Escape

 

With everything in so much turmoil these days and nothing we below can do anything about, I think it best to just focus on our own lives and those we live with, love and need.  

It does seem true that we are living at the end of a civilizational era, on the brink of catastrophic war followed by an interregnum that could last for centuries before another civilization arises, if one does.  It's odd to me that most people don't see this. They focus on trivial, ephemeral political issues -- hostility to a personality or political perspective.  They are as if the crew of the Lusitania were brawling in the wheelhouse, oblivious to the periscope of the U-20 foaming a path through the sea to starboard.  

Maybe their behavior is natural and to be expected; after all, does not the water still flow from the tap, is not the refrigerator crowded with food from every part of the world, do not the lights come on at night?  All is as it was and ever shall be.  Why would it change?

 So if the coffee in your cup inexplicably trembles ever so slightly  as it sits on the side table while you scroll your tablet, it cannot mean that a Tyrannosaur has smelled you out and is coming. Ridiculous.  And that low rumbling you hear is merely distant thunder, not the sound of a rolling artillery barrage headed your way.  How could it be otherwise? 

I'm with you.  I don't want to know.  All these grim conversations I've had lately with those in the know, men who see clearly how things are, have spotted the avalanche roaring down the mountain toward us, the tsunami rising out of the sea and racing toward our shore -- what can I do about it?  My own politics comprise the single sentence: Can't we all just get along? That gets a horse laugh from all sides -- the joy of life comes from smiting your enemies, and if you don't have any, you make them.  Fight with a neighbor, fight with a nation, whatever and whoever.  Just fight.

Well, I don't want to fight.  Go away, all of you. Leave me alone, can't you? Let me dream of a long ago summer of love that was once real and will surely come again.  

It was real.  Wasn't it?

 

Yippy ki yay

 We had an onslaught of coyotes harassing one of our herds and we didn't have enough hands to deal with the situation so I volunteered to night herd and then flank ride when we decided to move the cattle to a different range. I rode a gouch-eared mare they told me had good cow sense although she didn't look like much.

Since my main task was to keep the coyotes away from the calves I was armed with a saddle rifle, my old short-barreled Winchester .30-30.  When I was night herding I heard a lot of coyotes yipping and yowling  but only saw coyotes twice. Once I spotted one loping towards the herd and I reined in, drew the Winchester from its scabbard and carefully led the beast.  I could see it clearly in the strong moonlight.  I fired and missed but I must have got close because without slowing down he veered away from the herd, zig-zagging as he ran.  He must have been shot at before.  I counted him as a "mission kill."

The other one I saw was very close in to the herd, crouching getting ready to spring.  I was afraid to shoot at him because he was between me and the cattle and I sure didn't want to go down as having shot a cow if I missed him.  So I charged him. I thought about yelling and whooping but I didn't want to startle the cattle.  When he spotted me coming he took off.  Once I was between him and the herd I chanced a shot at him. He was pretty far away by then, but I reined in my horse, took careful aim, gently squeezed the trigger while holding my breath and ... missed him clean. I swear he turned his head to look at me, though.  I imagined him saying, "Nya, nya, ya missed me!"

I levered another round into the chamber and lined up on him again, but didn't fire.  If I didn't hit him the first time I sure wasn't going to now that he was farther away and getting hard to make out. 

Once in a while, I heard a shot fired by one of the cowpokes and wondered it they had any better luck than me.

Other than those two incidents nothing happened other than I got really cold. The sky was mostly clear so the temperature plunged down into the single digits. Before the moon rose the night sky was stunning.  So many stars. The Milky Way a wonder of creation. To fight the cold, sometimes I leaned forward on my mount, hugging her neck to absorb some of her warmth.  Several times I dismounted to swing my arms and stamp my feet to get the circulation going.  I walked some, too, did jumping jacks and squats and so forth, then remounted.  I had to keep up with the herd and keep an eye out for those darn coyotes. I remembered the words a worn out old man had once spoken to me, that the best job was one with no heavy lifting, indoors in winter and all the water you could drink.  I thought it was a joke then, but now I understood.

 After sunrise we brought dogs out, mostly border collies but also a couple of blue heelers, a type of dog I don't like but they were very good at encouraging the stragglers to keep up.  We didn't have dogs out at night because they might have been mistaken for coyotes and shot, but during the day they were very aggressive toward any coyote that showed up. I saw one border collie actually overtake a running coyote and bite one of his rear legs, causing him to tumble. He got up and lunged at the border collie.  The collie didn't engage but darted away.  I took the opportunity to risk a shot at the coyote. Missed again, but I saw dirt and snow scatter just behind him.  I should have led him a little more and maybe aimed a bit higher but he took off like a scalded cat so I counted it another mission kill.  At the shot, the collie, who was charging in again on the coyote, veered off and ran back to the herd.

 Once the herd was at the new pasture the coyotes became less of a problem.  Maybe they stuck to their home range. I don't know.  We did lose a few calves despite all our efforts so maybe they had eaten their fill and didn't feel the need to risk getting shot.

The sun was warm and the days were quite pleasant.  We all took turns sleeping in the camper mounted in the bed of a 4x4 pickup and chowing down at another that had been converted to a modern-day chuckwagon. Some boys drove up with hay bales that we broke open and scattered over the snow for the cattle to feed on.

After a few days of this, a relief crew took over. I was glad to head out, bone weary and sore. We rode our horses to the old bunkhouse and stable where the hands were staying and after taking care of our mounts and having a supper of pinto beans cooked with dried chili peppers,  fried eggs, ham, bacon and fresh-baked corn bread sopped in bacon grease, a salad of tomatoes, lettuce, onions, carrots, green peppers and black olives with a dressing made of vinegar, olive oil and lemon juice, and a desert of bread pudding with raisins, washed down with percolator coffee, all rustled up by yours truly, the guys washed up and crawled into their bunks. I cleaned the dishes, noting there were no left overs, not even one piece of corn bread. One of the guys got out of his rack and dried and put away the dishes for me. Afterwards, I sat down in a chair by the old coal-burning pot-bellied stove. Oh, it was so toasty warm there. I closed my eyes and fell asleep. When I woke up about 45 minutes later everybody was sleeping. I packed up my gear, left a note saying good-bye and God bless and went home. 

The cowpokes weren't so lucky. They are still out there, earning their pay.  

Later, I thought about the conversation I had with the 'poke who dried the dishes for me.  I mentioned my chagrin at firing at and missing three coyotes and he said, "You didn't really want to kill those coyotes, did you?"  As soon as he said that, I realized it was true, although it had never entered my conscious mind before. I stopped washing, pot in hand, as I thought about that.  He looked at me appraisingly.  Then he said, "You know we lost calves to coyotes.  Maybe to those you didn't shoot.  Think about the horror of those calves being attacked and ripped apart by the 'yotes, their moms trying to fend them off and failing, how they feel because you felt sympathy for their killers.  Something always has to die, Wanda.  Something always does.  Us or them."

 

Winter contentment

 

It's funny, but I'm regretting the passing of winter. For me, it's become a very comfortable season.  It compels confinement. In the past, that would have been frustrating for me, I'd want to be up and doing, out and about.  But recently I relish the relief of having an excuse to not do anything.  Oh, there are chores and things that have to be done around the house and with family, but they are things I enjoy doing or at least don't mind, and just about everything can be put off if the weather is inclement.

So life slows down and the long evenings of welcome quiet are something I look forward to. After the little that needs to be done is done, I sit in my favorite chair in front of the fireplace and read or knit -- my Lord, yes, I've taken up knitting and crocheting; I never would have imagined! 

This is a family that reads.  I've seen to that, or, rather, my parents did, making reading part of us kids' daily life, as their parents did for them, and as I now do for my children.  El jefe also came from a family of readers, so we dovetail in that as in so many other things. El jefe also enjoys reading aloud so he's the designated bedtime story reader. 

He's like my dad that way, but unlike the popster, who would read us books and short stories he always intended to read but somehow never got around to -- Moby Dick, Arundel, Northwest Passage, The Sea Wolf (I had nightmares about that one), Blue Hotel, The Lottery, The Tell-Tale Heart, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge....sweet dreams and nighty-night, kids; actually, my brothers loved the scary stuff, me not so much, 'though I did like Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales -- 

Anyway, el jefe reads them children's stories: Thumbelena and other stories by Hans Christian Andersen and Hansel and Gretel and the Brothers Grimm tales and also more grown-up tales such as Jack London's The Hobo and the Fairy, Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, Stephen Vincent Benét's The Devil and Daniel Webster, Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods, Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Frances Hodgkin Burnett's The Secret Garden, Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, Jerome K. Jerome's The Passing of Third Floor Back, Ring Lardner's Alibi Ike, Booth Tarkington's The Terrible Shyness of Orvie Stone, Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat. Also such novels as Peter Pan, The Virginian, Swiss Family Robinson, Heidi, Treasure Island, Riders of the Purple Sage, Alice in Wonderland, Charlotte's Web, Childhood's End, The Light in the Forest, The Hundred Dresses, Idylls of the King (okay that's poetry), Under Two Flags, The Maltese Falcon, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Four Feathers, Tom Sawyer, The Light That Failed, Wild Animals I Have Known (semi-factual), The Lonesome Gods, Huckleberry Finn, Pasó Por Aquí, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Screwtape Letters, The Hobbit.... They never know what he will read them on any given night.  His practice is to read them a poem before beginning his book reading, usually a classic from the 19th century -- The boy stood on the burning deck, Whence all but he had fled; The flame that lit the battle's wreck, Shone round him o'er the dead.....  Oh, dear.

He doesn't just read, he acts out the characters, giving them different voices, from squeaky to gruff, depending.  He rushes excitedly through the sentences or pauses dramatically, as the story unfolds, sometimes looking up from the page and turning his gaze from one child to the other and they look back with awe, expectancy or impatience -- yes, well, what happens? -- as the story line dictates. Sometimes his readings are so good and the novel so engaging that as I happen to pass by I stop to listen, too, slipping quietly into the room so as not to disturb. Sometimes my mother slips in to listen, as well.

What's that? TV? Cell phones? The internet?  None of that in my house! (Except internet for school work and other research under supervision.)

Otherwise, while el jefe is terrifying  entertaining the children, I sit watching the fire in the fireplace, thinking nothing much at all.  Sometimes I go over to a window and stand looking out at the winter landscape, watch the early sunset, see a late crow fly across the western glow, or maybe an early owl. One by one, the stars and planets appear and a chill draft curls up around the window, making me shiver, so I retreat to the fireplace and stand in front of it warming up, then make a cup of tea, settle into my chair, pick up my knitting and begin clacking the needles or go back to my book and open it to where I left off, the cat climbs into my lap, the fire hisses, and all's right with the world.

 

 

 

 

Atomic bombs now and then

Original art from the story.

If you wanted to change the horrible present and were somehow transported back 30 years into the past into your own childhood with full knowledge of all that had happened in the intervening years, what would you do? How would you convince your parents that you had returned from your adult future to you own childhood?  If you did convince them, what would they do?

 Time and Again, based on a story by H. Beam Piper, first broadcast over NBC radio as an episode in the series Dimension X on July 12, 1951. The story originally appeared in the April, 1947, issue of Astounding Science Fiction.  This was Piper's first published story.

This story interests me not just for its thought experiment aspect but because it evokes the last days of the Pacific War as it was for people at home in the states, how they thought about the war, and in particular what it was like the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, and more broadly how the future was expected to play out in another generation -- not well. Not well at all.

 

 

 

 

 

The Men That Don't Fit In

 

 I was thinking about poetry and wondering why it's basically vanished from the world.  Nobody writes it, nobody reads it, nobody cares about it.  Oh, sure, stuff called poetry is still published and maybe the poet's family says they read it and it was just swell, but the truth is there is no audience for poetry anymore.  And even someone like me who actually does read poetry reads essentially nothing published after 1960.

I think one reason why poetry is dead -- and there are many reasons -- is that there is no longer poetry addressed to the reality of life, distilled observation and common sense. Certainly there is no robust, masculine poetry anymore -- the kind that speaks directly to you without literary allusions, metaphors, obscure references, the kind of poetry you  have to take a class to understand. There used to be lots of that sort published in mass-circulation magazines, then collected in books that became popular best sellers.  There was also a lot of humorous poetry, poetry for children, religious poetry.  All gone now.  

It seems to me there is a demand still for such poetry but in its absence people quote, recite, song lyrics.  That's the closest thing there is to popular poetry anymore, and sometimes the lyrics are pretty good.  But too often they are painfully poorly written, the writer unskilled with the written word, unable to express well what he wants to say.  Not all, of course.  Some song lyrics are very good and stay with you, creating images in your mind that linger.

Anyway, here's a poem that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.  A plain poem telling us something about the world and a type of person in it that we can recognize. Maybe it's us and a warning.  It has a certain masculine flavor to it that seems gone from the world.  It was written by Robert W. Service in 1911.

There's a race of men that don't fit in,

    A race that can't stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,

    And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,

    And they climb the mountain's crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,

    And they don't know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;

    They are strong and brave and true;

But they're always tired of the things that are,

    And they want the strange and new.

They say: "Could I find my proper groove,

    What a deep mark I would make!"

So they chop and change, and each fresh move

    Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs

    With a brilliant, fitful pace,

It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones

    Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,

    Forgets that his prime is past,

Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead,

    In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;

    He has just done things by half.

Life's been a jolly good joke on him,

    And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;

    He was never meant to win;

He's a rolling stone, and it's bred in the bone;

    He's a man who won't fit in.

And here's a song, Gentle on My Mind, that I think has lyrics to rival the old verses of the popular poets of days gone by.  It was written by the great John Hartford in 1968 and is here sung by Glen Cambell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whoof!

 

Stay away from politics. 

If you get involved with it, the world looks terrible and it's clear that we're all doomed if something isn't done right now to stop the evil other side and their wicked ways.  

But if you avoid that toxic cesspool, you notice the sun is shining in a bright blue sky decorated with drifting fair weather clouds that cast dappled shadows, a gentle breeze from the south is rustling the leaves of the trees, flowers are blooming, the birds are singing, the cattle are lowing and the kids and the dog want to hike down to the pond and have a picnic. 

Let's go!

And hubby says, "Hey! Wait for me!"