Wildfire! Bloggers are Jack Kerouac's True Heirs: Remembrances "Written on the Run"

Blogging on the Run: Cedar Fire, July 27, 2012:  Marci and I were in town dropping off videos when we first saw Cedar Hill burning.  I'd been mowing the lawn earlier and saw a flash of light to the north, felt the thunder, followed almost imediately by sirens.  As I didn't see any smoke, I figured they had it out.  Lloyd, Rio and I came back later with the camera.

In describing his lifelong achievement in writing, Jack Kerouac wrote, "My work comprises one vast book like Proust's except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sick bed" (Introduction to Big Sur).

Life and Death happening between blog posts.  Our second local wilfire this season.

Having less than a dozen published poems to my name and nothing else in print, it may seem a bit presumptuous to compare myself to Kerouac, but when it comes to writing, pompous I am, pompous I be, and pompous I do.  Anyone who knows me, knows that out of necessity I have plenty of humility in other arenas in my life.   Writing is my one and only claim to greatness, which I'll cling to, even after I die. 

Driven by strong winds, the fire quickly spread to the northwest. 

However, I only compare myself to Kerouac because of process.  Writers write.  Quality and rank is determined after death, sometimes hundreds of years after death.   And my affinity with Kerouac is probably also my greatest weakness. I had a professor once tell me, "Everything you write is about yourself; as good as you are, you need break out of the box and write beyond your own insignificance."  He then proceeded to steer me to a novel project that went nowhere.  It could only go nowhere because it wasn't about me.  And like Kerouac, I only write I.  In younger years, that seemed to work well.  Ann Charters writes that Kerouac was "more committed to the act of creating literature out of his life than he was to living it."  Even encumbered with shyness, I lived a Kerouac-like life, which although not necessarily good for the soul, none-the-less was great for the page.  In El Paso, I truly was a Dharma Bum.  Only the void I entered was null, a face-to-face encounter with death without the release of Nirvana.

Wildfire is the new reality of the West.  Our forests will not be able to recover at the rate they are burning.

And so I went home.  There was nothing else to do, but start over.  This time, I decided that I would be more committed to the act of living life and less committed to creating a literature out of it.  I developed a plan to overcome shyness, went back to college, met Marci, who saved me, got my degree, as well as a real career, teaching, which I loved so much that for five years I didn't even write.  Then, slowly, I found a couple of projects that sort of worked for my new life.  The first was a project suggested by my brother, who is an artist.  Nevada's Highway 50 has always had special significance to us, as it was the road of our youth and connected our two homes--our mother's home in rural Utah and our father's home in Reno, Nevada.   We would write an illustrated book together, Highway 50:  Loneliest Road in America to premier at his art show of the same name. 

He was diligent.  So was I, at least for a couple of years.  I wrote frequently in a new format I discovered, which wove together current journal-writing with remembrances of the five-day trip we took together across Nevada's U.S. 50 to kick off the project.  I was even lucky enough to find an audience at Dine College's monthly Night at the Library.  Having an actual audience encouraged me to keep writing.

But then something happened.  We moved.  My format fell apart.  Like this blog-post, the expository explanations of the life-transition killed the text for me.  What made the writing sing--that is was remembrances "written on the run" also killed it.  Some of the leaps we must make in life are significant enough that the text refuses to follow.  The only way to go back and bridge the gaps is with summary, the deadest of all forms of writing.

Recently, I started a novel that weaves together a fictional story of a literature professor discovering the streets and rails of Chicago with a fictionalized true-account of living in my in-laws basement in Page, Arizona and actual journal writing.  But, again, I fear it may suffer the same fate of Highway 50 now that we've moved to Dry Creek.  I hope not, because it feels publishable.

But if it can't make the leap, that's okay.   I think I have finally found my venue.  The blog.  What format could be better for literature "written on the run"?  As, I've shown here, you can even record two stories at once--the text narrative and the pictorial narrative--which don't even have to line up.  Blogging truly is versatile.

I hope this trucker is either a blogger or vlogger.  How many wildfires are unfortunately now part of his runs?

Can I make a living blogging my life?  Can I become a known writer via the blog?  Who knows.  I don't even care.  Here's what I've finally learned.  Live life by a plan.  Write on impulse.  Never confuse the two.  And don't let one rule over the other.  You don't have to starve to keep your art alive, but you do have to stay slightly hungry.  If there's no reaching, there's no art.  And for the artist, if there's no art, there's no life.  We slowly die without that irrational impulse to record life on the run and share it with some unknown audience out there--real or imagined.  That's what drove Chaucer, that's what drove Kerouac, and it's what drives contemporary bloggers, like myself.  So, to steal from Jack, I hope you continue to enjoy "the world of raging action and folly and also gentle sweetness seen through the keyhole of [my] eye" because I'm driven to share that view with you whether you like it or not.

While our second fire of the season was still burning out of control to the north, the third fire of the season (and second in the same day) started to the south of Dry Creek.  Luckily, both were brought under contol that day.  These last two shots were photographed from the same location.  With two fires to fight at once, things could have turned ugly.

Sustainable Living: Here--Every Vital Place has its Scent.

Front Yard at Dry Creek.  Lloyd and I planted the oaks as seedlings in 1996. 
Large trees in the background are natural, following the canyon slope of Dry Creek Canyon.

It has been cool at Dry Creek since our return--with cloud cover, with rain.  Yesterday, it only reached 86.  Nice.  I sit in the arranged living room that only yesterday morning was so crammed with boxes you could hardly walk.  A cool breeze blows gently in the window.  Jack, our cat, sits on the sill, twitching his nose as he catches wafts of moist air from the canyon.

Living room after Marci arranged it.

Every vital place has its scent.  I loved August afternoons hanging up laundry in Tsaile.  Cool wind would bring the warm scent of summer pine as the monsoon clouds would build along the Lukachukai Mountains.

Here the predominant smell is of creek bottom and cottonwood.  It rises out of the canyon in waves on even the hottest of days.  Walking up to Mom's house is like going for a swim--how currents in the water bring ever changing temperatures.  Even though yesterday was mild, while we were walking up the lane, Marci hit a pocket of hot, humid air and commented on it.

Likewise, on the hottest of days, you'll be walking up the lane and a moist, cool pocket of air will perched on the canyon edge, waiting for you.

I have come to realize these small moments are worth whatever job I might have to take up to put food on the table and remain centered on this land.

Marci turns to look at the rainbow while looking after the chickens.  Autumn, my brother's dog, stays focused on the chickens.

Life, at least for the poet, is about place.  I don't need to be here, but I need to be some place alive with wild sights, smells and textures.  Alaska would probably do as well.  But as this is my home, heritage, it seems more ethical to make it here if I can.

I don't know how to explain this.  It may be something only people who identify with a minority group can understand.  Navajos get it.  A Navajo may have to live, may even enjoy living in Seattle, New York or Phoenix, but to most Navajos the only real home is the reservation.  They may enjoy the malls, the lawns, the restaurants in the big city, but their center is always the hearth at the center of grandma's hogan.

Utah is the Mormon reservation.  Zion.  For some, like me, it is a tainted garden, and we have a love-hate relationship with it.  How could it be otherwise for a liberal living dead center of Republican Land?  Yet, it is still home--the sights, sounds, smells, textures we identify with being.

The garden at Dry Creek--Our summer hearth.

Bono & the Big Heat: Drought, Fire, Love and Marriage in the American West

I've been planning to post this poem for sometime, but not necessarily wanting to.  Drought and fire have become the norms of living in the American West.  This year could be 2007 all over.  Once again, we have spent a good chunk of our summer watching fires--both live and on the news.  This is new.  Forest fires were not a regular part of my childhood.  They have and will continue to be part of my children’s.

This is my best poem, which is why I wanted to post it.  But it captures tension in my marriage, which is why I didn’t want to post it.  Marci literally saved my life.  Back in November of 1994 I hit rock bottom for reasons I won’t go into here, reasons I’m not even sure I totally understand, and probably can’t explain.  Anyway, I spent Thanksgiving night 1994 drunk, wandering up and down Mesa Street in El Paso, screaming “I want to die” at the occasional passing car and cursing God for my life.  Somehow I’d become encased in a shell of shyness and couldn’t seem to get out.  I blamed God for my inability to be myself around others, especially women.

I woke up the next morning with this strong impression:  go home.  So, I made plans to move back to Utah after spending 12 crucial teenage and college years away.

Shortly afterward I met Marci, and overall, I’ve been happy ever since.  I have two versions of my life:  one of deep dissatisfaction and anger and one of general satisfaction and deep joy--life before Marci and life after Marci.  She literally rescued me.  But no marriage comes without tension.  This poem records that tension, and that tension is its strength.  However, it’s much easier to share unabashed praises to my wife, and I’ve written many such poems.  Yet, good writing often requires doing the hard thing.  I have no idea if I will ever become known as poet, but if I do, this is one of the poems I want to be known for:

The New West

7/14/07

Cicadas riot outside the window.   Everest on the cot at the foot of our bed sleeps silent.

It is a warm night after an intensely hot day.

Earlier we drove out to investigate the biggest fire in Utah history. 

Over 360,000 acres.  Deep, rutted roads through soft alkali soil.  Neither Lloyd nor I remember these roads this way.  You want us to turn around.  Winding between high brush. 

Finally, first black finger of fire.   The print, really.  Strikingly manicured, smooth as a golf course, black rolling undulations below craggy black basalt cliffs. 

Then a stand of untouched brush and a lone juniper.  “One Tree Hill,” you say  The Joshua Tree.  U2 standing stoic before the shockingly sparse American West, Bono sweating in a white, wife-beater t-shirt.  In different places, that album spoke to us.  The Edge’s fingers clicking the strings like cicadas in the night.  Suddenly searing sounds rip through the atmosphere, bulleting the blue sky.   Bono, a mad preacher, snake charmer, symbol of sex, God, America.  And you give yourself away, and you give… Until, like an Arizona monsoon, the thunderheads rolled on.  Somehow I ended up forty and married. 

At some point we stopped.  Lloyd, the boys, Darth and I hiked up a volcano.  It irritates me that you remain behind.  Love is that way.  I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. 

A spoiled brat I insist you meet me inside myself where it’s impossible.

One hundred and three degrees Fahrenheit.  Heat rises in thick waves off charred grass and heat-polished, volcanic bombs.

The lone, silt covered van sits with you hidden inside, the size of an ant, at the edge of a chalk-white stripe etched across a broad, black valley, two isolated fires still smoldering in the distance.

One wide, like a dust storm.

The other narrow as the funnel of a small tornado.

I can’t live without you.

7/22/07

Sunday, the day of rest. 

I nearly nap on the living room floor after church, dinner and a late afternoon thunder storm.

Cool evening.

I sit at a round table under the swaying colored lights of the patio of the Blue Door Bar,

which we made together, for me,

in memory

of wilder nights and days blurred like smoky dusk following a fire. 

Margarita glasses now filled with milkshakes.

Our boys sit at the black-tiled bar under blinking martini light playing cards with Elvis on the back. 

Lennon is on the t-shirt on the wall in his guerilla suit.

Crickets chirp.

I walk up the lane to visit Mom. 

Deep smell of cool wet woods. 

Afterwards, I grab a flashlight and walk down in the canyon loud with life.  Cicada, cricket.  The night breathes after a short, intense rain.

Tomorrow there will be heat, dust, struggle against drought again.

7/27/07

Cool shade of cottonwood,

Chalk Creek churning,

over worn stone, singing

the same song over thousands of years.

Sunlight on boulders the size of over-stuffed chairs down to the size of ladies purses.

Deep reds,

pale blues,

rounded by the roll of ages.

Turbulent creek-beds during spring run-off.

What if global warming ends the snow-pack,

ends the annual rock toss downstream?

No more high waters cutting into banks,

bringing down trees, piling up crud?

No more silt and shit

beautifully backed up behind log jamb

to fill in with meadow

and cottonwood

and birds singing?

What if the seasons of the west end

and the song of the crashing creeks

goes silent?

What then will be our song?—

You and I colliding

--Indian Mormon and White Agnostic Mormon—

Begetting children here

among these rattlesnakes and song birds?

Will our family go on here

after Dry Creek cuts

through our land dry forever?

© Steve Brown, 2012

Extra:  Click here for Video of U2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ye8GLPUVsM

Charlie Gomez Staggers Over to Bill Sims: John Lennon, Rosa Parks, Caesar Chavez, Mahatma Gandhi, Mormonism, and Standing Up Against Prejudice--Sort of

Earlier today, a friend posted some anti-Mormon propaganda on facebook.  Then one of my peers in my MFA Writing program posted a news story about Mormons, and although it was mostly accurate, her comments were not.  As I respect both these individuals, I simply corrected misconceptions, and I thought “that is that.”

                Then, while packing for our permanent move to Dry Creek, I came across an old poem of mine:

Charlie Gomez Staggers Over to Bill Sims

                                                                Ever kiss a Mexican farm worker?

                                                                                No.  Don’t believe I have.

                                                                Pucker up fat gringo.

                And I realized that although I’m male, white and working on becoming fat, like Bill Sims, right now I’m actually more like Charlie Gomez because I really want to post, “Ever kiss a Mormon?  Well, pucker up, bigot.”

                I never know how to appropriately respond to prejudice because it’s almost always perpetrated by good people, and yet left unchecked, it’s dangerous.  I’m also aware I’m probably Bill Sims as often as I’m Charlie Gomez, so I don’t feel like getting on my high horse.  However, I came across another old poem of mine that might help me reply in some way--though I’m not sure how yet.  It’s long, so I’ll copy part of the poem, try to figure out how it pertains, then copy some more.  Hopefully, by the end both the reader and I will be enlightened.  I’m writing on a hunch here:

Jed Tells a Woman from Niagara Falls How to Get to State Highway 257

                You just go down a mile and turn left

at a deep black thick muddy road,

squishy and there’s some wagon wheel tracks--

no, not wagon wheel tracks,

just some 4-wheel drive tracks

in this deep black muddy road.

It’s called Henderson Road.

It’s deep-black-muddy

and heads towards nothing

but a big, long, hump-back blue ridge.

You’re not sure if it turns around it

to go around it,

or if it dead ends

at Skull in the Rock.

Maybe the mind is the “deep black thick muddy road.”  That may be a bit of a stretch, but let’s go with it, just in case it works.  We constantly perceive, often without any frame of reference, from the time we are infants, and these images, these sounds, smells, impressions--well, they lay down tracks, but overtime they become indistinguishable and unchecked, go nowhere.  Perhaps.

And anyway, on Henderson Lane,

to the left--

yes, to the left--

there’s some picket fence--

no, not just some picket fence--a bob-wire fence

and these old cedar-like post,

but they’re not cedar, cause a--

well, they’re just not.

Here, to me, the poem clearly becomes a metaphor for the mind.  But not just any mind.  An uncertain, intuitive, rather than a knowing, logical mind, like when Lennon writes--

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right, that is I think it's not too bad--*

And behind it all

is a muddy field,

a thick, muddy field,

with alkali on the surface.

and so the mud is deep and black

with white scum on top.

Our thoughts are not solid, not clear, there is no surface.  What appears to be concrete is really just a thin, crusty layer.  Underneath everything oozes.

And in the field is a steamin well,

a sulfer spring, yep,

a sulfer spring.

and the steam comes up,

and it’s hot, steamy and stinky,

this rotten egg smell,

just some real organic crud going on.

Clearly the unconscious.  Perhaps prejudice that seeped in long ago and is now bubbling to the surface. 

And the cows just stand around and stare into the steam

with these dazed, dull, stupid eyes.

And they never move,

or hardly ever move,

the big, stupid Hereford cows

with the dull brown stupid-looking eyes,

fat and bloated, starin across the steam,

looking blankly at each other

like friends at a funeral.

 Clearly you.  But also clearly me.  We are the big, stupid Hereford cows in the eyes of the oppressed.  That’s how you view the world when you are mistreated.  During my ninth grade year, we moved from Utah to Richardson, Texas, and I was too innocent not to share my religion with others.  As a result I was persecuted by other innocent, but extremely ignorant students, most practicing “Christians.”  That’s not a judgment, just a fact.  A year earlier, I’d persecuted an openly atheist student in Utah along with my peers, so I’m no better.

Still, as I wandered those halls in my silent protective shell, I saw cows--lots of them.  I think that verse is worth repeating.  This is how the oppressed view their oppressors:

And the cows just stand around and stare into the steam

with these dazed, dull, stupid eyes.

And they never move,

or hardly ever move,

the big, stupid Hereford cows

with the dull brown stupid-looking eyes,

fat and bloated, starin across the steam,

looking blankly at each other

like friends at a funeral.

Mob mentality.  Dumb.  The poem goes on much the same, but I won’t continue as it has some language in it that I won’t use now because of my religion.  Still, it’s impossible to leave out one part:

                So across the street

Is a corn field.

It’s just slowly slopin, slidin, oozin

brown field of corn

that’s been out in the sun, oh at least thirty summers,

rained on, just a stinkin, steamin compost heap

of earwigs, potato bugs and slugs.

The whole field’s just oozin, oozin

toward the river like a glacier

That’s where Charlie Gomez finally staggers over to Bill Sims:  Ever kiss a Mexican farm worker?  But only a few of the oppressed have that in them--the rare, vital Rosa Parks, Caesar Chavez, Harvey Milk and Mahatma Gandhi.   For the rest of the overweight, underweight, feminine, wrong religion, unattractive, shy…

no, it’s not like a glacier.

A glacier is a firm statement,

a solid thing,

an energy that says,

Get the F*** out of my way!

And this field doesn’t have that.

It’s just a slopin away,

a slidin into nothin.

Obviously, my own interpretation of my poem is forced.  Poetry occurs on an unconscious, not conscious level.  If you can paraphrase a poem, it really isn’t a poem.  But I do know after years of prejudice, after rejecting my religion, I became that sloshy field and I was "slidin away into nothing."  Then, somehow, like Charlie, I found my glacier-energy.  It was a hymn, a Mormon hymn, almost forgotten, a hymn that reminded me I Am:

Come, come ye saints
No toil nor labor fear
But with joy, wend your way
Though hard to you,
This journey may appear,
Grace shall be as your day,
Tis better far for us to strive
Our useless cares from us to drive
Do this and joy, your hearts will swell
All is well! All is well!

Why should we mourn?
Or think our lot is hard?
Tis not so, all is bright
Why should we think to earn a great reward?
If we now shun the fight
Gird up your loins
Fresh courage take
Our god will never us forsake
And soon we'll have this tale to tell
All is well! All is well!

We'll find the place
Which God for us prepared
Far away, in the West
Where none shall come
To hurt or make afraid
There the saints, will be blessed
We'll make the air, with music ring,
Shout praises to, our god and king,
Above the rest these words we'll tell
All is well! All is well!

Any large religion at times takes stands on political issues based on their core religious beliefs.  I think both the public and its members not only have the right, but an obligation, to react according to their conscience.  But it is one thing to challenge an issue, which is intellect, and quite another thing to use that issue as an open-door to express hate and then substantiate that hate with inaccurate propaganda.  That’s called prejudice. 

© Steve Brown, 2012

Sustainable Living Advice from Gary Snyder: Find Whatever Moves You to the Core; Move Never More

Lloyd, Rio, and Marci on the hike up Paradise Canyon Trail--part of our realm.

Phil visits our realm.

Moss Falls, the destination for this particular day.

As I’ve said before, my idea of Sustainable Living is not simply an environmental act.  Although living lightly (leaving the smallest carbon foot-print possible and being water conscious) is vital to our survival, the reality is, it’s often easier to help the planet ecologically by living in a high rise a couple blocks from the office than by buying land in Nebraska, Wyoming or Utah and deciding to live off the land.  For one thing, because of the scant population, human resources and services are scarce in rural areas.  Jobs are few and far between and there is no public transportation.  Some places are so remote buying a loaf of bread requires a road trip.

Marci walks a gravel road across a desert lake--part of the great expanse that is our realm.

For example, when I lived on the Navajo Nation, the nearest grocery store was 30 minutes away.  The nearest town with clothing, hardware and a movie theater--Gallup--was an hour and a half.  We did our best to cut down on fuel consumption by only going to town twice a month, but in order to comfortably make that trip with four kids, we purchased a full-sized van so that the boys wouldn’t have to ride back with bags of groceries on their laps.  In the rural west, it’s not uncommon to drive an hour and a half for a good steak and a movie afterwards, an absurd idea for urbanites, and clearly not good for the planet, but sometimes a psychological necessity, especially in the dead of winter.  That is why places like Denio, Nevada exist--dots on the vast uninhabited expanse--to provide coffee, a good steak and baked potato, and most important of all, human contact beyond spouse and children to the last frontiersmen.

The county in which Dry Creek is located in (which I’ll always leave unnamed so that I don’t accidently commit the same atrocity that Edward Abbey inadvertently committed against Moab), is an expanse of 6,828 square miles with a population of 12,420,  If you do the math, that’s an average density of 1.5 people per square mile.  There is lots of elbow room, but minimal services and career opportunities.  In fact, until Dry Creek is truly sustainable, I may have to commute an hour or more each day to work.  I’m a teacher and there are only three high schools serving that great expanse, half a dozen total within an hour’s drive.  Teaching positions seldom open up, and when they do, an administrator’s relative, who has been trying to return home for years, is usually the first applicant.  I don’t resent that; these communities are built on deep family ties.   But to claim that I’ll be assisting the planet ecologically by moving to Dry Creek is absurd--at least to begin with.

Remnants of ancient Lake Bonniville: Part of the 239 square miles or 3.50%  of the mostly arid 6,828 square mile county.  During the last ice age, western Utah was covered by an enormous inland lake.

But the ecosystem is not the only diseased system in the United States.  In most of the places I’ve lived since leaving home, I haven’t even known my neighbors.  Humanity in the United States is becoming a desert where roots are shallow and people tumble along the sands of dreams, blowing from one sink hole to another sink hole, searching for fertile soil, desperately looking for land where family can take root, but it never does, because we are career-driven rather than life-driven.  We go wherever our careers take us.  That is a monumental cultural change and I believe a spiritually devastating one.  People use to work in order to live; now people live in order to work.  The office has replaced the family as the center.  This cannot be good.

This, I believe, is what truly drives the sustainable living movement--a hunger for earth, for people, for place.  In Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, Wendy Johnson includes a quotation by Gary Snyder that captures this simple, radical philosophy so vital for our times:

Don’t move.  Stay still.  Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move anymore.  Take a look at one place on earth, one circle of beings, one realm of beings over time.

It will require sacrifice.  Losing a job might require taking a pay cut and/or a job with less social status in order to stay put.  It may require that the philosopher take up the socket wrench, the poet flip burgers, the anarchist mow the lawn and trim hedges at the cemetery.   But deep roots make it worth it.  I know it.  As a kid, I knew it.  All I ever wanted to do was float pop cans down the creek, run along the bank, catch them at the bridge, and run back again.  Does anyone ever really need more than this?  Not me.  When I initially left my home to "become something" I slowly grew ill and didn’t even know why.  And because I was ill, I couldn’t become what I’d set out to become anyway.  And if I had, nothing would have changed, as my spiritual center would still be along some creek watching a pop can ride the small rapids under the dappled shade.

Perhaps your center is a certain smell:  the dry pines of northern California in the summertime; the smell of coffee and bread from the corner bakery; maybe the ready-to-ignite air of Texas City on Galveston Bay.   Or perhaps your center is a sound: the peeling of church bells echoing through the concrete canyons as shadows are cast long and a stream of taillights heads for the suburbs; the rattle of tracks of the elevated outside the apartment window; the long, low moan of the foghorn or the hum of that great suburban serenador, the lawn mower.  Whatever it is that moves you to the core--find it and move never more.   For you will never feel quit right without that small something that rationally has no great impact on the world but to you is the universe.  That for me is Dry Creek.  Everything.  I simply do not fully exist elsewhere.

The garden at Dry Creek--the center of our realm.



© Steve Brown, 2012