Day 1

After arriving in town separately on a late-night flight, Andy joined us for breakfast.  Our outfitters, “Up-North Adventures,” ferried us around downtown Whitehorse in a van to shop for gas, groceries and liquor. On the way to the supermarket, the boyish driver told stories of kayaking down class-five rapids in the Andes but assured us that the Teslin-Yukon was quite tame. Back at the shop we posed for a group shot.

Midway on the two hour van ride to our starting point at Johnson’s Crossing, the Alaska Highway bridge near the head of the Teslin river, “His Oiliness” Lionel, the day’s elected leader, realized we’d forgotten to pack the two propane stoves we’d rented and asked the driver if there was any way they could be delivered to us enroute. The rest of the crew displayed their manliness by pooh-poohing that notion and insisting we’d cook on open fires.

In a darkening drizzle we loaded the boats and headed off under the bridge and around a bend away from the highway into what seemed like uncharted territory.  I remembered that Andy had promised to bring a Satellite phone just in case. Even in the dead light, a margin of brilliant green grass lined the banks in front of a moving mosaic of dark spruce and luminous yellow aspen.  The river was wide and the current swept us luxuriously downstream.

After two hours paddle, his oiliness bowed to pressure and called a halt at a fine campsite by the junction with Squanga Creek, only twelve kilometers from the start.  In a flurry of spontaneous activity, men scurried from the boats, hauled drybags and packs up the steep bank, pitched tents, constructed a makeshift table and benches, prepared food, gathered wood, built a cooking fire, and rigged a large tarp over it under the direction of Steve, our proficient tarpmeister. The first dinner consisted of steak, the last fresh meat for a week and quinoa enriched with garlic, onions and carrots. Rum toddies and chocolate around the fire were accompanied by a reading of Robert Service’s “The Spell of the Yukon”:

It’s the great, big, broad land ‘way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

As we packed all the food and anything attractive like toothpaste into the bear barrels, Andy offered a reality check after consulting the guidebook.  In order to meet the outfitter 300 kilometers down river as planned, we’d have to cover 75 clicks a day, eight hours of paddling at the rate we were going.  Taking into account an hour and a half each of set-up and take-down, there wasn’t much time for activities or exploration or fooling around.  John the next day’s leader who named himself “Gone Fishin” called for 6AM wakeup.

Day 2

To view a complete set of photos for this trip go here.
To view a slideshow of these photos go here.

Prelude

At the end of last year’s excursion, Peter had suggested that we go on a river trip in “The North.”  Andy came through late in the game, on June 24 with a fully developed proposal:

My work schedule has blown me away for a good part of the year.  As unreasonable as it may seem I have only one window of opportunity for a wilderness trip. I can leave Edmonton on the afternoon of the 8th of September and I have to return to meetings in Vancouver that begin at 6:30 in the evening on the 17th September.

If the timing works then I think we can have a fine time (without the joy of any bugs of the biting variety) in the Yukon from Sept 9th to Sept 17th this year.

http://www.grc.k12.nf.ca/climatecanada/whitehorse.htm

At that time of year the length of day will change from about 13.5 hours to 12.5 hours during that period as the world plunges the North into twilight by November

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=679&month=9&year=2009&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1

and the temperatures will not sustain black flies and mosquitoes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehorse,_Yukon#Climate

I am heading up to Whitehorse again on business tomorrow and will try to scope out essentials and good advice from those well disposed to me J in those parts concerning the Teslin River and the Yukon River.

See link below to have confidence that a 7 day trip is possible “ we could likely easily make that distance on our own considering that the guided trip is 7 days on the Teslin¦.I have some friends on Lake Labarge ¦.not related to Sam McGee

http://www.spiritnorth.yk.ca/trips/trip3.html

Within four days ten men had signed up including first timer Allan, a friend of Lionel’s, who volunteered to be head cook.

Steven ordered a crudely produced but authoritative guidebook about the route by local guide Mike Rourke and posted several pages thick with detail. Its  handdrawn maps indicating every riffle and possible campsite proved essential to our daily navigation.

Converging from afar, our group assembled at Vancouver International at the check-in desk of Air North in the early evening, excited to meet again after a year and thrilled by anticipation, a cross between the Fellowship of the Ring and the Three Stooges. The hole left by the absence of Peter, who had bowed out because of a rib injury and family obligations, highlighted the sense of privilege shared by those who managed to get away. The wait in the terminal was enriched by a superb exhibit of Inuit sculpture.

Landing in Whitehorse we were greeted by a welcoming face I hadn’t seen in decades: Noah C, whom I, Steve, Ian and Murray knew from Lund since birth, a friend of my son’s, whose parents had also come to live in the woods circa 1970.  He lives there with his family, a teacher of elementary school, handsome, healthy and happy in the place where they say “Down in B.C.”  He agreed to join us at our hotel for dinner.

When we debarked from the airport bus in front of the Best Western Hotel someone in a group of youngsters loitering at the door asked if we were from Whitehorse and when answered no said, “You’re lucky, this place is a hole.”  A few seconds later there was a crash of glass and the smell of gin, followed by a long series of howls as the kids lurched down the street leaving a broken bottle on the sidewalk.

At our long table in the bar, we were also joined by Jonah, a cousin of John’s who lives in Whitehorse, and his partner Monica, two young people employed in the business of recreation that makes this place seem youthful and prosperous –he as a sponsored mountain biker and shop manager and she as a designer.

Day 1

To view a complete set of photos for this trip go here.
To view a slideshow of these photos go here.

August 29  Midway between Bajo Point and Bajo Creek

This morning dawned foggy.  Paul had coffee already brewed on his stove as I crawled out of the tent, less stiff and achy than on previous days. Walking on the hard grey sand along the smooth curve of Skuna Bay was fast and fluent.  We were greeted by a flock of killdeer at a little creek’s descent into the ocean.  A distinct track preceded us, which Paul identified as wolf.  For a while it was joined by bear prints and the delicate tracks of killdeer and sanderlings which follow the water’s moving edge, a double oscillation of waves within tides.

As we rounded the point at the south end of Skuna Bay under an awning of horizontal spruces, the sky disrobed, revealing its naked blue splendor and the sun’s brilliance. The top end of the bay where we’d camped remained in clear view, but continued shrinking into the expanding landscape.  Three days now with no trace of other humans”no logged stumps or springboard notches, no boats or planes or even contrails”except for a sprinkling of detritus on the beach: mostly water bottles and net floats.

Calvin Falls came into view, a white cascade of fresh water pouring into a deep pool with a slow circular current that empties into an ocean-seeking stream flowing across the wide beach. I welcomed the chance to get out of my wet boots and take a cleansing swim before lunch.  As we continued on, the friendly packed sand was replaced by large polished boulders, at first difficult to negotiate but soon allowing light-footed progress guided by close attention to the steps immediately ahead, enhanced by the stones’ artful variety of texture and color.  Then the boulders got covered with thick deposits of seaweed and eelgrass ripped by storms from kelp beds offshore. We either had to slog through the soft wet piles or balance our way along the driftwood stacked at high tide line. At first the stench was overwhelming but after an hour or so, one got used to it.

We found a fresh water rivulet and nearby a tent site on a soft bed of rotten eelgrass behind a thin barrier of logs that separated us from mountains of broken bull kelp, giant kelp and other algae that would provide a fortune in sushi, fertilizer and xanthan gum to anyone who could harvest it. After a nap Peter and I headed up into the bush to reconnoiter, drawn by sky visible above the treetops. We tunneled through salal up to a bench where it thins to allow relatively easy walking among widely-spaced first-growth trees and windfalls. We made for a huge gnarled cedar and found around its back traces of removal of cedar planks by native inhabitants long ago. Such “Culturally Altered Trees” provide evidence in present-day land-claims negotiation. We wandered further back along the trunk of a windfall hung up in the crossing of a cedar and a spruce and ended up fifty feet above the forest floor in the middle of the clearing it created.  Peter’s foot dropped through a hole in the moss, but he didn’t fall.  We bushwhacked toward the little creek leading to our campsite on the beach and crossed on a windfall leading to another old-growth cedar with a bear’s lair in its hollow base.  When we returned to camp, we found Paul napping instead of cooking. After a rude awakening he cooked up a much-anticipated meal of jambalaya and sockeye salmon with chocolate pudding for dessert. The incoming tide nudged piles of seaweed into gracefully curved windrows along the shore.

I got up to pee at 1:00 A.M. and was shocked by a bright orange moon sinking behind the shelf it exposed by pulling out the tide.

For a full photoset and slideshow of this day’s sights, go here

Those morbid reflections were interrupted by Jan’s suggestion we go on a hike this last morning of her stay.  She’d been gloomy about leaving without me to face family and political challenges alone in San Luis for several days, and I welcomed the idea of doing something before Juliets birthday party in the late afternoon.  It was a brilliant day and we agreed on trying out the Atrevida Loop, a nearby trail I’d never been on.  I carried the big pack again conditioning for the Nootka Hike.  The trail was gentle and soft, dark under the cover of large second growth forest that one could see through for long distances and punctuated by the odd hemlock branch or sword fern illuminated by a shaft of sunlight. Our isolation from one another gave way to easy conversation, free of ponderous repetition and anxious complaints, enlivened by the promise of making love that night.

A slight steady whooshing sound interrupts these jottings, perhaps a truck approaching down on the highway, but then growing closer and recognizable as rainfall on the roof.  The drops not visible through the little window on my left, but showing on the deck and then audible as such on the kitchen skylight.  A golden patch on the moss and white lines on the eastern side of the tree trunks is cast by the low sun. The hum on the roof recedes, replaced by the buzz of the fridge.

At times we were quiet, just walking together, each absorbed in wonder at the hushed vitality of the world through which we traipsed; the duff-covered trail, the roots protruding from moss and gripping the broken rock, the ragged walls of interlocked root and soil and rock becoming soil formed by upended platforms at the base of windfalls, the furrowed bark of fir trunks splitting by rapid growth from inside, in fluted columns thrusting the green canopy hundreds of feet into the sky, the sour-sweet fragrance of damp alder leaves, the spongy feel of rotten wood underfoot, dropped there in chunks when the snag succumbs to gravity and decomposition–all summoning memories of living on the farm in the midst of this burgeoning growth and decay.

The trail was marked by iridescent red diamonds nailed at eye height on trees by Eagle and his friendly crew and also by an unsettling array of surveyors tape and spray paint marks suggesting that before long this quiet self-sustaining ecosystem will once again be denuded by chainsaw and ravaged by bulldozer, and that the trees now standing between the huge stumps of the original old growth forest destroyed a hundred years ago will themselves be rendered to stumps and join their forbears protruding from piles of dry dead slash. Instead of making a loop, the trail we followed converged with the Sunshine Coast Trail which we agreed to follow northward for another half hour before heading back the way we came.  The forest here seemed older, the spaces between trees wider, the floor covered with recognizable old growth nursling trees that must have fallen before the first loggers came through. A short section of the trail passed by six living ancient firs saved by accident and the trail makers’ designs.  At 11:30 we stopped for lunch sitting on the soft bench of a moss-covered cedar, munched crackers and pesto and apple and talked of how evolution may or may not account for us and the world we were immersed in, cued by Jan’s reading of Jarrett Diamond,’s The Third Chimpanzee and my reading of The World Without Us.  The exercise and the damp air of the forest and the subdued light made her look beautiful.

Upon our return to Knoll House, we both took short naps.  Juliet called and asked that Jan come early to her 64th birthday party, and while she prepared devilled eggs, I went down the driveway across the highway and in one hour in the hot sun picked a gallon of blackberries puzzling about how evolutionary adaptation could account simultaneously for the perfumed and sugared attraction of the fruit and the painful repellent of the thorns.  Back up the hill, I cooked the berries with sugar, cinnamon and the pectin Jan had bought, sterilized jars and canned eight of them for gifts to take back to California.  I dropped her off at Juliet’s and headed down to Okeover for a swim.  The tide was way out and a large multigenerational Chinese family were digging clams as I threaded my way across barnacled rocks and shells thankful for my water shoes.

We were the earliest guests at the party, drinking beer and following the last rays of warm sun in Steve’s beautifully sculpted back patio, talking of their travels to India, of our projected trip to Japan, of our hike and of course of the old days.  Tai and Theo, Peter and Ronnie, came and joined the circle, he describing a brutal ascent of 19000 foot Mt. Kilimanjaro he had undertaken earlier this year while sick with a cold. Then Peter and Margaret, Dylan and Amanda and Sage and his little brother and Sherry and Barbara and Roger Langmaid with whom I talked about David Creek, her former husband, whom I hadn’t seen since  1975, and Pam Begbie, and new people, Jack and David, and then it was time to eat and then Jan drew me back to Knoll House at 8:30 before dessert or present opening for our appointment, and then our bodies returned to each other in their fresh and blooming youth.

Yesterday, the long anticipated separation date of August 24, Jan finished packing and we went to River City for breakfast and internet. I left her at the airport and headed back to the coffee house where I spent a couple of hours processing and loading pictures to Flickr. When through with that around noon, I felt a familiar sense of isolation and disorientation; my Siamese twin fell off, what hit me? I checked Craigslists for boats, but also personals”first and predictable tropism of separation from Jan”but nothing in P.R.  I knew I had shopping to do for the upcoming hiking trip, but felt incapable, just like retreating home and crawling into bed. I went to the terrible bakery on Joyce just to quell hunger and got a cold and nasty slice of pizza, which did provide a little bit of restoration, then drove down to River City books, where I couldn’t find a map of Nootka, then got back in the car drove down Marine and up Willingdon looking for other outfitters or health food stores, and slowly drove by a new place advertising adult entertainment and then drove back to River City where I ordered coffee and reopened my computer and got serious about making a shopping list.  This took close to an hour, but reoriented me to tasks and problem solving.  I went next door to the outfitters and spent a half an hour shopping for a rain parka, leching the 55 year old nervous sales clerk until I was turned off by her breath and by my own jowly and wrinkled image in the mirror. Then I drove back up to Quality Foods with my grocery list, realizing that there were only two days more before our early departure for the Island and I needed to get the job done now, and that it was already too late in the day to start the Prodigal summer writing project.  I spent a long time picking out dried fruits and nuts, and while gazing at the smoked salmon heard a voice saying “Don’t buy that its poison.”  It was Michael F. pushing a grocery cart.  I said I’d been planning to visit him this afternoon and tour his subdivision. He said fine.  After about another hour of shopping for the meal by meal backpacking, I picked up a cooked chicken and then drove to Michael’s and invited him for dinner. He led me down to the two chairs by his new pond fed by a bubbling artesian spring, the sunny weather now having given way to gray, and he threw food into it for the leaping many colored fish and waxed lyrical about the family of wood ducks that have taken up residence there. He spends at least an hour a day sitting here feeding the fish.

He drove me along his new roads, including the $300K stretch of Edith Road, out to the bluff above our old farm where he hopes to build his own house once having sold his lots and where we admired a grand view of the Strait and the islands.  Then we went back to his mobile home and he phoned a Vancouver Real Estate broker who will fly up to see the subdivision on the weekend.  I drove to Knoll House and prepared dinner and Michael showed up soon thereafter with another $30 bottle of wine.  We ate and drank and looked at old pictures and remembered old stories and newer ones and finished another bottle of wine and parted with hugs.

I washed the dishes and went to bed at 10:15 and woke up at 6:00 from a dream of running a camp where I couldn’t get the counselors or the kids under control and where I just wrecked a car we needed to transport stuff by pulling the doors out of alignment driving through the bush. I bathed, shaved, took my pills, made the bed, did stretches, meditated a long time, ate a bowl of cereal and realized that there was still a good deal of packing work and trash burning to do, and that simply keeping this journal most likely would be as much writing as I could accomplish today.  I’ve been at it for three hours.

3:30

Was it three or four hours that I wrote the previous entry? I did sort pills and clothes and camping gear and food and packed my backpack.  Along with snack breaks, that took another two or three hours.  While I usually just throw things into a pack and suitcase hoping for the best, this five day trip required that I take care not to bring too much weight but enough to avoid going hungry, wet or cold.  That meant deliberation about which thermarest to select, whether or not to put the sleeping bag in a dry bag, and do I bring one or two cans of tuna to liven up the couscous dinner. Having loaded up the pack, I burned trash and then evaded Darwinian literary studies by returning to Steven Pinker’s new book, The Stuff of Thought.  Thirty or so pages and a short nap later, I’ve prepared a cup of Earl Grey tea and returned to the computer, here to list my current options: 1) read and revise the morning’s writing 2) go on a trip to Ervington’s to retrieve my hat and flashdrive and swim at Okeover 3) find and hack a route from the moss trail to Krompocker road 4) finish cleaning up the mess on the bluff with the chainsaw 5) explore the property between the new section of the moss trail and the highway 6) play the recorder 7) read my Prodigal Summer notes. (4:45)

Waking up at dawn under an orange full moon above Savary in pure silence. Since we arrived, day before yesterday, smoke from the fires on Vancouver Island has hidden the mountains that normally create the beautiful horizon line.

Before the children and grandchildren arrive, there is time to read and a wealth of comfortable chairs and couches at Knoll House for the purpose. I’m halfway through a book that I bought on impulse at Powell’s in Portland on the way up here because I’d heard about it from several quarters: The World Without Us.  It places many of the events that cause me anxiety in a framework that both magnifies their horror and reduces their pain by turning them into enthralling catastrophe narratives. If humans were gone from New York and the pumps that keep the underground city from flooding stopped working, the water would fill the subways and rust the foundation piers of the skyscrapers.  Within a few decades the whole thing would have collapsed into a landscape of rubble covered with forest. Elephant herds would multiply in Africa, restoring jungle to grassland. Untended corrosion in the chemical plants along the Texas Louisiana coast would cause explosions and toxic spills that  eventually would be cleaned up by bacteria evolved to do the job.

Its good to be reading this in B.C. where keeping back the bush requires continuing human effort without which cars and homes and cleared land can be seen succumbing to the engulfing monster of natural reclamation”as heartless and inexorable in its way as loggers and bulldozers chewing up the woods.  Where Joe and I felled a dozen fifty-foot jackpines threatening the house last summer, the opening is now filled with brambles and dandelion-like weeds I started cutting yesterday. I can hardly wait to fire up the chainsaw to clear windfalls blocking the trails I’ve carved over the years.  Imagining the relatively short interval required to neutralize the growing impacts of humans on mother earth serves as an antidote to my fear that what Bill McKibben predicted 20 years ago as the End of Nature will soon be upon us.

Three weeks ago I decided we need to have a party.  Summer’s half over and aside from family, there’s been no contact with people I love to be around. Always some new brushfire or obligation, and nobody invites me, and how can one celebrate in times like these when Claire lost her job and the wolf ‘s at Joe and Amy’s door and mother-in-law Ruth keeps heading downhill, but oh so slowly, and the news is of crises compounded and solutions refused.

Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain
¦
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there
¦
I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

Time out of Mind, Bob Dylan

But the tomatoes fatten and turn red, and the green beans feed us every night, and we’re between illnesses, and four grandsons grow and laugh.

Both of our birthdays fall in July, Jan’s on a Saturday far enough away.  We wont announce it but perhaps on the day itself.  I send an invitation to 30 people

and fifteen say yes.

In the meantime, while Jan’s second cousin Ivy visits for a few days, Ruth is sent by ambulance to the hospital to get treatment for a bladder infection”perhaps misdiagnosed”and then returned to Garden Creek Assisted Living. In Switzerland, the eighty five year old healthy conductor of the London Philharmonic has just taken a potion to join his wife dying of cancer on the next stage of the journey, surrounded by family members saddened but content.  The British authorities are considering prosecution. The reported scene reminds me of Socrates saying goodbye to his friends and drinking the potion of hemlock. Ivy’s 28 and she’s worked for awhile with the frail elderly.  We agree with what the conductor has done. She’s from enlightened Oregon, where two doctors have to make a determination that death by illness is imminent and inevitable in order to allow any such choice.  Might ending it before such a time, even when in good health, but at a predetermined age, say 85, be an even better idea?

As party time approaches it looks as if the tomatoes and beans will provide food for everyone.

Three days before, Ruth is again ambulanced to the hospital because of blood in the stool.  It’s determined she has bleeding ulcers probably caused by the Celebrex she takes to reduce the excruciating pain in her knees”unsuccessfully. The night before, Jan is  told Ruth will be released from the hospital on the day of the party and cant return to Garden Creek but will have to go to Cabrillo Nursing Home, the last stop for my father and mother and Jan’s aunt.

Early in the morning, we go to the farmers market for fruits and vegetables and Jan marinates the chicken and Greek Salad.  In response to her straightforward request for help, Claire invites us for brunch at her new home and agrees to help her move Ruth to the nursing home. After the brunch of buns and blackberries picked in the trailer park, mother and daughter go to the hospital, and I stay home with the baby cleaning house and preparing the rest of the food.

Tom, my ex-student and then ex-office mate at Cal Poly, shows up early with a friend and a friend of the friend to sit in the backyard and drink beer.  He’d said he couldn’t come because of a prior obligation to attend a baptism in L.A., but the baptism was canceled because the grandfather of the child was hospitalized with a stroke. This is a fine portent.  Our party will go forward despite all.  Tom and the boys go to work moving furniture, buying more beer and helping with the barbeque.  When the rest of the guests start arriving on schedule”including our eighty-something neighbor from across the street making it up the steps with her walker assisted by her sixty-something son recently out of rehab”the merriment ignites, and with the taste of the barbequing summer harvest it flourishes.

As we cook and drink together, Tom, whose memory is total and ineradicable, reminisces about a party here with my father, whom he knew quite well.

Suddenly I flash on some of the only lines I’ve ever memorized”spoken by the Old Shepherd in The Winters Tale, that Tom had taken parts in and helped me stage in the Old Mission downtown in 1992:

You have undone a man of fourscore three,
That thought to fill his grave in quiet, yea,
To die upon the bed my father died,
To lie close by his honest bones

The older I get, I tell him, the more those lines come to mind as I look at the photo of Henry on my wall.  Though his death in 1995 keeps receding into the past, as every year passes I feel closer to where he is now.

The celebration climaxes with the late arrival of Claire and her seven-year-old,

just in time for the surprise announcement of Jan’s 64th birthday with the Beatles song on the stereo.

When i get older losing my hair,
Many years from now.
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine.
If i’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When i’m sixty-four.

You’ll be older too,
And it you say the word,
I could stay with you.
I could be handy, mending a fuse
When your lights have gone.
You can knit a sweater by the fireside
Sunday mornings go for a ride,
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more.
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,

When i’m sixty-four.
Every summer we can rent a cottage,
In the isle of wight, if it’s not too dear
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee
Vera chuck & dave
Send me a postcard, drop me a line,
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine for evermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When i’m sixty-four.

more pics

To celebrate finishing the Bible as Literature article and get a workout, I decided to go on a bikeride. Checked the web for places I hadn’t been and came up with “Morning Glory,” a descent from the top of Cuesta Ridge that sounded appealing.  Jan agreed to drive me to the top of Cuesta Pass and I convinced her to take me and the bike up TV Tower Road until she refused to go further through the ruts and bumps.

It was pretty hot outside the car at 10:15 in the morning, though nothing like the 110 degree temps they were having in North County.  With plenty of water and slavered-on sunscreen I started up the road feeling a rare sense of “No Hurry.”

Once out of the oak forest and into the chapparal, the road stays close to the top of the steep ridge, revealing new prospects at every turn.

First was back down to the freeway going up Cuesta Grade.

clickpic for larger size (more…)

Dear Prof. Marx,

As the arts and humanities section editor for the Encyclopedia for Sciences and Religions, I am writing to inquire if you would agree to contribute an article of 4000-5000 words on the subject of “The Bible as Literature” for this particular reference work. The volume will be published in 2011.

As a leading international publisher, Springer is known not only for its comprehensive reference works, but for the global scope of the knowledge and expertise these works contain.

Your name was selected for this project because of your visibility and reputation in your particular field, and I genuinely hope will you say yes.  In the meantime, I thank you so much for taking the time to look over the particulars of this groundbreaking and highly significant project.
__________________________

1. Describe this discipline/subdiscipline and some of its most recent developments.

“The Bible as Literature” denotes an academic subject taught in high schools, colleges and universities and the academic specialty of a worldwide network of scholars. As a Library of Congress subject category in World Cat it elicits entries for 1252 books. In recent years, practitioners have preferred the term, “Literary Study of the Bible,” which produces listings as the subject of 653 books. There is no professional organization or journal specifically devoted to the topic.
The Bible as Literature/Literary Study of the Bible is a subdiscipline of both Biblical Studies and Literary Criticism.  Its activity is “exegesis,” that is, commentary on and interpretation of the Bible.

The word “Bible” has several meanings. It refers to a collection of separate books and to that collection defined as a single book. The Jewish Bible consists only of the Hebrew Scriptures or Tanakh. The Christian Bible includes the books of the New Testament plus the Hebrew Scriptures, which it refers to as the Old Testament. The Catholic Bible contains, in addition, the Apocrypha, a set of books not included in the Protestant Bible

Literature is defined as “¦artistic writings worthy of being remembered. ¦that are characterized by beauty of expression and form and by universality of intellectual and emotional appeal.”  Literary Study is defined as “the humanistic study of literature.”  “The purpose of a literary inquiry is a better understanding of the text”its construction, its forms of expression, its meaning and significance, and/or its relation to non-textual elements or to other texts.”  Although the text that Literary Study examines is usually concrete and specific, no understanding it produces is exhaustive or conclusive.

The Bible as Literature /Literary Study of the Bible is governed by a set of hermeneutic methods”i.e. certain principles of commentary and interpretation. It takes a secular approach, treating biblical texts as works produced by human beings within human history rather than a theological approach, which treats them as Holy Scripture, Divine Revelation or The Word of God.  It applies techniques of literary criticism to the Bible in the same ways they have been applied to other literary works since the time of Aristotle. These include:

¢    analysis of plot and structure,
¢    discussion of character, including the characters of narrator and author
¢    exploration of theme
¢    consideration of historical and geographic setting
¢    delineation of linguistic and stylistic devices, including figures of speech and verse and prose conventions
¢    categorization of genres
¢    correlation of intertextual references to other works

Some readers within faith communities that adhere to a theological approach to biblical interpretation regard the The Literary Study of the Bible as subversive; others see it as complementary. (more…)

[photoset]

Tuesday June 16

Grades in. Half a dozen or more thank-you emails from students. Calculating the profit on the Sierra Club benefit: $10K. The agonizing move of Claire from 24A to 16B complete.  Hidden Hills Mobile Home on the market.

I complete the touch-up painting, mulch tomatoes and cukes, break down the bikes and pack for the trip. After spending the day together, Claire and Ian and Dennis and Lucas come for pizza to Albert Drive.  Jan to City Council at 6:30.  Ian and I watch Aristocats. I wake up at 3:00 A.M. and complete the article on Green Building and Joe’s spec house that he asked me to write for the Sun Valley promotional magazine. [click images to enlarge]

The holy crusade for sustainability converted into marketing strategy and composition class writing prompts.

Wednesday June 17

7:30 A.M. departure.  Ian in his sleeping bag, watching Spider Man in the back seat.  We listen to Garrison Keillor reading his new novel Liberty borrowed from the SLO Library.  Buy cherries, peaches and apricots from a farmgirl at a fruitstand on Hiway 5. This is our fourth June trip with Ian to Ketchum.  He is carsick twice, but avoids messing the car. This time, no dallying at Donner Lake or Yosemite.  Sleep at the Elko motel after a late Chinese dinner.

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By the Eucalyptus Grove above the hairpin rail turn in Stenner Canyon.

Yet another pipeline coming through, this time the Nacimiento project.  A great berm topped by the two excavators that piled it over the place where wildflowers and snakes flourished in years gone by.  Behind me the rush of skidding mountain bikes coming down from Shooters on this temperate May afternoon.  Aaron L., the new Cal Poly ranch manager we met at the trailhead says forty or fifty a day pass his house at Serrano.  Rockslide Ridge lit from behind and to the left, Poly Mountain.  The oat grass swaying, creeks on either side tumbling lightly, peaceable murmur of student conversation, while some write and others gaze.

The new trail up here from the tracks on land just acquired by the city switchbacks through oak groves crossing and recrossing Stenner’s central fork on artfully curved, banked wooden bridges.

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The students leave at 5:20, after I read a parting prose-poem by Mary Oliver

Look, it’s spring.  And last year’s loose dust has turned into this soft willingness.  The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting their curvaceous and pale bodies.  The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.

And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.

Chad back from Japan and Nancy back from Germany have joined the hike and have brought food to share  somewhere down the trail.  He called at 3:15 to ask if the class would go today and if they could join it. The fellowship of Focus the Nation revived. Alex comes along to explore the section between here and the great oak, where I plan to stop for dinner. As we traverse the three-dimensional curves of the path through grassland and oak canyon, they relate the night before’s adventure of staging a Renewable Energy Education Program for the Sierra Club in Atascadero.  The POPRs (Protect Our Property Rights) turned out en masse, some to harrass, others to learn.  I try to turn their attention to the long prospects down the canyons to the sea, to the the colorful Jasper boulders, the little wetlands, and then the tree.

They discover a dramatically lit canopy under the kneeling limbs and unpack a wine bottle, fresh produce from the organic farm where I went this morning to pick up veggies with Lucas, a little baggie of bulgar wheat and a campstove.  While they prepare the feast,

I climb to the top of the tree, salivating now at the thought of eating something more than the trail mix in my pack.

I’m invaded by memories: the Durand Oak, and the meals of vegetables and rice with students and ex-students at Columbia in the Sixties.

As the sun goes down, I direct them to the path looping back to Serrano, happy to find the solitude I was anticipating yet grieving for their departure.  Nancy is leaving San Luis for good within weeks.  Chad has graduated. They are trying to maintain the bonds of Empower Poly and Focus the Nation against the entropy of dispersal with plans for a California Energy Tour and  other world-changing enterprises. I look for them on the trail below, but it is too dark and too late.

I hoist my pack and walk through tall grass over a rise into an encounter with a black-tailed doe.

She poses for me then prances off, then poses again.

The full moon rises fat over East Cuesta Ridge.

As the dusk deepens and the wind picks up, I pass from the Stenner watershed to Poly Canyon’s and find a relatively flat spot beside one of the springs that source Brizzolara Creek. I’m too tired to read or write or even look at the stars.  The northwest wind has picked up, harrying the trees and grasses, recalling Muir’s description of “A Windstorm in the Forest,” which we read last week:

when the grand anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees,…and even the infinitely gentle rustle of the withered grasses at my feet. Each was expressing itself in its own way,–singing its own song, and making its own peculiar gestures…The profound bass of the naked branches and boles booming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibrations of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf.

The wind is warm, but not as dry as the hot sundowners that make you feel like wildfire is just a spark away.

Next day I find out that while I thought that the hills above Santa Barbara were burning and much of the city was evacuated.  I burrow into my bag and the unrlenting wind tugs at it all night, shaking me awake every hour or so to see the moon progressing across the sky.

Friday morning I drop down cross country into Poly Canyon, knees and ankles grateful for the bracing of my heavy boots. An interesting bird in a dessicated Sycamore lets me take its picture

At 6:30 am the rising sun spotlights the top of Poly Mountain, just where I slept two weeks before.  It’s greeted by a group of students!