Recipe for Summer

The Solstice came and went announcing “Summer.” But true summer is a state of the soul, not accessible by calendar alone. How to arrive there? Try this recipe:

Change your answering machine to “Gone fishing,” throw the necessities, three novels, a book of poems and an old guitar into the car and start driving. Curse at the snarl of traffic from San Francisco to Sacramento and feel the first burst of release ascending into the pine-smell of the Sierras. Lose yourself in the Nevada sky and feel properly humbled by the purple-mountained-majesty of the Tetons. Note the change to the rolling hills and fruited plains of South Dakota. Set cruise control to 75 and sing along with each of the top 30 hits of June,1965—Catch the Wind (Donovan), Theme from a Summer Place (The Letterman), Sugar Pie Honey Bunch (Four Tops), Satisfaction (Rolling Stones), Mr. Tambouine Man (The Byrds). Feel the years peel away and remember that bright-eyed-bushy-tailed-innocence of a life yet-lived before you. Eat crackers and cheese at a picnic table rest stop by a grove of aspen trees. Breathe the silence and let another veil of busyness drop. Keep moving, now to the more intimate greens of Minnesota and Wisconsin with red barns contrast. Flop yourself down on the motel bed and stumble into an old Hitchcock movie on TV. Keep driving, now alongside the big trucks and lower speed limits and back into the swirl of Chicago-suburb traffic, the population having quintupled in the last two states. Spend the night at a friend’s suburban house with summer snow on the lawn from the neighbor’s cottonwood tree and remember the American paradise promised by “Leave It to Beaver”— the tree-lined streets, big-fielded elementary school, cozy downtown public-library, nearby Lake Michigan beach, large front lawns and everyone out walking their dogs while fireflies blink in the night. Pull into the Ann Arbor Holiday Inn to return the car 3,000 miles later and get a Turkish lemonade at a buzzing downtown café. Wake up the next morning straight into the arms of birdsong—summer has arrived.

Useless Beauty

What do Mt. Rushmore, elk antlers and a building called the Corn Palace have in common? I’ll give you a hint. Think Snow Sculpture Festival in Edmonton, Hubcap Ranch in Napa Valley, bamboo archways and xylophones in Bali, imbenge baskets from South Africa—all variations on “use what you’ve got.” (Or more proverbially, “When you’ve got lemons, make lemonade.” Having finally arrived at hot weather on the first official day of summer, that sounds appealing.)

The antlers are found in the hills of the Tetons, not only elk, but deer and moose as well. The Boy Scouts collect them and sell them and if you go to the plaza in the center of town in Jackson Hole, you’ll see four archways made entirely from elk antlers. The stores sell antler chandeliers, antler sculptures, and just plain antlers. The next state over, you can see the stone mountains of the Badlands and lo and behold, there are four large faces starting down from Mt. Rushmore. And nearby is Crazy Horse looking out from his perch. A bit further down the road in Mitchell, South Dakota, you can stop at the Corn Palace and see the murals on the outside made from—well, corn. (Still hoping to learn how to include photos—meanwhile, you can probably find images online.)

There indeed is a snow sculpture festival in Edmonton, equally remarkable sand sculptures on the beach at Rio, a ranch in Napa Valley with hundreds of hubcaps artfully arranged. Bali has scores of instruments and artwork made from bamboo, the South African imbenge baskets are made from discarded telephone wire, the galimotos in Ghana from old soda cans and such. Use what’s around you. That’s what humans have been doing for millennium and it’s one of the things that makes the art and technology of one place different from another.

Daniel Pink’s new book Drive talks about the importance of “intrinsic motivation” as a deep human instinct, but mostly uses examples from the computer world. People working from love and curiosity and making something useful—like the capacity to write this Blog online without either you or me having to pay for it. But there’s another kind of work we do that has no practical application at all. It’s entirely useless and yet, it gets us off the couch and out the door. It’s called art. It brings tourists flocking from miles around to witness the 17-year project that left four faces on Mt. Rushmore. Talk about intrinsic motivation! Imagine getting up every day for 17 years to chip away a little bit more rock to fulfill some inner vision and make it visible to the world.

Which is precisely what people called artists do. They’re no different from you or me, except that this urge to express something that we all share is in the driver’s seat instead of tucked away in the glove compartment. Like poet William Stafford, they might wake up early every day to write a poem with no idea what might appear on the paper or whether it will ever be sandwiched between two covers and available at the bookstore. Like Charlie Parker, they might wash dishes at a 52^nd St. jazz club just so they could hear Art Tatum play and then go home and practice.

In Victor Hugo’s epic Les Miserables (yes, it was a book before the musical), a Bishop is showing off his flower garden and his visitor remarks:

“You are always eager to make everything useful, yet here is a useless plot. It would be much better to have salads here than bouquets.”

…the Bishop replied, “You are mistaken. The beautiful is as useful as the useful.” He added after a moment’s pause. “Perhaps more so.”

William Carlos Williams put it another way:

“It is difficult to get the news from poems, but men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”

It has been a while since I’ve stepped up on the soapbox of arts advocacy, but I’m still getting e-mails from music teachers whose jobs have been cut. We should note that people are not driving off the freeway exit to marvel at someone’s math test. Be it Mt. Rushmore, the Corn Palace or a bunch of antlers artfully stacked, art adds a brightness to our day and reminds us of a life beyond the ordinary and mundane.

If we really pay attention, we might also be deeply moved by the original art of mountains carved by wind, rain and time, corn growing in the field and antlers atop the heads of elks. We humans are mere imitators, after all. But from the first cave paintings in southern France to sculptures made from hubcaps, the human urge to co-participate in creation is profound, thrilling and worthy of attention. School boards, take note.

Meanwhile, praise to all who’ve taken a moment from their day to pile stones in interesting formations, create a piece of art from old cell phones, make music from abandoned oil barrels. Useless beauty that somehow is necessary.

Coyote Urine

Title got your attention? Could be added to my list of underground rock bands. Or be the name of a micro-brewed beer (well, why not? Wyoming had one called Moose Drool). But it’s just another of those quirky little things I notice while traveling, those strange signs and sayings on the side of the road, billboards or T-shirts. Below is a sampling:

• Poison Creek —“Hey! Let’s fill up our water bottles here!”

• Badwater Creek — “Refill, anyone?”

• Horse Thief Campground— Don't forget to tie 'em up with a double knot.

• Blue Earth (Minnesota town)—“Where you from?” “Blue Earth.” “Well, nice meeting you…” (exit stage left)

• Report All Poachers— Hmm. Don’t see many of these in downtown San Francisco.

• Bridge May Be Icy — 95 degrees out. 90% humidity. I don’t think so.

• Your Mother Was Pro-Life (South Dakota billboard)— Well, it depends on which day you talk to her.

• World’s Greatest Dad (T-shirts seen on three different men on Father’s Day)—Two of you are lying.

• I’d Rather Be Tweeting (T-shirt on teenager at Mt. Rushmore) — And so she did.

And my favorite— product on the front seat of my mother-in-law’s car:

• Real Coyote Urine Ground Cover Deception Scent Granules —I am not making this up. Costs $15 and is designed to sprinkle around the garden to keep deer away. It makes a point of insisting that it is real coyote urine, not freeze dried or artificially produced. So I’m trying to picture the process here. 

Two guys out in the sagebrush of the West:

“Excuse me, Coyotes. We have a little business going here and wonder if you wouldn’t mind peeing into these jars? We’ll put a snarly picture of you on the product if you like.”

If anyone knows the real story, let me know.

Happy Father's Day

It’s Father’s Day and my day begins with a Skype chat with my daughter in Argentina. I talk to my other daughter from the Mt. Rushmore cafeteria. It looks enough like the one shown in Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” for me to get a little vicarious thrill of recognition and share the moment with her. Out the window, carved impressively on the mountain, are two of the Founding Fathers and their descendants—Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, subject of yesterday’s entry. Of course, all reports of Teddy at the Monument are extolling his accomplishments of extending America’s political and economic muscle. He was the first president to leave our shores, but it turns out, mostly to put his foot on the neck of other countries and extend our power. In some ways, he opened the door to our domination of the Philippines, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq—always under the flag of freedom, of course, but mostly to get what adds to our coffers and rarely (if ever) actually contributing to democracy in those countries.

But it’s Father’s Day and I have other things on my mind. It’s the first Father’s Day that my wife will experience without her Dad. And for me, it’s been four years. I’m wearing my Dad’s purple shirt and writing to him in my journal telling him the news. I do this on special occasions or whenever the spirit hits, taking seriously the ancient idea that we must live at least part of our lives on behalf of those who have left us—speak for them, walk for them, sing for them, dance for them– and then tell them about it. Since they no longer have bodies and voices, we can use ours to not only do what we need to do, but to enjoy on their behalf what they used to do— eat certain foods, go to special places, speak select poems, play and sing specific songs.

The other day, I played one of my father’s piano compositions for my Mom. As a young man, he dabbled both in composition and painting before the business world swallowed him up. One of the best things—as he would often remind me—I did for him in his later years was to play and record his compositions. He would listen to that tape most every day of the last five years of his life and yet more often in his last months. He had a good ear for a decent melody and accompanying harmony, but without training and perseverance, his development was technically weak. But still, they were his notes and his attempt to express feelings habitually left unexpressed in the business world of the 50’s and 60’s. Like a good American man of that time, he locked them away, but these tapes were the key that reminded him of a world beyond the conventions of merely bringing home the bacon and mowing the lawn.

So in honor of his memory, I’m including his favorite poem, one he could speak at a drop of a hat and often did. I now speak it out loud on several occasions, to the delight of those who haven’t heard it before and to the first hint of an eye-roll from those who have had heard it often. It’s from an obscure novel by Philip Wylie titled “Finnley Wren.” Read it out loud— like all poetry, the music comes out better when spoken.

And think about what poem you’ll be remembered for and pull it out on all family occasions, eye-rolls be damned! We’re here to leave our footprint on this earth and to be remembered as only we can be. 

Happy Father’s Day, Dad—your legacy lives on.

Life is just a passing spasm
           In an aggregate of cells;

Kiss me, pretty protoplasm,

            While your osculation dwells.


           Glucose-sweet, no enzyme action

            Or love-lytic can reduce.

Our relations to a fraction

Of hereditary use.

Nuclear rejuvenation

Melts the auricle of stoic:

Love requires a balanced ration—

Let our food be holozoic;

Let us live with all our senses

While anabolism lets us—

Till—with metaplastic fences

Some katabolism gets us.

Till, potential strength, retreating,

Leaves us at extinction’s chasm:

And, since time is rather fleeting,

Kiss me, pretty protoplasm.

            

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Today I had to stop the car on the road to let eight bison cross to the other side. That’s not something that happens every day. In fact, never. It was quite a thrill to watch them gallop as a small herd and equally exciting to see some pronghorn antelope, a distant moose, a yet more-distant black bear and the other furry and winged creatures who live in Grand Tetons National Park.

And so, with some dim memory of Teddy Roosevelt’s role in creating and sustaining national parks, I was all set to dedicate this Blog to Teddy and publicly thank him. But first, a trip to Wikipedia to get the facts straight. And there I read about all his laudable achievements, closing with:

“Roosevelt has consistently been ranked by scholars as one of the greatest United States presidents.”

Like any of us, I’m always happy to embrace a hero and Teddy’s memorable quote “Walk softly and carry a big stick” captures succinctly the essence of my “olive branch and the arrows” Blog. But I have read my Howard Zinn and James Loewen (author of “Lies My History Teacher Taught Us”) and am savvy enough to know that most of history as taught is the story of the winners told by the winners—kind of like an ongoing Fox News. So away from my books, I took to the Internet, found some stories by Howard Zinn, like one about Roosevelt’s congratulating the wholesale massacre of Filipinos. And then came quotes from Roosevelt himself from a variety of sources:

"I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."

"I don't go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn't like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth."

Then two more stories from Zinn’s A People’s History:

When a mob in New Orleans lynched a number of Italian immigrants, Roosevelt thought the United States should offer the Italian government some remuneration, but privately he wrote his sister that he thought the lynching was "rather a good thing" and told her he had said as much at a dinner with "various dago diplomats . . . all wrought up by the lynching."

William James, the philosopher, who became one of the leading anti-imperialists of his time, wrote about Roosevelt that he "gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society, for the manly strenuousness which it involves, and treats peace as a condition of blubberlike and swollen ignobility, fit only for huckstering weaklings, dwelling in gray twilight and heedless of the higher life. . . ."

So there you have the bad and the ugly—the same-old, same-old shouldering the “white man’s burden” of conquering the world, with war as the preferred method, massacre if necessary, shady dealings (with Colombia and the Panama Canal), mostly big sticks and very little soft walking.

Except maybe in the wilderness (though even here, Roosevelt’s passion was hunting). At any rate, while President "he signed legislation establishing five national parks: Crater Lake, Oregon; Wind Cave, South Dakota; Sullys Hill, North Dakota (later re-designated a game preserve); Mesa Verde, Colorado; and Platt, Oklahoma (now a part of Chickasaw National Recreation Area)." This from Wikipedia.

So thanks Teddy, for that. Like so many in power, you protected privilege and wielded your big stick ruthlessly, but sometimes did the right thing. That’s the human drama—we’re all unique combinations of the “good, the bad and the ugly” ( I would also add, “the beautiful”). Good leaders do bad things (Jefferson and his slaves) and bad leaders do good things (Nixon in China). People get caught in the prevailing winds of their times, with neither the vision nor courage to stand firm or walk the other way. It happens on all scales, from the grand stage of history down to the school board and staff meeting.

Still though, when it’s time to choose our heroes and pass them on to the next generation, I much prefer William James and Mark Twain, two contemporaries who criticized Roosevelt’s policies, spoke their truth to his power. So thanks to Howard Zinn and others for not only telling the truth to bring the old heroes down to size (don’t get me started on Columbus), but telling the stories of the many hero-worthy Americans that the history books leave out or whitewash. (Everyone knows about Helen Keller’s struggle with her disabilities, but few know she was a radical Socialist.)

Meanwhile, Teddy, I’ll see you tomorrow at Mt. Rushmore, with renewed curiosity about what the guidebooks say about you. And maybe I’ll speak some of your quotes out loud to my fellow tourists, just so they hear the larger picture. But still, thanks for your work on the National Parks—they’re magnificent.

Ode to the Bicycle

When I was in 8^th grade, I was addicted to basketball. “Addicted” is the precise term to describe the sensation I had that until I had my hands on the bumpy surface of that spherical orb, until I could dribble it this way and that and loft it in the air and hear it swish through the metal chains of the net, I was restless and ill at ease. I needed it so badly that in the winter, I would walk three blocks to the local playground, ball in one hand, shovel in the other, and actual shovel the court myself just so I could dribble and shoot, snow and 25 degree weather be damned. That’s how bad it was.

And now I have a little of the same feeling about bicycles. Oh, I can get through the day without biking and not get the shakes—in fact, many days and sometimes whole weeks—but when I mount the saddle and start pumping the pedals, there is that same gratifying bodily sensation I felt back in my basketball days of being at home, of some deep physical need fulfilled. I felt it today as we rented bikes by the Grand Teton park entrance and rode for 25 glorious miles on the newly completed bike path under the gaze of the breathtaking mountains on one side and expansive sagebrush meadows on the other.

Since yesterday’s entry was an Ode to the Auto, it is only fitting to praise the bicycle. No sheet metal over your head, no floorboard under your feet, just you in the crisp mountain air inhaling the clouds and feeling the always-threatening, but never-delivering occasional rain drops and the wind on your face. Away from the toys that can either feed or distract—the radio, the in-car video system, the car phone—it’s a different kind of solitude. A good time to plan classes or review where you summered the past twenty years or just let your thoughts fly with the breeze.

The old adage “chopping wood heats you twice” has its bicycle parallel. Biking gets you somewhere while saving you the trip to the gym. It has that element of swiftness and speed that is the stuff of mythology, but also the chance to just drift and amble. And stop. Today, the most enormous elk I had ever seen peeked out down the road before crossing. The bike allowed me to silently creep up and see where he had gone. I also spotted and stopped for deer, a distant moose, several marmots and a host of inviting wildflowers— larkspur, spring beauties, an occasional lupine.

Like the car, the bicycle promises adventure. When I was 10 years old in suburban New Jersey, riding one-speed bikes without helmets, my friends and I decided to take off one day and cross the Goethals Bridge some 25 miles away. And cross it we did, all the way down the other side into Staten Island. For anyone who knows that area—and imagine this without bike paths—that was quite a remarkable feat and it is a statistical improbability that I’m here to tell you about it. I remember a few other daring rides like that and believe that our little club disbanded when Bruce Crookston’s handlebars fell off as he was careening down a hill in Watchung Reservation. Another amazing survival story, but I think that was our Icarus-warning to stay closer to home.

From those promising beginnings, the bicycle has re-entered my life big-time. It is at once my preferred vehicle for errands, exercise, pleasure and increasingly, commuting to work. And I am far from alone. The rise of bicycle-mania is a cultural explosion akin to the printing press and cell phone. It seems like every day a new bike lane opens in San Francisco and the number of folks riding alongside me are growing every day. I was disappointed when I went to China in 2007 and saw that the government’s campaign to push cars had worked (much to the detriment of air quality and traffic), but heartened visiting Amsterdam where bikes outnumbered cars and pleased to visit my daughter in Washington DC and pick out one of those community bikes sprouting up like wildflowers in every neighborhood. (And then ride on a bike path that goes right by Reagan Airport, a strange juxtaposition  of transport systems).

Of course, in typical American-style, being “into” biking often means the whole 9 yards of special clothes, subscribing to the bike magazines, talking shop about the latest bike shoes or bike-related gizmo. I refuse to wear Spandex and prefer the Salzburg model of elderly women in dresses with their wicker basket on front to carry the day’s groceries. But whatever. The bike is human ingenuity and technology on just the right scale, a blend of machine and muscle, a mix of speed and leisure, a combination of practicality and pleasure. Praise to the bicycle!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to ride to the basketball court and shoot some hoops.

Ode to the Auto

To cross into Wyoming on a summer’s day with Mustang Sally pumped up on the car radio is to enter an American mythological landscape larger than life. “Ride Sally Ride!” you sing along at top volume, your skin tingling, your blood pumping, the wind in your hair (or what’s left of it), swept along into the heartbreaking beauty of the green meadows, snow-capped mountains and big blue sky. As my friend Chris Cunningham likes to remark: “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

It was also Chris who once remarked in a Joseph Campbell Study Group: “My first sensation of what it might mean to ‘follow my bliss’ was driving my car.” I remember being mildly shocked by this somewhat politically incorrect confession. Here we were talking about the great themes of mythology and he’s talking about a gas-guzzling, environmental-wrecking, factory-produced machine?

But Chris had it right. Political, practical and ecological concerns aside (as they must be in the mythological landscape), to “head out on the highway,” to “plan to motor West,” to “ride along in your automobile, with no particular place to go” is to have “fun, fun, fun”—that is, until “your daddy takes the T-bird away.” Remember these songs singing out the bliss of the American version of the open road? Getting into your G.T.O. or Little Deuce Coupe, passing The Little Old Lady from Pasadena out on Route 66 on the way to Surf City? They were the soundtrack to the great American Keruoackian mythology and promised to deliver everything that mythology cares about—adventure, search, flight, freedom, taking the hero’s journey snug in your Volkswagen bug or sitting up high in the van seat.

Mythology touches on the timeless and placeless universals, but often enters through particular manifestations of such. The excitement of moving and the double-excitement of moving faster than your own legs can carry is as old as the horse, the chariot, the stagecoach, the train, each of which constellated its own mythos. (I’m still enamored with the European train mythology, captured in countless movies and brought to life in my actual European train travel.)

But the car brought something new into the picture—a quality of autonomy and independence, the balance between giving yourself up to what the world offers and maintaining some sense of autonomy, independence and control. After all, trains demand that you follow their schedule, go only where the tracks are laid, get off and on at predetermined places, accept the décor of the car you sit in and deal with the people sitting next to you. But the automobile is indeed your mobile home. You choose your style of car, you choose who sits in the front seat with you, you set your radio dial where you want it and the volume you want it at. You also choose (schedule-permitting) what route to take, what side roads to visit, what pace your prefer. No wonder the auto trumped the train—choice is a red-blooded American virtue. And perhaps a universal one as well.

The automobile is a supreme paradox. The prefix “auto” means “self, one's own, by oneself” while “mobile” means “movement.” At the same time that you’re out there moving in the world, you’re also inside seated on your moving meditation cushion, your comfortable easy chair, your rocking chair on the proverbial front porch. Robert Bly called it “this solitude covered with iron.” It takes you to new and exciting places, but when the excitement gets too much, you can lock the door and drive away. You can eat meals in the car, you can sleep in the car and when you’re young and have no place to go, you can dive into the back seat of the car and hope that some of life’s supreme mysteries may be revealed in a tangle of disheveled clothes and heavy breathing.

I’m carrying with me Garrison Keillor’s new collection, Good Poems: American Places,  the perfect choice for this road trip. The poems are about places in the American landscape— one’s own back yard, the subway or a grand adventure into wild places—where something happened to capture the poet’s attention and poet took the trouble to tell about it and include the place in the telling. The first of fifteen sections is subtitled “On the Road” and as the titles reveal— Driving through the Poconos, Driving at Night, Driving West in 1970, Top Down, Mambo Cadillac—the car was one of those significant places where something special occurred, some sense of blessing was bestowed, something holy happened. Stephen Dunn’s poem, The Sacred, is alone enough to capture what I’m trying to get at here.

And here’s another paradox. This vehicle of flight, freedom, music playing, love in the back seat, the world trailing behind in the rear-view mirror while the road beckons ahead, has perhaps also been the most destructive force of the 20^th century. It helped create our addiction to fossil fuel, which in turn excused our ravenous appetite for war. It killed off the small towns and grew up the strip malls, it birthed the assembly lines and factory models that leaked into our schools, it invited trucked-in food from corporate farms to out-compete the local and home-grown—well, it’s a long list.

And yet, how we loved it. And love it still. A little like smoking—we know it’s terrible for us, but wasn’t that a pleasure to take time out and do nothing but inhale and exhale, a few smoke rings here and there, a style that we cultivated, a chance to chat with fellow smokers, the haze of the jazz club mixed indelibly with the slow curls of the saxophone’s notes.

But just as I’m more grateful than not that I can go to any restaurant or jazz club or train car without smoke, so will I graciously accept the demise of the automobile (or the rise of the electric car?). It had its time and behind the scenes, it was a horror, but up there in the driver’s seat (or back there during the drive-in movie), wasn’t it grand?