No Complaining

"Laus et vituperatio"
Geoffrey Hill, from The Triumph of Love

Boating and alcohol and boots you can't break in,
and other things I'd explain if I knew where to begin.
It's true this family is a train wreck
scattered back to the Fall,
but there's no one to blame.
Those are your own footsteps in the hall.
That's all.

Bring misery match sticks,
I'll bring/ catastrophe kindling--
and meet me in the next dry forest--
we'll beat sparks from the same dead horse.
Now you work in the factory
where they make gods and governments
(but you're still not funny)
and angels that say, "No complaining"
to orphans who say, "No complaining."

Thatcher and Reagan. Pete Rose. Gene Simmons. You.
It's maybe okay I had nothing to say.
Who would I have said it to?
You said our anger was all fashion, you said
our heroes were all liars.
And we were only fifteen but what we saw in the city
looked like real blood, real fires.

Bring misery match sticks,
I'll bring/ catastrophe kindling--
and meet me in the next dry forest--
we'll beat sparks from the same dead horse.
I used to work in the factory where they make
intestines and breastbones. We tuned them like radios
to angels that say, "No complaining."

Now I live on a mountain side.
We drop high hopes from great heights
and most fall but some fly
up among the Angels of Praise and of Blame.

You still work in the factory
where they make gods and governments,
(and you're still not funny)
and angels that say, "No complaining"
to orphans who say, "No complaining",
and rich men who say, "No complaining",
and junkies who say, "No complaining",
and widows who say, "No complaining".

Sanford "Sandman" Owen, Kolob, Utah, January 2011

I joined on with the survival school summer of 2009, probably late spring I think.  This is all pretty new to me even now.  I don't even remember exactly how I became a guide.  I have some buddies down in New Mexico and I had just lost my lease on the record store and wanted to get out of Tucson, so I packed up my stuff, all of it except the vinyl, and drove up through the Chiracahuas and dropped in on them just over the line past Duncan.  I've been camping in that general area for years, and my plan was to spend the summer camped out and reading and maybe fly-fishing a bit and think about my business and if I wanted to go back to Tucson and find a new store location, etc.  Anyway, I dropped in on my friends at the retreat center, this Tibetan Buddhist place up above Duncan, and we hung out for a couple of days and then went camping.  I've always liked camping and my dad was big into Indian skills, he called them.  Trapping, archery, some flintknapping, stuff like that.  So when we were camping I set some snares and caught us a few rabbits and stewed them.  Nobody likes wild rabbit that much, but with enough green chile and cooking them all day they're just fine.  But my buddies were pretty impressed even though they're strictly no-harm Buddhists now, and one of them mentioned having worked up in Utah and having several friends who worked as guides in a survival school and who taught primitive skills, he called them, to paying customers. 

I did end up going back to Tucson when it got cold up high, but without the store I got pretty fidgety, and I had developed sort of a mania for small game snaring, so I was just kicking around, sleeping on couches, trying not to impose, which can be very exhausting, and thinking all the time about living off the land in the desert and in the mountains.  I really caught the bug.  I went down to Native Seed Search one day to see if I could hook up with some garden work, which in Tucson is most enjoyable in February and March, and I found a notice for a trip into Copper Canyon in Mexico, with classes and demonstrations on Tarahumara crafts and hunting and farming skills.  I looked into it and pretty soon I was gearing up to join the trip.  I was gradually selling the remaining vinyl on e-bay, but I had basically nada, so I finagled a barter: I work cooking and packing gear and assisting the trip leader, and I get to sit in on the demos and classes for free. 

So off I went to Mexico with a bunch of divorced middle-aged women who all looked like they'd discussed their gear ahead of time: wide-brim hats, huge shorts with many pockets, hiking poles, huge packs, and brand-new hiking boots.  I won't bore you with details of the following two weeks.  What happened is that I learned a few new things about how to use gourds, but most important is that I learned that I know a whole lot more about wilderness survival than most teachers do.  I guess summers with my dad exposed me to more real practice than I'd ever realized.  I got pretty chummy with the course leaders and one of them invited me to join him on a course in Utah the following summer.  That was this last summer now. 

So I arrived in Kolob last spring.  I managed to unload almost all the records, and I pared down my belongings so I could travel pretty light in my Toyota.  No furniture, no vinyl, no girlfriend, no rent.  I love heading out to a new adventure without anything hanging over me, especially when my destination is southern Utah, which for me is God's country.  There is not a lick of decent-paying work here, but all I really need cash for is gas, beer, grass, and sugar.  Or so I thought.  Actually, it turns out I can get all these things in work trade.  I go up to the store and clean the bathroom and break down boxes and wash the windows and get a case of beer.  I take the case down to Thompson's and give him a couple of cans and he gives me this crazy banana bread made with pine nuts which is like candy.  Then if I want to chill, I walk up the creek a bit and trade another couple beers with Lauro for some home-grown.  For gas I got a $300 credit for cutting and splitting a cord of aspen, which I'd have done for entertainment.  I don't really drive anywhere, so $300 of gas lasts a long time.  So I fell into the Kolob underground barter market within like a week of arriving.  I love it.

So anyway, like a month after I got here I met the survival school folks and went through the interviews and tests and stuff and they hired me to guide a course.  I led a one-week, and I helped out on a four-week.  The pay is shit, but, like I said, that isn't a problem.  The courses are actually pretty strenuous, not like lazing around thinking about supper like I used to down in AZ.  We cover a lot of ground, and you're responsible for the customers, but I enjoy it.  Mostly they need to learn how to find water, which isn't that hard here, though I would have got lost in the canyons alone.  I also taught them snaring and rock-traps, and firestarting [which, honestly, I am not that good at] and basic knapping and shelter construction [which I really love and is my new mania for this winter: how to make a nice little house out of nothing much].  It was really fun.  I learned a ton from other guides about brain tanning and eating plants.  I like the weirdos who work here and I like the low-key life, and the long stretches of time off.

So here's what I know about what you're asking:

When I was in the middle of the 4-weeker, one of the students rolled her ankle, and I was the only guide on duty.  This was during the part of the trip when everyone is separate and fending for themselves and the guide on duty walks the cycle and finds everybody and checks on their health, etc. So I walked in on her camp, which was on a slickrock ledge in Black Bear Hollow, a very pretty place with easy water, but not much wildlife to kill and not many cattails to choke down.  Pretty good pine nuts.  Anyway, I walked into her camp, calling ahead like we're supposed to and she comes upstream to meet me looking healthy and smiling and just rolls her ankle right then, bad.  I heard the pop.  She seemed like a tough girl, but she was in tears, just on the ground rocking and all clenched.  It swelled up and turned blue right away.  I got her down to the water to soak it, but the water's pretty warm there, not really an ice bath.  The procedure is that if a student has an incapacitating injury the guide on duty has to notify the school and then we debate what to do about it.  So I set her up in her shelter as comfortable as I could and I headed out.

But we were two weeks into the backcountry.  This is country like nowhere else.  Hardly anyone but survivalists and ranchers ever make it that far out.  Not for lack of attractions, because this could very easily be a national park it's so pretty, but because it is wild, wild country, and so rough and twisty you have no way through except by hard work and clear-headed routefinding.  Like the Apache Stronghold, but hundreds of square miles.  So when I say that I headed out, what I mean is that I started a very long walk back to town through a maze of canyons and sidecanyons and side-sidecanyons and ups and downs and all manner of rocks and bewilderments that ended up getting me thoroughly lost.  Within a few hours I could not find my way.  I kept climbing up to orient myself relative to the mountain, always there in the north, but every path ended in walls or dropoffs, and I could not find my way back to her camp.  I know it sounds lame to be in a huge canyon in a place you've studied on maps and have spent two weeks walking around in, but there I was, in a huge network of canyons that seemed to have no outlet.  Also, I was carrying less than most stockbrokers carry to lunch, as I imagine it.  Small blanket, a knife, my shearling Tibetan coat, my clothes, a quart of water, some of those goddamned cattail pancakes I have learned to hate, a couple of promising looking pinecones, and an OK-looking strip of venison jerky.  Less than I ate for breakfast this morning.  I spent that night in the sand feeling pretty spent and cold and hungry.

Next day, I tried heading north again and turned into what I thought would be a small sidecanyon.  After a while it opened into a wide wash with a massive arcing wall facing the sun.  I figured I had walked a big squiggly loop south of the girl's camp and then ended up north of her camp and considerably higher.  What got my spirits up was that I found footprints.  Lots of bootprints in the wet sand along the stream.  It looked like several people had come here for water and then returned the direction I was walking, so I picked up my pace and hoped to meet someone with a map.  That's when I met Jeff [sic] Prince[Geoffrey Prince, the University of Utah archaeologist.  -Editor] and his crew.  Halfway up the wash I saw a group of people sitting in what looked like a living room made of tarps.  Very weird thing to see out there.  They had poles and tarps and a folding table and folding chairs and solar-powered everything and they were eating lunch when I walked up.  They looked as surprised as I felt.  After hellos they offered me a chair and I explained the situation, and they got out the maps and we figured out where the girl's camp would be, and we made plans for getting here out, etc. It wasn't as bad as I'd imagined, and they knew how to get there and Prince was okay letting two of his guys go and help.  So that was settled.

But back to your original question: did I meet Geoffrey?  And what was he doing?  So, yes, I did, and I think seven of his crew.  And what he was doing, as far as I can tell from having been there maybe one hour mostly sitting under a tarp eating tuna sandwiches and taking a load off is that they were doing archaeological work.  They told me they couldn't give any details but that they had been there all summer and were working on a dig and that was that.  I was really curious, but they were solid and kept saying that the location and the details of the dig were secret and that they couldn't discuss it.  That's all.  I tried getting the two guys who went with me back to help the girl, but they apologetically declined to discuss it.

Long story short, we did get the girl out, her ankle was not broken, I couldn't have done it without the help, and I really hit it off with one of the guys, named Anton, and we swapped contact info and agreed to hang out back in Kolob when he got time off.  Turns out that it was right after the course that I saw those guys in town getting mail.  Geoffrey was out with the truck running errands and had left Anton in town to wait and we had lunch at the Escalante Trail and he let slip that it was a big dig and that they had found some very valuable pots and some intact granaries up that cliff.  So that's all I know.  I spent maybe one hour with Geoffrey.  Since you're asking, he struck me as sort of a hard-ass, really anxious and uptight and straight-faced.  The crew seemed to be students or laborers, I think.  Prince was the oldest.  There were I think five other guys and two girls maybe about my age, which is 26, so maybe graduate students.  All tanned and looking like they'd been out for a while.  Prince was fussing with a schedule on his laptop and mostly I talked with the others.

Only contact I've had with any of them since then is with Anton.  We're Facebook friends.  He's at U of A [the University of Arizona, in Tucson. -Editor] working on his anthropology Master's thesis.  I also got the number of one of the girls, from Anton, but I don't have a phone and I haven't gotten around to calling her.  She'd probably remember me as the bearded reesty fellow who was lost and who hadn't brushed his teeth in two weeks and ate three sandwiches so fast it was embarrassing.  I love the wandering life, but it is hard to pick up girls.

FYI

I inhaled for 40 years.  Ideas, stuff, people.  Most of that is encumbrance that I am now exhaling.

I had 4 great grandfathers.  One died destitute and alcoholic and alone.  One died young in the flu epidemic of 1919.  One killed himself depressed in an asylum.  The other was a notorious philanderer who lived a long time, but we don't know much after he was run out of the family.

My maternal grandfather died of cirrhosis in his mid 50s.  He had been, before he was fired for drinking on the job, an Army colonel and an English teacher.  My paternal grandfather died right after retirement of heart disease and a prescription-drug fiasco.  He was a renowned athlete and the director of the YMCA.

My father seems healthy.  If he takes after his mother, he'll live well into his 90s.  I don't know much about him as a person because he doesn't talk with me, but he was one of the most highly-regarded planetary scientists of his generation, a very young professor at MIT and later at the University of Arizona.  He has spent his retirement so far working as a volunteer in the Mormon church's genealogy program and as a consultant to the Chinese government on space exploration.  I inherited my omnivorous curiosity from him, but my manner from my mother, mostly.  Actually, I'm not much like either of them.

I don't have any sons.  I have three daughters, and I think they love me and like me.  I had one big bout with depression, which I explained at the time with reference to boring and frustrating circumstances, but I think it was mostly chemical.  I talked with a shrink and she told me a few illuminating things about sleep and exercise and meditation, etc., but what I remember best is that she told me that daughters of depressed fathers develop a reflex to please men.  She thinks the martyrdom complex in women comes most often from the childhood habit of trying to please daddy, which seems sensible enough, though who knows?  I have a deep and bad habit of dramatizing my suffering so that people don't think I have it too easy, and the girls notice this.

In recent years I have felt my eagerness to impress older men diminish.  I've also noticed that I don't feel like looking good or, really, performing in any way at all for others.  I used to really strive for the appearance of effortless grace, to come across as Oscar Wilde, Rudolph Valentino and Jack Kennedy all in one excellent shirt, but now I bathe only when I really need to, wear jeans and old sweaters most days, and frequently find food on my sleeves.  Sometimes I see a beautiful woman and it doesn't even register.  I've pretty much stopped dusting off my secret weapon, too: I hardly ever sing songs and play guitar at parties anymore, which is how I used to hook 'em with wit and charisma.  At least the drunk ones.  As I've become less social, however, my taste for alcohol has abated, and now I prefer coffee.  Used to be I loved a late night of drinking and laughing with friends, acting stupid and blowing off my worries.  Now I prefer coffee in the morning with one friend at a time, and I am returning to earnestness and articulate holding-forth.

Tending a Place; In praise of restaurants.

At the bottom of the hill I live on, there's this restaurant/bar called The Falls. I love the place, even though it's still imperfect. It's the place I most often go when I want to drink coffee or beer 'out'.

The hill is really one side of the valley that opens onto Baltimore city and eventually onto the Harbor of Baltimore. From the continental perspective, it's the spent end of the vast, rolling coastal plain that you descend onto when you climb down out of the Blue Ridge heading east. The Falls is where you end up, by one route or another, if you are immigrating from Appalachia, looking for factory work, fleeing the shift and final collapse of the economy that supported household farming through 20,000 years of settlement culture. You sell the dirt and head up the Blue Ridge, across the swaying backbone of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and the Virginias, you cross the rivers and horse pastures of Western Maryland, noting how curiously well the grass still thrives over Antietam, Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg. You pick your way along country highways, the meanderings of which seem to have forgotten whatever historical logic first trod them into being, until with Baltimore in the distance you travel the last sleeping suburban Main Streets and the growing disorienting swarms of wallboard mansions. Finally you come to modest old neighborhoods inhabited by the hand-to-mouth middle class, teetering above the collapsed industrial dead zones of Baltimore City. Welcome.

Finally, you peer down Sulgrave Avenue, over the last several million years of eroded time, and there at the bottom is Jones Falls. Falls is a regional word for 'river', and Jones Falls is the river that Baltimore used to power its mills, choked into a coma, and then built a highway over so as not to have to think about it. And curiously, most of the beautiful buildings along Jones Falls, under the roar of Jones Falls Expressway, are old stone and brick mill buildings that are a hundred times better able to shelter actual human warmth than the mansions you've climbed down past to stand here, at the bottom of Sulgrave, in the neighborhood of Mount Washington, in front of The Falls restaurant.

The Falls is not housed in one of these beautiful old mill buildings, but it squats near the warmth of the last one, near the expressway, the lightrail tracks and Jones Falls. God, I really hate the racket from the expressway, but there is some deep principle of gravity that draws us all to this intersection--me and the river, the highway, the edge of the neighborhood. I'll happily sit out in the heat and roar on a summer morning and scribble just for the pleasure of being near this sense of gravity. Even though it feels poisoned in some ways.

The Falls opened about two years ago in a storefront that for years had a Korean grocery with nearly nothing on the shelves. There was then a struggling and failed deli. The corned beef was awesome; the lighting was death. The place was just too big, inorganic somehow, yucky. You ate the too-expensive corned beef and fled, wishing them well but unable to stay. When the place closed it was depressing because, while there are several other restaurants in the same little part of Mount Washington Village, there was no place for people from the neighborhood, really. We have expensive taste but no money. Mount Washington Tavern is an expensive sports bar with bad beer that attracts aggressive young professionals on the prowl. Ethel & Ramone's does often-good Cajun fusion but it's expensive and dark. I don't really know why I don't like it there. Their gumbo is excellent and I've had a couple great evenings eating late on their front sidewalk on warm summer nights. The crepe place next door to E&R can be a great place to take one of the girls to talk and eat snails but I don't like the fussy little tables. Everything is like doll furniture that got sent through a bigulator, including the food, sort of.

The Falls always has nine beers on tap, often really interesting and beautiful, often local. Always an IPA, and always a stout or porter. The the food is only adequate but they make a good burger and there's also more interesting stuff if you want to try, and there's always veggie stuff if you're with a veggie, which I really appreciate. But what makes it part of the landscape to me is the restlessness of the owners, the way they've gradually made a restaurant that fits the weird L-shaped space, found lighting that drew the room towards its centers, filled in corners with bottles of whiskey and tequila, glasses of various shapes, drawn the eyes up with clay busts, with paintings and photos, books. And the wait staff and bartenders are smart and polite in a very human way. None of the particular decisions is all that important in itself, although the beer is crucial and the lighting was deathly and bad bread is really sort of literally depressing. What makes the place work is something else.

Luca Turin has called perfume "the most portable form of intelligence," which reframed some of my thinking about art. That is, art--for me, anyway--is defined in part by intelligence. All kinds, obviously. If something is artful or elegant it is in some way just right, fitting. And when something is fitting in an unexpected way, there is the delightful pop of discovery, that clicking in the brain when a new synaptic pathway switches on. And something that continues to grow with those sorts of clicks and shifts is alive and enlivening. To know a restaurant as a form of intelligence, to be around for some of the attempts to make it fit the place: these are, in the modest scale of an ordinary life, great pleasures.

The Falls is slowly becoming a place where they know the food and drink that they serve. They have chosen it mindfully and they eat and drink it themselves with real pleasure. They stand around and taste and speculate over the relative quality of the new charcuterie platter. They understand the pleasure of drinking good beer, and there I don't have to feel self-conscious about noticing and sometimes talking about the layers of sensation and flavor. It is becoming a place where a person who wishes to locate himself or herself in the senses can attempt to do so with some of the resources and types of thinking required to do that. No small thing.

The continent is behind you. The Falls is just down there, at the bottom of Sulgrave Avenue.

Close Encounter with a Purpose-Driven Life

"I do management hire-fire for a multi-concept owner", I am sure she said into her phone as she swished by me and up the concourse rolling her carry-on.  She seemed so full of purpose.  I imagined the many sacrifices she's making to live her purpose-driven life.  Rising early to do her hair, eating fat-free yogurt in a hurry, keeping her belly sucked in and her face tilted just so, maintaining at all times a seriousness and responsibility and flinty joylessness that nearly obliterated her fine and possibly beautiful features.

Later, when I was last onto the plane, I saw her sitting in the back, not in business class, and she was so diminished back there next to the big guy with the Constitution tattooed on his forearm that I suddenly needed to get home to my girls and explain everything to them.  Like how coloring your hair and failing to enjoy the flavor of fat and never questioning your eagerness to please will make a doll out of you.  Girls!  Let your hair grow!  Eat!  Do not tolerate assholes!  Do not be driven by any purpose except your own enjoyment!  And let experience teach you what you really, ultimately enjoy!  I love you!

Several Posts I Can't Write

So here's the news:
Patti Smith's Just Kids is a wonderful if sometimes boringaspoop treatise on creating ones own world by attention to objects and spaces in order to counterbalance the massive momentum of the world's primary movement at a particular point.
Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead is the spiritual sister of 2666. You might oughta check it out.
I was in Pittsburgh last weekend with a friend who lives there with his wife and 8 year old son. It's something like Baltimore spread around and across three rivers and several hills. Similar energy of trying to salvage something whose potential is too great to give up but so far gone as to be painful to think about.
I'm watching heat shimmer above the chase that vents our gas heater. In fact it radiates for more than foot around the pipe before dispersing into the 29-degree winter day. Why aren't I resourceful enough to use that exhaust heat to heat the upstairs? Whiskey tango the fuck not?
I feel like I'll die with the undeciphered coin of some submerged continent in my pocket and it will be discarded with the trousers.

Whaddya think?

http://killingthebuddha.com/



Blake and Kirk:



Potentially day-making news: the editor of the crazily-named publication linked above just contacted me asking if I would publish http://offwithourheads.blogspot.com/2010/07/typical-american-impulse-or-well-pray.html in their magazine. She found it through Stephen Prothero, the religion writer, who is Dan Prothero's brother, who is Lavinia Spalding's boytoy, and we all know who Lavinia is, besides being my facebook friend and, therefore, one of the readers of a slightly-edited re-posting of this essay on FB a few days ago and she was not put off by my tendency to write extremely cumbersome sentences.

Wondering what people do when approached like this? Do I pant yesyesyes while humping her leg, or do I play hard to get, or do I say, sure, let's talk about it, or do I do research and find out how much I can ask for money-wise, or do I say, eh, I dunno, maybe your magazine is not Granta or the Paris Review or even Paris Match and all that and maybe I don't want to consort with the likes of you Buddhakillers, slam?

Whatchathink?

Generosity

Somewhere out in the zero-degree night, let's say on the edge of a smallish shabby town, there is a man drinking and quailing at the thought of having to go to work tomorrow. He operates a backhoe. He freezes his ass off all day every day in his backhoe. His back hurts. He does not love his wife and she sure does not love him. His kids are never around. He has cable now, and he loves ballgames. He wishes, hard, that he could just stay in his chair in his warm house with his TV and his bourbon and be assured that the bills would be paid. He really wants to stay this way. I want him to have what he wants. If I could, I'd give him a garage full of money and booze so he could just sit there at ease, knowing more or less what tomorrow will bring.

Got My Head Cracked. Twice.

Over the last 7 days of driving to Tucson and back with three teenaged girls and a fiancee, through mostly horrible driving weather, with awkward and probably septic living conditions and sickening expenses, with socially-charged visits and a big family reunion with a Mormon wedding in the middle, etc etc etc I have spent considerable time getting my head busted by two equally imponderable things about which at the end of the day neither I nor anyone else has much revealing to say:

1. To live at the very edge of the cash and credit economy, dipping into it when convenient or necessary, but largely isolated from its tidal surges and arbitrariness and impersonal procrustean exigencies, etc. is a very, very hard thing to do. Just thinking about HOW to actually do it is to step right up to the void. Fucking terrifying. I mean, the reason we HAVE this cash and credit economy in the first place is that we crave security so much that we are willing to trade our lives for it. To sidestep security is to step into the void, where any bloody thing can happen and few people can help.

2. The west, the canyons and mountains and deserts and forests, in fresh snow at zero degrees is so beautiful that I can stay in a state of almost continual rapture while rolling through it, even with three whinging kids and lots of popcorn underfoot and tailgaters and ominous state police cars and coal-fired power plants and dams and the Navajo reservation, and the incredibly ticky-tacky shit we people build, which sounds like a litany of disgust, but really I was in a state of almost continual rapture from Salt Lake City to Tucson and back.

So, there you have it: the two Mysteries: human nature and nature nature. Busts my fuckin' head!

XOV.