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 Mailing address: bo@bo-hemian.com |
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3 December 1998 -- A full moon tonight
I cannot believe it is already growing dark outside--these are indeed very short days this month. I am still trying to accustom myself to the snow that has moved in since the blizzard; about an 18 - 20 inch dumping. It becomes warm enough during the day for melting to occur, yet the surface freezes over at night, along with any areas packed underfoot, forming a crunchy glaze.
My first outdoor tasks involved clearing foot-pathways to the out-buildings and to the river, this second job being particularly precarious. I decided to hold it off until today, relying upon the cistern water I had put aside before the storm. As I open the last of the shovel blade-wide passage to the back porch, I watch the sun finally drop below the low ridge that divides this hollow from the larger one to the west. Soon, this detail will become lost in the murky twilight, and it will disappear completely when the stars finally arrive.
My Almanac predicts a Full Moon tonight, and indeed, it soon appears over the higher eastern ridge. The entire clearing enters back into usable light, once my eyes have taken their full time to adjust. I walk the path between the snow-piles to the woodshed and put the shovel back, amid the other tools. I then look to the wall and find my cross-country skis and poles. This evokes special memories from my youth, when I went out skiing across golf courses, etc. in the full moon, with my father and anyone else who cared to join. I step inside the front Cabin door briefly, peering into the darkened room where only the basic ember-glow remains behind the fireplace screen, and locate my ski shoes.
Soon, I am off, to blaze a path around the rough perimeter of the clearing. Breaking new trail requires special exertion in this much snow, and it is not long before I have loosened my garments even more than I had during the work of shovelling. With the moon still low in the sky, everything has a heightened sense of contour from exaggerated shadows cast in the ghostly light. On my 3/4-mile circuit along the woods' edge, I come across the familiar tracks of many creatures that had ventured over this surface before me. On occasion, I spot a deer-thoroughfare, leading to some unspecified location deeper into the woods. I keep a relaxed yet steady pace as I lay down these two strange tracks of my own, listening to the low wind over the skidding swoosh of my skis and the rhythmic crunch of the poles. Gone are those insect sounds of summer, and the trees so full of songbirds. The scattered boulders where I had sat in contemplation, looking back across the grass and low scrub to the full trees of the river bottom, are now ominous obstacles I must avoid.
I finally return to the Cabin vicinity, where I recognize the general area of the fire ring but nothing of its buried stone circle. The Cabin is but one more dark shape against the trees. I decide to travel the circuit an extra two times to even out the tracks, then I stow my skis in the shed. I finally head indoors and begin peeling away my sweated-up parka, scarf, hat, woolen socks and mittens, in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp and the new fire. It amazes me that the same moon and stars are with me in my real city life, but I never experience them in such a way. I have "no time"--the Schedule always finds me something else to do, and there are far too many lights anyway. I sit by the fire in my rocking chair, as the world goes on below. There is probably something good on TV to watch, if only I had satellite reception up here. But the moon and the stars do not appear on demand the way they have this evening over the snow--and that movie can always be picked up later at the video store, anyway.
RB
7 December 1998 -- Encroaching concessions
With the arrival of a few warmer days, I've been able to drive down the dirt track again in the truck, ending a considerable claustrophobic spell in that small wooden space. I was actually glad to see some of those sights that signal the presence of others, but then the Village along the river, now swollen with runoff, is nothing like the crush of the city and real life.
As I stand by the entrance to the filling station along the main road, looking back up the river-cut into those snowy hills, I begin to think I am becoming entirely too self-centered in that place of retreat. I shall soon have to carry along some manner of meaningful work when I get away. I've often complained about not being properly "socialized" as a youth, in the sense that I avoid the subjective sentimentality and pain of human interaction. But at least my formative years gave me a fine sense of the value of work.
I watch the few cars that pass, moving on down the well-sanded road, over the concrete culvert bridge and up the rise on the other side of the river, soon to disappear around the far bend. Out in the distance I see the old farmhouses, built on the edge of the cleared bottom land. Satellite dishes stand in front of most of these now, bought during the days when they were all 8-foot monstrosities. Perhaps that is what I need up there, I say to myself, but not for television...at least not at first. A simple TCP/IP link, that's all, so that I can sit in the living room for longer spells without feeling that terrible guilt of leaving everyone behind. I should like to find a simple roll-top desk in one of those antique shops, where I could fit monitor, mouse and keyboard so that they could be hidden from sight when not needed. There is such overwhelming enfoldment in the mountainous surroundings up at the Cabin that I could probably endure such an intrusion. I could still wake to the sun, pouring over the ridge onto those wooden floor planks, and sit by the fire in the evenings when I decide to break contact at last.
After visiting the general store to drop my inevitable trash and pick up the usual new provisions, I head to the pharmacy along the river higway north and get the two latest copies of Business Week, something I read a lot at the office. That particular publication seems to be heading more and more into information technology stories.
I finally begin back out onto the river highway to the main road, where I cross the river, leave the pavement and put my attention back into the 4-wheeling "driving task", as they called it in my high school driver's ed textbook. I'd rather not slide off the edge with this much snow over everything--my winch might prove useless. I am reminded that it is a very long distance into some most isolated woods, to reach 3766 feet and the Cabin dooryard. I pull around and open the rear hatch to haul my goods into the back door. The river is rushing at quite a pace, even up here, with this turnaround in temperatures.
No, I can't stay cut off. I drop onto the sofa, replacing my usual fare of Life and Look from the "simpler" times of 1942, 1943 and 1944 with stories from the urban centers of late 1998. Every so often, I see one of those ads for a GMC Jimmy, a Ford Expedition or a Jeep Cherokee, each parked in a setting as wild as the one outside my window. It seems that many in the "Western Industrial Democracies" must contend with tradeoffs like mine. There! Look at that center console--a built in cell phone with a data port! Escape is a futile struggle, I conclude with a sigh, as I finally toss the magazine onto the coffee table and close my eyes, listening to the muffled sound of the river outside the back window.
RB
11 December 1998 -- Stepping out of the way
It is another cold night up here at altitude, of the kind one knows when the sky is clear and nothing keeps in the heat. This reminds me once again of my stirring introduction to Jack London in high school, To Build a Fire, where "the man" becomes aware of the reasons for "the law that no man must travel alone" when conditions are sufficiently harsh.
As I sit alone on the plush sofa, watching and appreciating the fire that I will maintain throughout this long night, I think back to some of the harshness I've known while living in the social wilderness of the city. People might say I am choosing to feel desolate because it is a comforting way of denying life's responsibilities. I would reply to them that I have been driven to it as the least arduous of a large number of possible lives, each having its own regimen of external terror. As Winston Smith finds out in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a man will seek to avoid pain at any cost.
I am supposed to have companions of one kind or another, am I not? I should "get by with a little help from my friends", right? But these "beloved" are rarely a complete solution, on account of the new constraints and sacrifices they entail. The demands of solitude, as stringent as they can be, at least do not come with a face. One cannot violate the Golden Rule when the despised agent of aggravation is not an "other". Here in the woods, I need only wrestle with myself, and I have come to know the moves of this opponent very well. It is not a continued defense against an oncoming series of people inadvertently "in my way", who have every right, after all, to conduct their business as they please.
On some of these evenings that I hide with the fire in the kerosene lamp-glow, I almost come to something of a true rest, before my job, friends and family resume their consumption of my patience and emotional strength. Of course, it is not what I would really expect of "peace", something I begin to relegate to the collection of other impossible ideals that includes "justice", "honesty" and "unconditional love". I suppose, as Paul reminds the Romans, I cannot hope for something I already have. The substance of the "correct" life appears not to embody such perfection but only to seek it. I would like to know, then, how the vast bulk of the "others" out there can live with a life that has no chance of a truly complete and honorable earthly expression. What is left for realistic goals? How do they put up with failure, time and time again?
I try my best to say to myself that I have done enough to earn respect in this world, even though I have little hope of feeling it in my heart. The others that pass my frail and harried form in their well-adjusted lives appear to be saddened for a moment by the encounter. But then, they pick back up at what they were doing, with their irrepressible conviction in the face of admitted futility. I shouldn't be in their way when I'm like that, since they know what they are doing. They have themselves delightfully and properly "fooled", I say with my cynical tone, but then anyone would agree that it is a grand and noble illusion, when one becomes thus "deceived".
RB
15 December 1998 -- Deciding at last to let go
It is cold and gray outside the front window today, and I'm back to the quietness of the Cabin living room. I seem to recall many days like this when I was in grade school, and we sat looking out the window onto the subdued tones of dormant lawns and empty playing yards. But of course, we were fit to bust at this time of the year, since the Event was so close; the splendor of Christmas and its trappings. People have long complained that "it's become too commercialized" and "materialistic", but gifts of comparable monetary value to an adult will hardly inspire the wonders of imagination and play that a child will find in those simple toys and games.
I'm trying to figure out how to bear glad tidings toward my own hardened soul as I sit on the sofa, here in this setting whose constancy, rather than novelty, is the appeal. It is the time when the coming of God's Kingdom is celebrated throughout Christendom, and of course, that means nothing less than love, love in its most basic sense, unsullied by ulterior motives of the flesh. It is curious to me how the crowds down there in the city have that tendency to love, rather than to suspect. The day I can have this, too; when cynicism comes to its end, will indeed be a day of liberation.
I look out over the back of the sofa onto the clearing, across that rough expanse of well-established snow. The barest of flurries is falling out there; a dusting on top of the earlier dumping. I have come today to this hidden room after urban dealings that I incorrectly pictured as a fight to the finish, all wound up and seeking the ever-elusive rest. Too many things of too little consequence remain on my mind.
I must look strange to the better-tempered outsider, flinching and fleeing in the face of negligible annoyance. I give such matters entirely too great a slice of my time, out of disbelief in the simple power of love. Love requires so much risk and vulnerability, yet it is at my weakest hours that I come best to know my God. This must explain the joy of children at this time of year, since they are in the custody of adults who are charged with maintaining their best interests. While they are not fully empowered, they also have few cares.
Many is the time I have regretted having reached the age of consent; the age of responsibility, but I sense that the world considers me fit for some useful duties, if not the usual ones. I just end up taking it all too seriously and finally conclude that I am completely incapable. Surely, I do not have to raise the defense I think I do so much of the time, since there is so much goodwill, caring, and cooperation in that world, if only I would take it up on its offer.
In the quiet at last, I try my best to let go, though I fear the chasm over which I must be hanging at this moment. Certainly, I shall be dashed on the rocks far below, like Wile E. Coyote after his latest failed scheme. All right, I am going to let go--like the bumper sticker says, "If God is Your Co-Pilot, then Move Over to the Other Seat". But what is this? Am I falling? No! Such a soft landing it is; almost as if I had been resting in those powerful hands the entire time, while I gripped that tree-root protruding from the imagined cliff side, white-knuckled and terrified. It is so good to feel supported in this way, as I sink into the slipcovered sofa. That's all it takes--letting go. I find it hard to believe that such a resting place has been just below me, beyond my knowing, all this time.
RB
19 December 1998 -- Meeting the indisputable basics
In recent times, I have often found myself arriving at the parking spot in the front dooryard, wondering just what I am doing, coming out here to be alone. The glamour fades rather rapidly sometimes when I've actually made it away from the hustle, as if there is a twisted paradox of reality and justice that says I am living my life best when I am taken almost continuously to "the edge". Yet, I felt the need today to evade society's constraints and let myself consume more "idle" time in the middle of all these trees, rock formations, and near-frozen streams, amid the snow and the all-embracing cold.
It is indeed cold today, I say to myself as I leave the heated truck cab and walk about on the thin layer of new snow covering the paths I had cleared between the various buildings. I remember leaving the wood-bin a bit on the low side when I was here last, so my first destination is the shed, to begin that now-familiar procedure of loading up my arms and hauling more fuel through the front door. At least I have the substantial work of getting this place heated again when I return. There are also the labor-intensive procedures of the kitchen and personal hygiene that I take for granted when I attempt such escape at my city home on days off. This is a regular hobby, keeping the basics going at my perch in the woods, while the same things are expected and of no particular note in the modern home.
I'd think there was a time when people everywhere paid a lot more attention to these "basics", and perhaps lived more enriching lives as a result, although this could just be nostalgic fantasy. Today, comparable members of the American middle class have moved on up the needs hierarchy to spend their time chasing down things that are not really needs at all. Many times, as I run after such abstracted vanity, my life appears to be essentially empty. I have over-specialized myself, being left with weakness in the pursuit of what might really be called "human"; the object of this game got lost somewhere.
At least I do not need any of those elementary skills of polite society to fulfill the requirements of maintaining myself at this outpost of my imagination. Right before me, the tasks are evident and do not involve the onset of fears related to insecurity or ultimate rejection. The wood needs hauling; the heat needs to be restored. There is no great finesse to bringing the split logs into the Cabin, nor is there any in carrying the kerosene filler from the shed to replenish the lamps for the evening. I need not second-guess any of this; what I see is all I'll get.
While I know it is my proscribed lot in this life of the 90's and 00's to immerse myself in a world requiring discernment within the gray zones and duplicities of human business and social transactions, I choose today to live for awhile in this stark setting, where absolute truth is a little easier to see and to feel. I can only take so much of never knowing when I have really done what is right. As I walk about the still-frigid living room in my winter garments, I know I need to bring this dwelling to heated habitability. Building a fire right now is not an option that is open to interpretation, or subject to differences of opinion among equally reasonable persons. Cold is cold, I remind myself, as I build a base of kindling and look for the matches.
RB
24 December 1998 -- A break from facing the unknown
I have found a few moments within the maddening rush of what Christmas has become to stretch myself out, in front of the fire that wards off the cold all about me in the rugged woodland up here at altitude. It seems that the Holiday demands almost superhuman adherence to a raft of scheduled events, from those who would be committed to Family in any appreciable sense. Still, this load of exertion can have an inherent beauty of its own, as harrowing as it feels to keep each and every one of the others sufficiently attended to.
Perhaps, when all is done on this Heiligabend, or Holy Night, I might have a chance to return to the Cabin and "sleep in heavenly peace" for myself. I think to the conditions in the Christmas Story; of the rigid schedule kept by that road-weary party that had to stop for the night wherever they could, since they had run up against unavoidable circumstances. Maybe this is how I'm supposed to live my own life as well--not caring what the next situation may be, so long as I feel inspired to enter it.
It seems that this is how those constant objects of my envy, the "normal", manage to do it. They are driven, either by dreams or by reality's dictates, to do things for which there is hardly any guarantee of certain success. This has to be a true state of grace, to be so motivated. Even if they claim not to be religious or spiritual, I would place their faith above my own, when all I can think of is running for cover, high-tailing it out into these sticks and up the four-mile dirt road, where at last I do not face human demands and consequences, other than those I bring along with myself.
It seems a most formidable prescription for life at times, this walking by faith, for I do not see myself overcoming all, even when my cause is correct within my own conscience. I'm looking for the sure thing, and always tend to see myself plummeting over the brink into ruin from which not even the almighty hand of God can retrieve me. Thus it is, that I pull back at the moment of progress so often, and check my swing, growing older and missing opportunities, one after another.
It is time to pack up soon and return to the fray, I do believe. I bank the fire carefully and watch the flames subside, as I begin to recall where my various garments for the cold were left when I came in. It is a bitter cold, clear night, and the snow crunches mightily under my boots as I head out the front door to the truck. Yes, there is a world of social involvement that still, incredibly, has a place where I might try again when I return, for that is human forgiveness and the ordinary outreach that is such a commodity among its membership. I begin driving down the dark, lonely road beside the river below me in the ravine, with frozen banks yet a sizable flow remaining. The call to return down the hill to civilization will remain, most likely throughout all of my days. All it asks is that I lose myself within the continuity of its whole, which of course is much greater than the sum of its parts when they choose to sit apart.
RB
28 December 1998 -- Timeless predictabilities
The sun rises this morning, making its predictable entry into the cold, still sky over the snow-covered rock silhouette of the ridge. The azimuth of rising, as I see it from the front window of the Cabin, is now moving again from right to left, since the Solstice had passed on the evening of 21 December. Two distinct points on the ridge's arc denote the two extrema of winter and summer, and if I were into all of that "ancient astronomer" (e.g. "pagan") lore, I suppose I'd climb up there and place markers, though I wouldn't want to visit the one most to the east during its corresponding winter day.
In the hollow this morning, across the gentle rise of the clearing and up the hillside, it is so still, and the snow is such a uniform presence amid the stark deciduous trees and the evergreens that look closer to black in contrast. Of course, I cannot experience the fullness of this scene without extensive outerwear, and then not for long. I am kept encased in this capsule of habitability, never far from the fireplace and the stove. It hasn't yet become comfortably warm in this room since I crept from under the down comforter and flannel sheets this morning, to don my fleecewear and "soft" indoor shoes.
But I remind myself that I am not currently saddled by the burdens of the typical "mature, responsible adult" to which I bear superficial appearance, one who must maintain that myriad web of social continuities that would befit a man of my age. I shrink from these as unfair and unwarranted labors, yet complain in the same breath of my marginalization; my exclusion from the joys of the connected ones down there, most of whom are still celebrating the Holidays with their families. I realize I have no position from which to argue, yet my "cause" seems so valid. It is as if I were Job, having heard the entirety of the Lord's rebuke, but questioning still the putative "injustice" of my place in life, rather than turning to repentence, remorse, reparation and the making of amends.
After I sit for awhile, waking up within the cool slipcovered upholstery of the sofa, the sun becomes too bright in my eyes to continue looking out the window, so I go to the kitchen to begin the coffee. Out the kitchen window, I can see downstream into the ravine, where the dark line of the river-course is still within the substantial shade of the spruce, hemlock and thick willow cover. The woodshed and outhouse stand to the right, near the truck, exactly where I left them.
While real life hasn't such certainty of form or place, commitments well-nurtured and maintained will nevertheless lead to such long-term, established edifices as family and true friendship. Out here in my cherished isolation, I am trying to formulate a plan for relief from my abject spiritual poverty, to go back down there to know (and more importantly, to feel) the abiding and liberating truth of human contact and closeness. Yes, just like the Beatles classic tells us, "all you need is love". I suppose that is really a platitude, I say to myself with a sigh, as I place the coffee pot onto the stove. To the "normal" who have love as their daily experience, it must seem odd that I need to make such a concerted and deliberate quest for something so basic.
RB
