Day 4

Lord Robert, the day’s captain, saw to it that we were back in the boats at 9 AM on a bright promising morning. The only use of the word “spectacular” in our otherwise low-key guide occurred to describe the section of the river we approached soon after departure, dramatically illuminated in the morning sunshine.  Two high cutbanks converged to create what seemed like an endless maze, probably the outcome of past shifts of the river’s course.  We all stopped paddling and let the current slowly wind us along, dazzled by the luminous cliff faces and hushed by those in shadow, dwarfed by their scale, thrilled by the brilliance of sky and foliage on the opposite bank.

Lunch was scheduled for Mason’s Landing, a historical landmark 136 kilometers from our starting point.   Among the ruins of crude log cabins, we ate, rested and Murray chronicled and composed.  According Mike Rourke’s guide, the Teslin river itself didn’t yield much gold, but it was the route from the South to Dawson City and the Klondike a hundred miles north, and to nearby big strikes on Livingstone Creek in 1894.  First a pack trail and then a wagon road was constructed to lead there from this trading post, along with a telegraph line from the Hootalinqua junction downstream, our destination for the night’s camp.

Andy’s GPS told him that the current was increasing so we could slow down whenever we wanted to enjoy the scenery, the fishing and the feel of the river flowing fast over the bottom visible in the shallows along the shore and slow through the eddies and whirlpools on its surface in the middle.

At Hootalinqua, the Teslin terminated, absorbed by the Yukon river flowing into it from Lake Labarge. The Google map suggested this would be a sensational location, but the convergence was hidden by treed islands. Nevertheless one could suddenly feel a surge of new current and see that the color of the water had changed from a transparent brown to an opaque green.  We paddled hard to get across the channel  and arrived in a calm bay, at the end of which floated a pair of swans in placid dignity beside an artfully shaped boulder protruding from the water.  As we approached them quietly, they took off in formation and circled the large bay trumpeting as they flew over us and then returning to alight where they started.

Another reception was provided by a man standing on shore staring at us intently, dressed not like a canoeist or kayaker, but in torn jeans, jean jacket, gumboots and wide hat, long-haired, bearded, bespectacled and dark in complexion.  There was no sign of a boat along the shore and we knew there was no road to this place. As we pulled up on the sand beach, eager to explore this interesting location and make use of the well built outhouses, he asked if we had any tobacco, he hadn’t had a cigarette in days, since he’d had a fight with his uncle, got out of the boat here, and waited around hoping for a way to get home.

As we unloaded our canoes a tiny figure came shooting across the widened river from behind the island paddling a tiny collapsible kayak.   Cameron, a young man from Victoria had borrowed it from someone he knew who had got it from someone else for a hundred dollars. He’d started at Whitehorse on the Yukon river, and gotten delayed by a two day storm that kept him from crossing Lake LaBarge.  He had neither sleeping bag nor waterproof clothing nor job nor kayaking experience, but a spirit of adventure that was taking him through the five finger rapids all the way down river to Dawson City.

The marooned man, named Russell, also asked Cameron for a smoke.  His strange story and mix of reticence and talkativeness made everyone uneasy.  In reply to whether or not he had food, he said “up in a tree,” explained later by his saying he’d almost hit a grouse with a rock and that he could kill the two swans with one shot.  Steve urged that we offer him a ride out, but Andy suggested that we bring up all the paddles from the shore and keep them in our tents.

Russell disappeared while we ate a somber dinner.  Andy called Steve Mother Teresa and said that Russell refused his offer to call for help with the Satellite phone. Steve said that only “Westerners” would be hesitant to help a person like this in distress.  The rest of our group seemed reluctant to desert Russell but wary of taking on a passenger we distrusted for the rest of the trip, especially since his family and friends knew of his being here. After the meal to which he was not invited, Russell returned and asked for coffee”but not alcohol.  Steve gave him hot chocolate and John and he engaged Russell in conversation.  He had come up river, he said, with his uncle and two friends, one of who had “gone crazy” and run off into the bush up near Teslin Crossing, a spot between Mason Landing and the Spectacular Cut Bank.  The uncle insisted on returning to Carmacs down the river for a doctor’s appointment, but Russell wanted to stay and search. That was the reason for the fight. Wariness diminished somewhat as we all sat around the fire in the chill evening drizzle, despite Russell’s repeated mention of the “thirty aught six” that he had stashed in his camp. He also indicated that he had a son in England, that he was a volunteer firefighter, that he was planning to go to a First Nations shindig upriver, that he was a Boston Bruins fan and that he was familiar with Leonard Cohen.

Day 5

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

Day 3

Jobwaddhi made two sensible proclamations at breakfast: we would switch paddling partners and we would begin the day with stretches, a morning ritual that had been observed for at least the last two years’ trips and that would have helped get us through yesterday had it not been abandoned.

As we packed the gear, a large raven with a fat double chin perching on a snag in the middle of the campsite clicked and croaked with impatience to pick at our leavings   Daylight revealed fresh tracks of bear, wolf and moose in the mud, but we were disappointed that no large non-human mammals were sighted any time on the trip. Bald eagles, both mature and juveniles were in plentiful supply, along with the occasional dead salmon lying on the shore or floating in the water, after migrating up from the Bering Sea into which the river emptied 1900 miles downstream near Nome Alaska.

Three days from our departure point and cut off from other human contact, toughened by yesterday’s ordeal, familiarized with the recurrent features of the landscape, spared from rain though still deprived of sunlight, we had gained our riverlegs.  The current varied from 3 to 6 km/hr with the exception of some faster water on hairpin turns and in reaches where the contour perceptibly dropped.  At times steersmen faced a tricky selection of which channel around an island was least likely to run their canoe aground and threaten to swamp it in the strong flow.  As they approached a junction trying to decide, they would often discover that the current had already chosen for them. On one occasion Steven and Ian found themselves making a 360 degree revolution while negotiating a swift section. On another Murray and John became marooned on a gravel bar off of which they had to walk their canoe, but this was as close to mishap that anyone came. Despite his worsening illness, John remained spirited and productive as ever.

Several hours were spent passing through a burn where this summer’s forest fires rendered the tightly spaced black trunks into a dizzying moire pattern.  The destination selected for the day had the alluring name of O’Brien’s Bar, but rather than an Irish pub it referred to an old settlement on a flat section of bank surrounded by a 270 degree turn of the river.  With a surge of effort to fight a way out of the current, the canoes pulled up with a couple of hours left of daylight. People followed trails through the mossy forest which led to the ruins of a log cabin and heavy chunks of gold mining machinery manufactured in San Francisco, evidence of prospectors’ hopes and a long defunct paddle-wheeler trade. The catch of the day filled two large frying pans allowing each of us a generous portion.

After dinner Ian and Steven did a tandem reading of Robert Service‘s poem, “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” which takes place “on the marge of Lake Labarge” nearby.  Each brought a copy, which wasn’t necessary, since this chestnut seemed to be printed in every tourist information pamphlet and engraved on many plaques on the streets of Whitehorse.

Day 4

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

Day 2

Andy got the fire going before yelling “Rise and shine” at the crack of dawn.  Murray’s clarion call of “Where’s the f…ing coffee,” preceded pouring the brew which he lovingly percolated to supplement Alan’s multigrain porridge.  Grunts and groans issued from several quarters, a result of stiff joints unaccustomed to sleeping on the ground or paddling and lifting. John was coming down with the flu, but insisted he’d tough it out. Murray recited the poem he had crafted about yesterday’s events, recalling forgotten incidents and giving the whole a memorable shape. Banter and storytelling delayed departure till 9:00 AM. The red sky at morning served as warning.

On the river, the landscape grew more varied, at times opening to vistas of distant mountains pocketed with snow and carpeted with scarlet shrubs, at others unfolding high “cutbanks” of sediment carved by its meandering course into alluvial residues of sand and gravel left by receding glaciers. Distinguishing one from another and discovering the appropriate lunchstop and overnight campsite were officially delegated to the day’s navigator who carried the relevant pages of the guidebook in a ziplock bag.  But this thankless office lacked authority and its holder was subject to complaint and disobedience throughout the trip.

Within a couple of hours the temperature dropped close to freezing and it started to rain. Drybags were emptied of layers of waterproofing and insulation.  There was no choice but to paddle hard without pause–both to meet our distance quota and to keep warm–fueled by handfuls from the huge bags of gorp distributed by our food providers. Finally at 1:45, John allowed us to pull over at a small campsite for a lunchbreak. Gobbling rations of salami, cheese and cracker, men shivered around our small fire, and when it sputtered out in the increasing rain retreated under a tree.

Back on the river, the rain lightened but we resigned ourselves to spending the rest of the day in wet clothes.  It was dark by the time we found the night’s campsite, but trolling from his canoe John had caught three arctic grayling trout to contribute to Allan’s piquant dish of riso pasta and curried canned chicken.  Inspired by the cuisine, Ian our leader-elect took on the title of “Jobwaddhi” and offered deep spiritual counsel to his devotees in the accents of a maharishi, occasionally slipping into Scottish brogue.  The dialogue was enriched in dialect mastered by several members of the group who had spent time in India or were in fact students of gurus.  Substantial inroads into the rum ration and a sense of challenge overcome ended the tough day with satisfaction.

Day 3

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

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…)