the south has ever seen. I mean, I cracked those buggers and peeled them and sliced them and dumped out their yolks about as fast as you can say "grandpa so-and-so's angry eggs," which was the name of the recipe. And then I clicked a set of measuring spoons into my left hand and the world swerved into a zone of rough approximations: this scoop of that, and that scoop of this, and a couple half scoops of this one. And some extra horseradish. And then mash mash mash! Shovel it back into the eggs because the oven is beeping and the crackers are done!

"Yellow, Papa Joe, three minutes until dinner!" I holler through the doorway.
"What? We hear you shouting, but what did you say?"
"Dinner, two minutes!"
"Okay, okay, we're coming..."

Splash glasses of iced water on the table, refold the napkins, forks on the left, spoons on the right, plates out, crackers on the platter, eggs to the table ("oh boy!" says Papa Joe with a delighted look on his face), soup in the ladle, ladle in the bowl, ("Speedy Gonzales!" they say, watching me), oven off, burners off, bowls to the placemats--

Grace.

Papa Joe makes grace go on longer than any of the other graces we've had. He's glad his surgury went well. Yellow and I say a loud amen and we all dig in.

Happy Mule, Happy Girl

2010-05-16T11:12:00.001-07:00

Photos soon...

An Unusual Dream

2010-05-11T18:24:00.000-07:00

Last night I dreamt about a world filled with birds. In this world, people watched birds for guidance. The birds were messengers, of a sort, or they were foreshadows, maybe. I remember reading about augurs years and years ago--these were people who watched the birds for signs, believing that they were demonstrating messages from the gods or hinting at fate, I'm not sure.

In my dream I was floating on the surface of a pond, watching a bird build a nest beneath a footbridge. I wasn't floating in the water; I was resting upon its surface and was completely dry. The bird looked like a long-tailed mourning dove. The nest it was building was also resting upon the surface of the water. Soon a second dove joined in. I found I wasn't alone on the surface of the water.

Later in my dream I met a blue and gold macaw. He was in a large, old fashioned parrot cage, and handwritten poems, all devotional verses to him, were hanging on strings inside, and were perferorated around the edges where he had pierced them with his beak. I took him out and he climbed up on my shoulder and started mumbling. I didn't understand him, but I also knew he was somebody else's guide, not mine.

In the third part of my dream I was in a courtyard surrounded by freestanding shelves, cabinets, and doors, positioned randomly among trees and shrubbery. The periphery was a dense wall of fog. Every door I opened revealed shelves of food rations. I knew there wouldn't be enough for everybody, so I announced to the invisible general public that I would voluntarily go without my share in the hopes that at least a few others might survive.

Adjustments

2010-05-07T18:23:00.001-07:00

It's a strange year of this and that I'm having. A few months here, a few months there, a few months somewhere else.

I remember what drives me mad about living in a developed area. It's all of the cars. All of the all of the all of the cars. Radiating heat. Fumes. Bumped up against each other about as tightly as one could possibly fit them at high or low speeds without actually touching each other. Long traffic lights. Cars backed up for long distances. Silver cars, white cars, black cars, green cars, cars of all color, age, size, style, weight. It's a car culture.

Oh, do I miss the bicycle-happy streets of Corvallis and the foot-filled streets of Montpelier. It's funny, though, or tragic, because it's mostly in these unbearable CAR situations that I remember how important it is NOT to drive. Nothing makes me long for my bicycle more intensely than a really disgusting traffic jam.

If there's one silver lining -- no, no, no, make that a GRAY lining -- to the absurd intersection homing between me and my mule, and the heat, and the congestion, and the longer-commute-than-I'm-used-to, it's that my vegetable oil fuel tank is more useful here than it was in Oregon. In Oregon Muley was just a few miles away, and by the time my car was warm enough to ask for veggie oil, I was already there. That drive was short, but the highway was too exciting for me to bicycle.

The commute here will be WONDERFUL on a bicycle, as long as I can acquire a high-visibility body suit complete with a high-visibility protective bubble. I mean, the traffic is fantastic. Actually, I think it's just completely normal traffic---for the east coast. But having been gone for a little while, oh, oh, oh, it's enough to make me want to scream.

But once I get past the traffic and into the country (three miles out) the ride will be absolutely magnificent. I haven't biked it yet because the long drive here from Oregon landed me rather harshly on antibiotics and so I'm not only temporarily photosynsitive, I'm also, amazingly, ligament-sensitive. This particular antibioitic is not only anti-infection, but anti-exercise, too. Only a few more days and I'm free, thank goodness, to zoom my dear Trekkie bike all over Davidson county. Davidson? I don't even know where I am.

I'm going to post on ad on Craigslist for vegetable oil -- once I get my bike tires pumped and my BenZy tank full of oil, I'll really be ready to crank. Eat my french fry fumes, you traffic jams! Watch me spin by on my pedals! Watch me pass you all, bwa hahahaha!!!!!

You know what I REALLY want... a little trailer so I can haul the groceries home. Yesterday I walked from my grandparents' house to Tractor Supply Company to look at some equine products. Well, Yellow and Papa Joe thought I was a little crazy for even making an attempt. TSC can't be more than a mile and a half away -- but it was mid-day and HOT as the devil's britches -- well, I got up to the Mack Hatcher and Columbia junction and I'll be darned if there wasn't even a cross walk. Well heck. I had heat exhaustion AND I had to navigate a (how-many-lane?) wiiide intersection, too? Well, I made it without getting struck down. And I made it home, too.

Tomorrow I am taking my grandparents to the Franklin Farmers Market so we can get some eggs and asparagus and exercise and lettuce and everything else that is wonderful and fresh.

Just in Time....

2010-05-02T10:27:00.000-07:00

Well, we got to Nashville, TN, just in time to get stranded. We're safe in a hotel, but all of the surrounding roads seem to be blocked by police, floods, or both. Our hotel room is leaking water on the side, but at least we have electricity and free wireless internet! Andy's flight rescheduled for tomorrrow, as the airport is completely inaccessible.

On the Road Again

2010-04-29T19:28:00.001-07:00

With the saddest glances behind...

Honeychild Cleared

2010-04-12T15:58:00.000-07:00

The vet came out today to examine Honeychild. Since Honeychild is, yes, "livestock," she has to have a 30-day Health Certificate to travel between states. After some prodding, listening, and looking, the vet nodded his head and declared her fit for transport.

Honeychild is, in fact, happier than I think I've ever seen her. She is so excited about spring. She also seems better behaved than ever -- I think she's trying to be especially good for fear I'll leave again.

Because I've had more free time this month than I've ever had in Oregon, I've gotten to spend more leisure time with Honeychild. I give her a good thorough brushing every morning before letting her out into her field, where she promptly drops to her knees and rolls in the biggest patch of mud she can find. She's shedding out nicely and her dapples are already putting on their summer shine.

Yesterday Andy and I saw a bald eagle soaring over her paddock when we pulled up. Today I didn't see the eagle, but I saw three red-tailed hawks circling instead. I also saw a slug that was at least six inches long.

The vet asked if Honeychild and I were planning on riding to Tennessee. "No," I said, "we're going by diesel engine. But if we decide to come back, we'll ride."

Coffee, Norton, and Me

2010-04-05T16:25:00.000-07:00

I've been back in Corvallis for about 48 hours, and I've spent at least 40 or 42 of those hours clinging to my space heater. Despite my efforts at integrating my body into the space heater, and despite my long johns, scarf, and sixteen cups of tea, I've still come down with a cold.

I went to the grocery store today and bought a box of tissues and gallon of corn oil. Tissues for me, corn oil for Muley. Muley lost a little weight while I was gone. Poor dear. As much as I'd like to believe she lost her appetite because of my absence, I think it's actually the green grass's fault. I believe she is so smitten with the fresh green grass, as limited as her access to it is, that she feels the need to demonstrate her preferences by snubbing her hay.

****

This morning I took a walk across campus. The green grass was so green and the air was so fresh, I found myself laughing aloud. I was wearing my pink rain boots and several blocks from home I surprised myself by jumping up and down in a puddle. I really hadn't planned it -- I was just walking past a puddle, and then next thing I knew, I was jumping in it. I laughed some more and waved my yellow dinosaur umbrella around for good measure. Then I pulled myself together and continued on my way home.

But not before I noticed the rhododendrons. The air is so fresh today -- every day -- that I could smell the wet rhododendron blossoms when I walked past them. I think I must have gotten used to the city air in Chiayi, because this morning I felt so satisfied taking huge gulps of air. It tasted so clean and healthy that I felt extremely happy.

More than the air was making me happy, though. I was walking across campus because I had just been to the library. I was in the library because I wanted to check out the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry. While I was in the library I also chanced across a magnificent collection of Chinese poems put together by Kenneth Rexroth, and I had just spent ten or fifteen minutes reading these poems aloud to a captive audience.

I hadn't originally planned on going to the library when I left home early this morning. When I left home I went to the Beanery and read the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry with half a cup of coffee and half a scone. The introduction was so exciting and fascinating and illuminating that I felt I immediately needed to secure the postmodern edition of the anthology, as well. And so I bundled myself off to the library.

I hadn't really planned on going to the Beanery, either. When I first left the house I went onto campus to use a computer. The Beanery visit was a side-effect of my jet-lag. I woke up at 5:45 this morning and felt ready to start my day. Instead, I spent forty-five minutes enjoying the rising light from my pillow. When I finally parted from my blankets and stepped into the day, I wasn't planning on the Beanery or Norton or the library or puddle-jumping. They were the effect of spring, perhaps.

I think I've found a new favorite recreation in coffee and the Norton Anthology, though.

I visited Muley after dropping off the heaviest of my library books at home. After a thorough grooming, I turned her out on the green grass and read Tu Fu to her while she grazed. I don't think she paid much attention. But that's spring for you.

Happy Rainbow Birthday!

2010-04-01T07:56:00.000-07:00

What is in the box, Joe?

A cake??? With an apple on it??? It must be for me!

And I am 42 years old today, that's right! It's funny, how Joe turned 24 last month, and I'm turning 42 this month...

We are so happy and we are so excited to cut the cake open. Because what is inside? Can you guess?

Taro pudding is inside! And vanilla pudding!!! And isn't it the best cake you've ever tasted? Yes, that's right, with coconut trim and dark chocolate hiding in the apple outline -- this baby
is a reaaaaal cake.

And how do we feel after eating two slices each? Something like these people... Reaaallly full but we still want more...

HAPPY RAINBOW BIRTHDAY! HAPPY RAINBOW BIRTHDAY!!! 100% HAPPY! 100% HAPPY!!!

Thoughts on Moving... Again

2010-03-30T01:07:00.000-07:00

Admittedly, I shed a few tears in bed each night at the prospect of winding up my two months of leisure and leaving this warm, sunny land, where bananas are for sale on every street corner, haircuts cost $3, and I have a brother I can rendezvous with for lunch every day.

Though the testimony of my tracks may indicate otherwise, I don't like to move around. I like to open new doors ahead, but I hate to close the ones behind. Leaving Taiwan is sad for me: I don't want to go, but at the same time, I'm eager to see Honeychild and eat nachos at Block 15. Going home this fall, as exciting and necessary as it is, requires me to leave Oregon, which is also sad, because there are people and places and things I will miss. Going home is both heart-breaking and heart-mending. I tell myself sometimes I've got to draw in my feelers and concentrate on sinking my roots instead. I like to believe I have a sedentary nature. I see myself as a farmer rather than a wanderer. I like the idea of investing in one place, and of fostering relationships that are generations old.
I live in a privileged time and a privileged place. I can travel back and forth across countries and even continents many times in a single lifetime. I can go to faraway places without bidding a permanent goodbye to my homeland. I can stay in touch with people in other places while I travel. I can live in several places at once. I can shift my life three thousand miles and take more than a bundle of belongings. Generations past faced infinitely more challenges. Generations ahead may, as well. Love it while it lasts? Or don't spoil myself?

The answer to the riddle is go home. Go home for a while to recup and regroup. And then, when the wind blows, see if my roots are strong enough to hold me firm or if it blows me away again...

Build the Fire Higher, Dear

2010-03-25T23:14:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a paper-cut of a hummingbird right now. I was flipping through photographs of hummingbirds online when one photo suddenly jogged my mind home.

We have a screened porch on the front of our family's home in Pennsylvania, and my mother keeps filled hummingbird feeders on the open deck leading to the porch door. The hummingbirds have been coming to these feeders for years. When I was eight or nine I spent a summer dressed in red and pink standing beneath the feeders with my fingers outstretched. It took some patience, but the hummingbirds eventually accepted me and sat on my fingertips to rest when they came to feed.

After a few days I became convinced I could distinguish between the hummingbirds (all ruby-throated). I knew there was a particularly bold male who liked to sit in the oak at the top of the clearing, and I thought he was larger than the others. I called him King something-or-other; I don't remember what. I kept a logbook and wristwatch nearby so I could take detailed notes of all activity. I must have been writing poetry that summer, too, because I remember one poem in particular that I wrote about the hummingbirds and our lilacs.

Another summer a hummingbird got caught on the inside of our screened porch. He pushed his beak through the screen and became stuck; that was how we caught him. Holding a swooning hummingbird in your hands is an act that requires the same degree of breath-stopping gentleness as painting Starry Night on a fly's wing (such painters synchronize their brush strokes with their heartbeats). This is how carrying a hummingbird feels: if you so much as blink your eye, you might involuntarily crush him.

When I held him in my hand I saw he had skinned his beak when pushing it through the screen. A small curl had been scraped back and was hanging near his nostril. A hummingbird with a skinned beak.

But the real memory that looking at these photos jogged is from three summers ago. I was home for a month preparing for my ride west; I suppose it was May. As I was hurrying in through the porch door one morning, something caught my eye, and I abandoned my course to look more closely. Held against the screen by the flow of air, down low near the handle, were two infinitesimal feathers. Hanging in the shadows, they looked charcoal gray. I pulled them carefully away with the tip of my finger and carried them into light. Held to the sun, they crashed and exploded the scarlet light waves with an intensity I've never witnessed in any man-made reflector. They were the red neck feathers off a male ruby-throated hummingbird. Brought back into shadow, they changed back to solid gray without even hinting at their previous brilliance.

Didn't the Aztec kings wear cloaks made of hummingbird skins? These men must have been blindingly radiant in sunlight. There was a huge market for skins in Europe during the mid-1800s. Hummingbirds were so fascinating and beautiful and incomprehensible that they were being caught and slaughtered by the thousands -- or, actually, make that hundreds of thousands.

This brings to mind a quote I read recently in the beginning of a book. I cannot for the life of me remember where I came across this... only that it was last summer. The passage essentially made the observation that some men, faced with nature or wildness, are so overwhelmed with love or passion for it that they can think to express themselves only by firing guns into it. (If anybody can tell me where I read this or where I can find it again, I'd be thrilled.) Is a similar compulsion at play when women demand avian genocide in the name of hat ornamentation? The desperation to possess beauty, I think, is the same.

But back to the radiance of yesteryear: I read in a recent novel (The Kingom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming) that when people began installing electric lights in their homes, women complained that their diamonds didn't shatter the light as well and appeared dull. Diamonds are most brilliant by candles and firelight. I suspect women appear more attractive by firelight, too; nothing hides the flaws so well as shadow, and what warmer light exists than candle-cast? Replacing our fires with wires has probably done a lot to dull our passions across the board; our diamonds weren't the only ones to be sedated.

The feathers I found on the front porch lived for a time in a dish on the windowsill above the sink, where I could move them between sun and shade at my whim. And then I moved them to a more secret place, where they remain -- another token of wildness stolen away into human possession.

A Taste Of...

2010-03-23T06:15:00.000-07:00

A few nights ago I finished reading "Alone in the Kitchen With an Eggplant: Confessions of Cooking for One and Dining Alone," a collection of essays edited by Jenni Ferrari-Adler. I borrowed this book from Joe, who recommended it highly, and who received it himself upon high recommendation. I recommend it highly, too, particularly if meals are anything you ever take note of, or if you enjoy or hate or simply ever experience eating alone. We all do, I think.

I love to eat alone. Sometimes eating alone is really awful -- I hated it most when I was in India, because I ate in so many restaurants and was already a point of attention -- but most of the time, when I have the time to exploit my solitude, I love it.

I love to cook alone, too. I love to be cooked for (though I've committed the cardinal sin of taking it for granted) and I love to cook with somebody else who loves to cook. I love to eat in big groups or in very small ones, particularly if I'm eating with people who love to eat and who love to notice what they are eating and who love to acknowledge that they are noticing what they are eating. I also love to eat slowly, and I love to eat slowly with other people, because then I can be doubly sure that the meal is serving its full purpose and is nurturing more than just our bellies.

My favorite food to eat is food that is identifiable. I can tell what it is, how it grew, or where it came from (air? earth? water?). I love to eat simple food. I can revel in those complicated Indian curries, don't get me wrong, and I can delight in those dishes melded of endless lists of ingredients. Again, I know I have, in my life, complained about these "ornate" dishes, as I have called them, but they have their place on the table.

I love food to be well presented, attractive, and aesthetic on the plate, and preferably the table, and preferably in the entire room, including the window and the view. But that's getting idealistic.

My favorite food of all time is the unassuming sweet potato. I could write 10,000 words in jubilation on the tuber, but I won't. Because I didn't eat sweet potato for dinner tonight.

I'll tell you what I had for dinner tonight, but only because I just read "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant" and it's full of confessions from respected people about some of the scary, strange (and delicious) things they prepare for themselves when left to themselves.

And because I believe that what precedes a meal is relevant (it is always relevant to me), I'll tell you that this meal followed a good, hard, encouraging run (despite the fact that it involved two dozen tedious circumambulations of a running track). And a long drink of cold water preceded it, and some pleasant, if rushed, stretching. I was hungry.

Yesterday I went to the grocery store and I waffled for a good five minutes in front of the canned fish section. If I don't eat enough protein, I start getting Charlie-horses in the night. And I wanted something that wasn't deep-fried. Most of the labeling was in Chinese, but here and there I caught "tuna!" and "sandwich!" in English.

I began thinking about Orchid Island, off the east coast of Taiwan, and how it has several tens of thousands of barrels of radioactive waste leaking into the ocean making people and fish sick. I thought about how the poor tuna have devastated populations and how they eat fishes that have already eaten smaller fishes and how they end up with mercury accumulated in their fat. I began thinking about how the oceans are connected, and began wondering where "American" tuna comes from anyway, and whether it's all the same tuna in grocery stores all over the world.

I decided I should eat smaller fish, like sardines or herring, as I always conclude when examining cans of tuna. I suppose I'm always looking for that label that will say "mercury free! Fished from an ocean with too many tuna! Extremely healthy! This fish wanted to die for you! Eat it and make the world better!" But I never see that label.

I found the familiar square tins - they looked like my kipper friends - but wait, these were all roasted eel! No kipper, no sardines. I went to the dried fish row and got a bag of shiny, dried, very stiff whole fish. They were so stiff I couldn't break them in half. They were mixed with slivered almonds and were about the same size. Very small. With hard, stern little faces. That was something.

And then I thought about my stiff calves again, wuss that I am, and how I wanted to run further tomorrow, and so I went and bought the cheapest can of tuna and thought about my future children and how I was endangering their health by exposing their tiny developing bodies to mercury my own body might be accumulating. What a sell-out.

I pondered vegetables for a good long while and ended up with three enormous and sparkling clean carrots (I think they power-wash them here before scrubbing them with brillo pads) and a bag of four long, thin cucumbers. Then I got some tofu, with a blessed label proclaiming NON GMO!, and soymilk, and hoped that my skin wouldn't turn white and my hair wouldn't start to fall out (isn't that what a high-soy diet is supposed to do to you?). I bought some fruit and crackers and was finished.

So what did I fix for dinner, you ask? Oh, it hit the spot. So I was tired, limber, freshly showered, and hungry. And I cut up half a carrot, and sliced up a whole cucumber, and then I dumped my can of tuna fish on top (which, unfortunately, was canned in some kind of oil), and then I poured raisins on top of that, and then, to top it off, a scoop of yesterday's cold brown rice.

Ahhhh. That was an hour ago and I still feel full, full, full. Aaaaah. Fresh food, fresh food, fresh food. My calve muscles are celebrating in a very laid back, relaxed kind of way. And I enjoyed eating alone because I knew that not many people would ever enjoy eating such a meal with me. And so, in my privacy, I could relish every bite, and didn't have to be embarrassed about such unseemly combinations.

Oh -- and I had some of those little dried fish for breakfast this morning. Pretty crunchy, and they seem to be sweetened with something, but they're alright, as long as you don't look too closely.

TAKE MY POLL

2010-03-22T20:14:00.001-07:00

Right over there ---------> -----> ------->

Too Difficult?

2010-03-22T18:50:00.000-07:00

Perhaps my readership has a patchy history with poetry. I just consulted google analytics to confirm I wasn't the only person reading myself, and I'm not. So I'm revising my assignment. How about ANY kind of writing?

Here's a draft of my own poetry-that-fed-me chronology chart... Beginning with Wordsworth when I was, what, eight maybe? and going up to present, with Booth...

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - William Wordsworth
Ode to the Storm - Pablo Neruda
Grits Ain't Groceries (first verse) - Little Willie John(?)
Butterflies Under Persimmon - Mark Jarman
Bucolic (eek, the moss one, which number?) - Maurice Manning
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
From Blossoms - Li-Young Lee
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry
First Lesson - Philip Booth

Of course, to include stories, nonfiction, the whole gamut, hm, that would be a very different list. I'll have to think about that.

Novels that fed me... the books seem strange to me, now. Some I have reread and haven't appreciated so much the second time. But which ones have fed me, at least once?

Miss Rumphius - Barbara Cooney
Anne of Green Gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
To the Lighthouse - Viginia Woolf
The Summer Book - Tove Jansson

There -- the slimmest list possible, representing childhood, youth, high school, college, and post-college.

Nonfiction.... this is the hardest list. But of the dozens petitioning me for a spot, one stands out head and shoulders above the rest: The Good Life by Helen and Scott Nearing.

So there. There's mine.

Your First Assignment

2010-03-16T22:09:00.000-07:00

(Continuation of/elaboration on my comment on the previous post...)

I’m thinking about this now. I’m thinking about the poems that rise up and speak to us, poems we may have even met before but didn’t see at the time. The poems we fed off of for weeks or months or years. Poems we lived on as children or teenagers or adults, poems we lived on and left or poems we lived on and kept.

Can you remember these poems? Can you list them? Do you remember the order they fell in? Do they form some sort of narrative on their own? Can you… DO anything with them? (I don’t mean the last question in a futile sense, rather, an awed sense of possibility.)

Can I please pose this question to the world? Or, at least, the people I love who I’m interested in who read poetry? Or the people I’m fascinated by and wish I knew? Or a class of students somewhere as an assignment?

I want to see the list alone, first, alone for a good long time -- just titles and names, and then I want a list with commentary, prose, whatever, photographs, anything – some personalized links.

I want lists. Distilled lists – not the 100 poems that fed you. I mean THE poems that were your staple foods. Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty, if you’re voracious. The ones you memorized so you wouldn’t have to spend a day apart. The ones you rewrote in five journals. The ones that were in your mind even in sleep.

I’m working on my list. Some of the poems, of course, were obvious to me right away. Others, I fed off of once, and they’re buried now, but they’re coming back, I’m remembering them.

(((Note: I laughed like a crazy person when I finished typing this post -- and then realized my windows were open and my floor mates probably suspect my sanity now)))

Water to me Now

2010-03-16T19:16:00.000-07:00

First Lesson
Philip Booth

Lie back, daughter, let your head
be tipped back in the cup of my hand.
Gently, and I will hold you. Spread
your arms wide, lie out on the stream
and look high at the gulls. A dead-
man's-float is face down. You will dive
and swim soon enough where this tidewater
ebbs to the sea. Daughter, believe
me, when you tire on the long thrash
to your island, lie up, and survive.
As you float now, where I held you
and let go, remember when fear
cramps your heart what I told you:
lie gently and wide to the light-year
stars, lie back, and the sea will hold you.

Too Much Hospitality!

2010-03-16T05:19:00.000-07:00

This morning art class was held in Talin, a city about a half hour away. During every break, I am given as many cups of tea as I can drink (and sometimes candy, boiled ears of corn, etc). During one of our breaks this morning, one of the students told me that she had prepared a special rice ball for my lunch. She would send it home with me and I could eat it with any vegetables I wanted.

After class the teacher explained to me that I would be riding back to Chiayi with a different student since he had to go teach another class in another city. I was sent off with a Chinese wedding cake.

Then, the students invited me into their house. I was given a bag of nut candies. Then they took me out to lunch and ordered a platter of goose, three plates of sushi, soup, and the Taiwanese staple of cabbage sauteed with garlic. When it was time to go, they had the cook package the left-over goose for me to take home, and then ordered another plate of sushi so that I could bring some back to my brother.

This was the biggest meal I'd eaten in some time. The students didn't speak English, so I couldn't really refuse. When I got home, I fell over onto my bed and slept solidly for at least an hour... I still feel dazed. I brought most of the food over to Joe's to share with him and Fiona.

I'm discovering that it's much easier to just accept generosity than try to wave it away, which is exhausting and typically futile, anyway, and maybe just plain American, I don't know. And, as Joe pointed out, it makes them happy to be generous. So now I just accept the gifts and offer thanks.

Usually I'm not even asked if I want anything I'm just asked WHAT I want -- after class I'm asked "what do you want for lunch, rice, noodles, sushi, or blankety-blank?" And I say "oh, I'm not hungry" and they say "which is your favorite?" "Rice," I say, imagining a small bowl of rice (a completely sufficient lunch) -- but, no, "rice" actually means rice and vegetables and soup and meat.... Just as "noodles" means noodles and eggs and meat and greens and broth and a plate of sliced tofu...

"Wo bao le, wo bao le" I sometimes cry -- I'm full, I'm full. "Ah!!" They smile, pleased, if I say this after a meal.

Good thing I live right next to a running track (which, yes, I often visit twice daily).

Last Night

2010-03-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

I had a dream last night that we had an earthquake. First it was up and down, which I remembered was bad, and then it was side to side, which I remembered was better. I was in my room, a nice white box, and Joe was there, too. The movement was dizzying, and the building swayed side to side further and further until suddenly I realized we were going over sideways, and I was looking down at the wall which was becoming the new floor.

I was sure the room would rip apart, collapse: we would be buried, or Joe would fall to one side and I would fall to the other. So I grabbed onto his hand so we wouldn’t be separated. But the room stayed intact, and things didn’t even fall into a jumble. It kept turning-- walls were ceiling, ceiling was floor, floor was wall – and we were spinning as if suspended in outer space. I lost hold of Joe but that was okay, because we weren't falling; we hovered in the middle, because there wasn’t a direction to fall down to anymore. “April,” Joe said, as if to wake me, “look - we’re floating.”

Fond Recollections...

2010-03-12T05:21:00.000-08:00

Of Vermont and the Bread & Puppet Theater!

Garbage Success!

2010-03-09T06:25:00.000-08:00

A continuation of the previous post...

I visited Joe this evening but made sure to leave for home in time to meet the garbage truck. I couldn’t bear my trash another day. I took my trash out to the curb fifteen minutes early so I would be sure not to miss the truck. As I stood waiting, a woman on a scooter hauling a huge dolly swerved to a halt in front of me. The woman leaped from her seat and began jabbering to me in Mandarin. I shrugged and gave her my “sorry, I’m a confused foreigner” face. She ignored me and kept hollering over the noise of her engine as she began to poke through my trash bags.

“Just trash,” I tried to explain, “no recycling!” She found a flattened cracker box and brandished it at me for several seconds before tucking it back into my trash bag dismissively. I picked it up and offered it to her. She accepted it merrily and tucked it into a bag hanging from her handlebars as she hopped back onto her scooter.
“Thank you!” she called out in English as she swept away.

I waited for another five minutes and then the woman on the scooter came by again. This time she stopped in front of me and cut off her motor. She pulled down her face-mask and began delivering a long monologue, periodically gesturing to me and my trash bags.

“I’m sorry,” I said “I don’t understand.”

She leaped down from her scooter a second time and came over to stand right in front of me. She pointed to my trash again and gave me a long explanation in Mandarin.

“Garbage,” I said in English. “Eight thirty” I said in Mandarin.

After several more extended monologues, much gesturing, and my continued efforts to explain that I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about, the woman decided to help me learn Mandarin. She tapped her handlebar and said very slowly and clearly three words that must have meant “motorbike.” I repeated and she corrected. I repeated and she corrected again. After five or six tries she moved on.

She pointed to my hair. “Taaaang tou fa!” she said. “Taaaang tou fa,” I said. She shook her head no and said it again. I repeated it until she was satisfied enough to move on. She took off her helmet and pinched her hair, which was cut short. “Doooudin tou fa,” she said. We repeated the phrase back and forth as we had the others, and she seemed very pleased. “Shie shie,” I said, in thanks. She stepped back indignantly as if insulted. “Shie shie!? Shie shie!?” I was afraid I had upset her, but then, grandly, in proud demonstration, she said in English “Thank you! Thank you!”

“Uh, yes,” I said, “thank you.”

At that moment the door behind me opened and three fellows from my floor walked out with their trash bags. She scurried over to intercept their bags of recycling. One of the fellows hadn’t sorted his garbage, and the women stood over his bag scolding him loudly as she pointed out the items he could have recycled. Then we heard the garbage truck approaching, and she hopped on her scooter and sped away, hollering a final “thank you!” over her shoulder.

As the trash truck made its way down our block, rolling doors cranked open and an odd mix of men, women, and teenagers issued forth bearing sacks of garbage. An open box truck trailed the garbage truck, and it seemed they were accepting recycling at the back door. A garbage man hung to the back of the singing yellow trash truck, and he took my bags from me and tossed them away into the chomping depths.

Liberation – at long last.

The Issue of Garbage

2010-03-08T22:50:00.000-08:00

The garbage system in Taiwan has been a great puzzlement to me.

I’ve had no choice but to consider garbage very carefully because it has been accumulating in my room for four weeks. I don’t know what to do with it: I haven’t figured out how to get it off my hands. I have three tidy grocery bags full of trash awaiting disposal beside my front door. But dumpster there isn’t, public trashcan there is not, and dispersal by balcony-tossing is simply not a resort I’m willing to accept.

What does one do? I’ve considered sneaking my trash out of my room one piece at a time and casually depositing it in public trashcans, but even those are hard to come by, and such a method would take weeks, at best. Even the 7-Elevens, which seem to grace every third street corner, rarely offer a receptacle.

Some people keep a collection of their personal trash for a period of time as an exercise in waste-awareness. The extremists in this lot will even carry around all of the trash they accumulate during a certain period of time, perhaps a month, so that they are sure they fully understand how much waste is passing through their hands. Also, the people around these practitioners are subjected to the dirty evidence of wastefulness, even if they’d rather ignore such truths. This is a great exercise and I admire those who pay attention to their trash volume: kudos.

I, however, did not intentionally begin saving up my garbage – it’s just been the by-product of my living in an apartment building for the first time in my life compounded with the fact that I can’t speak or read Chinese. I don’t want all of this trash: I just can’t get rid of it. Information about trash collection is indubitably posted somewhere in the building, but, written in Mandarin, it’s of little use to me.

It is true that I could have asked a co-tenant about the proper garbage disposal procedure (and I eventually did), but until the problem began to infringe upon my delicate psyche, I was too shy to broach the subject with anybody I saw wandering in or out of my apartment building. I rarely see other people in my building at all, and I was concerned about initiating a relationship based on garbage. What if this person didn’t speak English? Would I have to imitate a garbage truck? Make garbage truck noises and sing the garbage truck song?* Show him my trash collection? How mortifying!

So I held onto my garbage and decided to conduct my own research. I began collecting clues, compiling observations, assembling evidence, and otherwise scrutinizing the mystifying and, in my mind, inaccessibly complex garbage-disposal system.

*The garbage truck song: Taiwanese garbage trucks blast a very distinctive tune that sounds very much like an American ice cream truck. But don’t get your hopes up: although the streets are packed with garbage trucks, ice cream is almost impossible to find.

Observations Gathered:

1. People will take your refuse and sell it.
When leaving Joe's apartment one evening, he asked me to carry some cardboard down to leave next to the small garbage can in front of his building (why doesn’t my apartment building have a trash can?).
"Just sit it there?" I asked.
"Yes," he said, "you know those people riding around on bicycles loaded with huge trash bags? One of them will take it."
"They’ll just pick it up for you? Why? They don’t look like they work for anybody. Do they get paid?”
"I think they sell it," he said.

2. Joe might be right. Several blocks from my apartment building is a refuse sorting area. It's kind of like an empty lot between buildings, but it has a concrete floor and a roof and is filled with mountains of trash. Whenever I pass during daylight hours, the place is bustling with activity. Men and women come in and out on bicycles and scooters with dollies or carts welded behind. Most of these little vehicles are carrying such towering loads of bottles, cans, cardboard, and other recyclables (on the handlebars and rear rack in the absence of a cart), that they’re about the height, width, and length of Indian elephants. I suspect that these private garbage gleaners might, in fact, be selling their recyclables to the sorters, who probably act as middlemen and resell the sorted sundries to larger recycling operations.

3. Trash cans are hard to come by in Chiayi. I pass about twice as many recycling receptacles than trashcans, but even those are scarce. Thus, I carry most of my trash home with me. I can't just easily chuck it and forget all about it as I can at home.

4. Garbage trucks will accept your trash but will not pick it up. I came to this conclusion after observing a garbage truck at close range. On this particular day, a trash truck and I passed each other in opposing directions. As the trash truck trundled slowly down the street singing its song, shop owners rushed out to throw garbage bags into the back of the truck. No garbage man. No assistance that I could make out. Just shop owners throwing their trash into a truck that could have been remote controlled or following magnetic strips beneath the pavement. The loud song, then, alerted people that the truck was coming. The slow pace gave them time to collect and present their trash.

5. Amendment: Garbage trucks will pick up your trash. Yesterday, while sitting at my desk, I heard a garbage truck approaching. I ran out to the balcony and saw a truck creeping down the alley. This truck had two garbage men and they were picking up bags of trash that had been laid out on the curb. No residents were in sight; only garbage men and the garbage truck. So garbage collectors do exist.

What to do with this information?

Four weeks of frustration and mystery.

Today I heard a truck coming and FLEW out onto the balcony. I really needed to get rid of some trash. The truck was, again, going down the alley, but already it was out of range. I had begun keeping a log of local visits from garbage trucks in an attempt to identify some sort of schedule or pattern, so I added my observations and the time of day.

And then I was blessed -- a fellow down the hall came out of his room and leaned his head out of a window, apparently looking for the garbage truck. I approached.

"Excuse me... do you speak English?" He looked a little startled and nervous.
"Only very little... not well."
"I don’t know what to do with my trash," I confessed. He looked confused. A second fellow came out into the hall and they spoke in Mandarin.
"Is that our garbage truck?" I tried, pointing to the alley.
"No no no," they said, “not ours.”
"What do I do with my trash? Do we have a trash truck, too?"
"Eight o’clock pm," the first fellow said, writing it on his palm with his finger.
"In front or in back?" I asked, gesturing toward the front of the building.
"In front," they told me, nodding, “eight… eight…” They switched to Mandarin and told me the truck would come at eight thirty, which, thankfully, I understood.

"Do I stand there and throw it in the truck when it passes by, or do I just leave my trash on the curb?" I wanted to be prepared, but this question was too complicated, and they shook their heads and shrugged apologetically. I moved on to a new question.
"Does the truck come every night?" They counted days on their fingers and held up various fingers to indicate days of the week, but I didn’t understand.
"One, two, five… Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday...” they told me. “One, two three, four... Six days, six days, eight thirty!"
"Okay," I say, "thanks. Thank you very much." I gave them a big smile and went back to my garbage-laden room, slightly confused but enormously relieved.

Thank goodness -- I would finally be able to free myself of my garbage – I had a date with the garbage truck.

Back in Chiayi

2010-03-07T06:34:00.001-08:00

We spent the last three days in Taroko and Taipei... a few images...

Sunrise above Tiansiang (Taroko National Park).

Flowers outside Longshan Temple (Taipei)

Gouldian Finches caged in a store along "Bird Alley" (Taipei)

A table of fresh birds in a morning market (Taipei)

What Just Happened?

2010-03-04T07:16:00.000-08:00

Joe and Fiona and I decided to take an evening art course at the Cultural Center in Chiayi. I thought the course was in traditional Chinese landscape painting. Maybe I was wrong.

Chris, who flies back to the states on Monday, decided to come with us to listen in on the class. The instructor was shocked when he came in and saw three white people sitting in the front row. He began asking Joe and Fiona lots of questions in Chinese; I have no idea what their conversation was, but the other twenty people in the class seemed fascinated and would periodically erupt in giggles (staring at us the whole while). It was rather awkward for me, I must admit, for I couldn't understand a word.

The instructor began to sketch a photograph of a building as a demonstration, but our presence was too distracting. After about five minutes, he asked Chris if he could paint his portrait, instead. Chris agreed and the class seemed thrilled.

Down Chris sat on a stool, and the student body swarmed around the professor to watch him sketch and then paint. The students asked if they could take Chris's picture. Fiona translated and Chris agreed. Students whipped out cameras and began taking Chris's photo from various angles. One woman took a long video. Gradually, a likeness of Chris began to emerge on the professor's paper, complete with shoulder-length hair, signature skull and crossbones headband, and sunglasses at the collar of his shirt. Periodically the professor would make a comment or explain something he was doing and Joe or Fiona would translate for me.

"Our nostrils are round," he told the class as he added detail to Chris's nostril, "but theirs are rectangular."

When he began adding color to the face, he noted that Chris's face was a little sunburned. "Aren't they afraid of the sun?" he asked Joe.

The class was two hours long and the professor finished the portrait just before it ended. Joe and Fiona came up with a Chinese version of Chris's name so the professor could paint it on the portrait, then he gave it to Chris to take home.

The professor asked if I was available to model for the college figure class he teaches on Tuesday mornings and I agreed. I will get paid! Joe and Fiona told me I get paid more depending on how much skin I show, but I'm not sure if they were serious or not.

Chris and I are heading to Taroko Gorge in the morning and then to Taipei for the weekend (with Joe). Hopefully no more earthquakes! We had three today and one was large enough to be quite terrifying. I hope Mama Earth will hold off on the shuddering for a while.

Love.

Alishan Rocks (and is full of stairs)

2010-03-03T00:58:00.000-08:00

Lantern Festival

2010-03-01T02:28:00.000-08:00

I'm still recovering!

The Lantern Festival, which takes place on the last day of the two-week Chinese New Year celebration, is hosted by a different city each year. I believe that Taipei originally hosted them all, but at some point during the past decade or so, the other cities put out the holla that they wanted the chance to party big, too. Lots of towns (all?) have their own lantern festivals, but the government helps host an official one each year. This year, lucky us, Chiayi was the city chosen to host the official festival.

[One town nearby is renown for shooting fireworks directly into the helmet-clad audience; another celebration in the north releases a mass of candle-powered lanterns into the night sky.]

We decided to walk to the festival from Joe's apartment (several kilometers) but were intercepted about half-way there by a fellow on the sidewalk. He had a walky-talky and began yelling into it just a moment after flagging us down. He had a little folding table, too, set up on the sidewalk, which was bare except for two juice boxes. After relaying what seemed to be fantastically important and urgent information into his walky-talky, he lept into the closest lane of traffic and began waving a flashlight frantically over his head, something like an excited airplane signaller.

Fortune was on our side: a towering bus with lime-green satin window curtains swished to a halt just a few feet from our delighted faces. We climbed in and settled into the extra plush seats and rode in luxury the rest of the way. The ride was free and we were soon deposited in the notable** downtown stadium next to the Festival HQ.

The rest of my tale is rife with armed troupes of boyscouts; wheeling television cameras mounted on cranes; a country's worth of illuminated tigers, pandas, emperors, and lanterns; R-rated puzzles; masses of pressing attendees; and a bounty of food ranging from stinky tofu to taro popsicles (yum!) ---- but I have to go to the grocery store now to buy more toilet paper! Awww man!!! Yes!!! You'll have to wait!

**This particular stadium (arena?) is notable because it's painted in a sort of holstein pattern. Or maybe dalmation -- the black blotches are rather spotty than... blotchy.

To see pictures from the Lantern Festival, check Chris's Flickr link here -- it should take you to a slide show. If you exit the slide show and just visit his general photostream, you'll see lots of other photo albums from Taiwan.

Video from Ocean

2010-02-28T01:23:00.001-08:00

Click on "Joe's Taiwan Blog" link at right to see video footage from Baisha including Joe's remarkable ocean entrance.

We Touched the Tip

2010-02-27T21:07:00.001-08:00

My older brother Chris arrived from LA on Tuesday night. We spent the rest of the week exploring Chiayi and on Saturday we drove to Kanding National Park with Joe and Fiona. The park is pretty large and appears to cover the entire southern tip of Taiwan. We spent midday hiking some trails where we could see craggy coral mounds jutting out of the hillside. We saw a lot of butterflies, too -- apparently 106 species have been identified in the park. We also saw a goat, crab, various insects, and monkeys. The monkeys were a surprise... I didn't know monkeys lived here.

In the afternoon we visited the lighthouse, built by a Brit in 1882, and hiked a trail that goes around the tip of the island. The lighthouse was closed for the holidays, so we didn't get to go inside.

Finally we decided we'd better head to Baisha (white sand) beach, which is on the western side of the tip, to catch the sunset. The beach was lovely -- small and protected -- and hosted a fair number of people on shore but only two swimming in the waves. We arrived about thirty minutes before sunset. The boys put on their suits and jumped right in. I hadn't planned on swimming --- but then a wave caught my foot and it was WARM. So I ripped off my clothes on the spot and dove in. Not all of my clothes. And I didn't dive. But it was lovely, lovely, lovely, warm, clean, translucent blue water. We swam around and completely forgot to watch the sun set... the water was too wonderful.

It took a while to drag Joe out of the water, but when we finally did we dried off and made the long drive back to Chiayi in the dark. We didn't get back to town until after 9, so we stopped downtown and had a late dinner on the patio of a sushi restaurant. Ah, exhaustion... today we're recuping because tonight is Lantern Festival! The town has been prepping all week (and longer, I'm sure). Should be beautiful.

I'm trying to upload more photos, but uploading here takes eons, so they'll be trickling into my picasa album over the next several days. Just click on my "Taiwan" slideshow on the righthand side of this page to view them.

Kenting / Kanding = Southern Point of Taiwan!

2010-02-27T08:30:00.000-08:00

Maybe you can't tell... but that rocky crag we're climbing down was really tall and scary!!!

And speaking of things you can't tell from the photograph... that ocean (which I jumped into about five minutes after taking that photo) is super warm!

Photos From Chris

2010-02-25T23:21:00.000-08:00

Now you can see some good photographs of Chiayi... much better than the ones I took. My older brother Chris, who is visiting for two weeks, took these around town. Last night we celebrated Joe's birthday, so those pictures are included, too.

Fire in the Streets

2010-02-23T01:06:00.000-08:00

On Sunday I left Joe’s apartment rather late at night to walk home. I had tried to translate a Chinese poem into English, and then we had telephoned our parents. It was nearly midnight now, and Joe needed to rise early for work in the morning.

As I left his apartment I noticed that the balmy air smelled strongly of incense. Even the wind carried traces of smoke. At home I associate incense with hemp and tie-dye, but here I associate it with prayer and offerings. In the near and far distance I could hear fireworks booming and crackling. When I turned the corner onto Xinming road, I saw a bonfire. The fire was in a sort of bucket on three legs, and the walls of the container had shapes cut out of it so the body of the fire was visible.

The bucket was placed along the side of the road in the parking lane. A shopkeeper stood in front of the fire, feeding it offerings of paper money. (Paper money, which is currency that wouldn’t work in the shops but is of substantial value to deities, is manufactured and sold in tight bundles and is a common offering in temples and shrines. Yesterday I saw handfuls of it crumpled up and stuffed into the mouths of two stone tigers guarding a temple.)

As I approached, I saw that the shopkeeper had a small folding table set up between his fire and storefront. The table was laden with pyramids of fruit, bouquets of flowers, tall candles, and burning incense. Inside the open storefront and against the very back wall I could see another shrine, this one was larger, ornate, permanent, and I guessed it might be home to a resident deity.

Walking further down the street, I passed more and more fires, some nearly extinguished, some only half built and not yet lit, but all accompanied by a table piled high with offerings. Some shrines were being tended by families, and some just by a single person. In some places I noticed rings of water on the ground, and I saw that during the ritual the people would pour circles around their fires. In front of some shops, the ring of water was the only evidence anything had taken place.

When I got home, I unloaded my arms in my room and took to the streets again. I walked west this time, into a smaller, narrower part of town I hadn’t entered before, where the houses were lower and older and the streets were darker and quieter. Peering down the alleys I saw scattered rows of glowing fires. Passing a large nightclub, I saw several men at work filling an enormous wire can with paper money; their fire would be huge. Three folding tables were joined behind them to hold an enormous spread of fruit, flowers, and incense. Women in short dresses wandered back and forth hanging onto the arms of suited men.

Now and then I saw fireworks explode over the rooftops. Firecrackers snapped and popped like gunfire, sometimes down alleys, sometimes in the main street, sometimes at the base of a bucketed fire. If I hadn’t known the sounds were fireworks, I would have been frightened.

I walked for an hour through the smoky fragrant streets, wondering if I would find my way home but at the same time too mesmerized to try. At some eventual point I found myself on a grassy and treed median with a path running down the center and it felt familiar and so I took it in a roundabout direction and walked until the houses began to feel right again and--sure enough, as I knew I would--I caught a whiff of osmanthus and I knew I was across the street from Joe’s school and that my door was just there in the darkness… and it was.

P.S. Don’t get the wrong idea… the streets don’t usually smell so fine: this was a special occasion.

Tudi Gong

2010-02-21T21:12:00.000-08:00

Well, I thought this was waaaaay too long for the blog, so I decided I'd just email it to my parents. Parents enjoy things like this... long detailed accounts from their children. They said "this isn't too long for your blog! It's interesting!" So, on the chance somebody else has the attention span my devoted parents have, I'm copying it here. Most of the things described are better illustrated in the slide show...

Tudi Gong

On Sunday evening, the first day of Chinese New Year, Fiona’s cousin calls and says she is going to stop by for a visit. We have just finished our dinner and Joe is preparing tea, so we sit down to share several rounds when she arrives.

She is wearing new clothes as dictated by Chinese New Year tradition and has on a brilliant red scarf. Red is a color associated with prosperity. “I’m wearing this for good luck,” she says indicating the scarf, “I need more money.”

Cousin produces a red envelope from her purse to show Fiona. It is decorated with gold script and illustrations of a deity and contains NT$600 (about twenty US dollars). She says something to Fiona in Taiwanese, and Fiona translates. “She wants to get her car cleaned, but her car is bigger than mine so it will be very expensive,” she says, laughing, “so she borrowed this money from Tudi Gong.” “Who is Tudi Gong?” I ask. Tudi, Fiona replies, is a god.

“Tu” means ground or land, and “Di” means earth. Temples for Tudi exist in small towns and villages all over the place, and some large towns or cities may even have ten or eleven temples for him. Tudi Gong is associated with wealth, so he’s a popular god to petition for money. One particular temple in the area, Zi Nan Gong (“purple south temple”), is home to a particularly powerful Tudi, and his money is especially lucky. So lucky, in fact, that he loans it to people in financial need so they can attract more wealth.

People who want to borrow money must first petition Tudi Gong for a loan. They visit the temple and explain why they need money. Perhaps they have no job, perhaps they are ill, perhaps they need to buy something expensive. Then, they drop two wooden blocks on the ground which will indicate Tudi’s response (yes, no, or maybe). If the stones answer maybe, you may petition for a smaller amount. If the answer is yes, the guards of the temple will send you away with money in a red envelope.

Money borrowed from Tudi Gong isn’t spent: it’s put somewhere special where the borrower wants money to accumulate. A bank account or safety deposit box would be a good place to keep it. Borrowers are allowed to keep the money for one year. Once the year is up, the money must be returned to Zi Nan Gong, along with extra money as a thanks and offering. Fiona tells us that people typically return twice what they borrowed.

“What happens if you keep the money and never bring it back?” we ask. Well, you never really get tracked down, she says. So many people make offerings and return extra money that there’s never really a shortage for new borrowers. Most borrowers are pretty faithful about making their returns, though. If they don’t return it, I imagine, they’ll never enjoy prosperity again.

This temple is near where Joe and I and Fiona are going to go camping in a few days, and Fiona says we can stop by to see Tudi if we’d like. I tell them that I need money and I want to petition to borrow some, but they remind me that I’ll have to fly back to Taiwan in a year to return it. Ah well, I’ll just get a job instead.

We camp for two days in the hills of Nantou. Nantou is the only county in Taiwan without coastline. Instead, it’s cramped with soaring lush green hills, at least one snowy mountain, and deep river valleys.

On our way home Fiona asks us if we still want to stop at Zi Nan Gong, Tudi’s temple. We certainly do.

I had imagined a modest temple with small, calm crowd of visitors or devotees. Not at all. As we near the temple, traffic cops begin to control the intersections, guiding lines of cars into various parking areas. We creep through the lots until finally finding a spot. We lock up and take off toward the festivities, umbrellas held defensively aloft against the persistent dreary sprinkle.

The parking lots are separated from the temple by several long chutes of vendors hawking everything from fried mushrooms to fresh cabbages to golden hens to plastic-wrapped umbrellas. Eventually we reach the small piazza in front of the temple. It is packed to the gills with swarming people holding umbrellas, golden hens, and other belongings high overhead to escape the chest-level jostling. We pass a statue of a broken-antlered stag standing watch over a recumbent doe. Just beyond we come upon a monstrous hen that appears to be woven of basketry. She is probably a dozen feet tall from base to beak, and her pedestal is another five feet high. The pedestal houses a cylindrical tunnel, about six feet long and just large enough for ducking and tucking people to pass through. A steady stream of visitors enter on one side and pop out on the other, collapsing their umbrellas as they enter and popping them open again as they alight. Passing beneath the hen is good luck, apparently, so we close our umbrellas and join in.

On the other side of the piazza is a stage where several dozen people are milling about watching the crowd. In front of the stage is another huge wicker construction. From what I can make out, this one resembles an enormous boat; the bow and stern rise higher than my head. Joe says it is built in the shape of some old style of currency. In the center of the boat form, an enormous wicker sphere is skewered on an axis from bow to stern. The sphere is spinning so quickly, I assume it must be plugged in somewhere. Judging by the people reaching out their hands to touch the contraption, I assume it is another objet d’ luck. Fiona explains later that the sculpture is “jin yuan bao,” or, more literally, “golden money treasure” – an ancient style of currency.

We observe the spinning sphere with fascination until the people onstage begin throwing candy into the crowd and a minor riot breaks out, somewhat hindered by the roof of shifting and snagging umbrellas. The umbrellas, previously hoisted high to deflect the rain, are suddenly maneuvered upside down to serve as huge candy catchment systems. A woman nearby notices I’m too stunned to partake in the scramble, so she hands me some candy she’s gathered from the ground.

Our next stop is the temple. As we approach, Fiona tells me to notify Tudi Gong before taking any pictures. “What should I tell him?” I ask. “Tell him you are here for entertainment and would like to take some pictures because you are very interested.” She put her hands together and bows toward the temple. “Ok,” I say, and follow her lead. The crowd density increases the nearer we draw, until finally we are forced to collapse our own umbrellas and press together to prevent ourselves from begin carried in opposite directions.

We push through the crowd until we reach a stand selling incense and paper money. Fiona buys a bundle of incense and gives us six sticks each. She directs us to hold it with our thumbs in the back and our fingers in the front. We’ve seen several huge, ornate urn-shaped vessels in front of the temple, each full of some combination of sand, fire, and incense offerings, and we squirm our way toward the nearest one so we can light our incense. The crowd is too dense for Fiona and me to penetrate, but lanky Joe is able to get his arm through the final barrier of people and sets our incense smoking.

From there we surrender ourselves to the swarm thronging toward Tudi.

We are carried across the first roofed patio and, finally, up a step and into sight of golden Tudi residing in the inner temple. The hardcore petitioners fill the final chamber, and we don’t press that far. Instead, we plant ourselves in the teaming crowd near the door, and Fiona tells us how to address Tudi Gong and shows us the proper way to wave our incense before offering three sticks each into a nearby vat of sand. As we stand near the door I heard a distant clacking noise.

“Do you hear that?” Joe asks me, and I nod.

“That sound is coming from the petitioners,” he explains, “they’re dropping their tiles.” I stand on my tip-toes trying to see, but the crowd is too dense.

The air is so thick with incense that I begin to sneeze. Visitors teeter past holding huge fistfuls of incense aloft, billowing trails of smoke in their wake; ashes crumble and fall onto the heads and shoulders below. We carry our remaining incense back outside the temple to leave in another vat of sand. The huge urns are prickling with incense sticks stuck upright in the sand; temple workers hurriedly empty handfuls of incense and douse them in water to make space for the new offerings.

After offering the last of our incense, we go to stand by a side door to the temple where we can look into the small chamber where Tudi Gong regales in gold. This is where visitors can petition Tudi for loans. Each petitioner stands praying to Tudi with hands folded around a pair of red wooden tiles that fit together like opposing sides of a cashew nut. Once a petitioner has made her prayer and petition, she drops the wooden pieces onto the floor. Depending on whether both tiles land face up or face down, a petition is granted or not. If one tile lands up and one tile lands down, the answer is “maybe” and the petitioner might try again for a smaller amount. Once the petitioners have their answers, they pick up their wooden blocks and leave the chamber to go to the “bank.” This is an adjoining building on the other side of the temple. We go for a visit.

The inside and entry to the loan office is so crowded we can’t even approach. Through the barred windows the room appears to resemble an old fashioned bank complete with clerks standing behind little windowed counters. Fiona tells us there are six windows inside. A petitioner approved by Tudi Gong must go up to a window, report the amount of money he’s been approved to borrow, and then surrender his citizen I.D. number before receiving the approved amount of money in a red envelope. The loans are good for one year.

Outside the loan office, we see more people jumbling past with golden hens. The hens are identical and are each encased in a small glass box about the size of a bread toaster. We saw many of these hens earlier in the throng around Tudi but weren’t sure exactly what they represented. Each hen has three golden eggs resting behind her tail feathers and each glass box has a little window in front of the cage hen’s face. We stop a young boy and his mother to ask if we can take a picture of their golden hen. They agree and tell us that they have had their hen for two years. The hens can be purchased from the temple and are taken home for good luck and to attract prosperity. Every year, however, the hens are carried back to the temple where their guardians wash them three times in the incense smoke and show them to Tudi. Then they can go home again, refreshed.

On our way out of the temple, we decide to get some food. The long lines of booths are irresistible. Fiona buys an enormously heavy bag of dried noodles for home, and then we focus on dinner. We start with a bag of freshly sliced guava with plum powder, and then buy a baggie of deep fried mushrooms. Next comes a cardboard box of sweet gooey sweet potato, and then a big bag of roasted chestnuts. Our final acquisitions are three skewered slices of stinky tofu.

Stinky tofu is really, really stinky. I mean, this is stinky stinky stuff. It’s not stinky like dead animal stinky, it’s stinky like live animal stinky. It’s rank. Joe explains to me that stinky tofu is tofu that was busy fermenting until somebody decided to fry it up and put it on skewers and sell it to innocent passersby. Like us. Actually, stinky tofu is a bit of a delicacy and, though I don’t find it especially delicious, it does taste a lot better than it smells. Hours later, my clothes still smelled like stinky tofu.

Photos are Up hup hup!

2010-02-20T06:42:00.000-08:00

Check 'em out. Forty photographs.
Click here.

Going Camping

2010-02-16T16:52:00.000-08:00

We're going camping... I'll try to get photos/videos up soon, but I need to get a camera cable... I'm having a great time have mostly caught up on my sleep, I think, mostly, mostly. I think that where we're going... we'll get to see sheep dancing!

Betel Nuts and Traffic Jelly, or, "First Time, Maybe Die!"

2010-02-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

Welcome to Taiwan.

I arrived in Taipei Saturday afternoon and took a train south to Chiayi with Joe. Fiona picked us up at the train station and brought us to her family's home for the Chinese New Year feast. The feast was already laid out when we arrived, so after some brief greetings and introductions, we sat down to eat. That's when Fiona's brother passed me a betel nut.

BETEL NUT: An Introduction

During my flight from Seoul to Taipei, I figured I'd better start reading up on Taiwan. Out came my glasses and Rough Guide. Betel nut, according to the guide, enjoys "almost totemic status" in Taiwan. Betel nuts are the seeds of the betel palm, and apparently provide a stimulating effect on their chewers (chewees?). The betel nuts here are wrapped up in folded leaves and come in different flavors (mint? anise?). My Rough Guide notes that they are notoriously sold by scantily clad women standing in glass boxes and that truckers are the most devoted customers. Well. (When I ask Fiona later if this is this is true, she says enthusiastically "yes, spicy betel nut sisters!")

The betel nut is chewed but never swallowed. The bright orange juice isn't swallowed either -- it gets spit out. Yuck. And it's apparently a carcinogen. Taiwan has one of the highest rates of mouth and throat cancer in Asia, and the doctors are saying the nut is to blame.

CHEW LIKE GUM, SPIT SPIT SPIT

When we arrived at Fiona's, I immediately noticed that her brother had betel nut teeth. By this I mean that they were orange. He was a chewer. In his pocket, Brother kept a plastic baggie full of beautifully wrapped betel nuts. He passed one nut to me and one nut to Joe, and indicated we should chew away. The mood of the moment suggested it would be rude to decline, so I suggested that we might save them for the end of the meal, and he nodded approvingly. We placed the betel nuts to the sides of our plates.

AN INTERJECTION: After forty-odd hours of travel, I mostly wanted a water bottle and a bed -- not a potentially cancer-causing betel nut.

Midway through the meal, somebody passed me a dish and I heard something fall onto the floor. Could that have been my betel nut? A little while later, I noticed my betel nut was indeed missing. Hmm. I glanced around the floor but didn't see my missing nut. Maybe the whole thing would be forgotten. Maybe nobody would notice.

Wrong. On a trip to the sink, Fiona's sister-in-law came across my missing betel nut half way across the kitchen floor. Damn. But no -- she didn't link it to me, instead she delivered it back to Brother, chiding him him in Taiwanese (presumably for carelessly loosing his nuts). Saved!

Wrong again. Once we couldn't fit any more food into our stomachs (wo bao le! wo bao le!), the table noticed that my betel nut was missing. "I think it fell on the floor..." I admitted. No matter, Brother pulled out another. He said something in Taiwanese. Fiona translated -- "he says you'd better enjoy them, he doesn't give many away."

I stalled for time by asking questions.
"Will I be able to sleep if I chew this? Isn't it a stimulant?"
Nonono, they said, it would just warm me up.
Joe and I looked at each other across the table. He was holding his betel nut between his thumb and forefinger, about halfway to his mouth.
"So I just chew it?" I asked.
"Just chew, don't swallow."
"So I spit? Where should I spit? What do I spit in?"
Somebody handed me a small clear plastic cup.
Great.
Joe and I eyed each other again.
"How long do I chew? Until the juice is all gone?"
"Like gum, just chew, spit, chew! As long as you want!" They were excited about this.

I placed the wad gently in my mouth on the left side. Joe did the same. We bit down. We chewed. Our eyes got big. We spat. We chewed.

Everybody in the room was anxiously awaiting our reactions. After about fifteen seconds of chewing, Joe said "it's getting warm."

Sure enough, my mouth was beginning to radiate heat. I spat another gush of orange juice into my cup. Joe did the same. Fiona began laughing. "Your teeth are orange!" I'm sure they are, I thought.

The heat spread rapidly down into my neck, across the right side of my chest, and the whole way down my right arm. My fingers were glowing within seconds. My whole face felt warm and red. I looked over at Joe and he looked like he might be about to break into a sweat. "It's really hot" he said. It wasn't spicy at all -- it wasn't like that -- it was like plugging in an electric blanket and then swallowing it.

I chewed a little more until I thought I might have a heart attack and then spat the entire wad into my cup. Joe held out for another minute or two before letting go of his wad, too. We asked for water so we could rinse and spit, cleaning out our mouths.

Fiona's sister was laughing. I told her how quickly the heat had traveled through my blood and how quickly I was cooling down since I'd spat out the nut. "Yes," she said in broken English, "your heart will beat very very hard. The juice -- some people die if swallow juice the first time. Heart stops!"

"What?" I cried. "We could have died if we'd swallowed the juice by accident?" She thought my dismay was very funny. "Yes, first time, maybe die!" Fiona agreed with her. The juice wasn't the only danger she and Fiona went on to tell us: any betel nuts harvested growing upside down would kill us, too. Unless you harvest the nuts yourself, you can't be sure you're getting nuts that grew in the right direction.

Well, Joe and I lived, and -- needless to say -- we haven't had any betel nuts since.

Oh -- and traffic jelly... when we got caught in traffic, Fiona said hesitantly "we are in traffic... traffic..."
"Jam," Joe said, "a traffic jam."
"That's right," said Fiona, "not jelly."

I made it!

2010-02-14T00:36:00.000-08:00

Here I am in Taiwan... All well, all fine, I'm tiiiiiiired and Joe won't let me take a nap....

Goodbye!

2010-02-08T16:01:00.000-08:00

Well, my life is opening to adventure again. After 17 months in Corvallis, I've decided to take a break. On Thursday I'm heading to Taiwan to visit brother Joe for two months. Then back to Corvallis for a few months to straighten up business, and then off to the east coast with Muley in tow.

In the past I've enjoyed writing sensational missives about the scrapes I've barely avoided (or completely fallen into). I think my previous adventures were probably a bit more prone to accident than this one may be. Without 72-hour train rides, Indian monsoons, interjecting cowboys, and wilderness escapades, this time round may seem rather tame. I have a room leased ahead of time (thanks to Joe and Fiona); I have money in my bank account (thanks employment); I'll know somebody where I'll be going (my brother); I have a return ticket home already paid for (I won't get stranded). With such fail-proof arrangements, what could possibly go wrong?

So -- despite my wisdom this time round -- I hope my dispatches will be as entertaining as in the past. As long as Joe doesn't keep too close an eye on me, I'm sure I will find my way into some new and exciting (or, at the very least, bewildering) situations. Furthermore, I'll be attempting to practice my basic Mandarin, so at least we can look forward to my endless self-embarrassment.

Until next week...
~April

Going on a Journey

2010-01-26T18:41:00.000-08:00

Suppertime

2010-01-22T09:48:00.000-08:00

I Double Love Muley

2010-01-21T23:03:00.000-08:00

I Love Muley

2009-12-12T09:22:00.000-08:00

Apple Pie for my Last Day of Work in the Field

2009-10-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

I cut out a paper tree and birds to use as a stencil for the cinnamon.
Yum!!! Came out of the oven even prettier than it went in (but no photo to prove it).

Sleep Well, Garden Bed

2009-10-30T23:05:00.000-07:00

Lettuce carrot to the beet of peas
I've bean corny so long
I squashed the tomatoes and peppered the potatoes
Bean out in the garden too long

An organic grown is coming from a watermelon
See what my honeydew
She parsleys with a parsnip and turns into a turnip
I never know what she's into

There's eyes and ears and heads in these beds
Don't radish the celery
I got plum peachy with a pear of boysenberries
And brussels sprouted the broccoli

~The Barefoot Farmer

Rewired

2009-10-22T08:28:00.000-07:00

Well, since our house became rewired to the internet a few weeks ago, I guess I don't have so many excuses not to keep up with myself here. And since a real writer should be able to write about the mundane, and not only while adventuring, I really don't have ANY excuses not to write.

This week I came down to Los Angeles to visit one of my brothers. LA is a real zap out of my normal reality. Here are a few key things I've noticed so far.

1. space
2. space
3. real homeless people
4. fancy shiny people

And in more depth:

1. SPACE FOR THINGS:
Okay, my first concern is space. Incredibly, in places like this where there are so many buildings forever, country things must be put inside of city spaces. For example, I am used to gas stations and service centers being on the edges of town.

Where I grew up, gas stations were never in the thick of the city, and service centers were usually somewhere next to a corn field or an intersection or behind somebody's barn next to a pile of tires. Well, here, if you put the gas stations all on the outside, you'd never be able to get to them in time when you needed them. It would take far too long. So things like gas stations, service stations, and even things like grocery stores and pet supply stores are all mixed up in one mad jumble.

Because there's no space to give them their own space.

City streets aren't just for restaurants and bike shops and bookstores, I guess. I had forgotten. My God! In the parking garage where I parked yesterday, a Trader Joe's appeared to be connected to the very parking levels! It was very beautiful for me, because I was so hungry and I could buy a fresh apple right away.

And my second concern: space.

2: SPACE FOR PEOPLE
My second space concern is space as it relates to people and their explorations. This is how it happened. I was having lunch with Chris and his friend and I suddenly thought: "I wonder where Chris's power tools are? I wonder if Chris gets to build anything here? He's so good at building things, what if he forgets how?"

And then I had lots of memory images brush forefont: Chris building his house, working on his car, making the barn apartment, roofing and siding our house, cutting up firewood with the chainsaw, and so on. And then I thought... but there's no space!!! Where would he do any of that, let alone store things like chainsaws or carpentry tools in a place where space rents for tens of dollars per square foot?

Of course my first worries were that Chris might not be using some of his great skills, and I felt sad at the thought he wasn't measuring things and installing windows and so on, because he's so clever at such things. But then I also thought about how he gets to fool around every weekend hang-gliding and surfing and camping and hiking and rock climbing. And he does seem very happy. It is understandable to me that people might prefer hang-gliding to nailing down asphalt singles.

But I kept thinking about it. I think he and many other people work all day and then they get to fool around at night and on the weekends. I began thinking "why don't I get to fool around?" and I decided it was because I have a mule and garden and two jobs at living-wage pay.

Why do I have a garden? I asked myself. And I know why. Besides all of the beauty and joy and fascination... I like to have something to invest in. My ultimate goal, really, is to have my own house so I can spend my time planting fruit trees and shearing sheep.

And I can see that living here in LA, where space is awfully limited, investing in the space around you might not come as naturally. Because where does one have room to make anything for herself? Or himself?

And so it's an interesting thought that there might be this huge workforce (and I imagine them all to be single and 30 and living in rentals) that goes to work each day to help complete somebody else's project, and then gets off work and spends the rest of their time playing. Work and play. Work and play.

It seems like a happy leisurely thing for the short-term, but I would grow nervous with it in the long term, not having time to invest in my personal surroundings... building and planting, you know (geez, I'm such an agrarian). I suppose I see my current life as "work for them, work for me, work for them, work for me" or "their projects, my projects..." rather than work/play. And that's my own choice, for all my whining about being too busy.

But here's the ridiculous part... for all my talk of INVESTING -- which in my case means a vegetable garden and some mason jars -- I have no money saved, but my brother does. Which means he'll own his own home on some tropical island and be cutting his own firewood again (for fun) while I'll still be in some rental wondering whether to use my last garden bed for potatoes or garlic.

#3 and #4: REAL HOMELESS PEOPLE AND FANCY SHINY PEOPLE
The homeless people here are very different from the homeless people in Corvallis.

The ones here keep their belongings in carts, beg for money and food, have cardboard signs, and have sensible cardboard sleeping shelters.

The homeless people in Corvallis have sleeping bags and sometimes tents, often bicycles, don't beg (because they have more money than I do?), and party in central park and the church parking lot ALL DAY LONG with endless bags of booze and cigarettes.

It's like people who are homeless for a living versus people who are homeless for the hell of it. Our homeless people have much more fun than the ones here in LA, who look a little stressed out and unhappy (except for the ones I saw dancing on the beach).

Fancy shiny people also live here in LA, and there are many more of them than homeless people. The fancy shiny people have fancy shiny clothes, cars, and hair. They are more fun to watch than the homeless people because they seem happier and have more energy. Also, they have more gadgetry that I don't understand. They often come in pairs or in small pods, like whales. Only they aren't like whales at all. They're more like jingling butterflies. Are they even human? They are so otherworldly. But sure enough, below the wings, they still have an insect body.

Ha ha. They'll never transcend the rest of us completely.

~April

Canning Season!

2009-08-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

Ah, I'm back in Corvallis after a lovely 10-day trip back to Pennsylvania to visit my family. What greeted me back in Oregon but a big patch of HUGE green beans! Hey! Most of them were too big to use, but I stripped the vines and was still able to put up several batches of very delicious pickled beans for those wet dark days of the Pacific Northwest winter.

This morning, on a whim (and with two free hours) I decided to run to the edge of town to buy a box of peaches. They were so ripe and perfect that they ended up in the pressure canner before they even knew what was happening. If those won't cheer me up in December, nothing will. Beautiful jars of sweet yellow peaches!

Nothing like the delight of harvest season. And the blackberries are just beginning! Back in Pennsylvania, blackberries never seemed like a very worthwhile fruit. But just try the blackberries out here -- sweet and enormous and dark and wonderful.

Well, that's about as much rejoicing as I have time for now. I've got an appointment at 5:30 sharp!

2009-04-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

Finally time for a new post, I guess... it's been quite a while. In brief, I'm still in Corvallis, still lovin' up Honeychild, and still dreaming of adventure.

The winter was a dark and wet one -- I suppose that's the typical deal here in the Pacific Northwest. Now that the sun is returning to the land once again and the daffodils have popped up, all is forgiven. And the daffodils -- I'm not kidding! I've seen more varieties here than in my entire life. You can't travel a hundred feet it seems, in town or country, without coming across a patch of them. Downtown Corvallis seems like an endless bed of them, in fact, at least compared to any other city I've lived in.

And what do I do besides gape at daffodils? I'm still working at the same little bookstore (Grass Roots) as when I first arrived here in Corvallis last September. You can check out our website to see what I'm reading (click on "staff picks"). I get to do a lot of reading (though still not as much as I'd like) and also enjoy getting to peruse gallies (pre-published drafts publishing houses send us to help generate hype and reviews). I also get to do some writing, mostly for our weekly newsletter and other little things like that.

Right now we are in the midst of National Poetry Month so my job has actually become even better than usual. Each day I get to send a poem out to our mailing list with some commentary. We also post the poems on our website. It's been a blast choosing poems for the month (the other girls I work with have been helping with this, too) --- it's like getting to compile my own anthology. We even started receiving submissions from local poets! I've been loving the entire project because it forces me to immerse myself in poetry for at least an hour or so each day. I wanted to avoid printing too many poets that folks were already familiar with, so it's been great finding new sources, too. My favorite recent find is Al Zolynas -- a brilliant contemporary poet who lives and teaches in California. Oh -- and I get to set up some poetry readings, too. Tragedy of tragedies, one of my favorite local poets is out of town for the month...

And you may be curious about Honeychild. She's become quite a favorite out at the stable for her verbosity and begging skills. Ooooh she loves her oats! Folks can't even walk past her stall without her nickering and grunting and smooching out her lips in classic "give me a treat and scratch my ears" body language. That said, she's actually fairly distrustful of most people beside me. I really wish I had some folks who could hang out with her a little to help socialize her. I rode her a few days ago afer a winter off and she was terrific - we even went on a little trail ride. I've been ground driving her, too, and she always seems eager to please. She's finally gotten to move back outside again recently and is totally full of herself... ah, spring.

What else? I've been making lots of sourdough bread and sourdough pancakes with the starter I was given back in Montana last summer. I made a rye starter, too, which is proving itself to be quite tasty. I've been getting fresh cow's milk from some folks outside of town so I've bene making butter, too, and tonight I made my first cheese (a very easy soft variety -- it's resting now and should be ready in a few hours). I'm really looking forward to a summer of gardening and harvesting and putting up food...

In the next few weeks I'll start working part time at a small seed company that operates out of Gathering Together Farm, a CSA/restaurant that is located in the next town over (Philomath). I've got a good garden going at my house (right in downtown Corvallis) which I started last fall -- I've been eating lots of greens and even turnips out of it for the past month or so, and have lots of other goodies on the way. My housemates and I have accumulated the materials for a chicken coop and are planning on getting that built in the next week or so so we can keep two little hens in the back yard.

Well, I suppose that's all for now. I know this post was mostly newsy but I felt like I had to get everybody caught up a little bit. I'll get some stories up here soon.

Love to all.

P.S. For my birthday a few weeks ago I took a trip out to the coast and into the Drift Creek Wilderness area. The photos are from that trip...

Papercuts, Under the Stars

2009-01-03T17:23:00.000-08:00

April and Honeychild to Collaborate in Papercut Venture

2009-01-02T21:59:00.000-08:00

Keep your eyes open and your ears pricked for the new line of papercut stationary from April and Honeychild. What better team than a mulish muse and a girl who likes knives? Coming soon: stargazing ducks and Muley's interpretation of spring.

Oh My...

2008-12-31T18:49:00.000-08:00

What has transpired in the past three months? To think I haven't made a post for a full season. I apologize.

What to tell you of October, November, December? The rains came, snow came briefly, and ice. The clouds have blocked the sun for some time now, it seems. I had a distracted solstice, and observed the sunrise and sunset with only partial attention. I did recall, however, the summer solstice I observed while on the trail last summer, and how solemnly I watched the sun travel through the whole day. I feel I have passed through many places since then.

My Christmas was quiet -- my first day off in a long run of harried days caught between the stable and the bookstore, scattered here and there with little sun breaks with Clara and Lyle, the 20-month old cousins I care for several mornings each week. I dined Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with dear friends and spent the other holiday hours cleaning, washing laundry, and working in the stable. (I did spend midnight on Christmas Eve bundled in my sleeping bag on hay bales I'd dragged into Honeychild's stall -- I didn't hear any of the animals speaking, but there was certainly a lot of braying and grunting.)

I still don't know how long I intend to stay out here or where I might turn next. Part of my heart leans back towards Asheville, and another part sighs for Vermont. The folks at the bookstore where I am employed have encouraged me to stay for another year, but I admit I feel rather lonely being so far from my family. I've been hesitant to form too many attachments here, as well, for fear they would make my return to the East more difficult, and so perhaps I've isolated myself more than I really intended to. I realize that if I decide to stay through another summer I will need to involve myself more in the community and perhaps spend less time reading books in my kitchen -- a cup of tea is rather poor company, after all.

I will be returning to PA for a visit in early March, so mark your calendars and plan to drop by for a hug.
Enjoy these last few hours of 2008... We get to hang up our new calendars tomorrow.

~April and Honeychild

P.S. My photos spanning the past three months are finally online - I'll post them for you all as soon as I finish captions (very soon).

Gardenbeds and Haircuts

2008-10-06T05:23:00.002-07:00

I have broken ground for my new garden. I've been dreaming of gardening since the season ended in Pennsylvania a year ago, so I decided not to let a little winter get in my way. Yes - I will sing greenery forth from the soil no matter the season. And so, five days ago I brought six burlap sacks of mule and zorse manure home from the stable and attempted to turn the ground in my back lawn with a pitchfork only to find it was packed solid as concrete.

Four days ago my friend Kirk lent me his pick-ax and planks to frame in a raised bed. Three days ago I broke ground with the pickax and began double digging a raised bed 3 1/2 feet wide, 18 feet long, 1 1/2 feet deep, and 1 foot high. Two mornings of digging brought me halfway across the garden bed and about two degrees of pain away from hiring a masseuse and chiropractor. I considered borrowing a rototiller but concluded a jackhammer would be a more appropriate choice. Amazingly, I found seven worms in the ground (I expected to find none).

The neighbors seem to appreciate my efforts: several come out to sit on their steps and watch my progress each morning.

"That's a big hole you're digging," says one.
"You sure know how to swing that ax," says another, "where'd you learn to work so hard?"
"I guess I grew up in the country," I say, unsure how I am supposed to respond.

"What are you gonna plant in there?" asks the young man from across the lawn each day.
"Brassicas," I answer each time, "and lots of greens. Maybe some carrots."
"I'm thinking of putting a garden in my yard," he says one morning, surprising me, "I'm thinking of putting it right here." He motions to a grassy spot beneath a tree.
"Not there," yells his mother from inside the house, "I don't want it there, I want it on the other side."

"Hmmm..." I say as I keep chipping away at the crusty soil.

"You know, I could cut your hair," says the young man, eyeing me.

"Hmmm..." I say again, swinging the pick-ax. The truth is, I haven't gotten a haircut or even a trim since I walked into a
cuttery on the main street of Vergennes, Vermont, in early January and gave them full liberty. My hair was fairly short back then, and the months since have been rife with the embarassment of a persistent mullet and shaggy bangs. I've been wanting a haircut for months but have had neither enough money to pay a stylist nor enough faith to employ a friend.

"I can do weaves and perms, too, or just a trim." I raise my eyebrows and swing the pick down. Is my hair really that bad?

"I could help you with that," says the young man, coming to stand on the opposite side of the garden bed. I'm not sure what he means at first, but then I look up and see him gesturing at the pick-ax. The weather has been rainy lately, and the turf around the bed is caked with mud. He's wearing pure white loose-laced tennis shoes and has a ciggarette stub dangling from his fingers.

"That's okay," I say.
"I'm serious," he persists, "I'm really good at that." I offer a weak chuckle and decline again.
"Well, don't say I didn't offer," he says, "I like to pull my weight around here." I'm not sure what he's referring to, but I nod understandingly and turn back to the soil, which seems to be loosening a little in the wet weather. The neighbor adds a few last attempts at conversation, but I'm too absorbed in my quiet time and eventually he leaves on his bicycle to pick up a carton of cigarettes and I'm left to myself again.

I find a broom in the garage and walk to the park across the street. Yellow leaves have blown into wet drifts along the gutters. I brush them into piles and sweep them into an empty burlap sack I've laid out. A group of skateboarders watch me skeptically from the swingset. When the sack is full I carry it back to my garden and dump half of it in the bottom of the trench I've excavated. I pour some manure on top, layer it with soil, and then stir it all up with my shovel. I imagine broccoli roots spidering out in all directions through the loose soil. I imagine dense stands of bright chard and feathery sprays of spring carrot greens. Oh, the life I will coax out of this soil once I'm through with it! I can hardly stand the waiting.

~April

The Bookstore

2008-10-05T23:12:00.000-07:00

My new job. Shortly after arriving in Corvallis I was hired in a small independent bookstore downtown. The bookstore is owned and run by a married couple who are kind as kin. The manager and staff are as dear as the owners. I have such tremendously wonderful luck with employment! I'm really delighted to be surrounded by books and people who love to read, though admittedly, it's changed the routine of my life quite dramatically.

I haven't been reabsorbed into society so completely as to require an alarm clock or a wristwatch yet, but I feel such developments are immanent. Working in the afternoons means hurrying to the stable in the mornings to care for the mules and then hurrying back into town to pack my lunch and change attire from hay-covered sweatshirts and mud-spattered jeans to dangly earrings and blouses and skirts. My wards transform, too, from long-eared hay browsers to inquisitive book browsers. Ah, the lives possible on this earth!

My day at the bookstore usually ends with a visit to the library where I check out all of the new books I've decided to read. I have no less than nine books on my nightstand tonight, including books from the poetry, psychology, fiction, science, and nonfiction genres. I cook a late dinner once home and then fall into bed to read a few chapters and then write until I can't keep my eyes open any longer.

Love,
~April

Photos!!!

2008-10-04T00:20:00.000-07:00

Yes, there are new photos posted!

Check them out at the "April's Photos" link at right.

New Home, New Job

2008-10-02T22:19:00.000-07:00

I settled into my new home last week -- a sweet little house in downtown Corvallis just five blocks from my new job and a one-minute walk through Central Park from the city library. The house has three sweet bedrooms (small by modern standards but more than adequate by mine), a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and basement. Five of us are packed in here, so the rent is cheap and the spirit is high. I love it! The inside of the refrigerator seems to be the only spot where space is tight, but unless we keep acquiring food and quit eating it, it shouldn't become a problem.

My room is a lovely little niche with hardwood floors, white walls that angle in towards the ceiling four feet off the ground, and a sunny window with more than satisfactory privacy for town living. A closet and three-drawer bureau are both built into the walls of my room, eliminating the need for much acquired furniture. Within a few hours of moving in, however, my housemates presented me with both a nightstand and a small bookshelf. I've since acquired the top half of a desk that was set out for free on the sidewalk earlier this week. If I can find a small stool just a foot or so high, the new piece should make a very decent, if not shallow, writing desk.

Most wonderfully, and a bit luxuriously, I've been gifted with a mattress to sleep on. When I moved into the house, I was fully intending to sleep on my sleeping bag and saddle blanket as I've been doing these past four months. I remembered the many fruitless hours I invested in trying to find a bed while living in Vermont, and decided I wasn't even going to waste time thinking about such things. I'd completely let go of the idea and was even looking forward to spending my next sedentery phase entirely bedless (save my bag and saddle blanket) -- "what a simple way to sleep!" I thought, "no bed to make -- just a sleeping bag to smooth. And it's entirely mobile and totally free."

I hadn't been in the house for five minutes when I'd been offered my choice of a mattress or futon! I ended up with a very cushy and new-looking double mattress scrounged up from the basement. I'd been excited at the prospect of avoiding the purchase of bedsheets, but I compromised with myself and found an attractive pair of mismatched flat sheets at Good Will the next day. One is olive green and the other is dusty rose and neither is form-fitted so I do, indeed, spend too much time carefully remaking my bed each morning (I like to leave my things in order). I have not decided yet whether or not I will try to acquire a blanket. Practically, I'm taken care of because I'm able to unzip my sleeping bad and use it as a blanket. Aesthetically, my sleeping bag is mummy-shaped and doesn't contribute to my perceived feng shui of the room.

This unintentioned mattress acquisition, however, is a perfect example of the wonders I've been experiencing of late. It seems the less I try to snatch at things, the more easily they come. What a relief! Meeting one's needs takes a lot of energy -- it's a lot easier not to need!

Let me talk about food now, because food is a real and totally valid need, assuming you're neither a sungazer nor set upon starving to death. Food is one thing I worry about and often (irrationally) wonder if I have enough of. I think I've already written about the wonderful bounty of blackberries and apples I had access to while staying with my muley out at the stable. I was a little concerned that moving into town would entail giving up my free food supply. Quite the contrary! Corvallis is the most food-full city I've ever experienced! There must be at least one house on every block with at least a tomato plant in the front yard, if not a full blown orchard, vegetable garden, or livestock operation. Just within several blocks of my house I have access to apples, grapes, pears, and honey, and have scouted out plums and chickens, too! There's even a bakery a few blocks away that puts left-over bread loaves in bins behind the store in the evenings -- I patronized that alley last week and came away with a very nice baguette. On top of the food grown right in town, one of my housemates is the assistant chef at a large CSA outside of town. She seems to bring home a new surprise every day... carrots, grapes, freshly baked sourdough bread. Quite delightfully, I borrowed a canner and was also offered the use of a cider press, so next week will be a busy one.

Honeychild is happy as ever. I sure miss her since I moved into town, though! I bike out to the stable almost every day to feed the mules and scratch Honeychild's withers. I'm going to try to borrow some driving lines soon so I can practice ground driving her some more. I've been thinking a lot about draft work and recently subscribed to the Small Farmers Journal which lends much space to discussion of draft power. Honeychild has been contributing to my urban gardening project, too -- yesterday I scooped two bins and four burlap feed sacks full of her manure. I brought it into town and will be using it in my new raised beds I'm building. My good friends in Corvallis are offering me lots of support in this new endeavor of mine -- my first winter garden! The ground in our back yard is hard as rock, but I've been loaned a pick, so I should be able to get it churned up, inch by inch.

More later, my sleeping bag calls...

~April

Settling In

2008-09-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

Muley and I watched a big harvest moon rise last night and set this morning. I've moved my nightly encampment from the lawn of the bunkhouse up to the pathway in front of Honey's paddock where a big oak tree holds the dew off me and I can feel the wind sweep in across the plain from Mary's Peak. Muley shares her paddock with a smaller mule, named Kate, who looks like Muley in every way save a white star and shorter legs. Kate has developed the bizarre habit of pulling my tarp off me as I sleep and dragging it into the paddock along with my sandals. She stands there at my feet chewing my sandals while Honeychild reaches up to shake the branches of the oak tree with her teeth, dropping leaves and acorns down upon my sleeping bag.

In the morning, I wake to see Honeychild standing over me watching me. "Good morning, Honeymule," I say, to which she responds readily with a long, earnest bray, issued just several feet from my bleary face. Then she sighs and lets out half a dozen board yawns while the other mules begin to cry for their breakfasts. What cacophony! And so I rise and head to the bunkhouse to dress, usually just in time to see Fred, the one-legged peacock, ruffling his way disgruntledly down from the haybarn. Morning is upon us all!

After morning chores I've been heading in to town pretty regularly. I've been loaned a bike from my dear Corvallis friends and it has proven indispensable. I try to get back to the barn by 6:30pm so I don't get stuck on the roads in fading light. I usually get back in time to grab a bowl from the kitchen and head out to the blackberry patch along the driveway. I've frozen five gallons of enormous, plump blackberries and three more of blueberries. I've also begun drying apples (from the tree outside the door) and am going to sauce and can more tomorrow. Amy, who runs the stable with her husband Barry, has been bringing me wonderful produce from her jungle-garden, and I've been blanching and freezing everything I can't eat. I love getting ready for winter!

I received a call today from the president of the Oregon Coastal Trail Association. He called to tell me he'd brought up the idea of my riding a mule on the Corvallis to Sea trail at a recent meeting and had been met with enthusiasm. So... I'm getting in touch with some folks locally in order to do a little more research to make sure the trail is a feasible challenge for me and Muley... If so, we'll probably try to ride a portion of it in the next few weeks -- we need to get a glimpse of that ocean before the rains set it!

Oh! And I've arranged to move into a lovely room in downtown Corvallis and have accepted a job at the family-owned Grass Roots Bookstore just a few blocks away...

More later and love to all,
~April and Honeychild

P.S. I promise -- photos are on their way!!

We're in Corvallis!

2008-09-08T13:01:00.000-07:00

Can it be real? Honeychild and I made it to Corvallis, Oregon, in the warm breezy hours of the deep dark night. Honey bolted off that horsetrailer like a honeybee chasing a hungry bear - she was a big tired Muley who needed to pee in deep wood shavings and roll and shake in a dust hole. Once Muley was happily settled into her big new stall I crawled off to my own fluffy cloud. I'd planned on staying in the bunkhouse, but the night was so mild and lush that I couldn't stand to be out of it. I unrolled my sleeping bag in the night-shadow of an apple tree and swapped out my dusty travel clothes for long johns. Half way through my task I collapsed and fell back, staring at the stars above me. The insects chirruped loudly from the trees crowding around the edge of the lawn. "What wonderful heaven," I thought to myself. "Trees, trees, trees, trees, trees." I held my eyes on the stars and waited for my sign. A moment later, a shooting star darted across the bottom of the sky. "Good," I thought, "I'm in the right place."

Waking up in the morning was like finding myself in the middle of a surprise gift and unwrapping it from the inside out. I'd driven into Corvallis in the dark, so I scarcely knew what surrounded me. When dawn broke, I found I was in the midst of trees, dhalias, sunflowers, barns, outbuildings, and dozens of mules. I plucked my breakfast from an obliging branch and set off to explore. There was Muley, head hanging out of her stall, braying to me. I haltered her and led her out for a walk. Rounding the barn, another surprise greeted us -- a zorse (a zebra-horse hybrid) was grazing contentedly in a small pen. Just beyond it, a male peacock was settled on the grass. And above the peacock was an oak tree! An OAK tree! What relief. Oak trees and apple trees will make this place home.

On Our Way

2008-09-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

After leaving Augusta and heading north, Honeychild and I spent two and a half lovely weeks with Russ and Maxine Barnett in Whitefish, MT. Honeychild settled in immediately with the Barnetts' two horses and three mules and was reluctant to leave when the time came. I was a little reluctant to leave, too -- I was having such a good time! Russ and Maxine were kin right away and were as nice as parents to me. It was sad to leave when the time came to move on to Spokane, WA. Fortunately, Amtrak connects Corvallis, OR to Whitefish, MT, so I'm hoping I might be able to come back in the winter to go ice fishing...

While in the Bob Marshall Wilderness I'd met some folks from Spokane and exchanged contact information with them. I called a few days in advance and asked them if I could come stay with them for a week while I looked for a trailer ride to Enterprise, Oregon. "Absolutely," they said before I'd even finished my sentence. And so, on the last day of August, the Barnetts drove me west to Spokane and left me with Dean and Anna Koesel.

My week with the Koesels has been packed. Dean is a small and large animal vet and also runs an embryo transfer business with his wife, Anna. That means they artificially inseminate valuable beef cows and flush the 7-day embryos out to freeze in liquid nitrogen until transferring them to surrogate mothers.

On Monday I got to watch Dean flush a cow (wash out the embryos) and also got to put my whole arm inside the cow to feel around for her ovaries and uterus. On Tuesday I went to work with Dean at the vet clinic and got to see him treat several horses, a cow, a premature cria (baby alpaca), and a dog. On Wednesday Dean, Anna, and I drove to a large dairy near Moses Lake to breed some cattle, and on Thursday I spent the day swinging a hammer on the house their son is building. Today we moved irrigation pipes and picked up rocks and I got to drive a front end loader and a skid-something. Wow!!! I got to move several huge haybales with the front end loader (alone!) and I got to use the skidder in the field where we were picking rocks. Maybe my destiny lies in operating heavy machinery...

Tomorrow Anna is going to drive me south into Oregon, and on Sunday a fellow there is going to drive west to Corvallis Oregon. The fellow driving me to Corvallis is Barry, of Valley Mule Co., where I'll be keeping Honeychild.

I'm excited to get to Corvallis where I have good friends awaiting me. Three months on the road, depending on the generosity of strangers, is wearing. I've made so many friends, though, and have so many people to visit when I pass through Montana and Washington again. It will be good to have a stable place in Oregon where Honeychild and I can finally settle in. It looks like we'll be overwintering in Corvallis, so I suppose I'll be finding a job and a place to live. I feel so far from home. I've never been away from home this long before! I've never gone this long without seeing anybody from my family. Well, I suppose they will have to come visit me. I've been talking to my brother in LA and hope we get to have some adventures together while I'm out on this coast. There are so many places to see!

Once I get to Corvallis I'm going to look into the Corvallis to Sea Trail. I've heard it's a good 60-mile trail to the ocean. I'm hoping to travel it round-trip with Honeychild to conclude our adventures.

Even a week ahead seems too far in the future to contemplate. I am tired! And germs have finally caught up with me -- I have my first cold since before I set out on the road. Sigh.

Thank you to everyone who has been sending me encouraging notes. I'm not in a good internet spot at the moment, but I hope to respond to you all soon. I am so, so warmed by your good thoughts and wishes.

More soon,
~April

New Blog

2008-09-05T15:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog. The Wind Riders blog will now be laid to rest and my future adventures with Honeychild will be chronicled here. It might take a few weeks to get my links posted since I'm still on the road, so just bear with me. New photos should be up soon.

~April