Missing:
A yellow and blue winter tent. Made by Sierra Designs. Last seen approx. 3 miles W by NW of the Log Bird, pitched on deep snow on a densely wooded slope. May or may not be submerged in new snow or shredded by wolves. Finder's reward: The chance to spend a weekend at a trapper's camp on an alpine lake just over the ridge.
I went up the mountain as far as I could the Saturday before last and stayed the night in my tent. The slog up the slope and through the snow was excruciating yoked to the weight of the pack. I had been hoping to reach the ridgeline (sponsored by a Japanese automaker, would you believe it?) where I might have a line of sight to my destination--Nelson Lake. But it was not to be. Around 4 o'clock my legs simply gave out, forcing me to pitch the tent. The following morning, after deciding I needed to return to feed Tipper rather than continue the push up the mountain, I left the tent up on the snow platform I had tramped out to pitch it, along with a camping mattress, some food, a few sweaters and a first aid kit. The idea was that I'd be able to approach it with a far lighter pack the next time up. Toting no more than a sleeping bag and a camp stove, in theory. And the contingent idea behind that one was that if I could manage to reach the lake, I could spend a leisurely if cold weekend there, having done all the preparatory work in advance.
Yesterday, needing exercise and with nothing more pressing to do, I ventured back up the mountain to see if I could find the tent. This time I brought some red tape to blaze the trail. My tracks from previous slogs up had been all but erased by new snows, but I recognized most of the waymarks and could occasionally make out faint depressions where my snowshoes had gone. The problem was really one of time. I didn't get started on the walk until around 12:30, leaving only five and a half hours till full dark. The mountain was enveloped in swirling white clouds of snow that would occasionally part to reveal more distant swirling white clouds of snow.
I hurried along as well as I could, though, and had come within what I calculated to be a quarter mile of the tent by 4:15. Not only was the snow deep nearly the whole way up; there was also an icy intermediate layer atop which the new accumulation would give way and slide as if on ball bearings. I must have fallen on my face ten times going up. So at 4:15 I reasoned that it would be the height of foolishness to spend any more than 15 minutes looking for the tent in the woods above the clearing that told me I was close. I trudged up in a direction that alloyed memory and chance, and found nothing. At the half hour, I gave up and turned back as planned. Although I hadn't actually located the tent, I had made a good trail almost straight to it, and had blazed the path to hedge against deep new snows.
Going back was pretty near to skiing at some points, in the sense that skiing is more or less a controlled fall, and sometimes a plain old fall. The chutes and slopes that had been merely tiring coming up had now become grave hazards: I would not survive a broken leg on the mountain. On the steepest parts I simply sat down and slid, using my crampons for brakes. It was fun. By the time I'd made it all the way down to the Log Bird it was near dark and I was feeling like I'd been run through a tumble dryer. I would go up again today, but I'm not sure my legs would stand for it two days running. I'll save it for the weekend, and will today go downhill skiing instead: 16" overnight.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Nystrom's Pride, Stoker's Ferry
Solving the firewood problem would entail one of two options. The first was to log my own firewood on public land. The second was to have wood delivered. I chose the second on the strength of a casual risk-benefit analysis. Like running a chainsaw, felling trees is never without risk. I might like to log and section my own trees just to see what it's like, but doing so under the pressure of exigency with zero experience did not appeal with its judgmaticness. I called up the only firewood listing in the yellow pages and asked for a quote. $270 for two cords of dry Lodgepole Pine, cut and delivered. I consulted with neighbor Steve. He told me I was getting a deal, so I accepted, with delivery scheduled for Sunday afternoon. I got a call from the wood guy at around 2:30 yesterday. He was about 45 minutes away. Not wanting him to lose his way getting up to the house, I went down to the mailboxes to wait for him. He showed up as scheduled, and I led him up the way.
To call my driveway slick would be to understate the reality by a wide margin. Its iciness is the result of torrential snows while I was gone combined with several daytime thaws over the past two weeks. Blame Darren: If he had shoveled, ice would not be an issue, and I would not be faced with the grim prospect of wipeout every time I set foot on it, sometimes with the danger doubled in the form of an axe, a chainsaw, a hot potato. Irregardful: The wood man was unable to get his truck all the way up my drive. He stalled out halfway up with the load facing the wrong way. A diagnostic poke around convinced him that the problem resided in the fuel pump. Lacking the needed part, the diagnosis did not translate into repair. I ventured that he might be able to get the engine running by letting out the brake and engaging the clutch once it had rolled to speed. He tried it, but the engine would not turn over. Worse, the truck ended up blocking the drive of neighbors Steve and Terry, with no way to move it. I offered the wood man some coffee, but he declined, asking to make a call instead. He called his wife to explain the situation, and said she would find him walking down the West Fork road. The situation had frazzled him, and he took off walking to cool his heels. Far from frazzlement myself, I viewed the 8,000 pounds of wood at the bottom of my drive as an opportunity to get some exercise. I set about it by nuzzling Nystrom's Pride back against the wood truck so that the gate just about touched the other truck's frame. I then scrabbled atop the load and began heaving sections of wood down through the topper window into the bed. The wood clanged dully on the metal, and neighbor Steve came by to see what was happening. He was not terribly concerned about the truck blocking his drive, and reasoned that he would be able to shave a section off a snowbank to clear a passage. He was soon helping me relay the wood from truck to truck just the way you see strings of workers propagating sandbags or rocks or what have you down the work detail in propaganda pieces plugging industrial harmony. I was able to get through three of four loads by dusk, when I repaired to the Log Bird to make an elk stir fry.
I'd like return, for a spell, to the theme I opened with yesterday: The dialectic of writing and reality, where the writer is constantly either amplifying or eliding his subjective experience of the real. As I noted earlier, while engaged in the act, the writer is attempting to transcend his subjectivity in favor of a linguistic performance that he desires to be universally, or at least widely accessible. Of course, a person can only escape his subjectivity into the rarefied air of the universal for so long. Even at the height of inspiration, his being-in-the-world as animal, as the subject of base drives, will inevitably reassert itself in the form of hunger, libido, or the need to piss.
This is exactly what happened to me yesterday while working on this blog. No, the reassertion of my physical drives did not take the form of peeing on the carpet and then wolfing down a steak while masturbating. Instead, after several hours of confinement I was overcome by the need to use my body, to move around. In what I cannot help thinking of as an elegantly germane proof of the foregoing, I went outside to finish unloading the wood from the delivery truck. It took me about two hours and it wore me out. Which was the point. Nietzsche goes on at some length about the utility of "mechanical activity" in the priests' struggle to get "work-slaves and prisoners" (most of us) to accept slave morality. I like to think that I've managed, at least in cases like this (where debt and taxation and piecework are not involved) to liberate mechanical activity from its oppressive context, applying it instead as a salve to a mind frayed by long effort.
After the final load [which I left in the bed of Nystrom's Pride to have more weight over the rear axle for a difficult journey I am thinking of taking, on which more soon] I went back inside to finish the blog post. I opened a beer as I sat down, and was promptly furnished with more proof of the antagonism that prevails between writing and reality: A tiny dribble of beer splashed onto my keyboard, instantly causing a short circuit. The screen went blank, and I was unable to power the computer back up. Half of what I had written was lost. Of course, this was more than a simple antagonism between reality and writing. The beer, after all, while nominally representing reality in this struggle, is also the means of distorting and filtering reality par excellence. But this is too rich. Suffice it to say that I managed to get the thing running again this morning.
To call my driveway slick would be to understate the reality by a wide margin. Its iciness is the result of torrential snows while I was gone combined with several daytime thaws over the past two weeks. Blame Darren: If he had shoveled, ice would not be an issue, and I would not be faced with the grim prospect of wipeout every time I set foot on it, sometimes with the danger doubled in the form of an axe, a chainsaw, a hot potato. Irregardful: The wood man was unable to get his truck all the way up my drive. He stalled out halfway up with the load facing the wrong way. A diagnostic poke around convinced him that the problem resided in the fuel pump. Lacking the needed part, the diagnosis did not translate into repair. I ventured that he might be able to get the engine running by letting out the brake and engaging the clutch once it had rolled to speed. He tried it, but the engine would not turn over. Worse, the truck ended up blocking the drive of neighbors Steve and Terry, with no way to move it. I offered the wood man some coffee, but he declined, asking to make a call instead. He called his wife to explain the situation, and said she would find him walking down the West Fork road. The situation had frazzled him, and he took off walking to cool his heels. Far from frazzlement myself, I viewed the 8,000 pounds of wood at the bottom of my drive as an opportunity to get some exercise. I set about it by nuzzling Nystrom's Pride back against the wood truck so that the gate just about touched the other truck's frame. I then scrabbled atop the load and began heaving sections of wood down through the topper window into the bed. The wood clanged dully on the metal, and neighbor Steve came by to see what was happening. He was not terribly concerned about the truck blocking his drive, and reasoned that he would be able to shave a section off a snowbank to clear a passage. He was soon helping me relay the wood from truck to truck just the way you see strings of workers propagating sandbags or rocks or what have you down the work detail in propaganda pieces plugging industrial harmony. I was able to get through three of four loads by dusk, when I repaired to the Log Bird to make an elk stir fry.
I'd like return, for a spell, to the theme I opened with yesterday: The dialectic of writing and reality, where the writer is constantly either amplifying or eliding his subjective experience of the real. As I noted earlier, while engaged in the act, the writer is attempting to transcend his subjectivity in favor of a linguistic performance that he desires to be universally, or at least widely accessible. Of course, a person can only escape his subjectivity into the rarefied air of the universal for so long. Even at the height of inspiration, his being-in-the-world as animal, as the subject of base drives, will inevitably reassert itself in the form of hunger, libido, or the need to piss.
This is exactly what happened to me yesterday while working on this blog. No, the reassertion of my physical drives did not take the form of peeing on the carpet and then wolfing down a steak while masturbating. Instead, after several hours of confinement I was overcome by the need to use my body, to move around. In what I cannot help thinking of as an elegantly germane proof of the foregoing, I went outside to finish unloading the wood from the delivery truck. It took me about two hours and it wore me out. Which was the point. Nietzsche goes on at some length about the utility of "mechanical activity" in the priests' struggle to get "work-slaves and prisoners" (most of us) to accept slave morality. I like to think that I've managed, at least in cases like this (where debt and taxation and piecework are not involved) to liberate mechanical activity from its oppressive context, applying it instead as a salve to a mind frayed by long effort.
After the final load [which I left in the bed of Nystrom's Pride to have more weight over the rear axle for a difficult journey I am thinking of taking, on which more soon] I went back inside to finish the blog post. I opened a beer as I sat down, and was promptly furnished with more proof of the antagonism that prevails between writing and reality: A tiny dribble of beer splashed onto my keyboard, instantly causing a short circuit. The screen went blank, and I was unable to power the computer back up. Half of what I had written was lost. Of course, this was more than a simple antagonism between reality and writing. The beer, after all, while nominally representing reality in this struggle, is also the means of distorting and filtering reality par excellence. But this is too rich. Suffice it to say that I managed to get the thing running again this morning.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Slurry Incineration Facility
Slurry Incineration Facility
Writing has a frustrating dialectical relationship with lived experience. Writing, of course, is a way of processing experience, of refining it into vignettes, categories, stories, metaphors. Writing is a testament to the mind's reflective and analytic ability to make some sense of the phenomenal torrent. All writing, whether fictional or functional, bases in varying degrees of directness on lived experience, and would not exist without that experience, the feedstock of creativity. On the other hand, if one makes of writing an end unto itself--as scribblers do--writing also enters into an antagonistic relationship with the very lived experience it seeks to mine for meaning. When driven to write I resent the intrusions of reality and exigency (errands, chores, obligations, emergencies) into the time and space where writing occurs. In some sense the writer's experience of life is the poorer as a result of this drive to disconnect from the real in order to manufacture meaning. At other times, when seeking inspiration or understanding, the writer elevates the real (either in 'real time' or from memory) to the altar of sanctity, convinced that his marginal participation in such slivers of time is sufficient to generate a general, viz. infinite, understanding of whatever type of experience it happens to be, on the order of a principle. It does not matter that the writer does not consciously acknowledge the effort: For proof of his arrogation of universality, it is enough that he should write and seek to be read. To formulate it a bit differently, the writer's relationship with reality/lived experience is a paradoxical one whereby he seeks not only to attenuate and amplify experience so that it can be surveyed, simplified, distilled, etc., and then put down on paper, but also to deflect and occlude reality precisely while engaging with it (or its memory) in his effort to translate it into accessible linguistic testimony. To take the next step in the description of the writer's reality paradox, he seeks a) to expand his subjectivity/participation in reality to the point where it is elevated into a universal principle that can be understood by all--consciously so, and with the end of writing in mind; and b) to exclude himself from participation in reality while writing--to eliminate himself as a singular subject of that reality. This is a dangerous game, and it accounts for the classic trope of the writer flying into a rage when he hears a knock at his door.
The past few days have been heavy on reality, initially at the expense of writing, but the mind loves nothing more than carrying a remainder. I aim to offer you the residuum of that experience here. Just don't come knocking while I'm scribbling.
On Thursday I worked hard again. No counterpoints to the tedious experience of being a debt-peon to report. Maybe one thing: My translation that day contained several instances of the term 'slurry incineration facility,' which tickled me. I did go check my snares, but the forest critters were still cowering from the report of my shot the day before. I watched some early episodes of Seinfeld and went to bed feeling like the incompetent antiquarian of my own adolescence.
On Friday morning I piloted Nystrom's Pride to Missoula, about 2 hours away, in what was the first step toward resolving the problem of heat, specifically wood heat. I mentioned in my first Montana post that the cabin has a large wood-burning stove. Such a stove does little good without a supply of good firewood, of course, and that's what was lacking. During our scarcely overlapping tenures at the cabin, Darren and I had managed to burn all the dry firewood. By early last week, I was down to a little supply of green, ice-bound Ponderosa pine that had been cut in late 2007 and had not seasoned long enough to burn well--something I learned over successive evenings of sooty-faced frustration. Rather than serve another day as bellows to a paltry fire, I drove to Missoula to borrow a chainsaw from the folks who own the Bird's Nest, taking Tipper with me. The road was clear and I was at the owners' home by 11. Mark gave me a brief tutorial on how to operate the saw (made by Husqvarna, a Swedish heavy equipment company), as well as a parting gift of several pounds of frozen elk steak. On my way back through town I ran another couple errands. First I stopped off at an 'outdoor store' to buy some more refined snaring equipment. As often happens at these modern mega-emporia, I left lugging a bit more than I went in for. In addition to a set of spring-locking wire snares, I bought 2 steel-jawed traps, a book on trapping, and a bottle of synthetic coyote urine. Considering the smorgasbord of recondite trapper's outfit, I thought my purchase rather modest. Next I stalked the aisles of Wal-Mart's cavernous food section--I fear my trapping materiel will only go so far in the way of calories.
By four o'clock, I was back at the cabin sawing logs. The going was tough. I really had to lay into them, and would later find out that the chain was as dull as the lesson on Voodoo Economics in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Because Tipper had spent the entire day confined to the car, I pitied her case and gave her free rein in the yard before starting up the saw. As I began leaning into the logs and bracing myself against the machine's howl and yowl, I noticed the little old mongrel plodding up the road away from the house. I thought she must not have liked the noise and would return, having explored her environs, when the sawing was done. After sawing and splitting for about an hour, I looked up and saw that the light had begun to fail. I called out for Tipper. No response--her rheumatic form was nowhere in sight. It was then that I began to worry. There wasn't an hour left until dark, and the temperature was tailing off toward a cold night. I walked up the road the way I'd seen her go and noted with some dismay that she hadn't been heavy enough to make any prints in the icy snow. Before setting off on a search I called up Darren to see if he had any pointers. The only information he offered was that I shouldn't underestimate the poverty of her vision and her hearing, and that I had better get going.
I'll try to be brief here, and dispense with every particular in favor of the doghunt's flavor. My first move was to drive up and down the icy road a couple of times in Nystrom's Pride. Nothing availed, I went to introduce myself to my closest neighbor, just up the way. A knock on the door revealed old gaptoothed man with one arm. He introduced himself as Lefty. In response to my inquiry about Tipper, he launched into what promised to be a lengthy discourse on life, neighborliness, and a dog's unknowable ways. I'd scarcely sat down before he began flourishing the mementos of his years and enlivening the atmosphere of his home with fond anecdotes and seasoned speculations. Excusing myself before I could be transfixed by the spell of his broken solitude, I told him I'd call another day. Once outside, I felt the day fading almost palpably into the blackness of space. While scuttling back down the icy road I wiped out and slammed into the ice wrist-first. It smarted some. My next move was to strap on snowshoes and circle the homes in the direction Tipper had trotted. I called her name over and over and heard nothing. At one point I thought I saw her tracks by the front gate of a house shuttered for the winter. They faded just a few steps in. A feeling in the pit of my stomach signaled that I may have seen Tipper for the last time. It seemed so arbitrary that she should go out like this after 15-17 years of keeping doggy death at bay.
Out of ideas, I hustled down toward the neighbors below, Steve and Terry. They own an old collie who I thought might be of use in tracking Tipper down. They were very sympathetic, and it wasn't long before all of us were poking through the woods calling Tipper's name in voices more and more forlorn. The collie picked up no scent, or didn't bother to follow it. My searching assumed a more desperate character. I tore through the woods heedlessly, and it wasn't long before I could no longer see where I was going. Tipper was gone, and I gave her long odds of making it through the night. Dark had well and truly fallen. Terry tried to offer some comfort by saying that old dogs sometimes just wander off when they sense their time is up. I thanked them and made a couple of final rounds of the neighborhood in my truck before going inside to call Darren. The sadness of Tipper's probable demise coupled with the guilt of complicity in her flight weighed heavily. In spite of myself, I'd grown quite fond of her. I larded the call with shoulds and why didn't I's. Darren was not reproachful, but I couldn't help thinking that her disappearance would alter the character of our friendship. I tried lighting a fire with the wood I'd split as Tipper trotted off to her frozen grave. Appropriately, it wouldn't burn, and I spent a relatively cold night with the propane-fueled furnace turned all the way down.
The next day I got up early to saw and to chop the green pine, both as an act of penance and because the chopped stuff could season inside as I burned some putative dry wood. Around noon I heard a voice and looked up to see neighbor Steve. Do you want to take a ride, he asked.
You mean to go look for Tipper?
No, to pick her up. She showed up at that house waaaay up the hill this morning.
Should I bring a bag to put her in?
A bag?
I mean for the body.
No, man, she's alive!
And so she was. Other than a visible brittleness from a tiring slog and a brutally cold night, Tipper seemed quite content. She was lounging around on a Persian rug in the capacious and well-heated living room of a beautiful house owned by an older and by all indications highly successful gentleman. An indebted canine caretaker could be forgiven for suspecting that Tipper had gone off not in search of her eternal sleep, but for a more properly 'executive' lifestyle. She seemed indifferent to her rescue.
Writing has a frustrating dialectical relationship with lived experience. Writing, of course, is a way of processing experience, of refining it into vignettes, categories, stories, metaphors. Writing is a testament to the mind's reflective and analytic ability to make some sense of the phenomenal torrent. All writing, whether fictional or functional, bases in varying degrees of directness on lived experience, and would not exist without that experience, the feedstock of creativity. On the other hand, if one makes of writing an end unto itself--as scribblers do--writing also enters into an antagonistic relationship with the very lived experience it seeks to mine for meaning. When driven to write I resent the intrusions of reality and exigency (errands, chores, obligations, emergencies) into the time and space where writing occurs. In some sense the writer's experience of life is the poorer as a result of this drive to disconnect from the real in order to manufacture meaning. At other times, when seeking inspiration or understanding, the writer elevates the real (either in 'real time' or from memory) to the altar of sanctity, convinced that his marginal participation in such slivers of time is sufficient to generate a general, viz. infinite, understanding of whatever type of experience it happens to be, on the order of a principle. It does not matter that the writer does not consciously acknowledge the effort: For proof of his arrogation of universality, it is enough that he should write and seek to be read. To formulate it a bit differently, the writer's relationship with reality/lived experience is a paradoxical one whereby he seeks not only to attenuate and amplify experience so that it can be surveyed, simplified, distilled, etc., and then put down on paper, but also to deflect and occlude reality precisely while engaging with it (or its memory) in his effort to translate it into accessible linguistic testimony. To take the next step in the description of the writer's reality paradox, he seeks a) to expand his subjectivity/participation in reality to the point where it is elevated into a universal principle that can be understood by all--consciously so, and with the end of writing in mind; and b) to exclude himself from participation in reality while writing--to eliminate himself as a singular subject of that reality. This is a dangerous game, and it accounts for the classic trope of the writer flying into a rage when he hears a knock at his door.
The past few days have been heavy on reality, initially at the expense of writing, but the mind loves nothing more than carrying a remainder. I aim to offer you the residuum of that experience here. Just don't come knocking while I'm scribbling.
On Thursday I worked hard again. No counterpoints to the tedious experience of being a debt-peon to report. Maybe one thing: My translation that day contained several instances of the term 'slurry incineration facility,' which tickled me. I did go check my snares, but the forest critters were still cowering from the report of my shot the day before. I watched some early episodes of Seinfeld and went to bed feeling like the incompetent antiquarian of my own adolescence.
On Friday morning I piloted Nystrom's Pride to Missoula, about 2 hours away, in what was the first step toward resolving the problem of heat, specifically wood heat. I mentioned in my first Montana post that the cabin has a large wood-burning stove. Such a stove does little good without a supply of good firewood, of course, and that's what was lacking. During our scarcely overlapping tenures at the cabin, Darren and I had managed to burn all the dry firewood. By early last week, I was down to a little supply of green, ice-bound Ponderosa pine that had been cut in late 2007 and had not seasoned long enough to burn well--something I learned over successive evenings of sooty-faced frustration. Rather than serve another day as bellows to a paltry fire, I drove to Missoula to borrow a chainsaw from the folks who own the Bird's Nest, taking Tipper with me. The road was clear and I was at the owners' home by 11. Mark gave me a brief tutorial on how to operate the saw (made by Husqvarna, a Swedish heavy equipment company), as well as a parting gift of several pounds of frozen elk steak. On my way back through town I ran another couple errands. First I stopped off at an 'outdoor store' to buy some more refined snaring equipment. As often happens at these modern mega-emporia, I left lugging a bit more than I went in for. In addition to a set of spring-locking wire snares, I bought 2 steel-jawed traps, a book on trapping, and a bottle of synthetic coyote urine. Considering the smorgasbord of recondite trapper's outfit, I thought my purchase rather modest. Next I stalked the aisles of Wal-Mart's cavernous food section--I fear my trapping materiel will only go so far in the way of calories.
By four o'clock, I was back at the cabin sawing logs. The going was tough. I really had to lay into them, and would later find out that the chain was as dull as the lesson on Voodoo Economics in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Because Tipper had spent the entire day confined to the car, I pitied her case and gave her free rein in the yard before starting up the saw. As I began leaning into the logs and bracing myself against the machine's howl and yowl, I noticed the little old mongrel plodding up the road away from the house. I thought she must not have liked the noise and would return, having explored her environs, when the sawing was done. After sawing and splitting for about an hour, I looked up and saw that the light had begun to fail. I called out for Tipper. No response--her rheumatic form was nowhere in sight. It was then that I began to worry. There wasn't an hour left until dark, and the temperature was tailing off toward a cold night. I walked up the road the way I'd seen her go and noted with some dismay that she hadn't been heavy enough to make any prints in the icy snow. Before setting off on a search I called up Darren to see if he had any pointers. The only information he offered was that I shouldn't underestimate the poverty of her vision and her hearing, and that I had better get going.
I'll try to be brief here, and dispense with every particular in favor of the doghunt's flavor. My first move was to drive up and down the icy road a couple of times in Nystrom's Pride. Nothing availed, I went to introduce myself to my closest neighbor, just up the way. A knock on the door revealed old gaptoothed man with one arm. He introduced himself as Lefty. In response to my inquiry about Tipper, he launched into what promised to be a lengthy discourse on life, neighborliness, and a dog's unknowable ways. I'd scarcely sat down before he began flourishing the mementos of his years and enlivening the atmosphere of his home with fond anecdotes and seasoned speculations. Excusing myself before I could be transfixed by the spell of his broken solitude, I told him I'd call another day. Once outside, I felt the day fading almost palpably into the blackness of space. While scuttling back down the icy road I wiped out and slammed into the ice wrist-first. It smarted some. My next move was to strap on snowshoes and circle the homes in the direction Tipper had trotted. I called her name over and over and heard nothing. At one point I thought I saw her tracks by the front gate of a house shuttered for the winter. They faded just a few steps in. A feeling in the pit of my stomach signaled that I may have seen Tipper for the last time. It seemed so arbitrary that she should go out like this after 15-17 years of keeping doggy death at bay.
Out of ideas, I hustled down toward the neighbors below, Steve and Terry. They own an old collie who I thought might be of use in tracking Tipper down. They were very sympathetic, and it wasn't long before all of us were poking through the woods calling Tipper's name in voices more and more forlorn. The collie picked up no scent, or didn't bother to follow it. My searching assumed a more desperate character. I tore through the woods heedlessly, and it wasn't long before I could no longer see where I was going. Tipper was gone, and I gave her long odds of making it through the night. Dark had well and truly fallen. Terry tried to offer some comfort by saying that old dogs sometimes just wander off when they sense their time is up. I thanked them and made a couple of final rounds of the neighborhood in my truck before going inside to call Darren. The sadness of Tipper's probable demise coupled with the guilt of complicity in her flight weighed heavily. In spite of myself, I'd grown quite fond of her. I larded the call with shoulds and why didn't I's. Darren was not reproachful, but I couldn't help thinking that her disappearance would alter the character of our friendship. I tried lighting a fire with the wood I'd split as Tipper trotted off to her frozen grave. Appropriately, it wouldn't burn, and I spent a relatively cold night with the propane-fueled furnace turned all the way down.
The next day I got up early to saw and to chop the green pine, both as an act of penance and because the chopped stuff could season inside as I burned some putative dry wood. Around noon I heard a voice and looked up to see neighbor Steve. Do you want to take a ride, he asked.
You mean to go look for Tipper?
No, to pick her up. She showed up at that house waaaay up the hill this morning.
Should I bring a bag to put her in?
A bag?
I mean for the body.
No, man, she's alive!
And so she was. Other than a visible brittleness from a tiring slog and a brutally cold night, Tipper seemed quite content. She was lounging around on a Persian rug in the capacious and well-heated living room of a beautiful house owned by an older and by all indications highly successful gentleman. An indebted canine caretaker could be forgiven for suspecting that Tipper had gone off not in search of her eternal sleep, but for a more properly 'executive' lifestyle. She seemed indifferent to her rescue.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The Huntsman Testifies
I'll make this one short after a long workday. And I'll relate not the work but the brief and thrilling amusement that broke up the time. When the light began to fade around 4 I was reminded again of my snares. I went outside, equipped with 12 gauge and snowshoes, only to discover that my cleverly fashioned, cleverly placed snares had again been cleverly avoided. At the site of the second snare a little ways up the hill, there were squirrel signs everywhere. Tracks, droppings, nutshells, everywhere these nutshells, even...wait a second...yes, nutshells flaking out of the canopy overhead. I looked up, scanned, swept, focused, and saw a tree squirrel frozen against the trunk, giving me the squirrely eye of the hunted. Having been without tail or hide to my credit during this new year, my reaction was automatic. I released the pump action with my thumb, fed a shell from tube to chamber, undid the safety, sighted and BLAM! my quarry fell dead out of the tree. Its unseeing eyes were obsidian, its little rodent's teeth yellow and fluted, its hindquarters sanguinary with the result of the blast. I picked him up by the tail and happily strode home over midwinter's white crust. Once I'd wrangled off my snowshoes and convinced Tipper that she in no way stood to benefit from my kill, I fell to the process of gutting, skinning and butchering. After past misfortunes, I was relieved to find the pelt relatively intact. There was also no lead in the body, so I stuck most of the flayed carcass in the freezer. The only parts I fed through a hole in the ice covering the creek out back were the head and paws. Result: A clean kill, the beginnings of a forest critter stew, and another puzzle piece in my coming line of fur couture.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Slovio
When I sat down originally to write this I had a clear outline of the progression of the post in my head. First I would relate my day at the cabin in broad strokes, making everything a bit more grand and pathos-laden than it really was. Then I would step back to muse on something of more general anecdotal interest—whether political or historical or ethical—and see where it took me and how, once lost in this wilderness of anecdotal interest, I might navigate back to the safety of the Log Bird Nest. I picked up my computer to begin. By instinct, I checked my e-mail. I responded to a message or two, setting off a typical series of Internet-borne tangents to satisfy a contingent curiosity. The ultimate tangent landed me at www.slovio.com where I was acquainted with Slovio, the pitiable latter-day Slavo-centric answer to Esperanto that has had some trouble catching on. From the Web 0.1-looking website, an outwardly positive testimonial to the language:
Mark, USA:
I am a student of the Russian language, and have found it very difficult to learn Russian. I have even spent several months in Russia, just trying to understand it. When I got back to the US, I was very frustrated, and did not know if I wanted to continue with Russian, but then I found Slovio, and it has made my life so much easier. I still study Russian, but as a shadow of Slovio. I find Slovio almost easier and more flowing than my native language of English. I can read a passage, and even if I do not know a word, have a complete understanding of that passage. Slovio is amazing, and I would love to see it become a universal standard in Eastern Europe. I have also tried Slovio with some of my Russian friends, and although it sometimes takes them a second to understand me, they normally have no problem. This language is great! Thank You!
Even allowing that the testimonial might be real, it was stupid: Both stupidly written (experienced) and stupidly cited, being so unconvincing, amoebic and feeble. We needn’t worry about the drifting dabbler who hatched Slovio being co-opted by the folks at Burston-Marsteller, not before he can realize his flabby utopian dream of using Slovio as the grout to give body (spirit) to an amorphous, vaguely incestuous unity of Slavs, or, failing that, to seal his own shriveled spirit into the bombastic sarcophagus of a new Language whose taproot has penetrated the soul of an ancient tribe—honoring him in death while honoring all Slavs in their idealized state. A couple clicks through the search engine results revealed that Wikipedia’s Slovio article had been deleted by site editors on the grounds that the subject lacked ‘notability.’ According to the eliding editor, “Slovio is not alive anywhere [but at] www.slovio.com.”
Who can fathom the extent to which fanatical and irrational obsessions determine the courses of personal and communal destinies? Why are some so susceptible to forming attachments to doomed causes? Why, in this man’s case, the middling contentment with the role of meaningless, ridiculously marginal jester? Why should the realm of the laughable, the pathetic and the forgettable be the realm in which the great bulk of men are destined to be, to dwell, to ‘occur’ in the sense used in Infinite Jest? Is there a dogma that will soothe this particular wound in the human psyche? Or, is there a positively identifiable content that characterizes a significant life that I—for instance—have acquired or am in the process of acquiring that this man didn’t and won’t? Who can assure me that no one has come across some utterance or project of mine in some ever-fresh virtual heap of mental tailings and had the same nauseated reaction of contempt alloyed with world-weary resignation?
There is laughter in the contemplation this flaccid latter-day Quixotic figure, yes, but look a bit longer, and there is also fear, vertigo, delirium. Far from helping me negotiate a passage through the fear, the laughter stages a descent into fear that is all the more shocking. Why, with all our ideological and technical ingenuity, have we not managed to fashion better screens to block out the bleak horror that both grounds this kind of marginal obsession and infects us with its dread when we allow ourselves to look too long at the destinies of those swept into the abysmal gutters surrounding the main stream: Those unfortunates without the artifice to be included in the lie, or in the official reactions to the lie.
Years from now I may be asked, “What, Markus, were you doing on the day Obama was elected?” I peck out the following by way of aide-mémoire. I rose at 8 to let Tipper out to pee. Tipper is a shaggy old mutt who pledges some vague allegiance to the terrier breed. She is epileptic, snaggle-toothed, plagued by halitosis (much better since the pulling of several rotten teeth and a course of penicillin), does nothing but sleep between bouts of contented feeding, provides nothing in the way of utility, and is somewhere between the ages of 15 and 17. Tipper is also my companion in the house.
After Tipper’s matinal purges I put on some coffee and made my own ablutions. I ate bacon and eggs and had coffee and sat down to work. An impossibly pointless catalogue about tables, chairs, storage units, shelving systems to be traduced, detail by detail, from Swedish to English. When the pointlessness became too oppressive I read two articles: One an analysis of the Arizona Cardinals’ defensive renaissance in the playoffs, the other a principled cry of outrage from the Left commentariat on some subject or other. Ah—not so. It was about the crimes against the Palestinians, whom I wish I could help and whose destiny I pity, and whose tormentors I hereby hollowly condemn. I was corralled back to my document by the grim mathematical logic of compensation per unit time. I will not accept work unless I can parlay it into a certain number of dollars per hour, and by slacking I cheat my own production quota. Some time later came a relieving call from my distant girlfriend. I turned in my skull-explodingly mind-numbing assignment around lunchtime—there is no thought involved in a business translation, because atmosphere and context do not need to be painstakingly reproduced: The language and cadence and contextual assumptions are always the same.
In the afternoon I spoke on the phone to a friend and to the members of my family while baking almond cookies and roasting a duck. The cookies turned out fair to middling, while the duck, though lean and gamey by nature, roasted well and gave a reasonable amount of character to a stuffing pieced together from an onion, a potato and a green pepper. While the duck roasted, I strapped on my snowshoes to go check my snares.
I have three operating snares. Two are within five minutes of my back door, with a third about an hour’s hike up the mountain. The failing light meant I would only get to check the two today, putting me at risk of wasting an animal. Remember what I wrote yesterday about not warranting the prudence of my undertakings? The first snare is a squirrel ramp. It consists of a series of nooses suspended by wire gallows over a pole that is leaned against a tree in order to offer credulous squirrels an energy-saving shortcut to the canopy. But there was no catch, no sign of disturbance. I had leaned the ramp against the tree in question after discovering a pile of nutshells at the base, so I left it in place in hope that a reckless squirrel might hazard my gauntlet of nooses. The next snare is about a quarter mile up the hill. It is a simple noose placed over a snow burrow and hitched to a nearby bush. I’m not sure what lives in the burrow, but it or something else had encountered the snare and yanked it off the hole. Squirrels were mocking me from the canopy as I inspected the scene. I shook an admonitory fist at them, then reset the snare and went home, where I played the part of frustrated varmint hunter as I sat on my porch and glassed the backyard by the fading light, shotgun across my lap. As fond a day as any, I suppose, to consider later and square with the annals of overwhelming and incoherent power.
Mark, USA:
I am a student of the Russian language, and have found it very difficult to learn Russian. I have even spent several months in Russia, just trying to understand it. When I got back to the US, I was very frustrated, and did not know if I wanted to continue with Russian, but then I found Slovio, and it has made my life so much easier. I still study Russian, but as a shadow of Slovio. I find Slovio almost easier and more flowing than my native language of English. I can read a passage, and even if I do not know a word, have a complete understanding of that passage. Slovio is amazing, and I would love to see it become a universal standard in Eastern Europe. I have also tried Slovio with some of my Russian friends, and although it sometimes takes them a second to understand me, they normally have no problem. This language is great! Thank You!
Even allowing that the testimonial might be real, it was stupid: Both stupidly written (experienced) and stupidly cited, being so unconvincing, amoebic and feeble. We needn’t worry about the drifting dabbler who hatched Slovio being co-opted by the folks at Burston-Marsteller, not before he can realize his flabby utopian dream of using Slovio as the grout to give body (spirit) to an amorphous, vaguely incestuous unity of Slavs, or, failing that, to seal his own shriveled spirit into the bombastic sarcophagus of a new Language whose taproot has penetrated the soul of an ancient tribe—honoring him in death while honoring all Slavs in their idealized state. A couple clicks through the search engine results revealed that Wikipedia’s Slovio article had been deleted by site editors on the grounds that the subject lacked ‘notability.’ According to the eliding editor, “Slovio is not alive anywhere [but at] www.slovio.com.”
Who can fathom the extent to which fanatical and irrational obsessions determine the courses of personal and communal destinies? Why are some so susceptible to forming attachments to doomed causes? Why, in this man’s case, the middling contentment with the role of meaningless, ridiculously marginal jester? Why should the realm of the laughable, the pathetic and the forgettable be the realm in which the great bulk of men are destined to be, to dwell, to ‘occur’ in the sense used in Infinite Jest? Is there a dogma that will soothe this particular wound in the human psyche? Or, is there a positively identifiable content that characterizes a significant life that I—for instance—have acquired or am in the process of acquiring that this man didn’t and won’t? Who can assure me that no one has come across some utterance or project of mine in some ever-fresh virtual heap of mental tailings and had the same nauseated reaction of contempt alloyed with world-weary resignation?
There is laughter in the contemplation this flaccid latter-day Quixotic figure, yes, but look a bit longer, and there is also fear, vertigo, delirium. Far from helping me negotiate a passage through the fear, the laughter stages a descent into fear that is all the more shocking. Why, with all our ideological and technical ingenuity, have we not managed to fashion better screens to block out the bleak horror that both grounds this kind of marginal obsession and infects us with its dread when we allow ourselves to look too long at the destinies of those swept into the abysmal gutters surrounding the main stream: Those unfortunates without the artifice to be included in the lie, or in the official reactions to the lie.
Years from now I may be asked, “What, Markus, were you doing on the day Obama was elected?” I peck out the following by way of aide-mémoire. I rose at 8 to let Tipper out to pee. Tipper is a shaggy old mutt who pledges some vague allegiance to the terrier breed. She is epileptic, snaggle-toothed, plagued by halitosis (much better since the pulling of several rotten teeth and a course of penicillin), does nothing but sleep between bouts of contented feeding, provides nothing in the way of utility, and is somewhere between the ages of 15 and 17. Tipper is also my companion in the house.
After Tipper’s matinal purges I put on some coffee and made my own ablutions. I ate bacon and eggs and had coffee and sat down to work. An impossibly pointless catalogue about tables, chairs, storage units, shelving systems to be traduced, detail by detail, from Swedish to English. When the pointlessness became too oppressive I read two articles: One an analysis of the Arizona Cardinals’ defensive renaissance in the playoffs, the other a principled cry of outrage from the Left commentariat on some subject or other. Ah—not so. It was about the crimes against the Palestinians, whom I wish I could help and whose destiny I pity, and whose tormentors I hereby hollowly condemn. I was corralled back to my document by the grim mathematical logic of compensation per unit time. I will not accept work unless I can parlay it into a certain number of dollars per hour, and by slacking I cheat my own production quota. Some time later came a relieving call from my distant girlfriend. I turned in my skull-explodingly mind-numbing assignment around lunchtime—there is no thought involved in a business translation, because atmosphere and context do not need to be painstakingly reproduced: The language and cadence and contextual assumptions are always the same.
In the afternoon I spoke on the phone to a friend and to the members of my family while baking almond cookies and roasting a duck. The cookies turned out fair to middling, while the duck, though lean and gamey by nature, roasted well and gave a reasonable amount of character to a stuffing pieced together from an onion, a potato and a green pepper. While the duck roasted, I strapped on my snowshoes to go check my snares.
I have three operating snares. Two are within five minutes of my back door, with a third about an hour’s hike up the mountain. The failing light meant I would only get to check the two today, putting me at risk of wasting an animal. Remember what I wrote yesterday about not warranting the prudence of my undertakings? The first snare is a squirrel ramp. It consists of a series of nooses suspended by wire gallows over a pole that is leaned against a tree in order to offer credulous squirrels an energy-saving shortcut to the canopy. But there was no catch, no sign of disturbance. I had leaned the ramp against the tree in question after discovering a pile of nutshells at the base, so I left it in place in hope that a reckless squirrel might hazard my gauntlet of nooses. The next snare is about a quarter mile up the hill. It is a simple noose placed over a snow burrow and hitched to a nearby bush. I’m not sure what lives in the burrow, but it or something else had encountered the snare and yanked it off the hole. Squirrels were mocking me from the canopy as I inspected the scene. I shook an admonitory fist at them, then reset the snare and went home, where I played the part of frustrated varmint hunter as I sat on my porch and glassed the backyard by the fading light, shotgun across my lap. As fond a day as any, I suppose, to consider later and square with the annals of overwhelming and incoherent power.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Notes from under a Mountain
Been here a week now. Nineteen days into the new year, nothing written. Which can’t hold a candle to the latter half of last year’s lack of production—a year characterized by my own dazzling passage into the symbolic order as a taxpayer-subject. Since which reluctant decision I’ve been smothered in the embrace of a terseness that is half the fetter of exigency and half bitter self-lacerating ripening-through-silence gagged by an overlay of stoic physical culture. Many thoughts have rushed past the broken weir of my pen and my facility for scribbling with it, most of them rubbishy, some worth preserving, all irrecoverably downstream of where I stand now.
But to be alone for 40 days in a snowbound cabin nudging the hocks of a fine northerly articulation of the Rocky Mountains calls for mending the weir, if only on the strength of the regret I anticipate feeling should I fail to, ahem, capitalize on the situation. Without further ado then, I will marshal my lobes and extract from them what intellectual labor I can menace forth.
The cabin sits 16 miles to the east of the Nez Percé Pass on the way into Idaho. My mail is postmarked to the town of Darby, 20 miles away. I have registered for rural delivery at the Darby Post Office, and they deliver. To get here, you turn onto West Fork Road 4 miles south of Darby and follow it for 14 miles, then turn onto Nez Percé Road. After a mile or so you’ll round a rising bend and see a rank of mailboxes come into view at the head of an old logging road. I am making my home for the winter just a few twists up the hill. The house sits near the top of what is neither a neighborhood nor a village, but a small cluster of homes that happen to have been built in an upland wilderness because of the road and whatever constellation of history and property rights and concessions and dreams--and follies. The road cleaves in two what would be the largest contiguous wilderness area in the country if it were not for the road itself. As it is, the area north of the road is administered as the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, and that to the south as the Frank Church River of no Return Wilderness. Auspiciously, I live and have so far conducted all my wilderness activity to the north of the road.
Let’s unpack the term cabin, as used by me, above, by way of framing. The house, in reality, is an artfully masked and modified trailer home. I like to think of it as a bird: The trailer forms the original flightless body or fuselage, while the master bedroom and garage were added on to elevate the fowl (originally a foul fowl because flightless, formless, low to the dirt and scum) into the realm of airborne squiredom. I, who rent, am a mere apprentice to the squire’s idle craft, but the cabin is attractive and would not look out of place in a rustic lifestyle-hawking magazine aimed at those who like to think they have or are thought of as having done well for themselves. The bird’s plumage of hewn log-halves is quite attractive too. There are a number of mills and workshops along the main road that specialize in log homes, and presumably they also provide log siding that can be used to make a structure resemble a log home. Please note that I wrote the above with a forward view to your tacit agreement to the disclaimer that I in no way wish to actually deride those who dwell in trailers, nor in actual log homes, but that the above was penned merely in the way of harmless mirth.
The cabin is well appointed inside and I feel that I lack for nothing: There is a full kitchen, three bedrooms (two in the fuselage, one in the north wing), a living area that is contiguous with the kitchen and which centers around a bulkyblack hole of a wood-burning stove, and two bathrooms. I inhabit the bedroom in the wing, also known as the master bedroom, which I should mention is a bit malapropos since I can’t seem to consistently warm it to the point where I feel properly masterful. Nothing thwarts a man’s authority quite as much as having to mince around the bedroom in the morning, fumbling for socks, shivering, groaning and cursing with dread. I do have a roommate: Darren. He is going to be gone for the next several weeks, so I hereby eviscerate his link from the narrative-depictive sausage chain. On the authority, if you should ask, of absolute proclamation. More on him below, in other words.
What is essential to this situation is not the living alone; it is the immediate proximity to wilderness. If you were to step across the creek in the backyard and continue walking in a straight line, you would go for weeks before hitting a road or built structure. Given current conditions, it may in fact be impossible to surmount or circumvent even the first crag without ice climbing equipment and a considerable amount of gall, or desperation. And it is on this essential element, the element of the vast forest-clad spine of snow-seized mountain, that I will focus. In the weeks and months to follow, I will tell of treks, forays, follies, furies, chases and strolls--all in and through the element of the forest. I am approaching the wilderness in the fashion of an enthusiastic amateur. I make no warrants regarding the prudence of my own activities, nor about the competence with which they are undertaken. I mean for the following installments to bring you no utility whatsoever, unless it be an aesthetic or life and wisdom-living one. And who can take the measure of utility like that?
Before mentioning any concrete outdoor undertakings, a word on weather: Impressions, evolution, forecast, uncertainty, dread. More than a word, then: When I first got to the cabin in late December, the weather was cataclysmic. The 7-hour drive from Bozeman was snowy nearly the entire way, nowhere more so than on the roads approaching the cabin. It was the first time I’d had to engage the 4-wheel drive mode on Nystrom’s Pride. The driveway would have been impassable with only two spinning wheels.
Between Christmas and the 7th of January or so, the area was pummeled by a daily barrage of snow--almost a foot a day, I heard--with low temperatures to boot. Since my return on the 11th, however, most days at the cabin have climbed above freezing, and there has been no new snow. The consecutive suns arrayed on the online weather forecast have had me feeling fairly confident about mucking around in the woods until now, but the clement days will soon turn, giving way, lo, to days of howling storm and driving snow and frozen fogs. It is generally true that the winter weather here is milder than in Bozemen. Being west of the Continental Divide confers on the person so situated the moderating effects of Pacific weathers.
But let’s escape these murky abstract waters and swim! Swim, swim, swim--toward the light of the real, toward lived experience, toward living, breathing animals who’ve run afoul of one of my snares…
(To be continued)
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