6.20.2003
Yesterday afternoon I smelled smoke. I got on the phone with a neighbor who said she'd heard lots of sirens racing into the park but didn't know what was going on. I headed into the park myself and followed some fire engines out to a turnout just before the entrance to Heart's Desire. On the way there, our local radio station KWMR filled me in. There was a fire at Shallow Beach, between Heart's Desire and Shell Beach. The homes at Shallow Beach were being evacuated.
We're a ways off from Shallow Beach, but we are the next set of homes should the fire head south along the shoreline of the bay, the direction of the howling winds. As I drove out there I couldn't see any smoke, and I could no longer smell it. When I got back home, though, the smell was strong. I called my neighbor again, who said she was going to stop packing. "Packing?" I cried.
She told me that ever since the Inverness Fire they'd had evacuation orders in her house, and a metal box already filled with irreplacable papers.
Since she wasn't going to pack, I figured I'd go swimming. The wind was really wild down on the beach, and the eastern shore of the bay was 80% white with chop. I swam straight out and then looked up the coast, but I still couldn't see any major source of smoke. But by now it was hurting my lungs. The smoke was picking up.
When I got back to my cabin I decided to pack some things. Better to have done it and not needed it than to be caught unaware and given short notice on evacuation. First I packed the guitar and my drum, then my photo albums, passport and social security card, and a sleeping bag with a pad. After that I was paralyzed with uncertainty. I made a list then, of valuable items: work related files, dog food and medicine, artwork, small gifts from people who love me, electronics, what? It was getting harder and harder to think straight. Nothing seemed very important. I tried to make myself concentrate. What would be difficult to replace? What do I value? Is it all expendable?
The radio was giving updates every ten or fifteen minutes. I heard that a helicopter and two planes were now fighting the fire, many fire departments were there, two wildland fire fighting units had arrived, two bulldozers were on their way, the fire was only 2-3 acres, but the winds were heavy. I knew some of this for myself. The helicopter was making passes directly overhead as it flew between picking up water and dropping it on the fire, and the wind was gusting loudly against the eaves. I kept imagining the fire just over the ridge. The wind and the helicopter were shaking my house like a precursor to the fire.
On the radio, they gave the number for the Inverness Fire Department. I missed it, but decided to call. The woman who answered, I'll have to find out who that was, was great. I told her where I live and asked if I should be packing. She said no, and when she did relief entered my body and tears sprung into my eyes. I hadn't realized until that moment how afraid I had been. She told me to stay aware and to stay awake, but that they had the fire contained to one acre, and they were hitting it with everything they had, and that two wildland fire units would be sitting the fire all night.
Outside, I could no longer smell the smoke. The wind remained, a reminder of the vitality and the danger. This morning, instruments are left by the door, a list of valuables, my passport and a little knowing in my body. I could lose everything someday. Yesterday could have been the day. It would be scary and deeply unsettling to lose my home and my belongings, but when I confronted my "things" and thought about what to save, it was clear that none of it really mattered. It seemed absurd to pack my truck with mere things, and it was difficult to assign more meaning to certain objects in my home than others. Was a TV worth saving, an expensive book, a snuff bottle, a piece of jewelry, my leather jacket? Some items I knew I should save like photos and my computer, my common sense didn't desert me, but there was an absurdity that became apparent in placing heirarchical value on things at all.
Who knows what I would be saying if I had indeed lost "everything", it might be a completely different story I'd be telling about my things. I guess 'evacuation orders' are called for in my home: a list compiled on a very commonsensical day of things I should grab if the orders ever came to walk away from the path of the fire. I should also buy some renter's insurance, and put a sign next to the door that a dog lives here, in case she's here without me. I also need batteries for my radio. Time to get prepared.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:53 AM link | comments []
6.19.2003
Here's something I've wondered about. Wouldn't you be ashamed to call yourself a war blogger? I can understand that some people believe that a particular war might be justified, and might want to argue its benefits or their particular reasons for thinking so, but why would it follow that they would want to name themselves after not just that war, but war in general. Once you've called yourself a war blogger, how can you go back? Could you then be against the next war without renaming yourself? We like to believe that even amongst the people who believe war is necessary and reasonable, it's considered a terrible last resort, an evil necessity. But the people who've named themselves war bloggers are aligning themselves, with their very names, with that act.
If I call myself a peace blogger, and you call yourself a war blogger, will we ever be able to hear each other? And if we can't hear each other, how can we ever expect nations to hear each other rather than go to war. Then again, would I be the only one in the conversation to hope for that?
Despite these questions, today I submitted my link to peaceblogs.org, for the sake of balance. I have some qualms about naming myself a peace blog, but none about declaring myself as a person standing up for peace. I am not simply "against war", I'm "for peace". I'm not trying to further divide the world into "us" and "them". I don't proclaim it because I want a fight, I say it as declaration and because peace seems like a thing worth having, a good idea, one worth living for.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:01 AM link | comments []
6.18.2003
For no particular reason, other than that I heard it recited lately, and loved it, I'd like to share this poem. James Stephens is a great Irish poet (Follow this link, then scan down the page to a photo of James Stephens, James Joyce, and John Sullivan.The Twins
--James Stephens
Good and bad are in my heart,
But I cannot tell to you--
--For they never are apart--
Which is better of the two.
I am this! I am the other!
And the devil is my brother!
But my father He is God!
And my mother is the Sod!
I am safe enough, you see,
Owing to my pedigree.
So I shelter love and hate
Like twin brothers in a nest;
Lest I find when it's too late,
That the other was the best.
Have you ever been to 'Real Women Online'? Now's your chance. This week's Carnival of Vanities is up.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 7:19 AM link | comments []
6.17.2003
Of the seven Osprey nests in the vicinity of the Perth trail, I think four of them have chicks. I've only seen the actual chicks in two of them, though. They're quite big now. The nest that sits below trail has only one chick. The other day it was lying on its side, and a neighbor said he saw it in the same position this weekend. I wonder if it was attacked in the nest. It lifts its head, but apparently can't stand. This young Osprey is the most beautiful thing -- golden, radiant colors, fresh feathers. It's by far the most beautiful bird I've seen. I hope to check on it today, especially if this fog holds and keeps me out of the water.
I hear that the Osprey nest above the Episcipalean Church has chicks. I don't know about the nest at Millerton Point, or the nest on the way to Limantour in an old pine.
And by the way, the bear has not been heard from. Not a track seen nor a trash can overturned. Guess he went back to wherever he came from.
Yesterday my thermometer read 80 degrees, and this morning it's 55. The sun sure felt good. I took phone calls outside, curled up in my redwood chair. Even took a little break out there with a book mid-afternoon. Sweet sunshine. From there, it was a straight shot down to the beach for a long swim. It was high tide, so I dove in a few feet offshore, swam out and then parallel to the beach to the pier and back. I imagined my body getting strong, shedding its winter bagginess, like loose jeans that come out of the drier fitting like a glove. I imagined swimming across the bay, all the way across. I imagined long summer days drifting in my kayak, then falling overboard into the soothing coolness of water. When it's hot like yesterday, it's easy to imagine that it will always be so, and though I know better, I indulge that fantasy of heat. A summer day wants to be indulged. It wants to tug at the damp corners of your imagination and hang them on the clothesline until they're bleached beyond color, taut and white. Summer days are gifts of time. Lazy, sweet-hot, shimmering time.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 8:07 AM link | comments []
6.15.2003
One Hand in the Earth
I’ve come late to a love of the land, to an affinity for place. It snuck up on me while I was consumed with matters of the heart and other fiery occupations. One day I was tightrope-walking along, juggling fireballs and swords, minding my business, when I became aware of a familiar sensation. I felt a dull ache in my heart and tension in my belly, like love, but not directed at any two-legged beast, but towards the very ground.
Two places on this earth have drawn me in that way: the beach where I lived in Nayarit, Mexico, and this place where I stand, the Point Reyes Peninsula. What occasioned this re-drawing of my spirit and attention? I believe it had something to do with time, and hands, and eyes.
I spent four years going back and forth between these two places of beauty, calling both of them home. This was the longest stretch of time I’d spent anywhere since early childhood, and the first time I’d lived anywhere rural. In Mexico we built gardens and palapas, thatched roofs and fortified sea walls, repaired fences and fought back the jungle, and planted the sloped ground as fortification against the rains. Back in Olema, I grew plants as obsession, and though I didn’t own the land, I worried it and learned how to dance with the earth to encourage green things to grow.
Meanwhile, I began to see the complexities of the land around me through the eyes of a friend who had love for it. I learned from him how to sit or walk quietly through a landscape and let it reveal itself. We ate cereal on our sun-drenched deck and looked up at Mounts Vision and Wittenberg and Point Reyes Hill, watched the birds come and go in our yard, saw them return in season to buid nests in our trees. In Mexico I applied this watchfulness to the tropical landscape, paying attention to the birds that fished the shoreline or the freshwater marsh that formed where the creek stalled next door, learning to see fish through the surface of waves, and studying the relationship of sand to sea when rocks were taken week after week from the beach in order to pave local roads or to build foundations.
Blake says that you can’t stay in the ‘walled garden of the lover’ forever. If you try to hold onto that fire and passion, you’ll fall all the way down to the ‘valley of isolation’, to cold self-pity. In order to keep progressing, you have to increase the heat of that passion with constant creativity. Like a marriage, this love of place. And like marriage, it requires art and imagination if it is to soar. I no longer have that land in Mexico, it slipped through my fingers like sand slips from barren shores. I can’t dig my hands into her soil, or smell her sweet, fetid womb, or hear the waves from my bed, but I can keep her alive with my love through words.
My friend, Jorge, took me into the jungle with a wheelbarrow. In the remaining stumps of fallen palm trees, when they’ve been dead for a certain time, all that remains is humus, the richest soil. The tree become earth. You dig into the stump from the top and your shovel fills with it, dirt brown as coffee, alive as jungle air: a redolent mix of blood and sweat and decay and heat. You want to swim through it, to breathe it, and when you have and your sweaty limbs are streaked with dirt, and your nostrils caked with it, and your shoulders are sunburnt and blistered, you run through the waves and dive into the salty, warm ocean and float there, held by a dream that comes up through the earth and enters you, leaving you no choice but to love. And when it’s time to leave this place, you carry a heart that’s broken open, and scarred hands that know dirt, fists that crave clay, and eyes that open onto the world as place, a lover’s eyes. And then you write about it, not because you can, but because you have to. If you don’t, the fires of longing will consume you.
* * * * * * * * *
Some place bloggers have gotten together and formed a Wiki, a what?, yes, a Wiki. Over here. We're writing today, some of us, on a collective topic.
posted by Lisa Thompson on 10:46 AM link | comments []
Copyright 2003 Lisa Thompson. All Rights Reserved.
