May 25

John left on his mission early.

The diminished band of six packed leisurely and pedaled through the parking lot at the approach to Myra Canyon. At the end of curved cut in the rock a vast panorama unfolded. A huge gulf dropping to Lake level was scooped out of the high plateau to which we’d ascended for three days. A dozen or so side canyons covered with the charred remains of a burnt forest and numberless rockslides, opened into it. At the top of the canyon rose a single, wide, snow-covered peak. Volcanic eruption, landslide, holocaust: a display of nature’s power, demonic and sublime.

Next into view came a fine level line threading its way from where we stood, in and out of the side canyons, heading off towards the snowy summit and then back toward us on the other side of the abyss, supported across gaps narrow and wide by a delicate latticework of trestles.

After a lengthy stop to gaze, we crossed the first trestle on a surface of new planking that produced a clean hum from the tires.

It was a smooth thrill of a ride, created by a double human triumph over nature. The first was the original construction of the railroad, motivated by the desire to extract her wealth. The second was the recent reconstruction of the trail and trestles after decay and fire, motivated by the desire to provide pleasure to visitors. As we stopped again at the end of the first trestle, two kids and their parents on bikes came up behind us. “It’s just like Disneyland,” said one.

(more…)

I found the listing on the ECOSLO bulletin: Irish Hills Docent-Led Hike. A good location to see early flowers, and Jody a congenial leader. As directed, Jan and I drove to the end of Madonna Road and parked in the new subdivision bordering Costco and the Open Space. The houses are large and densely situated on the flat valley floor, stark, typical sprawl bedroom neighborhood, but promising a different atmosphere once the trees have grown enough to provide something of an urban forest. Jan noted that the park with basketball courts and baseball field that can be used by the residents of the  projects across the street were required of the developer, Marshall, while she sat on the City Council. So was the preservation of the old farmhouse at the trailhead, which was sold to a private party who could only renovate and expand it in such a way as to preserve the look of the original building.

It was one of those mild spring mornings with a touch of cool brought on by the slight sea mist especially welcome as the group of about ten people mounted the winding trail. The perennial bunch grass was bright green, and several lilies were coming into leaf. The first bloom a white flower I cant identify.

Ascending the serpentine ridge, we gained larger views of the Los Osos Valley, shopping centers and new subdivisions creeping over the fields and hills in every direction.

But a large green patch in the middle of the sprawl remained where the decades-long struggle over the Dalidio property has left the land fertile and fallow. Adjoining it, is the “Gap” property situated along Prefumo Creek between automobile dealerships and the South Laguna residential neighborhood. This was the parcel before the planning commission last Thursday night that Citizens for Planning Responsibly urged be developed in accordance with the General Plan. Jan wrote a long and expert treatise that formed the basis of all the testimony and for which the Commissioners expressed gratitude, since the City Staff had not done the job.

Jody stopped on the way up at several places to fill us in on some of the details of procurement of the 700 acre patch of open space that serves as one part of the city’s future greenbelt. The Madonna family, which owned vast acreage both of the hill property and the fertile alluvial plain down below were required to deed some of it to Open Space in return for permission to develop their huge shopping center. The same was true of the developer who built the neighborhood we passed through, as well as of the owners of the adjoining Foster property, who ended up developing only two lots on their more than 200 acre parcel.

At the shoulder of the ridge, the trail levelled and headed west parallel to Froom creek below. As civilization disappeared behind us, its sounds were replaced by the rush of water. Ahead and up the creek the only sign of human impact was the gash of the road gouged in the canyon by the property owner, the late Alex Madonna, master of the D9 Caterpillar bulldozer, whose ostentatious signature is inscribed on mountainsides in every direction. Above the opposite bank rose a high wall of impenetrable looking scrub oak woodland. The trail was bordered by the first bloom of Ceanothus cuneatus, light purple, odiferous, exuberant.

We continued down into the canyon along a branch of Madonna’s road that the city along with conservation organizations has tried unsuccessfully to restore. The disfigured walls were neverthess beautiful in baring the browns, greens and whites of weathering serpentine. The surface of the road was carpeted by a strange red plant, apparantely chlorophil free, which I havent yet identified.

Walking upstream along the creek, we found the first California poppies of the season, dazzling two-toned goblets of orange and white with red tipped leaves and buds.

Further along we came upon a tributary creek surrounded by the leaves of rare and endemic local native, the San Luis Obispo bog thistle.

Following the tributary to some its sources, I discovered water seeping straight out of the porous serpentine rock.

After a snack break in the shade of oaks and bay laurels along the rushing creek, we headed back up to the ridge, passing banks of bush poppies whose leaves were dried but whose blooms shared in the festivity of an early California Spring.

Great God, I ask for no meaner pelf
Than that I may not disappoint myself,
That in my action I may soar as high
As I can now discern with this clear eye.

And next in value, which thy kindness lends,
That I may greatly disappoint my friends,
Howe’er they think or hope that it may be,
They may not dream how thou’st distinguished me.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith
And my life practice what my tongue saith
That my low conduct may not show
Nor my relenting lines
That I thy purpose did not know
Or overrated thy designs.

(1841)

Universal spirit, O hear my urgent plea
For nothing less or more than plain integrity
That I may carry out in deed what in my mind I know
Is true but never comfortable, and find new ways to grow.

And if it is required to abandon obligation
And spend more solitary time in quiet contemplation
Then give me strength and confidence to follow my own light
And cut loose from the need to be approved in others’ sight.

Please let me saunter off with you, really walk the walk
Instead of giving yet another classroom Thoreau talk.
Let it not be that making do will win out finally,
That I cant find a way to write and testify,
That what was learned so long ago stays merely memory
Some idealist delusion better left to die.

Woke up this morning feeling rested, relaxed and healthy—first time since the new year. Went for a swim, after which I felt exuberant. At 1 p.m. I took a break from grading papers to fill the bird feeder and discovered it was clear, breezy and warm outside. After I added a scoop of sunflower seeds, the red-headed finches twittered their gratitude from the surrounding cover. I walked up the steps to the blooming volunteer almond tree, the first sign of spring. Coming close, I was enfolded by its shimmer and fragrance. Honey not tasted but inhaled, its sweetness pouring through nasal passages up into sinuses behind my eyes.

What a day for bees, I thought, and immediately was surrounded by dozens of them flitting and hovering, trembling in the wind along with the blossoms and new leaves, apparently oblivious of my presence. The breeze died down and the fragrance ramped up. Up close I watched the bees nuzzle and grope and hump the tiny golden stamens at the center of each blossom. Vibrating with excitement, released from the pull of gravity, they rode a wave of pleasure in taste and smell.

I was transported with them for a moment. Then I tried to observe. A single blossom held an inexhaustible supply of delight. One after another bee entered its bower of warmth and brightness, took its harvest, and was replaced and sometimes bumped out of the way by a new visitor.

I tried to track an individual bee, noticing how it used two or three or four hands to grasp whatever it gathered on the top of those stamens and shove it greedily into its mouth. It moved to another blossom, dove in, turned on its back, curled its abdomen around the group of stamens and rubbed furiously against them with its belly.

At most ten seconds on any one flower. But, why move on when there’s plenty left? Why approach another flower and then back off, or touch down on a third and depart without entering? What determined its preference? I couldn’t track a single bee for more than a minute before it sped out of my narrow focus.

more bee pics

I sit twenty five feet up in the branches of the great live oak, on the deck of the tree house. Inside is drenched by rain that’s fallen through a gash in the roof. I’m enjoying a break in the weather that probably wont last long enough to finish writing this entry. The hike up was easier than expected, aided by two new gaps in the fence and enough fresh grass to allow evasion of the worst mud.

I’ve moved indoors. The intact half of the roof keeps the drops that penetrate the canopy from blotting my words. What do we need for shelter? This makes the cabin at Walden a McMansion by comparison. No lake, but the occasional stream flows within view, down the middle of a gully covering the underground watercourse that allows this tree to grow so large. The lichen coating its elephantine limbs now is bright green. The slope that tilts almost to vertical just above the uphill edge of the canopy bursts with new vegetation, hastening to stabilize and clothe itself before it’s undermined from below by slumpage or eroded from above by runoff.

On the way here I noticed water sheeting off driveways and pouring out of drainage pipes embedded in the sidewalk, gathering in the gutters and racing down the gentle slope of the street. All that water from these tiny municipal lots, looking for a place to go because it cant soak into the ground or find its natural channels. Further along the flow increases and suddenly disappears with a roar. Tucked under the lip of the sidewalk a grated storm sewer opening three concrete squares wide. This is where the stream draining the whole valley between Poly Mountain and our Alta Vista hill must once have run, starting at the top near the Admin building, going by the site of the PAC, under the track and practise field, down to Palm Street, then California, then Monterey then Santa Rosa, before emptying into San Luis Creek.

Beyond the sewer opening, the water flowed toward me, a thick foam-edged meander crossing Grand Ave. next to the parking kiosk.

Its been raining for weeks. The one sunny day I remember since the funeral in Paso Robles was Thursday the 31st: Focus the Nation Day. May it be remembered as a historic one.

Focus the Nation Cal Poly slideshow

The second day of rain. The gift from heaven prayed for in need. Wet. Cold. Dark.

My aunt Hannelore died Monday in Sao Paulo. She was 86, my mother’s half sister. We met in person only during the visit Jan and I made to Brazil ten years ago. But we talked regularly on the phone, and corresponded at length by letter and email. She was a born writer with a great mind. They wouldn’t let her become a doctor in the 1930’s. She married an older man who took a mistress and left her nothing in his will. She always loved him. “In her home when she was going to upstairs, her hart stooped and she died quietly,” wrote my cousin Marcelo.

On Friday we attended Maggie’s funeral. Saturday was Don’s memorial celebration in Lund. Sunday a fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration outside Solvang, where I sat next to a woman I went to elementary school with. We didn’t say it, but looked at each other marveling at the ravages of time.

I’m feeling overwhelmed by the demands of teaching, the impending climax of Focus the Nation next week, the huge expansion of the Sierra Club’s chapter’s commitments to lawsuits and fundraisers. I cant do justice to any of the specific obligations they incur, let alone to the doom-laden mission to do something about the threat of Global Warming which lurks behind all of them.

I wake up with grim determination to get through the day and I plow through the piled on tasks longing simply for the moment to sink into the pillow at night. Maggie, Don, Hannelore, enjoy your rest.

I regret binding myself with duties that generate unrelenting anxiety, that pull me away from the innocent vitality and the fresh bodies of my four grandchildren, and of the other kids at Ian’s school I was able to play with in the autumn. I long for more of the retreat at Knoll House and regret leasing it out to Tristen and his family for another year or two.

I read Thoreau to prepare for today’s class.

There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still. There was never yet such a storm but it was Æolian music(1) to a healthy and innocent ear. Nothing can rightly compel a simple and brave man to a vulgar sadness. While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me. The gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house today is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too.

I want to take this therapy with a walk outside or with reading my own ecologs, but instead I have to scurry to get on with the jobs at hand. I know that the movement through isolation and sadness leads to connectedness and joy, and that the more room given to grief, the grander the reward:

I have never felt lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude, but once, and that was a few weeks after I came to the woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever be strange to me again.

Another mixture of Henry’s truth and lies. One hour only he says he felt lonesome. But I sense that he grappled with that “insanity” every day, rain or shine. And that he knew the struggle was what produced the exaltation that made the common companionships of life pale to inadequacy. Every gorgeous item in the catalogue of solitary joys that follows is drawn with ink of ashes and tears.

It took more time than conceiving a baby, but planting a new crop of snow peas was finished in the half hour between our Sunday morning walk with the dog and taking great grandma out to lunch at the Sushi bar. Now there’s less than a half hour to write about it, between completing Monday morning’s preparation and leaving for class.

I yanked the decrepit old cherry tomato plants out of the raised bed and salvaged the remaining fruits to explode in my mouth while spading the damp compressed soil. I’d planned simply to insert the peas in the ground without disturbing the soil structure but it was too hard for my forefinger to penetrate. Digging revealed that roots, probably from the adjoining Toyon or Hollyleaf Cherry, had invaded the bed from below and were converting it into a dense fibrous tissue. With the shovel I was able to turn the soil and pull out most of them. I used a hand cultivator to smooth the surface and picked out several dozen stones that somehow had floated to the surface. Then in a corner of the bed, I poked a circle of ten holes and dropped one hard quarter inch sphere into each. I made six more such circles to fill the space of the bed. At the center of each I stuck one of the ten foot bamboo stalks I’d been reusing for years to grow peas and beans and tomatos. I pulled the tops of the bamboo stalks together like tipi poles and tied them up with a short length of soft cotton string that I’d cut off one of them with kitchen scissors. I patted the soil smooth over the seeds with the flat of my hands. Seventy seeds, sixty climbing vines, twenty sweet and crunchy pea pods each, by the end of March, when it will be time to replant tomatoes.

4:45 p.m. close to sunset, sound of hoofs galloping behind the dome where thirty people sit quiet, the light and warmth of a day between storms waning.

A single birdcall highlighted against the silence protected in this hollow between Caballo peak and Cuesta ridge. Poly Mountain rises to the south, Rockslide Ridge to the north. A wispy cloud above the summit of the peak begins to luminsce below higher dark gray clouds, then drops below the ridge line. A small stream meanders through the middle of the structure, separating the rickety stage from the new concrete amphitheatre seats. Poly Mountain’s north flank now burnished with dark gold light from the invisible sunset. Muscles tensed from a day of preparation, teaching and hiking up the slippery canyon trail slowly relax as the weight of the body settles on the cool cushion of stone.

Jan, Steven,

About 8 trees blew down near your house in the last storm. The good news is that none of them damaged anything, & that they don’t need immediate attention. They don’t need Zenia or an expensive faller to clear them out. And the final good news is that there are now more poles for Joe.

We went up today and cleared the tree tops from the driveway. And I took the limbs off the downed tree near the shed but did not buck it up cause I don’t know the lengths Joe wants.

The house looks fine. Towagh, Kemi, & Aya plan to come up on Dec 20th.
In other news there was a great potluck at the Lund School yesterday.

Peter

blowdown pictures

Despite the sound of hammers and traffic, the world seems emptied out. It’s two days after winter graduation, three weeks to the end of the year. The sun so low it makes windows glitter all over the valley before me.

Why do I face the city and leave my back to the back country? Its not a friendly season, despite the quiet, the warming sun and cooling breeze. The ground I sit on is bare dirt. A scattering of small hard berries: deer pellets annealed by the fire that’s burned off the grass, blackened the rocks, trimmed the yuccas into globular bulbs topped with brown quills surrounding a few spared green ones. Their needled tips curve south clawing for light.

A few days ago I wandered through the restored ruins of Poly Canyon. Now I look down into it, shadowed by a warren of rising buildings flanked front and back by massive rectangular parking structures.

Only a half inch of rain was left by last week’s much heralded storm. The grassland has turned from green to gold to tan to a corpselike gray.

Much of the way up here, I followed a deer trail along the blank margin of the scrub. Ecotone. “Why do they choose this route,” I’ll ask the class on our hike in January after we read Mary Austin’s “Water Trails of the Ceriso.” They’ll answer, “to stay close to the cover.” Just like the birds and rodents who harvest the grass and seeds close to the edge. Below me a rustle breaks the silence and two rear ends bounce three times downward and out of sight.

Fire and drought.
A land dry, silent, withdrawn,
aching to soak up moisture,
to shine and swell,
to burst into flower and song.

How many vertical layers in Savaryview?

1. Deck surface
2. Railing
3. Close clearing with rocks
4. Path to bluff
5. Proscenium of trees
6. Lower fringe of trees in front of water
7. The passage between Mace and Hurtado points
8. Mace point
9. South beach and Savary trees
10. Georgia Strait
11. Comox peninsula
12. Comox Valley
13. Lower cloud layer
14. Front Range
15. Skyline Range
16. Distant sky
17. Overhead sky

What are the movements?

1. Sun, moon, star light: the time of day or night, the seasonal angle, the cloud covers
2. Skyscape: cloud density, color, shape, texture on horizontal and vertical axes
3. Wind: intensity, steadiness, direction, in sound, smells, effect on land, sky and seascapes
4. Tidal ebb and flow, shrinking and expanding the beach
5. Current in the channel
6. Snow cover on the mountains, expanding and receding
7. Wildlife: bugs, birds, mammals

The temperature drops a degree or two. Does the stove need a log? It’s been an hour. I go downstairs to check, feel warmth as I reach the bottom steps, hear the rippling flow of combustion, see the flicker in the window. Not at all. Instead of raising, I lower the damper. There’s a living being at work for my comfort down there that requires close tending. When I came home last night and the stove was cold, I worried that the jack pine was poor fuel, that Dick may have tricked me, that I’d have to order a load of fir for any visitors. But the fire lit easily, and when I woke up this morning, it was still going.

What are the planes of consciousness?

1. right now: the temperature, the stove, the view, the list, appetite
2. observing and recording right now
3. reading and revising right now’s entries
4. reading and revising yesterday’s entries
5. reflecting and commenting on yesterday’s entries right now
6. recalling: old stuff in the computer. Old stuff remembering earlier stuff…

A phone call. The College Dean wants to know if I’d be willing to moderate a round table discussion on Sustainability and the Liberal Arts with a distinguished visitor the day after I get back. Suddenly there’s homework.

I walk down to the bluff listening to the glocks of three ravens flying formation.

I encounter a squirrel cheeping loudly and take his picture and a film and sound recording.

Douglas squirrel Tamiasciurus douglasi …skull olive brown on the back and buff underneath, the two colours being separated by a black line. The bushy tail is also darker above…coniferous seeds from the mai pat of the squirrel’s food, supplemented by berries and mushrooms. …does not hibernate…stores large quantities of cones for winter use….active during the day, scolding and chattering as it tries to chase other animals from its home territory. Nature West Coast 205

Follow the trail to below the summit. See Cortes and Twin Island.

Walk back and hear chipping and see a little wren on the path back to the house. Winter Wren, Troglodytes, troglodytes

Repair gasket on woodstove.

Eat the last leftovers of Michael’s Snow White Chicken. The water chestnuts and baby bok choy and diagonally sliced asparagus and the local grown chicken, stewed in its own broth, whitened with the corn starch—along with the remains of a bottle of Okanagan Semillon Chardonnay.

Finish reading Prodigal Summer. Its happy ending makes me feel happy. A vulgar enjoyment. I will enjoy sharing it with students.

This is my last night here until April or May. I love this house, this land, this neighborhood, this province, this country.

Peter B. is back here at 6:30 in morning to pick me up for a hike up into the Coast Range. I have some difficulty getting going and packing what I need for the day. We drive two hours to the trailhead on logging roads where no old growth remains and the second growth is harvested with the haste of looters. But this grandiose landscape would be inaccessible without those roads.

We ascend through juvenile yellow cedars and wine-red blueberry twigs above Gamma and Alpha lakes till we come to the half-iced over Beta lake, at the base of the two Knucklehead peaks.

This is the easiest ascent of any of the high mountains in the area, and Peter’s plan is to make a loop between the two peaks and around the lake. But as we pull ourselves up by gripping the heather protruding through the iced-over snow, it becomes evident that the going will be rougher than expected. At times the snow is soft enough or the crust is thin enough for us to break through and gain traction. But in most places the surface is slick with hard ice.

At a little plateau where the vegetation gives way to pure rock and snow, Peter unpacks his single pair of crampons.

One goes on his left foot the other on my right. If you put any weight on the foot without the crampon, you are sure to fall, not something you want to do, given the slope and dropoffs. With the cramponed foot, you carve a rough, flat resting place for the useless foot but dont move it until you’ve stepped sideways and a little forward with the cramponed foot. Then you move the useless foot into its prepared spot and repeat the sequence. This is a lesson on the complexity of normal walking. It takes half an hour to make what would be a five minute traverse without the ice.

The weather is clear, the views spectacular and proceeding is not too strenuous or frightening if you slow down and pay very close attention.

We decide to stop for lunch at the saddle between the peaks, forgo both summits and head back the way we came.

The way down is easier because we have tracks to follow and the snow has softened a little. What a substance: hard, soft, appearing and disappearing–a solid almost as mercurial as liquid or gas.

Once returned to the lake, we split up to meditate, sitting on cushions of heather in the early lowering sun. Back by nightfall at Peter’s house, we’re served a salmon dinner by Margaret. A girl at the reserve sold her the fish, which, it turned out, was stolen from her grandmother’s freezer.

7:45 am

The light comes up slowly to reveal a clear sky. The wind has shifted to northerly, blowing the smoke from the bark burning in the stove down across the clearing. Carbon: burning cellulose, cutting down trees to make a view. No freedom from sin.

I slept better on the hard mattress in the small bedroom last night, except for the old teaching anxiety dreams just before wakeup: classes start today and I’m unprepared. It’s a relief to open eyes and remember I still have two months.

I switched beds also to close off the lower bedroom, which was draining heat from the rest of the house. The fuel was consumed, but there was no chill this morning. “Sticks in box, no more cold,” Ray Mungo’s mantra at Total Loss Farm in Vermont, Winter 1969. The basics of survival and satisfaction.

It took five minutes to start a fire, get the coffee going and draw a hot bath. All systems work. The enjoyments of simple and civilized. No car, internet, tv, radio, but yes, hot water, tight house, computer, and camera. I’m settling in.

The silence is like the blanket of warmth that envelops me when I go near the stove. I stop what I’m doing and snuggle in it. It’s heightened indoors by the discreet sounds of the house, flames in the stove, stove pipe pinging with temperature changes, the electric water heater or the pump switching on and off. Outdoors it’s the distant lap of waves, a raven’s croak, a car on the highway.

The extra dark coffee with goats milk has the thickness and taste of mocha. Sip slow.

The dawn is late and slow, lighting snow on the island peaks.

Frost, shoes sliding on the icy deck. The sky starts to overcast. Alterations of light and temperature mirror mood and desire.

Today what I want is to be inspired by this place to create. Not the woman of my dreams but Knoll House to be my muse, as it was in August when I was led to dig out the paired rocks, when the earth and the vegetation directed me to undress them and their glory was revealed, when they asked to be embellished with ferns and moss and they stood forth in splendor.

I step outside and am captured by the wide-eyed gaze of a doe. I return the stare, lock on her eyes, huge cupped ears, white-margined black tail.

I back up slowly to get the camera. Does this effort to appropriate the moment corrupt it or pay it tribute? The deer waits for me. Unfazed by the meretricious flash, she keeps grazing and then wanders off. “Coast Deer or Columbia Blacktail—Odocoileus hemionus. …a twigeater, browsing on Douglas fir, western red cedar, yew, blackberries, huckleberries and salal.” Nature West Coast p. 211

M comes up with his pickup and we load the canoe for a trip to the Ragged Islands. He hasn’t been in this boat, which he paid half for in 1974, for thirty years. It’s battered but still seaworthy. He paddles stern, weight too far back for the boat to balance stably and rusty on steering skills.

We piddle around the Lund Harbor and then head for Finn Bay against a stiff westerly breeze. We go through the little channel at Sevilla Island, and try to round the point into Thulin Passage but both agree it’s too dicey. Wind behind us, we coast back to Lund, the weather now again clear and brilliant.

We load the canoe into his truck and out onto the ramp in the sunshine come Carol P, and her daughter Cindy. Carol and I hug—she worked at the store during the seventies—and Cindy and I look at each other trying to place faces. Michael introduces me as Steven Marx of the Marx farm. She says I babysat for you. She’s nine years older than Joe. Most likely while we were doing the camp. Carol reminisces with Michael about the best of times, when he was chef in Lund and the restaurant was always full, even in the winter.

Michael parks the truck while I wait on the ramp, and comes walking down the hill with a tall man, whom I recognize as Don. We all retire to the pub. Don taught English in Powell River for 12 years, worked in a sawmill in Tahsis, then ran a school for troubled teenagers in Victoria. We schmooze for three beers. On the way home I propose to Michael that he be the cook for a dinner party on Saturday night at Knoll House, and that we go shopping on Friday. He agrees.

I come home and make myself supper—again Renee’s frozen lasagna and there’s still a portion left, along with local broccoli from the Lund store. Sounds like something living in the wall behind the couch where I sit. I doze off and am awakened by Peter U. delivering the bottle of whiskey I’d left in his car yesterday.

Speak to Joe on the phone. Tomorrow he goes to Hawaii for two weeks to build a barn with five members of his crew. He’s been working ten hour days the last three weeks. Amy’s business is dormant. They are under pressure. Appreciates our gift of Y membership. Voice is deep and sober.

This morning I wake up at a more decent time, drink coffee, meditate in a world of chaotic voices and impressions. An overcast damp day, the moist decaying leaves from the season of “Terry’s Boat,” another piece about Lund I never got into the computer. I microwave a bowl of the oatmeal left here by guests, and after fussing with the phone for a while manage to reach Jan. She tells me the doctor she saw in Santa Maria confirmed that the lump wasn’t a problem. Ian was just arriving in Halloween costume with Dennis. He said he missed me.

I find the red handled axe I bought at Canadian Tire this summer, gather some rounds of firewood scattered near the house and set up a chopping block. The first big round shows traces of previous efforts, is twisted in its grain, and has spongy outermost rings. Go slow, I tell myself, find the fine cracks, focus eyes where the blade should hit, angle the axe head with the grain. The first few blows are off and the blade buries itself in the soft tenacious outer rings. After about ten my aim improves, but the wood remains intact. After another ten, shoulders sore, I’m about to quit. Then with a loud crack a half inch gap opens across its diameter. My “yeah!” echoes through the woods. The next three rounds go quickly. Instead of asking to borrow a chainsaw or buying one or trying to get the old Homelite going, I roam past the perimeter of the clearing and find twenty or so rounds strewn in brushpiles. I throw them up on the road, carry them to the block and split enough to last for my stay. In the woodshed I separate three categories; kindling, starter wood and fuel.

Still thinking about asking Peter U. to lend me his kayak or kayak with me to Cortes, I bike down the driveway. I have to dismount a few times to move the derailleur manually. It’s a thrill to speed down the curve toward Malaspina Farm. I find Peter working alongside Lucien, yarding out huge rounds of freshly cut alder that a faller had just taken down along his hydro line.

He tells me to borrow his bike which is smaller and better. We take his dog on a walk down a steep road to the edge of Okeover Arm, stopping at a lovely house, lawn and orchard with a landscaped stream winding through it to the shore. It reminds me of the stream on the Marx farm in winter rushing under the bridge and alongside the house.

We talk of children and grandchildren and my hopes to spend more time here with and without them and his hopes that S and W and their children will locate here at the completion of medical school. We come back to the house where Lucien is making lunch and Ronnie is coring and peeling apples for drying and adding to their homemade granola.

She’s recovering from the flu, but as animated as ever. She says, “Steven will know this,” and asks me a question about the proper ritual for unveiling a gravestone a year after her mother’s death. I have no idea, and I fail to link the question to the fact that today is Halloween, the day of the dead and of my father’s death. I do know that on such an anniversary it’s customary to light a Jahrzeit candle and say the Kaddish.

After lunch of two slices of bread and mustard—I turn down cheese and salami much to Peter’s disapproval—he drives to Lund to pick up the Globe and Mail for the word puzzle to which he’s addicted. At Nancy’s over coffee he tells me the story of Sacha and Wendy’s trick announcement of pregnancy by giving them an elaborately packaged giftbox with a positive pregnancy test stick inside.

Back at Knoll House I make a fire with my new wood. Jan calls and mentions mourning for Henry. I remember with shock.

The sun starts doing amazing things with the clouds behind Savary.

I go out on the deck and down to the bluff to take pictures.

I phone the number given to me by Ruth and leave a message that I cant kayak to Cortes this visit. It starts to rain.

I light the kerosene lamp for Henry, gather his pictures on my computer and read my account of his death on October 31 1995, my eulogy and my obituary.

I collect the pictures in my computer of other dead people I cared for and put them into an album. There are 11. Actually 10, since I find out a few days later that Terry K. is still alive.

The morning is dark and overcast, the house cold. I get up three hours later than usual. The bad smell in the bathroom is back. This time I look high rather than low and see a swatch of fur protruding through the insulation panels in the ceiling. After coffee and a new fire in the stove I return with pliers, lift the panel, clasp the dead mouse by the tail and cremate it.

Since I’m offline, no new input here today. Writing about yesterday, when nothing really happened, has already taken up six hours. If I were online, I’d be interrupted every few minutes.

I bike down to Lund and find it almost deserted, a contrast to the summer’s bustle. The water taxi would cost $110. each way to Cortes Bay. The kayak rental is closed for the season. I eat soup and empanada at Nancy’s bakery and bike back up the hill to M’s place. Since returning here a year ago after 21 years away, he lives alone in his trailer, works on his subdivision plans and his art. He seems healthy and happy, but how does he handle the solitude and lack of stimulation? The TV is on, next to his internet computer. We talk about old times.

Peddling up the steep driveway in the dark I meet neighbor Dick in his diesel pickup on the way to dump his compost for the bears down below the rock bluff. He tells me that our tenant last year showed him a photograph of a cougar sunning himself on the moss near the deck.

I meditate from 7:30 to 8:00, the silence of this place amplifying the static in my head. Usually it “settles down” for the last few minutes, but not now that I’m doing it twice a day in this perfect spiritual retreat. Nevertheless afterwards, I feel clearer and more optimistic than before. I read till ten, finishing My Year of Meats, carrying on a conversation with the author, as if she were the protagonist, Jane Takagi–a Japanese-American documentarian filmmaker. Though a DES child, Jane wants a baby and gets pregnant. Then loses it with a “missed abortion,” a form of miscarriage involving carrying a dead fetus for several weeks. That rare term awakened long-dormant dark personal memories.

The truest material for me in the book’s somewhat contrived denouement is expression of grief for this loss. All the happy endings—Jane’s career success, the defeat of the feedlot hormone conspiracy, Akiko’s pregnancy, her escape and welcome in America, the rekindling of Jane’s romance with Sloan—don’t mitigate its pain.