A freshly laundered pillowcase makes headlines. I wake to the bad press.

Without glasses I feel vulnerable but look a little scary. Which makes sense: so often it is the most frightened people who say and do the most frightening things, especially when you get them into large groups: lynching, caucusing, you name it.

Glasses allow me to keep my distance from the world. A couple weeks before Christmas, the frame snapped on my old pair and I had to get new ones. I went to one of these places that offer two for the price of one: great, I thought, I can go twice as long before I have to get another eye exam, by which time I will probably need bifocals. But that’s another story.

A friend with more fashion sense than me showed up to help me pick the two pairs: one a light wire frame similar to what I had before, and the other a hipper style: thick, dark green plastic rectangles around each eye that say I AM WEARING GLASSES. My friend assures me they make me look like an urban architect, but I’ve decided they make me look like someone I’d like to punch in the face. They are, however, made of 100% recycled plastic, so they are figuratively as well as literally green.

So great, I can make a political statement with my choice of eyewear. But the other frames — the ones that do their best to be invisible — make a kind of statement as well. You can bend them completely in half and they won’t break! That’s the kind of politics that actually gets you places in this country. Eventually, of course, they will break, but then I’ll just don the other pair, which by then should be completely out of fashion. Which means I won’t have to spend long hours in front of the mirror practicing an air of urbanity and trying to avoid punching myself in the face.

The optometrist told me I have the eyes of a teenager, whatever that means. I guess it means there’s no medical marijuana in my future.

Hey! I should’ve held out for frames made entirely of hemp.

2.
When Borges came to speak
at Penn State, he sat folded
into an easy chair on stage,
still as a lizard on a heat rock.
He quoted Basho to show
that metaphor isn’t essential—
the “ancient pond” haiku.
But as he delivered his pronouncements,
he kept smiling at something
three feet above our heads.
And seeing the smiles pass
across his blind face, we all
began to smile too,
pleased at our proximity
to such a famous solitude,
which we were sure
must’ve been flooded with light.

3.
I’ve kept all the glass ashtrays
from when I used to smoke, lovely
as the windows of a church
in which I can no longer kneel.
Has it really been 12 years?
Borges said: Life is a dream,
to which someone in the audience objected:
That’s a metaphor!
No, he intoned, it’s the truth.
And for some reason
everyone broke out laughing.

Based on this post from August 2009.

It should be noted that we have plenty of squirrels, so sometimes the walnuts don’t fall on their own; they are pushed. Maybe the squirrels are simply clumsy, and drop the nuts by accident. But I’ve watched them do it, and I have to say I think they relish the sound of a walnut connecting with its unmissable target the earth, like bored kids with a frisbee aiming for the terminal bud of a tree seedling at the edge of the yard, and shouting with triumph when a lucky throw shaves it bald.

photo by Darwin Bell (CC BY-NC license) - click to enlarge

Writing is hardly an innocent act. I remember with what force I had to strike the keys of my dad’s old manual typewriter when I was a kid. How the ribbon would rise to the occasion like someone throwing himself between an assailant and his victim, absorbing the blows. And as the ribbon ran dry, how the type would slowly fade, prompting me to pound the keys harder and harder, pummeling the paper, turning the letters into pale, shallow graves.

The first time I used an electric typewriter, it felt like cheating. It was in 4th or 5th Grade. I was typing up a parody of the movie Jaws — “Lips,” which we would later perform in appropriate costume. One of the kids who’d volunteered to help on the play sat and watched my two-finger typing, studying me closely but not saying a word until I was done. “I think I understand how you’re doing that now,” he said. I hadn’t realized until that moment that it was a kind of magic trick.

I took touch typing as an elective in high school, and of course we used nothing but the most modern IBM Selectrics. That was in 1982, I think. But when I started at Penn State two years later, it was nothing but the old manual for me. I figured as long as I had a newish ribbon and a sturdy, erasable bond, that was good enough. And in my own writing, watching a poem take shape letter by letter and word by word… I find myself almost salivating now as I recall the pleasure of that tactile experience. Poems were things that you hammered out by hand, which is perhaps how poets were able to unironically refer to poetry-writing classes as “workshops.” And most lyric poems being fairly short and the look on the page difficult to grasp with too many hand corrections, it was easier to just keep hammering out new drafts. I have a huge file box upstairs filled with nothing but those abandoned prototypes, like the empty larval shells of cicadas. The final drafts sit in a nicer, metal tomb downstairs, beside my writing table. It’s hard to simply throw out a handmade thing.

After we bought the adjacent property here in Plummer’s Hollow in 1992, we had the melancholy task of going through the derelict house where our neighbor Margaret had lived almost until her death the previous year. Among her possessions were three typewriters from her youth in the 1930s or 40s, when she had pursued a secretarial career in New York City. They were huge and black, archaic as ringer washers or Model T Fords. By that time I had switched to a word processor and was happy to have put the typewriter era behind me, so when a friend mentioned he collected typewriters, I passed those machines onto him without a second thought. Now I kind of wish I’d kept one of them as a conversation piece.

Around that same time, I had some people up for a party, and they all had a good laugh at the ancient, hulking, hand-me-down of a PC I was using. It must’ve been at least ten years old! I used WordPerfect 6.0, and only a Courier font because that’s what typing was supposed to look like. A few years later, I finally upgraded and put the old beast out to pasture — literally. I didn’t know then about the heavy metals and other hazardous substances found in circuit boards, cathode ray tubes and the like. So now it sits in a shallow, unmarked grave somewhere out in the goldenrod patch we call a field.

Prompted by Beth’s latest post, “Process,” at the cassandra pages.

• listen to music
• listen to the radio
• process photos
• work on a podcast
• post to a blog
• post to Twitter
• visit Facebook
• tend to qarrtsiluni submissions
• read or answer email
• revise poems, none of which have a paper backup
• call or take calls on Skype
• do laundry
• cook
• make tea or coffee
• run the tap
• flush the toilet
• tell the time

Things you can do during a power outage:

• read a book
• read a magazine
• weed the garden
• write with pen and paper
• weed the garden some more
• take pictures
• go for a walk
• gather herbs for drying
• take a nap
• drink a beer

I am trying to lead an unexciting life and failing miserably. I give thanks to the power company for its periodic lapses, reminding me how far I have yet to go.

Written with pen and paper, 10 August 2011

Carolina wren silhouette

Teakettle, teakettle, teakettle chants the Carolina wren from my front porch, seemingly unfazed by this morning’s rain and gloom. I smile at what I can’t help hearing as irrepressible ebullience, though quite possibly to the wren its song conveys matters of urgency and deep seriousness.

August is the quietest time of the year for birdsong. The neotropical migrant hordes whose songs made the woods ring in May and June are mostly done raising their broods, and many species are in the midst of their molt and lying low. So the Carolina wren’s song is more welcome than ever — especially considering that we didn’t have any of them nesting around the houses this spring, for whatever reason. A couple pairs nested elsewhere in the hollow, Mom said, and are now dispersing, some to breed a second time this season. Which may very well be what my front-porch wren has been so excited about the last couple of days.

Carolina wrens are quintessential dooryard birds, and their songs awaken the nesting instinct in my own breast. But we haven’t always shared the mountain with them. This August, we Bontas mark the 40th anniversary of our move to Plummer’s Hollow, but Carolina wrens have only been here less than 30 years. Like us, they are outsiders, still figuring out how to belong. Back in the 70s, our only year-round wren species was the house wren. But thanks to climate change and the milder winters we’ve mostly been having since, its larger and less hardy Carolina cousin has been expanding northward. During especially severe cold snaps, however, all the Carolina wrens on the mountain will die out, and we’ll have to wait for a year or two until their population is replenished from those in small-town heat islands in the valleys. In recent winters, I’ve noticed wrens going through the loose rock foundation to take shelter in the crawlspace under my house during especially cold nights. Or to put it more accurately, I’ve seen them emerge early the following morning, ready to bubble over with song no matter how bitter the wind and cold.

Coyote pups in Plummer's Hollow (photo by Bruce Bonta)

I’d love to interview some of the newer animal residents in Plummer’s Hollow to help gain perspective on my own tenancy here. What might the coyotes have to say, or the bears or fishers? None of them were present back in the 70s either, and the eastern coyote is an altogether new animal, a cross between the western coyote and the timber wolf. But like my friend Chris Bolgiano, whose essay “Becoming Appalachian” I republished here the other week, I am also fascinated by those whose roots in the area go back generations. Is it really possible to become like a native when your first years were spent elsewhere?

My older brother Steve just returned from a summer in Newfoundland, and stopped by our earliest childhood home near Waterville, Maine. He reported that “our” pine forest beside the lake looked great, with most of the old trees still there and in fine shape. A McMansion stood half-finished and derelict in what had been my favorite old field dotted with low junipers and outcroppings of bare granite, mute testimony to someone else’s failed attempt to belong. We may have moved to Pennsylvania when I was only five, but anytime I see rock and junipers like that surrounded by conifer woods — as I have on trips to the Adirondacks — I feel a pang. I obviously imprinted on the look and smell of the north woods in a way that’d difficult to ignore.

Mountain people in the Appalachians and Ozarks stand out, I think, because most Americans live such transient lifestyles. About 15 years ago, I remember reading an essay by a Penn State sociologist that criticized Central Pennsylvanians for their unwillingness to move elsewhere in search of better economic opportunities, which he said reflected a chronic lack of ambition. Nowhere in the essay was there any recognition of the possibility that forming strong bonds with a place might be a positive thing, leading to peace of mind or a sense of well-being. About the same time, one of the guys who hunts on our property mentioned that he’d found out he could make three times more money if he’d be willing to move out to Las Vegas. But what would I want to move out there for, he said. They don’t have woods like we do here. I wouldn’t be able to walk out my door and go hunting for white-tailed deer. Right on, I thought. And Las Vegas, of course, is the ultimate in transient, unsustainable cities, built around the dangerous fantasy of getting something for nothing. Forty years from now, when gas is prohibitively expensive and water scarce, it will probably barely exist, but people will still be hunting and farming in central Pennsylvania.

Farming in Plummer's Hollow, 1919 (photographer unknown)

I’m neither a hunter nor a farmer, so perhaps my own connection to the land is less vital and intense than it could be, though I like to think a place needs its poets, too. We even invented a jokey title in recognition of my role here: Poet in Residence, Plummer’s Hollow Private Nature Reserve. Sounds a little high-falutin’, I guess, but unlike Chris, I am so lacking in ambition myself, I don’t even especially desire to be accepted as Appalachian. (Not that anyone here ever thinks in those terms. Hell, Pennsylvanians rarely even think of themselves as being Pennsylvanian!) I attended the local public schools for 12 years, and was for the latter half of that time a complete outcaste, although I wasn’t disrespected in any regular or significant way. I was never bullied, for example. The other kids simply avoided me, which was fine because I had little to say to them anyway, caught up as they were in television, sports, and other things I didn’t know or care about.

That six-year-long experience greatly shaped my sense of identity as a permanent misfit, to the point where I actually get uncomfortable if I’m around too many like-minded people. It’s probably the case that having an older brother with a known ability to kick ass helped keep me from getting bullied in high school, but I don’t think that’s the whole of it. At least for straight, white males, I think it’s actually easier to be weird or different in Appalachia than in many other parts of rural and suburban America. I don’t know if there are quite as many oddballs per capita here as in New York City, but I’ll bet we come close. What I’m getting at is that, in the Appalachians, not-belonging is almost an accepted mode of being — a way to belong.

Which in a way brings us back to the wrens. One of the other new inhabitants, since 1993, is Troglodytes troglodytes — the winter wren. Prior to that time it had been exclusively a part-time, winter resident in Plummer’s Hollow, probably for close to 200 years, since the original forest had been logged. While some of the new species to the mountain are here because of global warming, others are here because the forest is aging, and becoming structurally and biologically more diverse in the process. The winter wren, we believe, is in the latter camp, and its return as a breeding species was sudden and fairly dramatic.

The Plummer's Hollow Run in winter

I was alone in Plummer’s Hollow in early December, 1992 when a heavy, wet snowfall struck, bringing down hundreds of trees in the deepest, wettest part of the hollow where the ground remained unfrozen and roots had never had to brace themselves against strong winds, as they would on the ridgetops. It took days just to chainsaw the road clear. We decided not to touch any of the fallen trees below the road, restricting our firewood cutting to a dozen or so oaks above it. We mourned the loss of so many mature trees, but knew that leaving them where they lay would be best for the soil and best for the health of the stream. Stream invertebrates thrive on coarse woody debris, and the addition of numerous small waterfalls and pools would greatly improve the structural diversity of habitats for all species.

The following spring, we started to hear, for the first time ever, the lyrical, liquid song of the winter wren. We’d stop the car just to listen. What a treat! It turns out that winter wrens love small, rushing streams spanned by great big fallen trees. True troglodytes, they search out cave-like spaces in which to nest — a bird after my own heart. In the 20 years since, we have never been without nesting winter wrens. Trees have filled in the canopy gaps from that snowstorm, and the deep hollow remains the most biodiverse part of our entire 648 acres, even as we face more severe challenges, such as the impending loss of all several hundred eastern hemlock trees to a microscopic scale insect called the hemlock woolly adelgid: another new, non-native inhabitant.

As I reflect on our forty years in Plummer’s Hollow, I find myself wondering whether we are more like the wrens or more like the adelgids. Are we capable of finding new niches and living lightly on the land, or is human residence inherently destructive? My answer changes depending on my mood. I thought it would be interesting, though, to solicit reflections from other members of the family, so tomorrow we’ll begin what I hope will be a series of responses to some interview-style questions I’ve drawn up, starting with my dad. Stick around! I’ll put the teakettle on.

As I drank my coffee this morning, an odd, almost repulsive idea occurred to me: wouldn’t it be awesome — or something — to interview people who hate me or my work for an episode of the Woodrat podcast?

This is a seep of acid mine drainage (AMD) in the midst of an otherwise gorgeous boggy wetland that my hiking buddy L. and I explored on Tuesday. It’s just below the Bell Gap Rail Trail in State Gamelands 158 at the top of the Allegheny Front, Central Pennsylvania — the same place I visited last October 31 with a much larger group of people, who were unfortunately more interested in hiking than in dawdling along taking pictures (see The Shining Season).

An artificial wetland uphill from the trail is designed to remove the heavy metals from the water through a series of ponds, so things are much better than they could be. But I was struck by the garish beauty of the AMD, that lurid reddish orange, here with an oily blue sheen from (I think) decomposing plant matter. It may not exactly belong, but it is an almost literal red flag, reminding us that the site is nowhere near as pristine as we might otherwise assume. And this is not irrelevant, since L. was actively considering a return visit in a couple of weeks to harvest some of the abundant mayapples and wild strawberries on the site. Would they be safe to consume?

In the wetland and in other spots along the trail, we were treated to a profusion of late-spring wildflowers: starflowers (above), Canada violets, Canada mayflowers, wild columbine, Jack-in-the-pulpit, dolls’ eyes (below), a pink ladyslipper, toothed rockcress, and more. As usual, I snapped way too many pictures, and when I got home and looked at them on the computer monitor, I was disappointed by how thoroughly conventional most of them were. A too-obvious approach to beauty is one of my real weak points, I think.

It was the foliage of the highly toxic false hellebore (remember the poem?) that offered the most visual interest, I thought, both in the flesh and in the resulting photos. Being toxic often licenses extra showiness in the animal kingdom: think of red efts, monarch butterflies or poison arrow frogs. It’s probably fanciful to attribute the flamboyant style of false hellebore to its unpalatability, but who knows?

So with this idea of interviewing people who hate me: what lurid, painful, grotesquely attractive things might emerge from such a conversation? Would conversation even be possible? How would I find such people, and having found them, how would I convince them to participate? What would I hope to get out of it — just some kind of masochistic pleasure, or genuine insight into my shortcomings as an author or human being? Would the results be at all interesting to other listeners?

Yesterday I read the sad story of the decline and fall of Bill Haley (“Falling Comet” by Michael Hall, Texas Monthly). In a way, it seems, it was the adulation of fans that frightened, confused and ultimately killed him, a great performer beset by extreme social anxiety. He kept returning to the stage, mesmerized, and then to the bottle. He obsessed too much about what his fans might want, Hall claims, and was therefore ultimately unable to evolve as an artist.

I am obviously in no danger of ever receiving the kind of adulation Haley did, but still, any bit of praise can be dangerous if taken the wrong way. A wise writer friend recently wrote (and will I hope tolerate my unattributed quoting): “Hype fogs up the mind. This is not about humility. If you believe the wrong things about your work, you won’t grow.”

But words of censure and detraction too can be crippling, as any abuse victim knows. Pace Nietzsche, what doesn’t kill you hardly ever makes you stronger. Why on earth would I want to invite it into my blog? To feed a perverse sense of self-importance, perhaps, by saying, look, see how great and articulate my enemies are? As an exercise in empathy, to try to see the world through the eyes of those who have absolutely no interest in returning the favor? It’s not a hairshirt thing, I don’t think, but I don’t know. Maybe I should ask them…

Traveling home, of course, I got back the time I lost on the flight over. It was just about the longest morning of my life, starting at midnight when I was en route on the express train from London to the Birmingham airport, continuing for many hours at the airport lounge (I didn’t bother getting a motel room), and then on the flight itself, which left at 9:00, lasted for seven and a half hours, and arrived at noon. I had a window seat at the very back of the plane, and spent much of the time gazing at the tops of clouds from 35,000 feet in a state of mild stupefaction, the combined effect of sleep deprivation, a recently contracted head cold, and the sheer wonder of it all.

The plane was a Boeing 767 and bucked and heaved a lot more than I remembered from my previous intercontinental flights on 747s, and this combined with the wave-like tops of the clouds made it feel almost like a sea voyage. From time to time I’d switch on the screen in the back of the seat in front of me to check our position and verify that we were, in fact, hurtling along at 500 miles per hour. I thought back to my very first day in Wales, when I got a chance to ride in a small, flat-bottomed boat known as a coracle, a version of which the Irish St. Brendan supposedly crossed the North Atlantic in. Thousands of newly hatched mayflies were rising off the river as we took turns trying to pilot the rudderless, slow-going craft against the current.

View on YouTube

The boat had just been made two days before by John and Cathryn Warren, the next-door neighbors to my hosts in Wales, Clive Hicks-Jenkins and Peter Wakelin (that’s Peter in the coracle after me; Clive’s voice is in the soundtrack, and he did the filming while I took a turn in the thing). I had simply happened to mention that a good friend of mine in the States was crazy about coracles, and asked if they knew where I might see one.

Somehow the unreality of flying across the Atlantic in a few hours was balanced by the unreality of having my desire to see a coracle instantly granted, sitting in it and finding myself unable to go anywhere very quickly except in circles. In fact, at that moment, there was nowhere I particularly wanted to go. Though the ancient ocean-going coracles did probably have rudders (and according to The Voyage of St. Brendan, could be fitted with a sail), their relative unsteerability constituted part of their attraction to Celtic monks, for whom the ideal form of travel involved surrendering to the will of God and going wherever the winds and currents took them. Some of the more God-besotted ones set off without even an oar. I could see their point. Almost everything — trees, wildflowers, birdsong — was new and miraculous to me, and I wanted nothing more than to stop and soak it in.

*

UPDATE (5/19): I’m honored to report that this post has spawned not one, but two responses from my friend Kristin Berkey-Abbott. Check out “Coracles and Communication,” which includes a poem called “Coracle of Prayer,” at her personal blog, and “Coracles and Currents” at Liberation Theology Lutheran.