Chevy Step-side

Well, the house is in good order with no major projects slated for this year. We enjoyed the studio and we got to make some built-in furniture in the space. The fire and southern light through the windows made it a lovely space to work in. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's masterpiece, "Team of Rivals", about Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, while sitting in the old rust-colored hand-me-down chair, feet propped on the kindling splitting log.

We get restless with the idea of no projects of our own. Because we had to sell the quite new Silverado to get through the winter after a difficult year last year Cicely was left without transportation of her own when I had the big Ford on a job. Her father is a mechanic and a Jeep racer so she has a good dose of that love for four-wheeled things in her blood. This spring we snapped up an '84 Chevy step-side in fair shape and in need of some sweat, love, and craftsmanship. I have never been accused of being a mechanic, so when the motor checked out we thought we could all pitch in and give the pick-up it's due over time.

Cicely and I pulled into the drive late one evening and it was immediately more beloved than the newer model that preceded it. Veronika's favorite feature was the rust on the body, particularly the doors. This comes as no surpise because at eleven she loves clothes from "The Red Hen" second hand store more than any of the commercial clothing stores. Noble, at thirteen, had driven the family pick-ups around the neighborhood from time to time, and without seeking permission he turned the key and peeled out in reverse into the street. He and Veronika disappeard for a few minutes on a test drive. They came back safe and sound with smiles stretched from the corners of their face. Then they put on safety glasses and started to rip up the rotted wood bed, and then to clean the windows and to go over each inch assessing projects for later days.

It has never been on my list to restore a vehicle but I have really started to understand the appeal, in the same way dilapidated buildings appeal to me. Since then we have gotten the pickup more road worthy and have spent many times the hours on shaping up an old commercial building in Twisp. Versus buying a new vehicle, this Chevy is already so much more fun at a mere fraction of the cost. I suppose that by the time Noble and Veronika are able to drive legally they will have a true sense of ownership of it, as they should.

Geppetto: The Creator's Dilemma

I have very recently published a book to most e-reader devices entitled, "Geppetto: The Creator's Dilemma". It is an allegorical novella intended, through familiar characters from folklore, to provoke philosophical questions about quality, purpose, and meaning. The archetypal artisan by his qualified hands has created a perfectly crafted son. Pinocchio is uncommonly good but unruly and paradoxical, and possibly more wise than his fashioner. Geppetto, with the assisatance of his skeptical friend Leonard, must explore to the tragic depths whether the creator can love or even understand his creation, as the two are made of totally different material.

You may sample or purchase the book by clicking here.

The Smiling Pulverizer

Whatever this valley has been called before, I have to submit after much consideration that Sally Portman was right to describe the Methow as “The Smiling Country”. But the smile is tricky like a coyote’s and as complex as the face of a woman keeping her thoughts to herself. The smile is often that of a friend, familiar and comfortable, or too often full of pain and empathy like a fellow mourner’s for the transition of a great soul into death. The smoker jumper smiles at his paycheck, and there is a smile in the October snow that lights on an evergreen bough, the August sun jangling on a river swimming hole, the myriad faces of Balsam Root in springtime, the tan bare arms and shoulders of a gardener, the determined grin of a novice builder driving home a pickup load of nice dimensional lumber, and there is a smile in the long curved shape of the first of a thousand zucchinis in autumn.

There is something about the smiling country that makes one smile where elsewhere, with the same trials, concerns, and obsessions he might grimace. The Methow Valley is too small to have enemies, and narrow enough to have scores of them. It is full of independence and willfulness, and this pervasive individuation, made of yoginis and Christian fundamentalists, spouses and lovers, farmers and ranchers, rednecks and socialists, man and woman and child, volunteers and profiteers shape itself into a community imperative. Instead of coming to blows or berating with profanities, the people sometimes smile instead, to survive as individuals, and for the community imperative that somehow, somewhere along the way was foisted by trickery on the unsuspecting rugged individual and stubborn intellectual. Perhaps the Valley herself teaches it, smiling to survive a human effect by magnanimously carrying her people along in spite of us.

From my narrow and puny narcissistic viewpoint, the Methow Valley is still doing what it always did, even to become. It is a grinding stone with hard rock on either side, and up and down the myriad drainages. Everything in the middle is ground down. Any of us here live in the action end of the pulverizer. Everything angular is rounded. Everything hard is converted into moon dust. Elsewhere in the West one can stand on the looming edge of a basalt plateau, or place the feet squarely on the high point of a sandstone column and be untouched except by wind. Mighty. Conqueror. Godly and majestic. Small yet engulfing. But take that same hearty soul, this epitome of evolutionary mind and excellent body, and put her in this valley, and the memory of ice will curl her into a ball and grind her competence into flour that mixes with the last independent man that came here because he thought government would never find him. Bodies, minds and souls don’t die, but rather they are ground into meal and eaten by their neighbors as nutritious and energizing hand-patted cakes, sacramental like the body of God, a god that says, “I” and “Am”, and “Here”, and I think that when he thinks it he smiles, and I feel grateful.

Flawfulness

My good friend Orson built some lovely upper cabinets for the kitchen of one of my long-standing clients, the ones whose Methow vacation property is guarded by Kitsune, the fox. Orson's work is characterized by care, love, patience, and precision. To the left of his gorgeous work a foot-wide space remained to be artfully filled. I was invited to provide some sabi to Orson's wabi, some yang to his yin. I made the cabinet's decorative shell out of a sheet of hot-pressed steel that had been hanging about the owner's property without purpose for numerous years. Some of the steel I ground down past the mill scale to the shiny steel hidden under blackness. The cuts were deliberatley out of perfect square. I intentionally accelerated the arrival of rust in places, and highlighted with red paint. Cicely's eye for detail and her steady and smooth hand accomplished the kanjis in the original mill scale on the left side. The idea is that years of patina will continue to beautify the piece by rusty degradadition in contrast to the very fine carpentry elsewhere in the house. It suits me, and I am not offended at all to be called in to balance things out a bit with my propensity to flawfulness.

Unimprovable Land

Work has been slow but just enough opportunity has remained to pay numerous bills and to continue to eat well. Winter promises a slow down that allows time to think more about work than to do it. With the wood stove glowing and putting off bone warmth, it’s been nice to work contemplatively for a client out of the finished studio, making some built-in dressers of fir and their twenty-four drawers. Slow-downs are nicer every winter and after seventeen of them as a craftsman I have found a way to enjoy.

I approach cross-country skiing on the Methow Valley Sports Trails Association’s machine groomed trails more like a meditation and necessary physical therapy, counteractive to years of bad habits at work on my poor ankles, than the way the fitter get to use the trails for recreation. From the tracks of the Rendezvous that ties Winthrop to Mazama by a higher route there appears to be miles and miles of endlessly exploitable land for human purposes, still untapped. But the best craftsmanship one will see on these trails is the perfect herringbone pattern made by the skate skiers that charge up the elevations, leaving me and Gypsy the dog in the quiet again of rhythmic scraping in the classic tracks. The craftsmanship will live a shorter life than a may fly, and if the skier is better, a perfect pattern will be accomplished thoughtlessly. My still injured left shoulder, though sore, feels better after a ski and I take particular care not to crash onto it when zooming down the black diamond leg of the Cedar Creek trail that leaves Gypsy’s muzzle in a cake of frost.

Silence, the untouchable, and solitude, true loves of mine, cannot be improved by any example of permanent purpose. I am only one degree less inspired by the architecture of sociality: cathedrals, skyscrapers, opera houses, and the order and practicality of a nicely designed and executed family home. There is a misnomer in our capital-driven culture, and it is the idea that when we touch the earth with industry, temples, and homes we have improved upon it. County records should call it altered. It might be altered in a very pleasing way or ravaged for resources, but from the perspective of the rest of pantheistic introspection, humans don’t improve land. We have learned to change it and to convert it for our purposes but only two species of millions could, if they could all consider it, call it improved. The narcissism is available only to us, the willful converters, the craftspeople of materials and souls, and in the case of the Cougar Bait side of the trails, joy is also available to the accomplice: the family dog that would rather skim atop the grooming than break a virgin trail.

I feel profoundly blessed to be the son of a man of character and principle. My work ethic that I inherited from him is similar but lesser than his seemingly tireless and dedicated energy. His life of expertise and leadership is at this moment an immediate and direct offering of love and compassion to his neighbors devastated by a very recent and cataclysmic natural and human disaster. The prolific prosperity of his church enables the giving of monumental gifts. Beyond my birth and rearing, and some very hard years and trials, I feel even more blessed to have a deep and loving relationship with this man even while we disagree thoroughly on many matters of conscience and ideology. Our differences seem every year to come more into focus because of world events, as does our mutual appreciation. My parents intentionally brought half a dozen children into a world they thought would be mostly destroyed before their offspring reached old age by the eagerly awaited Second Coming of their Savior. I call it plain old violent, antisocial thinking to look forward to the end of the world, but I am immeasurably grateful to have been born. I tend to feel guilt easily, and for more and different things than two decades of ideological indoctrination intended.

Foundational and fundamental to my father’s religion, and one aspect of my own religion for that matter, is the belief in an eternal battle for freedom. We were convinced at church and at home that our most important civic responsibility on earth was to defend and protect the liberty of all people to freely choose their salvation. We believed that the freedom to thrive and to worship the God that loves prosperity was to fulfill our eternal and foreordained duty to subdue and hold righteous dominion over the earth and its resources for the greatest of all rights: to bring as many waiting unborn souls as possible into the loving embrace of a righteous and secure Christian home. I have retained some of the things I was taught as a child and rejected others.

Humans are made of the energy of converted food, and that is all. The energy from those kernels of grain or a potato is converted into walking and talking and being productive, and the rest is recycled as fertilizer. But to create potential human energy, the fertilizer, whether human or chicken or fish or bovine or oil, has had an enormous proportion of energy already extracted from it, just from the breathing, not to mention the energy required to produce the food in the first place. Because of arrogant dominion over resources the soil has been irrevocably depleted by stages, every time it is tilled and harvested, for more people all the time. No matter how much fertilizer is applied to formerly arable land there is a net loss of energy because to keep the ideas of how to conserve and preserve energy, however brilliant, take a lot of energy. When the resources available to make food become unequal to the energy required for us to breathe, billions will still prosper, but billions will have to eat something besides food, and die, and then He can no longer be named Providence, except by the eaters. The non-eaters will have to give Him another name.

While Dad was trying to sharpen my view into a narrowly prescribed way that included success for all of eternity, I was going broad with less thought for the eternal and more for this dirty and wet world, this sometimes snow covered Giver, and I realized at the same time that other nations and cultures had beautiful ideas, too, even if irreconcilable to the dogmas of benevolent exceptionalism I inherited. I hope that these societies will have access to food too, for generations more while somehow preserving ethnic and cultural identity, because the prosperous and righteous have considered that those first of God’s commandments, to multiply and to accomplish dominion over all exploitable things, could now be improved by restraint and the more difficult commandment to love, even to love what is instead of what can be changed into the familiar.

When winter is over I hope to work again with fervor at altering this beautiful place, because I am a man and it is what a good lover of the trades does, and people close to me hope to have food to eat and an ample home to live in. But love is not simple and it is full of conflict. I feel incomparably blessed to be able to consider how best to love while others in the world have no choice. Perhaps for them the only thing left to love is the idea of mere survival, partly because of what I love and because of my freedom.

Garbage Can Noah

I had this old galvanized garbage can that I almost took to the dump to get it out of the way. Now it hangs on a wall and this is better. I am perplexed by Noah, the builder archetype, and his story fills my imagination. Does he ever raise his arms in frustration, or is this an image of religious ecstasy as the first drop of rain hits his face, vindicating his madness, or if his faith has been justified is he pleading for the flood to stop before most everything is destroyed, despite his obedience? The body is in copper and used diamond blades. Noble suggested some wood so that this copper-age man of faith could be a little more animated by earthiness.

Thinking of Samoa

I've been thinking of Samoa all the time for the last few days. I lived in Samoa and American Samoa for 18 months when at twenty, quite presumptuously and wrongly I hoped to convert Samoans on their lands and in their villages to my birth family's idea of God. Though I ultimately disavowed the faith I was sent to promote, the people of Samoa touched and changed my life forever. My deepest hope is that they will survive this terrible natural disaster with greater strength and peacefulness than ever before. Let no one imagine that this event had anything to do with the intentional will of a god. The following is extracted from the daily journal I kept at the time:

The village invited me to be the assistant trainer for the boxing team when I went running alone for miles on the paved road at 4 a.m. in the morning, then did it again the next day. By the third morning there was a crowd of us young men running up and down the road, all of us harboring the idea of being better boxers. I longed to box with them in the muddy pen formerly owned by pigs, but mission rules prohibited me. While training, a blow to an unprotected nose would drop the boxer’s opponent like a rag doll, and ten hands would slap and cajole until the young man was able to move out of the ring to make room for two new teammates to pummel each other in the head. Sometimes they fought until they were so exhausted that I thought in a last effort of animal strength to preserve his own life, a boxer could rise up and make that one killing blow just to end the fight.

Every night every soul in the village would sing church hymns at the top of our lungs. I’ve never heard anything as beautiful as various families singing, as if in a round, all at the same time in praise and effortless unrefined harmonies, and every night I wrote in my journal by candle or storm lantern. One night my intention to get down my impressions of the day was distracted by a little dark-brown-skinned girl with curly blonde hair who scratched restlessly at the floor of the hut with her fingers, waiting half-patiently for my attention. That night Uigi (pronounced Wingie) sat at the edge of the hut I shared with my companion while hundreds of moths gathered to the single source of light, a kerosene lantern that hung from the rafters above my head. I had counted more than twenty strikes with a stick that she endured before she stretched her tough bruised legs to the edge of the hut where I slept.

I put down my pen and went to sling my legs over the rough-hewn boards of the floor. Uigi stood back in a posture of defense as she looked at me with luminous eyes. She stepped back again, bowing in submission to my will, but I gently followed her to the openness of the compound.

She stared into the sky and said, “The moon is bright.”
“Yes.”
“God lives there, on the moon, when it is bright.”
“I like to think God isn’t so far. The moon is far away.”

She fled from me, ashamed of her impertinence. I was ashamed of my insensitive reaction to her expression of faith. I hollered out to her across the compound, repentantly, “The moon is bright! God lights our steps tonight! Come back!”

And I became a Samoan at heart when I chose Uigi’s language over mine. From that day forward, wherever I went on the compound she was holding my right hand while my left held an axe for chopping firewood for the umu. With the simplicity of her sincerity, a sense of doom came hard over my whole body and sapped my strength. I had to let a part of me tingle away like a sleeping limb before I could make room in my heart for a new way to perceive a wholly other place. I would try to comprehend Uigi’s God instead of indoctrinating her with mine.

In my travels between villages I found an old cassette tape and player in a drawer in the church building. I slept that night on the church grounds, opting to sleep alone in a small food preparation hut behind the church. As darkness came I strung up my mosquito net from the rafters. I settled onto my portable bed, a thin woven mat intended to soften the irregularity of the two-inch lava rocks between my shoulder blades and against my spine, and I lit an incense coil. The blue smoke spun before me like the burning of a cigarette with a lonely aroma like tobacco, and I let the depression in to do its thing; to wear itself down by my lack of resistance. Despite the incense, the mosquitoes filed in through holes in my net faster than I could squish them. I turned on the cassette player and Anne Murray sang to me personally, “I want to sing you a love song. Want to rock you in my arms all night long…” I was in love on my mission, with a land and a people who sometimes hated me, often misunderstood me, and who gave me every opportunity to see if I could be human. The only sound when the music was over was a subtle hissing from the burning incense. I understood very slowly again that my god resides in silence, not words, and that it was a different god than the one I acknowledged in my promise to serve the Lord. I fell asleep with my sheet pulled up over my chin. Tiny animals took my blood to share with my hosts, and the blood of my hosts mixed with mine. I woke to hundreds of mosquito bites on my swollen red knuckles and fattened fingers.

The following day I submitted to what my hosts wanted from me, against what I was trained to turn them into. When I listened to their desire, hoping to accept more graciously their food, I became the teacher they wanted me to be, and love was reciprocated back.

I sat in a very humble rock-floored fale. Woven mats were laid out in layers over the lava rocks and though rare, this family had a low table positioned in the center of the floor. We sat with legs crossed. It is the greatest offense to straighten a leg toward any other while sitting, and thus we sat for a long time, hours past when the legs go numb from keeping them still and tight. As bats flew by one side of the fale I stared at the baby that lay on the center of the rough-hewn table. Flies gathered to dozens of open sores on the tiny male’s skin, and the flies dug at the crusty food that congealed in the corners of his eyes and between his legs. The infant’s hands lazily grazed at the skin of his face, like a cat’s washing its face with a paw.

The parents sat wearing a constant smile, that I would honor them by eating their specially prepared boiled turkey tails. After a meal it would be appropriate for me to show my thanks with an admonition from the scriptures. Instead, putting my scriptures deliberately behind me, I held my hand up with my fingers spread. I tilted my hand horizontally, and I slowly rotated it clockwise:

“Tonight, My Lord and Her Highness, look up into the night sky, and I promise you that there you will see the mirror of the place we share in the universe.” I slowly waved my hand to the children and eldest son who now clamored to have a view of my hands. “The universe is like the shape of my hand; it is dense in the center and spreads into tendrils like the octopus.

“We are here, on the edge of this finger, and when we look out from our place in Creation, we can see across infinity to the next tendril that hides the next arm behind it, and so on, and so on for eternity. In time, after millions of years, we experience the whole universe as we rotate around, until we arrive back where we started, looking out into infinity. Wherever we are, we are part of infinity. This is how I think of God.”

“Our Teacher, we are humbled that you would honor us with the secrets of God. Tell us please also about the trip to the moon.”

And I did, for hours and hours, day after day to groups that grew after each meal in a great variety of homes, homes predominantly without electricity or running water. They called these the “Beautiful Stories” and the stories grew to include plate tectonics, hydropower dams, and I bluffed my way through explaining how jumbo jets can possibly fly. I’d explain some of these while farmers taught me how to hunt for and how best to eat grub worms, and the proper depth to replant the cropped head of a taro plant. It taught me the sacredness of food, and sharing it. “Eat me; drink me” was the god’s silent commandment. The constant sacraments left precious little time to discuss the superior points of one religious dogma over another.