Western Rambler

A Few Highlights of the Last Mountain Ramble

2010-10-04T09:06:00.003-05:00

The alpacas, Levi, Reese, Vinnie and Junio, from left to right

The llama, Hummer, and the two pygora goats, Marguerite and Bonk

The outdoor kitchen

My sleeping quarters

The Water Vehicle (a Cadillac hearse rigged with a very Mad Max style 200 gallon system in the back, complete with a tiny racing wheel and, yes, it handles like it wants to crash over these rutted dirt roads)

And of course my lovely sister Rose at farmer's market (I also have a stalwart soon-to-be oath-brother, Max, but for some reason I have no photos of him, and it's too bad because he looks as fierce as ever)...oh, and the jolly lady behind us is the phenomenal baker Gloria

"The List"

2010-10-03T10:51:00.003-05:00

WATER

house/barn catchment
rain barrels
glass drinking jugs
cistern (ferrocement?)

FOOD

gardens
fruit orchard
chickens
goat dairy
wood oven (horno)
mortars and pestles
hand grinders/mills
root cellar
beer brewing
apiary
bow and arrows
solar dehydrator
canning/pickling equipment
coffee trade (horseback caravan anyone?)

SHELTER

underground (or partially underground) winter home
open air summer lodge

CLOTHING

fiber and leather trade
wash tub, washboard and press

MUSIC/ART/BOOKS/ASTRONOMY

solar powered studio
dulcimers
accordions
piano
acoustic basses and guitars
paper making (and ink making/trade)
tattooing equipment on solar power
home library
star observatory with telescopes (a Schmidt-Cassegrain might be nice)
stone and plant labyrinth
astronomical hilltop stone calendar/festival monument

Any suggestions?

"The City"

2010-10-03T09:24:00.007-05:00

It looks like I am a country boy at heart truly! I did not expect to return to Portland so heavyhearted, but the web and hum of machine and the thick threat of madness seemed to blanket every street as it took me back in the very first day from the high desert. I had accidentally booked my flight the same day as Harvest Festival, so while my brother Max was likely stuffing himself with homemade pie and local brisket, I was sitting on a plane awaiting traffic. I can hear his mocking laughter now. Oh, sweet brotherhood. The security at the airport in Albuquerque was the first shock back in to the reality of empire. As I held my hands above my head, the machine scanned me from head to toe and I blanked my thoughts as if they could read them as well. The jet I transferred to in Salt Lake City was a large state-of-the-art sleekster, complete with flat screens that automatically drew down from the ceiling in rows above the passengers, playing advertisements and television shows. I laughed to myself when I thought of the movie 2001 and remembered that it’s 2010 now. Oh, dear. I go from hauling water in buckets and cooking on an outdoor flame to sitting in a jet that puts to shame the space shuttle that was launched the year I was born. First night in the city, I went for a long walk to help me feel better. I had no destination, simply to reacquaint myself with the town and perhaps console myself with its beautiful aspects. Every other person I met on the street was drunk, high on crack, belligerent, suffering from mental illness or wrapped in a fog of sadness. I found myself tearing at my hair and murmuring out loud self-admonishments for planning to live again in the city. This walk was having the opposite effect! Without conscious effort, my feet led me across the Broadway Bridge straight to the train station. I stood before it, laughed at myself out loud, and looked at the tracks leading out of town longingly. I sang Hank Williams “Rambling Man”, threaded my way through Chinatown and meandered back to my apartment on the inner eastside. I found myself missing the mountains and the call of elk like a broken heart misses its love. I laid awake past midnight listening to the grind and screech of industry and trains on the river, then awoke four hours later with my sister and put hot water on the stove in the darkness before dawn. We laughed while talking of building houses and planting gardens on the mountainside. Now the birds are starting to sing and the sky is turning a soft grey-blue. I am reminding myself for the goal I set, the reason to be here: saving up for top surgery. I am reminding myself that the city is simply the human hive, like the anthill, and there is a kind of beauty in it, even through its suffering and dysfunction. In the meantime, I'll start a boy band, ride a bicycle, utilize one of the nation's finest library systems, and glean what I can from this dirty old town before it falls into the ocean. Besides, it's October, my very favorite month. The neighborhoods smell like wood fire and pumpkin pie. Seven months. That’s all. Then I am going back to school in New Mexico, living in a beautiful Spartan “Mansion” on the hilltop, planning the cabin of my dreams, eating fresh sheep cheese, drinking sweet honey mead and living the rest of my days as a mountain boy. Now I can deal with that.

A Few More Days of Desert

2010-09-29T14:07:00.002-05:00

Childhood is coming back to me in flashes of sun and smells, earth, the texture of leaves. Sometimes I part the boughs of a pine and it's as if I am a small child:the world is enormous and unknown. I could fly through red windows of rock under a lavender sky. The waters are still pure and the dream world is more real than expanses of cracking parking lots. A great Thunderbird burns out of the sky and the machines are powerless. The desert is absolute and pure, cinnamon red and sage green, without boundary and definition. The sun herself sends the power of dream and life into rains, rainbows, bones and blood. The fire and vibrancy, the hardship and sharpness of this land draws me like the mouth of the serpent. The soft, mossy beauty of the Northwest has healed me and still holds its healing, but it is the desert that stokes fire in me, creation.

Elk bone moon, I'll return before the next summer solstice. For now, winter will wrap me in moss and mist and the crisp death cold of high desert December will wait.

A Month Back in the Mountains

2010-09-10T10:16:00.002-05:00

High speed travel is such a strange thing to me. Tuesday night I walked home in the grey Portland rain and today I woke up to a honeyed sunrise over the blooming Zuni Mountains. On the way back from the airport a full double rainbow graced the valley and my friend Genevieve and I laughed because it was so beautiful we could hardly believe it. The black volcanic rock, wildflowers of every color, the golden light of the dying day, all of it was overwhelming. It was that familiar time warp when you feel like you're coming home, that years have passed and yet no time at all. Coming home. That's strange because I feel like every place I've ever been is home.

Much to my delight, Hummer the llama remembered me. He was excited to get his neck rubbed and kept giving me fragrant kisses with his buck-toothed mouth. The alpacas are so adorable I can hardly stand it. For the next few weeks I'll be cooking out of an outdoor kitchen under a netting. It's so very amazing to have the view of the valley from the propane stove, past which in the cliffs contains ancient ruins that I'll get to explore in the coming days. The Cadillac hearse that will serve as my water vehicle is even more pimp than I remember it!

It's good to see my family here, to see the "Mansion" on the hill hung with skulls, to look through the old chests of letters and keepsakes, but most especially, to see the universe at night and hear the wolves at dawn. Already I can feel the static of urbanity unraveling its tangles into the dry air. The woods quietly shuck it off of me like dead skin. Yes, a deep calm sense of home is here more than any other place I have been.

and what of hope?

2010-07-19T20:26:00.004-05:00

slumberless,

hungerless,

i cannot sit to sup,

only walk through byways,

breathing to cool

the coals stoked

at the cradle

of my hips,

bringing fire and smoke

to the cage of ashes above.

i stop to weep

under a maple

with a prayer

that my arms alone

will be enough

to hold my being,

which is empty enough

to contain

the entire universe.

Back at Work in the City

2010-07-14T22:21:00.005-05:00

I work food service in a busy cafe in a hospital. It's good money most of the time but high action and high stress. The customers are all the nurses, interns, doctors, patients and other workers, everyone from the public transit to the construction workers on the riverfront. Today was one of those especially trying days where everyone had some special request, weren't happy about something in their personal life and taking it out on those around them or just plain rude. To boot, I haven't slept and have had a lot on my plate emotionally and physically. None of my other coworkers were particularly happy about the day either, but I gave out a few shoulders massages and tried to keep my spirits up. The whole point of me working there, besides the money of course, is to just be the as much a bright spot in these people's day as I can. Working in a hospital isn't easy when you're treated like a vending machine, as my manager put it, and people have lots of sadness, anxiety and fear about these physical traumas they've just gone through.

But just when I thought I wouldn't be able to make it through with a positive, giving attitude, of course, genuineness came through to the rescue. A man about old enough to be my father came in with his female companion and after a transaction full of complaint from her, he looked me in the eye and said something to the effect of this: so many people come through here, ailing and sad, and you are just smiling and so positive, it really makes a difference and I sure appreciate it. I must be hard, but with your attitude, I bet you're a lot older than you look. He looked at me like if I was his son, he'd be proud and he meant it. He was a salt of the earth type of man, with an outdoor tan, beard and layman's speak. His words touched me in such a way that will not fade for moons and moons. I felt tears come near when I brought it to memory as I cleaned up to close the cafe. This is why I do what I do. Not just to make a dollar or twenty. Just to give a little care to each person who walks in with all their rawness and offer something more than a cup of coffee, but an actual real connection with a compassionate human being. Thanks, man, I hope you do have a good night.

To Portland on Sauvie Island

2010-05-30T15:55:00.004-05:00

Shannon and I drove up in five days, car packed to the brim. We had only one blowout on Route 66, ironically close to the last place I had a blowout when I was moving across the country. It was Shannon's birthday too, so while the car was being rocked with semi-trucks passing us mere feet away on the highway and grit was blowing in our faces, I jacked up the car and sang happy birthday to her while she laughed. We stayed the night in Kingman, Arizona, the one place I had said I didn't want to stop. Funny things happen when you put aversions on. We ended up replacing all four tires due to wear and that our route would take us right through the Mojave Desert. We decided to cut across to Highway 1 and drive up the coast. On Highway 58 we stopped to pee in oil country and saw the pollution that is in my last post. Strange that this was one of the most beautiful hilly roads we had seen, fantastical and reminiscent of parts of the British Isles. Single trees and small cow herds stood on what seemed impossibly steep hills around the incredibly winding road. We stayed a rainy night near Hearst Castle in a little touristy town that seemed to scream for a Hitchcock twist. We spent a day in Oakland with some friends and had a great time seeing the neighborhoods and visiting. The last night on the road we were rained out. I woke up in a puddle and so we packed up and drove out of the campsite at a record 5:27am.

It seemed that we arrived in Portland in somewhat of a state of shock, grumpy from the road, broke and not ready for the bustle of the city. We took turns comforting each other and spazzing, probably for the first week, but our stay on Sauvie Island has been good. Our hosts are graciously sharing a smorgasbord of food and it has been wonderful reconnecting with friends. Shannon and I have planted, mowed, mulched, cooked, baked and helped out with the chickens and turkeys here, which has been a nice transition into the city. We watch the ships roll down the Colombia River and the ospreys catch fish. Next week we will be moving into a beautiful apartment above my friend's Waldorf school and I have already started work, so things are settling in only a week's time. The only thing that still remains strange to me is all this driving on highways, but once we move into the city proper I'll be back on my feet and out of the vehicle. Such a small city Portland is in the grand scheme of things, but it still seems overwhelming. The return to the country is inevitable, but I still look forward to this time here. And next week I get to fly to Brooklyn and see my best friend. It'll be my first time in New York or anywhere on the east coast. It seems laughable imagining me walking through the Big City with amazement and apprehension, not at me being there, but that it exists at all. From mountain trailer to NYC and from the desert to the Pacific Rainforest. I look forward to the next bend in the road!

Pictured on top is Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood in the middle and the old pump house with a passing ship on the Colombia.

Oil Bubbling Off Side of Road

2010-05-29T15:02:00.000-05:00

May Day

2010-05-04T08:30:00.002-05:00

It was May Day last year I flew in from the Pacific Northwest into Albuquerque and have been in the Southwest since. Last year I went from the airport straight to the Maypole dance at the Old School Gallery near Candy Kitchen, New Mexico. The sun came out and the snow stopped just for the dance and then came back again.

This year the snow folded us the same way, with the dance just clear of snow and the sun peeking out behind deep grey clouds showering snow in other parts of the valley. Dennis, with his fabulous pearl-snap shirt, jaunty cowboy hat with great feathers and salt-and-pepper beard, got up on the ladder to unbind the ribbons and I caught them to hand to the girls and women preparing to dance around the maypole. My sisters were around the pole, dressed in spring skirts and smiles. One of the ribbons snapped off and Dennis threw it around my shoulders, remarking with a laugh that I was the new maypole. Max later said I was the newest phallic symbol in town, ha! I wore the bright yellow-green ribbon the rest of the day. As the last ribbons came down from the pole crowned with roses, I ran back to the drum crescent and began to drum with the other men and the older women wearing pants. None of this was predetermined as far as gender or dress, it just happened naturally, without talking or arrangement, which I thought was interesting. I kept laughing with joy and also the irony that behind us, standing at the door of the gallery, was a large Zuni family observing our ceremony. The colorful ribbons braided with the weaving skips of the girls dancing and I laughed as our drumming sped up with the shortening of the ribbons, thinking about the Zuni family watching the white people's ceremonial dance of spring. How funny to think of this flip, how usually it is the other way around. The family joined us for dinner, a delicious feast of food all grown, raised and prepared by neighbors. Lamb stew, sheep cheesecake, smoked pork, beans, and corn chowder made with corn grown in Zuni. Stuffed and beaming, we rode back home and I still had the bright yellow streamer of the maypole around my neck. One year, one sun chariot, one circle of boyhood.

Soon Enough...

2010-04-27T11:10:00.003-05:00

My sister and I will be driving out to the Pacific Northwest in about two weeks. My feet are itching but a sadness is still in the pool at my center. The quiet, the ravens, the coyote moons, they will be here and I remind myself that I will be where the water is in the forest, so I don't have to miss them, I don't have to feel loss. The city, the city, the city rumbles like a distant train coming closer and there is some dread to the rising excitement, but it is all lovely, rushing being. I can visit and give song to the canyons in my dreams, even after I am off to the salt-laughter of the oceans.

Four New Hens and Lots of Pickin'

2010-04-15T11:20:00.002-05:00

Yesterday we got four new "buff ladies" we named Swanmay, Thrasher, Butch and Elvis. They seem to be integrating into the flock well, but they think their house is my trailer. Maybe they like the way it smells. On that note, I've been writing lots of songs about living the classy country life and such. I'll be posting more up on YouTube as the satellite on the trailer can handle the uploading...

Here's my newest one (recorded yesterday!) called Rich:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2qrgprXhNI

Planting Trees!

2010-04-09T20:40:00.002-05:00

Today we planted new trees, native bushes and berries: thirteen bur oak, five serviceberries, nine hackberries and one New Mexico olive. We also transplanted our two apple trees last weekend. I think everybody's pretty happy with it all. Thanks Whooville and friends!

Billy Ray's New Mexican Mocha (Workout Routine)

2010-04-07T20:28:00.003-05:00

Boil water on the open flame or propane stove. (Tip: If your propane regulator is frozen from precipitation, while not recommended, you technically can dump boiling water on it to melt it and free up the gas line. It hasn't exploded yet...) While water is heating up, do twenty pushups, twenty crunches, five sets of mountain climbers and run in place or do jumping jacks until water is hot. Gingerly pour 12 ounces into warm Mason jar (if your jar is too cold it will bust...oops) with 2 tablespoons coffee, local from La Montañita Co-op or Ancient Way Cafe if you have grant money, otherwise Yuban in a big can is fine. Add a dash each of cardamom, cayenne, nutmeg and a few dashes of cinnamon.

You may decide to pamper your mountain mullet at this point to a little deep treatment with some olive or avocado oil. This is the desert after all, honey, we have to stay moisturized! Thanks Ma!

Let coffee sit in hot water while dancing like a superstar to one Lady Gaga song in athletic pants, a sleeveless tee, wrist warmers and a silver chain. If you're feeling really spunky and want some serious caffeine, follow it up with an ABBA song and include lots of spins and two finger air thrusts.

Strain with muslin or a tea strainer into whatever's fairly clean and jar shaped, add heaping spoonful of unsweetened cocoa and one heaping spoonful of local honey. Yes, alas, I am a honey purist, and perhaps this seems somewhat silly considering my apparent lack of concern with coffee and cocoa, but when you're financially challenged, you have to pick your battles. Stir and enjoy! You're now ready to haul water, chop wood and run through mountain valleys! Some would question whether you should drink coffee at all and your siblings might question your sanity, but here's to having a blast! Rock on, kings and queens!

Mountain Time

2010-04-06T10:42:00.002-05:00

Every time I step out into the windy hilltop surrounding my trailer, I feel like I am seeing it for the first time. The stars seem new to me and they have names that have never been spoken. The moon travels so fast through the sky. A week passes and it's been a year and yet only an hour. Rabbits freeze in the brush. I walk downwind and on stone, but still all the animals know where I am. The sun is wandering north again and it seems like yesterday I was three years old, milking a goat with my big sister, it seems like yesterday I was a little lizard-bird, watching the fall of the greatest lizard species on earth. Tomorrow I'll watch the great red sun set from Mars, the atmosphere of the sun expanding and engulfing the planet Mercury, thinking that once there were Sky People who came from Venus and Earth. I'll draw them on rocks and speak in flashes of chemicals.

Dawn

2010-04-01T11:01:00.002-05:00

Just before dawn I put the kettle on the flame and put Yo Yo Ma's solo works quietly on the speakers, a record I haven't listened to in years. By the time I poured a thick cup of coffee dashed with cardamom and cinnamon, the sky was transforming from grey into orange. As Yo Yo's cello wove a tender melody into the air, all at once I took my first sip of coffee at my doorstep, the sun peeked over the valley, turning the pines and junipers honey red, the Sanctuary wolves began to howl over the hills in the distance and our rooster, Rocky, squealed his wind-up toy crow, all in the space of a few heartbeats. Without thought or attachment, my eyes filled with tears. Being here in this moment is something artists since the dawn of time itself have attempted to express, that moment which connects you to everything that was and is and will be, all of its sorrow and delight, so raw that your heart breaks open.

The Mouth of the Train Back West?

2010-03-02T17:43:00.004-06:00

The oceans and the rumbles of St. Helens keep calling me in my dreams to go back West. I have been weighing what it means to leave the desert. It means drawing myself inward, to glean from the cities what I can while they stand in their present form. It means finding something new about this thing called civilization that I've demonized so much in my mind. Isn't civilization just another structure of nature, like mounds of termites, hives of bees, hills of ants? Does it have to mean separation to live in a city? Frequent changes in geography help me understand my perspectives. What does it mean to live sustainably, really? Sustainability is a word that has been so overused and I think misses the point a bit in that it does not include the sheer passion for living that fires the simple life. It does not describe the cold slice of water from the well in the desert winter sun. It does not describe the feeling of triumph that sears through you when you have survived another sub-zero night without a heater and dawn sets the sky on fire through the frosted trees. These are things that don't have the same meaning when you can just turn on a faucet and crank up the central heat.

A year of living mostly without electricity and completely without running water has changed my life. This winter has been one of the harshest winters the old-timers of this place have seen in years and definitely the harshest winter I've ever experienced in my life. Multiple snowstorms left us stranded for weeks. We still sled water from a neighbor's tank and hike over a mile to the truck to pack groceries and feed on our backs. I got frostbite twice. Wet socks: don't do it. We haul water and split wood every few days. I bake four loaves of bread from scratch a week. Coyotes keep us up yipping during the fullest moons all night. I would do this every day of my life. I have felt so empowered by this experience. I feel a new confidence in all of the things life can throw me. Larger and larger things seem to be little inconveniences now, if not transformed to become something other than inconveniences altogether, but rather a challenge to live creatively!

I'm ready to see how this experience has transformed my perception of civilization. I know I'll be back, if not to this particular place, then back to the hills or the forest. Would I spend another winter in the mountain desert? Oh, hell yeah!

Kahlil Gibran - On Death

2010-02-25T11:29:00.001-06:00

In Memory of Our Friend Dream Eagle:

"You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance."

Winter As If the First Time

2009-12-25T13:19:00.003-06:00

It's been a while, so this is going to be a long one. Winter hit me for the first time in my life without the cushion of central heat and other modern conveniences. Or money, for that matter. I felt for the first time the sense of urgency to batten down, finish projects, chop enough wood, and gather food before the snows and the crystal cold.

I worked a week of construction to fund propane tanks and flours sacks. I learned how to use an industrial nail gun and began to feel my body change with the new joys of labor to hasten and firm it further.

Also, the last few months have been an intense spirit homecoming as well. It began with a release, allowing myself to grieve. The financial hardships made me consider pawning my piano and Shevy continued to patiently talk me out of it. I finally actually set it up and played. Then I tearfully told him one evening, as the sun set on the mesas through Jo's kitchen window, that I missed playing and that I probably shouldn't sell the piano because music is my primary way of opening my heart. He didn't press the fact that this is what he had been telling me all along. I hadn't played in months, and I hadn't played very much for years. Not since the Armless Children production. He started to do reiki on my left shoulder, which has consistently given me pain since adolescence, and he said there was a black mass there in my chest. More specifically, it dawned on him that it was surrounding my heart. Afterwords, I home drove to my trailer, thinking of the dream I had last winter in which I was speared in the throat by a giant from the depths of a cave. He backed me into the ocean and I turned into a fish. I thought of the black mass as a scar of the wound in my throat, the silence, the silence that had taken me at times through the years into a dark part of myself and I wept behind the wheel watching the crescent moon rise. When I got to my trailer there was a message on the machine. My sister Shannon's cow, Annie, had her calf, a beautiful boy, Gustav.

A few days later I wrote a song and I haven't stopped writing songs since. Music helps me listen, to the birds, the trees. The woods asked me to listen and yet I also knew that I am not meant to walk into the woods to take something, some sort of meaning perhaps, but to give something. I felt strongly that I was meant to sing to the woods, to offer my voice as I had nothing else to give. I found myself terrified, but I sang facing East, greeting the day. I was embarrassed and afraid, even as I knew that I do not have to be afraid of offering and renewal through song. I met my old man in the woods. Not my father, but the adult me I look to as a guide. He said, go ahead and sing, what the hell are you afraid of? Now hardly anyone can get me to shut up. Grandfather Pine, thank you.

Shevy, Max and I finished building their hearth and chimney, the front porch deck, the composting toilet and the stony path to the front door. We moved the pop-up, the Spartan and the chickens to the new acreage on Great White Father Road. Thank you, Jo, for being so infinitely generous. We also have a pregnant pygmy goat, Tina Turner, and two pygmy/la mancha goat crosses, Nelly and Jorge thanks to Jo. She has also let us use her solar panels, so we're pretty well set up now. We have solar power, propane and wood heat, a composting toilet, big water tanks, and if we heat water on the stove, we can even take showers! The day we finished the hearth we went to a bona fide hog roasting up at Tony and Eden's across the valley, which was great fun after all this work setting up the trailer.

Genevieve, Max and I processed apples from one single tree in Ramah in an epic day of making applesauce and apple butter until the wee hours of the morning. Genevieve and I joked that in the city we stayed up past midnight going to shows and in the country we stay up late canning. It was a good laugh and we were quite delirious by the final batch. Afterwords, we still had baskets upon baskets of apples to use. I dried some of them and made apple pie filling to freeze and made up new recipes. So many apples that I wrote a song to honor the tree, called the Apple Tree of Ramah. You Tube posting of the song will come soon! We also made a batch of cherry mead! Yum!

An unexpectedly heavy snowstorm swept through just before Halloween. Our chainsaw wasn't running well to get much wood and I spent a morning sawing juniper by hand with the bow saw. We hadn't gone to the well in time before the blanket of snow trapped us in and so by the second day we were melting snow on the wood stove to drink! I thought it was rather fun and during the snow days I took up drawing again.

Mike and Genevieve left for Thanksgiving and had a few projects to finish before leaving town. I helped them finish the fence for their llama and pygora goats (amazingly cute and I fell in love with them), which we made old-west-style out of juniper limbs and hog wire. It's a good looking fence, if I may say so myself. Also, I helped Genevieve plant their fruit orchard of apples, cherries and apricots and learned a few things about fruit trees from her. I watched their animals and stayed in their vintage bus while they were away. Many things made themselves clear to me while I stayed on their beautiful hill, which lies on the edge of Candy Kitchen near the Zuni Reservation. I heard the elk and slowed down enough finally to feel how the land lived. I learned to cover my spit if I spat on the ground. I learned to walk softly and slowly enough to not need shoes among the rocks and cacti. I learned more about being in the land as much as I would be in myself, in my body, present and grounded. I watched how the red ants worked during the day. I watched how the moon sank like a celestial longboat through black waters, fleeing the wolf Manegarmr, son of Fenrir, as my Norse ancestors would have said. I felt the passage of time as a tree grows to the sky and earth, like Yggdrasil itself, like the corkscrew dance of planets in the cosmos, and how it lives more than it passes.

I drove back to Texas with Jo down to her family near San Antonio and met Ariel later that same day (after driving all night) at a cafe in Wimberly. Wimberly reminded me a little of Oregon, with it's cute little shops and creek-fed forested hills. I had the pleasure of meeting his friends and see the buffalo once more. The next day, the sun and warm breeze on the lake were mesmerizing. It felt like summer. I wrote a song on the shore, watching the water sparkle under the ducks and mating dragonflies. We wandered the grass with our shoes off, singing songs and telling stories. That night we built a fire and stayed out under the skies in our sleeping bags, watching the Geminid Meteors streak across the night.

The next day we drove up to Denton and stayed with Ma and Gramma. The first thing Ariel and I saw was the giant gas rig they erected to drill right behind Gramma's house. The papers have been talking about it and people are making noise, but it infuriates me that it is still legal to drill that close to residential areas. It is not acceptable. More on this later...

Cardo's Farm is always evolving and so much has happened in the last few years. The Denton farmer's market is expanding and more people seem to want to get involved. I got to meet the bull calf, Gustav. And I got to be a part of chicken harvest, which involved 30 or so chickens. We had a plucker, which made it easier. This time, the logistics and flow of cleaning the birds really sunk in and yet it is still difficult spiritually. It felt good to gather and offer thanks and prayer for the birds beforehand. I am still processing this cycle.

It's Christmas day and I'm about to start helping Ma make yummy foods, so I'll wrap this up real quick like. All in all, this winter has transformed me in ways I had not expected and I am finding that every moment is another step towards myself, my calling. That's a damn good feeling. Thank you friends and family, I love you more than words can describe.

Squirrel Hunts and Pie Chomps

2009-09-21T12:17:00.002-05:00

Another sunny day in Candy Kitchen.

Harvest Festival was Saturday!

After so long, Max was finally picked as a pie judge (a highly coveted position indeed) for the pie contest this year. He ate almost a whole pie. The winning pie, apple-strawberry-raspberry, got auctioned off for fifty bucks. Shevy bid on a massive zucchini in the vegetable auction (it won largest veggie, I think) and won it for four dollars. It was quite fun! Max rolled into the pick-up as we left, belching and moaning with the enormity of his position, made official with the "Judge" ribbon in gold lettering.

We're almost finished remodeling the kitchen in Max and Shevy's mobile home. We put up the last of the ceiling yesterday. Now all we have to do is paint, install the woodstove and lay the flooring for the living room.

Lots of rains have come through and since the cats and dogs are all gone, mice and squirrels have taken to rummaging in my pantry for midnight snacks. I have had virtually no sleep. Yesterday morning I found a bold, fat squirrel kicking back in the pantry. I shooed it, and as it walked out the door like it owned the place, the girth of it even caught Max's eyes. He cried out in alarm, "There it is! There it is! Oh, my God, it's huge!" He barely escaped with his life as the enormous squirrel threw it's weight out the door rudely, barreling past Max like a barbarian.

Upon closer inspection of the empty glass milk bottle sitting on the floor of the pantry, I found a fairly fresh, organic free-range mouse...

It's high time to adopt kittens.

Whirlwind Through the West

2009-09-11T19:01:00.003-05:00

Shevy and I drove Northwest last week all the way to Portland from Candy Kitchen, just for long enough to pick up my things. We had been scattered with remodeling the trailer, moving and Shevy's school in Gallup. We hadn't had a full nights rest in a while. We pretty much left without too much thought, not packing a tent, for example, or enough food. Shevy had been craving summer sausage for a good while, so that was packed with some cheese, peanut butter and a loaf of honey bread I had made the night before.

The weather was pleasant enough, but on our heels was the remnants of the storm Jimena. North of Gallup until Colorado is all desolate desert. Shiprock looms out of the sea of dust like a primeval castle of Gods. Past Mesa Verde and Canyon of the Ancients is a more lush string of little pioneer towns. Monticello, Utah was under construction and smelled heavily of asphalt. Somewhere along this route was an amazing anti-meth mural.

On the way to Moab, we stopped near Church Rock to make lunch and check if the rear axle was leaking too much gear oil out of the right seal. A cop had stopped someone across the highway. We sliced some sausage and cheese to snack on. Pulling out back on the highway, Shevy forgot to signal and so the cop pulled us over. Neither of us had showered in no one knows how long and I hadn't brushed my teeth in a few days. The cop came up on my side, even though Shevy was driving, I suppose because of the narrow shoulder. I was very conscious of how I must have smelled. The cop asked Shevy to step into his patrol car to talk. They talked a good while and I wanted a cigarette for the first time in weeks. The cop came back up to my window and said he smelled weed. He asked if we had smoked weed in the car. The look on my face must have been incredulous to the point of disrespect. I laughed, probably rolled my eyes, said no, then held up the large summer sausage and asked, "You sure it's not the sausage?" He actually laughed. No, he had smelled that too. Shevy had consented to a search, since he knew there was nothing in the car and it would take less time than refusing, so the cop asked me to step out of the vehicle and the asked if there was anything in my pockets. I said no, but felt that I did have something, something that looked very much like a pipe from the outside. "Yes, I have this," I said, brandishing my pee tube. "What's that?" A little roughness to his tone there. "A pee tube." I held it to my crotch and stuck my pelvis out like I was peeing. I laughed hard on the inside, probably letting surface a smirk, and stood aside while he half-heartedly searched the car. He let us go with a just a warning. I laughed almost to Salt Lake City over the fact that in one interaction I waved two phallic objects at a cop.

Utah is gorgeous, full of carved red sandstone, forests and rivers. We reached Salt Lake City after dark and I cried through it, as I always do. Something about the place makes me feel so sad. Maybe it has to do with the world's largest open pit mine there? Energetically, the place is like the Swamp of Sadness for me. We put on power metal and trucked almost all the way to Boise before fatigue was overtaking me. We pulled over in a rest stop and slept in the bed of the truck until dawn.

We reached the Oregon rainforest in the afternoon. I felt strong nostalgia and longing for this place that has become such a deep part of my heart as the rain came down into the green black of the mossy forest.

I had missed my friends so much! They are all so wonderful! We had good times eating, watching movies, drinking beer at the bluffs and playing music. Thank you all for being so wonderful, helping me store my things (Ro, Spence and Casey, thank you so very much!) and sharing. I can hardly wait to come back in the summer.

Shevy and I packed my things. We only stayed two nights and one full day. I didn't want to leave so fast, but things had to be done back home. That and I'm nearly broke now and (stars above!) the city is expensive. We whirled in and whirled out and I hardly had time to even think about the fact that I was, in essence, finally moving away from the city. I had mixed feelings because I have such good friends here and there are still things I feel are unfinished here. But I will return to visit, and soon.

On the trip back we slept under the trees in Dry Canyon, Utah in the open air, since we didn't have a tent. All day I was dreading all the possibilities: condensation on my sleeping bag, campsites being full, sounds, bears, etcetera, thinking it was going to be a terrible rest. It was the best night of sleep I've had in weeks. It was cozy, dry, quiet and we were the only ones in the whole campground. Another lesson in letting assumptions go. The rest of the drive went smoothly. We watched hawks soar through mesas and bighorn sheep walk over the mountains.

The rain from Jimena flooded Ramah but Candy Kitchen was just a little damp. It's been raining since I returned and last night was an amazing lightning storm of molten gold sunset with purple lightning bolts zapping through deep ocean blue clouds.

Yesterday, Shevy and Max went to an Albuquerque flea market for a wood burning stove. They brought home a beautiful little Vermont Castings for only 500 bucks! Also, Mike and Dean gifted me a gas spitting 4X4 Subaru that backfires every time I down shift. It's so fun to drive! I was looking forward to mudding and this morning I got the chance, sliding from one side of the road to the other, coming to rest in the driveway like a drifting boat. Fantastic!

The chickens have been laying again, the wolves howling often and the birds are bringing a symphony of fall. I made two batches of wheat tortillas from scratch and pulled up the dog fence by hand. My hands are bruised and sore, but it was a good feeling to use my body until exhaustion.

I'm looking forward to the winter: wood chopping, more afternoons with the pot of tea, my Underwood and Oxford dictionary. I can feel the Halloween chill starting in the air and can almost taste the breads baked inside the little snow submarine under Zuni stars.

I left the city, finally, after so long.

An Unearthed Appreciation for Water

2009-08-28T21:29:00.005-05:00

Today I took a luxurious two minute shower, turning off the water while scrubbing with soap.

It was much needed after scraping mold and rat poo from the vintage trailer we are remodeling.

The other day we loaded around 150 gallons of water into the water tank, bucket by bucket by bucket, hand hoisted. That's not the usual routine, but we didn't have the water pump.

I thank the ground and the rain for every drop. And thanks to the monkey who invented pumps. It sure does take a hell of a lot longer to move water without them.

Settling in for the Season

2009-08-18T16:06:00.001-05:00

August 2009 011
Originally uploaded by Billy von Raven

Yes, the time has come to land for the winter. After much deliberation and procrastination, I have decided to stay here in Candy Kitchen, New Mexico. I will be coming to Portland for one weekend only to get my books and musical instruments. My brothers have been so kind to hand me their beautiful 1950 Spartan trailer they are living in now. We are moving to a larger piece of land on a hill. They have just bought a fifty foot mobile home and our autumn project will be restoring it.

The winter here is like some place in Narnia: snowy, starry and frigid. I'm very excited to spend it here, making books and drawing. I will be keeping in touch through mail primarily, because the land we are moving to will not have electricity and I no longer have a cell phone. There is very little reception out here anyways.

Seeing the Milky Way every night keeps me sane and joyful. When told my dear friend Amanda the other night about the stars, I finally understood myself, in saying it out loud, that much of my survival of childhood depended on sneaking outside at night just to look at the stars and know that there was something bigger out there, something expansive and beyond all the pettiness and cruelty, the confusion and claustrophobia. Something without judgment, something that merely is, without definition and pretense. The stars are my mother and father.

Today I walked through the oak grove in the sun, through the red rocks and barrel cactus and let myself delight in being now, without being caught in ideas about what I should be doing and producing or the future. Just living. It is so beautiful that it hurts.

El Morro, Atsinna, Dragonflies and Thunder

2009-07-30T19:07:00.010-05:00

This morning we climbed El Morro, which means 'the bluff' or 'the headland', a bulwark of red and white sandstone standing against the sapphire sky. At the top was a partially excavated Zuni pueblo, called Atsinna.

A Zuni ranger popped out from under the half-buried first floor and greeted us. He told us that over a thousand of his people once lived there and that they travelled first from the Grand Canyon and went all through the West. Each time they moved, it is because they were given a message by the Sun or the Moon. He spoke of the Red-Gold and Turquoise Dragonflies as spiritual messengers. We stood in the middle of the world, he said, what the White Man calls the Continental Divide, the saddle in the North. Other rangers, he explained, would tell people to stay away from this, don't touch that, don't sit on the ruins, but not him, he invites, beckons people to join and listen. He said sometimes people came and told him they were one-quarter Navajo or one-eighth Lakota and that they would ask him what he was. He shook his head. "We are all mixed." He pressed his firm, flat hand against his heart. "It is here that matters." He told us he was restoring the pueblo because now that it has been excavated they must repair it frequently to keep it from eroding. Grandmother, Grandfather or Sister is here in these rooms, watching and laughing, he says, they can see me but I can't see them. They knew of this time now, when the world would become heavy, too heavy for the gods to hold, because there would be too many people. There would be a great time of scarcity and sometimes the future is sad, but he would continue to teach people, tell the children the stories of his Grandmothers, all the children, regardless of their skin, because this is what he must do. He talked to us a long while and finally said he must end his break.

We thanked him and ventured down and around the box canyon. We were thirsty and hot. A pool under the bluffs harbored bees and dragonflies, just past the petroglyphs of rams, hands and snakes. In a very short while after coming down from the ancient Atsinna, in time for us to take shelter at Inscription Rock Cafe, the monsoon poured down cool rain and hail on the desert.

After a Monsoon at Dusk

2009-07-24T11:36:00.007-05:00

The silence is deep enough that you can hear the plants grow and the heart leave footsteps in silt. The pinesap and sagebrush fill the air. A lone crow or dove whoo calls and breaks. The white-jade of sage reaches in delicate tendrils above the dark green. Little bulbs of flowers rise like drops in shocks of white, yellow, lavender, orange and red. The blond grasses shoot out of dark roots and hold rain like pearls. Sounds envelop you in the silence, such that the pack of wolves seems to be in the sunset instead of in the purple darkening East. The soil grows alive in hillocks of fungus, moss and succulents. Pine sprigs hold droplets underneath, gleaming spiders' eyes in the last grey of twilight. Night falls like feathery down.

A Funeral of Birds

2009-07-17T11:21:00.011-05:00

My brother Shevy picked me up from Zuni in the midst of ominous clouds, but the rain didn't break as we drove up into Candy Kitchen through the green pines and red sandstone. When we pulled into their acre under the piñons, I noticed a dying baby swallow in the bed of the truck. She had fallen out of a nest, perhaps, in Zuni where they darted around the eaves of the roofs. She was severely stunned and too young to make it without her mother. She opened her black eyes and beak a few times weakly, sometimes sputtering and spasming. I didn't have the courage to kill her and when I tried to set her in a tree, she would seize violently until she started to fall. Knowing the kitten was prowling, I set her at the foot of a tree. The kitten would have a play at hunting.

I felt regret at not having the courage to kill the bird. Max consoled me, "The kitten got hunting practice. Babies killing babies."

I was not consoled. I had never taken an animal's life myself and had wished I had, to spare her the minutes of kitten torture before she died.

The next afternoon, some of our neighbors spontaneously visited all at once and convened in the driveway. The UPS truck pulled in randomly at the same time to deliver Shevy's chainmail supplies. The dogs barked briefly, but without enough urgency to warn us of the coyote passing across the road with a red young chicken in its mouth. We marveled at how close it got at such a leisurely pace, as if flaunting the kill. Shevy and Max don't have guns and the coyote disappeared in the pines to the South. After a check of the chicken houses, we determined it was our neighbor's chicken.

Young Mike, who lives down the road, had a violent, rapist rooster to kill for a neighbor and Shevy and Max had been thinking of taking their rooster Spud as well, as he's been pecking the hens quite rudely. We decided to meet here to harvest the birds the next evening.

Shevy had to work that afternoon so Max and I distracted ourselves with projects. We built a deck in front of the trailer, put a loaf in the bread machine and cleaned up the kitchen.

In addition to the rapist, there was another hen who has been eating eggs, so she was also collected. Mike and I drove them ceremoniously in a banged-up hearse he and Genevieve had just fixed up. As we drove back to Shevy and Max's, he told me it had carried 27 bodies. A good number.

I was the only one who had been a part of chicken harvest, plucking and eviscerating, but none of us had killed our own meat before. We dallied, preparing nachos and listening to metal. The trailer filled with the ring and sheen of sharpening knives. Mike brought a knife his grandfather had made by hand. That was to be the knife we would use to take the birds. We were children who had not yet shed blood, so we had to steel our nerves for the kill. We decided to ritually carry the raping and baby-eating birds out of the hearse. Mike donned an executioner hood made from a Navajo Pride flour bag with eye holes cut. Shevy hooked his chainmail belt on with a cut-off Punisher skull tee. Max wrapped a cloak about his shoulders. With the Darth Vader theme playing out of the trailer, Max and Shevy marched the chickens around back and Mike came up in the hood, carrying a sword. It was unplanned and we laughed nervously. Shevy tried to open the cage and pull the cock out, but he protested in a flurry of squawks and feathers. We suspended the ritual, growing nervous now, and prepared for the actual harvest. The chickens knew their fate and that this was only ritual.

We had waited long enough. Dusk was coming. Shevy and Max decided to save Spud for another day as it was getting late and we already had two to butcher.

We cut a hole out of the corner of the executioner hood to turn it into a kill bag. A table was set with a cutting board and construction plastic. Max covered the bottom of a 5 gallon bucket with earth to catch the blood and feathers. I knew it was up to me to start it, having had the most experience. My voice was beginning to shake but I opened the cage and grasped the rooster firmly from the back. It let out a bloodcurdling scream, which scared Max off to the the pop-up at the back of the land. I whispered to it as we put it into the bag.

I was thankful Mike was courageous enough, without speaking, to take his grandfather's knife first. I held the rooster and, after a few starts and fits from the bird, Mike slit its throat. Dots of dark velvet blood hit his face. We breathed in the evening, Shevy above us, Mike holding his head and I his body. This was opening us all to the doorway in which all flesh eaters of our ancestors passed through. Shevy was in a trance, eyes open, concentrating on calming the bird as he crossed over into the spirit world. Mike and I spoke of meat eating, awareness, a few laughs broke the fear.

The vat of water was still on the flame, so we bled out the cock and went on the the hen. It was my turn to handle the knife. The hen was calm. I looked her in the eye and massaged her throat, then drew the knife through her neck. The cut wasn't very deep but she didn't protest much and ruby blood spilled downward. I drew the blade across again to hasten her death and apologized to her out loud. My nerves nearly gave and sadness welled in my eyes, but my intent grew hard and clear like the knife. Mike and I held her until she bled out and the last shudder of life left her. I went into the trailer to ask Max to bring the water. I dunked the birds and began to show Mike how to clean them, starting with the rooster. (I will leave out the details of evisceration, but for those who haven't done it and are interested, the best site I've seen so far is the blog on How to Butcher a Chicken.)

Dark came upon us and it was Mike's turn to clean the hen. The coyotes began to howl and I looked Mike in the eyes and laughed. Shevy brought out a lantern. Their crops were full of grain, since the neighbors who sent them to us didn't know to fast the chickens before harvest. It was messy and we were inexperienced. The hen had a fully formed egg with a soft proto-shell and yolks at various stages and sizes clinging to the back of her ribcage. We stood mesmerized before her. Since she had been eating her own eggs and the eggs of her friends, her liver was yellow and she was mostly bright yellow fat.

It was well after dark when we finished. Mike and Shevy went to bury the bucket of blood, guts and feathers out West behind the land for the coyotes: an offering of sorts to let our chickens alone. Max and I cleaned up the site. He dumped the vat of fatty, bloody water on the turnips. As wolves howled from the Sanctuary to the East, we washed up at the water tank on the shed deck, the grey water going into the blood bucket to rinse it. Shevy then dumped the bucket away to the North. He came back with a quartz crystal spear he found there and placed it on the table where we slaughtered.

Mike bid us farewell and we sat in the trailer for a while, mostly silent, until almost midnight. Shevy said to me, "You don't look so good."

I hesitated. "I'm processing...that was my first kill."

He nodded. "Oh, I didn't know."

We eventually shuffled off to bed, warning each other we might be kept up by coyotes. Half-asleep, continually I reminded myself we cleaned everything up. Through the night, I heard wolves and coyotes yipping and howling and kept smelling wafts of bird fat and death.

In the morning I awoke with a heavy humility. I had looked a soul in the eyes and took its life. For the first time in this body, I felt a sense of adulthood. I placed the quartz under the piñon pine where we spilled the birds blood. Sunday we will feast on chicken and dumplings, BBQ chicken and greens, and give thanks again.

Dancing and the Night Adventure

2009-07-11T21:15:00.003-05:00

I have been reading Zinn and writing my zine, cooped up in this Federal housing on the Zuni Reservation for weeks. Shevy and Max came over and I began to spazz about how silly it was that the carpet was white in a desert filled with red sand and just how on earth the woman who lives here can keep the carpet so white with a dog, a baby and a toddler. I wanted to have the house in the same condition they left it in, but I am simply not a neurotic cleaner. I'm actually a poor cleaner. I think a little dirt and dust is great. But I am neurotic about doing a good job, so I started to scrub the carpet insanely and wailing loudly about how all the mother must do is clean this god-forsaken carpet. I couldn't seem to get one speck of dust out if it. Shevy and Max tried to calm me and took me out of the house for the first time since I've been here. The dog Guinness has severe separation anxiety and so my instructions were to crate him if I left, so he wouldn't pee on everything, destroy blinds, or try to run after the car. This is the main reason I haven't left until now, as during the day it's much too hot to crate him. So I crated Guinness in the backyard and we went off to Ramah to céilí dance.

Céilí is Irish social dancing, a little like square dancing, in sets of 2 partners. We learned the Siege of Ennis and the Fairy Reel. I hadn't had so much fun in I can't remember when! Though it was quite funny, because my gender was confusing to some of the folks and céilí has traditionally specific roles for boys and girls. Shevy drank a bit of Jameson and I drove us back to Zuni in his pickup. They were going to stay the night with me and drive to Gallup in the morning to pick up Sparkles, who was getting his balls chopped up. Shevy was a little tipsy on whiskey and explained his plan for telling Candy Kitchen that I was trans. I thought it was highly amusing, since publicly supporting my decision to be trans in his small rural community would be a testing of the waters, since neither he nor Max is out to most his neighbors there.

When we got to the house in Zuni I was laughing and went out back to let Guinness out when I saw the busted open empty crate and no Guinness. My stomach fell. I called for him, driving the pickup around the Reservation, while Shevy cleaned and gutted trout to fry up for dinner. I grabbed a flashlight and took off in the moonlight through the valley between the mesas to the East. I walked all around almost to the lake, the silvery moonlit grass sticking in my socks. There was no sign of Guinness and the dogs on the Reservation were uncannily quiet. I heard faint coyotes to the North. I sat with Shevy and Max, eating in relative silence, and recalled that he had no collar. We waited, lounging and digesting wordlessly. Shevy and Max finally went to bed.

It was one in the morning and I put on a pot of coffee. In dismay, I formulated what I would say to the couple if their dog didn't come back. I sat in the yard drinking coffee, jumping at every sound and softly calling the dog's name. I was about halfway through the coffee when I heard whining around the side of the house. I called for Guinness and I heard a clamor over the fence. Guinness bounded up grinning like a dog, covered in mud. I squealed with relief, almost in tears. He jumped inside and around all over the white carpet, mud practically flinging, and I was never so glad that the goddamn carpet was getting dirty.

A New Place, A New Way

2009-07-06T14:34:00.003-05:00

My time in Zuni is almost up. Two more weeks and I'll be going back to stay with my brother for a bit until I ride a train Northwest. This desert I'll miss sorely.

The beautiful swallows have built a nest at the corner of the house, which the cat, Luna, watches with predatory constance on the window sill, her tail swishing in violent bursts.

Rains come in huge, quenching drops from heavy thunderclouds riding the blue like dark chariots.

Bulwarks of red striped sandstone, millions of years old, rise on either side of the valley. Sky riders have passage on rainbows that arc into the valley at nearly every rain.

Dawn turns the plains at the feet of the mesas into molten gold, the near-white grasses shimmering with a brightness that nears pain, like the true form of a god.

The warbles of great elder ravens can be heard amongst the pine and juniper, whose language is more ancient than the trees and stature is as tall as a human child. They fly as strong as kestrels and hawks, their wings nearly as wide as a human is tall.

Lizards and snakes scurry across the pink sand, through gnarled shrubs, scraggly grasses and spiked cacti.

And finally, after dusk is the blackness, the jet of galactic dust clouds even blacker than the sky itself, and the stars that sparkle on the night waters. Stars that cannot be seen under the electric web of the city. Stars which I will return to, first to see again with these eyes, then to greet me when the Valkyries take me to their halls...

Until then, I will walk through the streets of a city on the edge of the Empire, to gather my strength and will, gather my knowledge and skill, gather my allies and return to the hills with a band of heathen queers to live the way we choose, to live with the hills instead of off of them, despite the calls and comforts of the Imperial Cities...

Great-Great-Great Gramps

2009-06-26T23:41:00.011-05:00

I started reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States again and it prompted me to do a little research on the reasons why my family left Germany one hundred fifty years ago.

Young Ernest Gottfied in the Midst of Revolution and Civil War

All I know about Ernest Gottfied Schmieding, my great-great-great grampa, are basics: when and where he was born, married and died. Also, that his maternal grandfather was a paper-maker and his paternal grandfather was a merchant. The rest is historical conjecture. He was born in Herne, Germany in the year 1836. Herne is in the Westphalia (roughly translates to Western Plains) region of Northwest Germany, around the same latitude as London, and fairly close to the Netherlands. Herne is on Emscher, a tributary of the Rhein, in the Ruhr Area, which is now the fourth largest urban area in Europe, after London, Moscow and Paris. It has been called an industrial complex. This is what it looks like today:

The Ruhr, at the time of Ernest's birth, was afire in the the Industrial Revolution, with mines and factories sprouting everywhere, mainly coal and steel. Before the Industrial Revolution, people had been farmers for at least eight hundred years. A horse market fair had been established in the 15th century there, and today it has grown into a full-blown carnival fest called Cranger Kirmes, the second biggest fair in Germany after Oktoberfest. Last year, in 2008, 4.7 million people attended the 110,000 square metre fairgrounds, earning it the nickname of "most crowded fair in the world".

Beginnings

The Pagan Saxons were the ethnic natives of Westphalia, who fought the invading Franks and also the conversion to Christianity. After a hundred years of attempted conversion, they were finally and brutally converted by Charlemagne in the 8th century, who destroyed Irminsul, their giant pillar or world tree, sacred to either Ziu (Tyr) or Wodan (Odin). Bees, whose honey was made into mead, were also sacred in the Irminsul symbol, representing the tree stumps where they made their wild hives.

After a reign of nearly a thousand years, The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation declined and finally dissolved in the Napoleonic Wars thirty years before Ernest's birth. Napoleon raged across Europe and set his youngest brother Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte as puppet King of Westphalia. When Napoleon was defeated by the Prussians and the British, the Congress of Vienna established the German Confederacy, which was a conglomeration of 39 states and 4 city states, the most powerful of which were under the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. Others were under the jurisdiction of the Kings of Denmark, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Bavaria, and Saxony along with other lesser German Dukes.

Revolution

Herne was under Prussian rule in the Province of Westphalia when Ernest was born. The people were poor, oppressed and censored. The Industrial Revolution made working conditions terrible. Cholera outbreaks and famine were spreading. When Ernest was twelve years old, in 1848, revolution broke out like fire across all of Europe.

The people of Germany demanded freedom of the press, free elections, a constitution of basic rights, the right to assemble, the right to arm themselves and trial by jury. In February, 1848, news of French Revolutionary victories spread to Germany. In March, the city dwellers demonstrated and the peasants rose against their still feudal states. What came to be called the March Revolution began. In Berlin alone, hundreds of demonstrators were shot. Within months, however, work was begun in Frankfurt on establishing general elections and the drafting of a constitution. The Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches (Constitution of the German Empire) was passed about a year later. However, within a few years, the rights were being undermined and revolutionaries were executed or imprisoned for lengthy terms. Unification was imminent and tensions between the Austrian Empire and the Prussians were rising. In 1866, when Ernest was 30, civil war broke out. The Prussians were at an economic and military advantage, with extensive railroad systems, needle guns and fast loading rifles. Prussian rule was inevitable.

Staten Island

Ernest fled to the United States, reached Staten Island and married nineteen-year-old New-York-born native Anna Ophelia Greene. Hopefully, Ernest didn't have any illusions about the United States. Maybe he wasn't aware that the States were still in the aftermath of American Civil War that ended the year before. True, slavery had been abolished, but working conditions were not a whole lot better. You would work 18-hour-days and get paid maybe $3 a week. They probably lived in overcrowded tenement housing, some of which still had no indoor plumbing and no windows, just a pump and an outhouse for over a hundred people to share. Thousands died from unsanitary conditions.

Ernest and Anna Ophelia started to have children. Workers were granted an eight-hour day after a three month strike of 100,000 in New York. But the rich got richer, Rockefeller founded Standard Oil and became America's first billionaire, and the poor were being laid off, evicted or killed in heaps of trash and sewer by the hundreds and thousands. In 1873 the country slumped into a depression. The following year in New York City workers assembled in protest and police responded with brutality. Women and children were stampeded by fleeing protesters. Bystanders were clubbed. Thousands more went on railroad strikes. Police again attacked, shooting and bludgeoning protesters in the skulls.

Ernest and Ophelia left the country for Ontario, Canada for at least ten years to escape the slums and sweatshops of New York, but eventually came back to settle in the United States in the Shelby Township on the Eastern shore of Lake Michigan. The biggest industry in Shelby was metal. The Industrial Revolution was in full swing and working conditions in the iron mines and factories were still unsanitary and inhumane. Ernest and Anna had six kids to feed.

But in 1871, three years after the birth of their first child Charles Thomas, my great-great-grampa, Germany was united under Wilhem I, Emperor of the Prussian Second Reich.

Even though times were tough in the States, Ernest had escaped and spared his grandchildren the horrors of the Third Reich to come decades later.

The Monsoons are upon Zuni

2009-06-26T17:15:00.005-05:00

Thunder is galloping in from Defiance Plateau. The wind is whistling between the stucco houses. The rain comes in waves, the sound indistinguishable from the wind-swept trees. It is four-thiry in the afternoon. They are right on time.

I saw the strange centipede again this morning. The yellow goat's beard seedheads, which look like large dandelion seedheads, are in full bloom. I sat behind the corn and squash this morning to draw a charcoal of the mesas behind Blackrock Reservoir, which is dry but verdant. The scanner here doesn't seem to work with the computer, otherwise I would have posted the drawing.

I've been sprouting adzuki and lentils, so I steamed some and made tostadas on fried corn tortillas with cheese, cumin and chili powder. They were tasty-fried-delightful.

Filled with too much caffeine and a bit human-starved (three-and-a-half days since I've interacted with one), I galloped and skipped to Finnish-folk-death metal, giggling and pretending I was a unicorn. I'm laughing out loud recounting this. I must have been inspired by the two or more double sky-wide rainbows that have appeared to me over the past few days.

The rains are subsiding. They'll most likely be back at the same time tomorrow or the next.

The photo was taken by David Bazan about a kilometer south of here. It is a Zuni cemetary.

and the con-men...

2009-06-23T19:34:00.004-05:00

Yesterday a dumpy white dude in jeans knocked on the door.

"Hi! Are you the owner of the house?" He was holding a can of Glade.

"Nope, I'm just house sitting."

"Oh, cuz if you were the owner of the house I could shampoo your carpets!"

I looked at him with puzzlement, wondering how he'd do that exactly with a can of Glade, but I just smiled and shook my head.

"Ok, thanks! Have a good day!"

Later at dusk a young good-looking Zuni knocked on the door. He had tattoos and a CD in his hand. He spoke nervously.

"Hi, I was...I'm wondering if you would like to...I'm selling my paintings."

"You know, I'm house sitting for this family and I don't have any cash."

"Oh. Ok. Can I have a drink of water?"

I wasn't going to deny him a drink of water and, while I was aware of the disparity in that the white family I'm sitting for has thousands of dollars worth of electronics and hundreds of dollars worth of liquor while the local youth go door to door for a little cash, I still wasn't going to let him in the house.

I made an excuse as I shut the screen door behind me. "There's a dog."

I came back out with a glass of water which he finished quickly.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome."

"Thanks. You too." He didn't hear what I said and was already walking away.

The Double Rainbow Over the Storm and Power Flickers in the Uranium Capital of the World

2009-06-23T16:18:00.007-05:00

Last night the edges of Andres, the first named storm of the season, bore all the way up here to Zuni, New Mexico. Andres itself is about 1,200 miles south, off the Pacific coast of Mexico, and may develop in to a full-fledged hurricane. The storm whipped up wind, spattered rain, and dropped strange fiery polyps into the sunset. A titan double rainbow filled the entire sky, while the mesas behind were aflame with the dusklight.

The power flickered and turned on the shorted-out jacuzzi on the back porch. Shevy and Max were over and we didn't know what the sound was at first. We lifted the cover to see the swirling water around the jets. The water was cold and the smell of chlorine was overpowering. We decided that even if the jacuzzi was working, we wouldn't want to expose our bodies to that much chlorine.

It seemed the storm was over and night had fallen, when the power began flickering on and off. Neighbors cheered and whooped war cries every time the power died. After four or five flickers the power went out for good. Shevy informed me that power companies were notorious out around the Reservations. Not surprising.

The power came back on in the middle of the night, blinding me in bed. Luna, the cat was out all night hunting mice so I couldn't sleep, having had explicit instructions from my hosts to keep her in at night from the noisy, roving packs of wild dogs, whose barks (and yelps of the domesticated dogs desiring to join them) kept me up just as much. At sunrise, Luna nonchalantly galloped up near a destroyed and de-limbed mouse as I watered the corn.

Today, I learned that Grants, about 75 miles east of here and around fifty miles from my brother's land, was once the Uranium Capital of the World. I knew the proximity of the Trinity Site, the first atomic blast in the largest military installation in the United States, the White Sands Missile Range. I didn't know that it was (and we are) so close to the largest uranium deposits in the nation. Through the 1950's to the 1980's the area was the largest producer of uranium in the world. The miners were, of course, mostly Navajo, Zuni, Mexican and black. The first one to discover the uranium in 1950, a young Navajo named Paddy Martinez, worked as an impoverished miner scout under the railroad industry until he died, while earning corporations a killing. The operations boomed, busted, saw another boom after the 1973 Oil Embargo, and started winding down in the 1980's with falling uranium prices. The mines have mostly been closed since but in the last couple of years, uranium mining corporations have been trying to move back in to New Mexico. They are meeting a huge opposition from the Tribes, whose sacred sites are in some of the proposed mining areas. In fact, in January, Strathmore Minerals Corp. announced to its shareholders:

Strathmore believes that Roca Honda may be one of the best undeveloped uranium deposits in the United States. The New Mexico Operations office was opened in Santa Fe in 2005 and permitting activities for Roca Honda began in 2006. The project attracted Sumitomo Corporation of Japan and a joint venture agreement was signed in July, 2007. An ongoing permitting effort and feasibility study is underway.

Strathmore and Sumitomo are going in together 60/40, respectively.

And just a few weeks ago, Uranium Resources, Inc. announced intentions to file a petition for a review on whether or not a proposed site in Churchrock, New Mexico is Indian Country and therefore under the jurisdiction of a permit from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Grants, New Mexico is now mostly a prison town, running most of the state's prison systems, but they seem eager to get back into the lucrative business of uranium.

Robert Gallegos, once a miner in Grants, published this poem in the 1982 collection, Ambrosia Lake:

we live and die to mine
to eat as we are eaten

in the mine there is the music
of the train
and the whistle of the miner
as he walks down the track

deep in the stope there is a song
whose verses are buried in the muck
and the slusher keeps humming
while the skips knock on the guiderails
as they go up and down the shaft

it's just a shallow mine
this open grave
wherein will rest a miner
until nothing is left but bone
white as the day moon.

Metal and the Black Night

2009-06-22T02:19:00.004-05:00

I've spent my time the last few days humbly, reading in the corn garden overlooking the mesas, writing, or, embarrassingly, on the Internet or working out on my host's Bowflex machine listening to metal. I remember seeing them on infomercials and I always wanted to try one out. They're pretty ingenious and fun, like a whole gym in one machine.

I got hold of a Zuni metal band I found on Myspace called Corrupted Vision that plays around the Reservation and they invited me to a house party next week down in the village. I was so excited that I could hardly sleep. So I set up my typewriter on the dining room table and started writing a fairy tale, The Warlord's Daughter, about a beautiful princess born without a womb who overthrows her father. A good father's day tale.

I tried to go to bed around one in the morning, turned out the light and everything, but Guinness the dog needed to go out to pee, so I got up, put on a pot of coffee and like a true bachelor tore into a half-baked batch of brownies the mother of the house had left me. I opened the door to let Guinness out and the black night sucked me out, even though I was shivering in my briefs. The Milky Way stunned me as if cymbals were crashing through the sky. The dust lane loomed through the heavens like a dark sword surrounded with the gossamer filaments of the Orion Arm. The moon is nearly new. Meteors sparked down the edges of the sky. Star clusters (whose light left them when Pangaea on Earth began to split) appeared to my naked eyes. Jupiter's bright disc looked to truly have girth before the points that were the stars.

As coyotes and wild packs of dogs wailed and yipped in the distant bluffs, I thought again how I truly literally cannot see my place in the universe in the city.

The Zuni, A:shiwi

2009-06-20T09:38:00.010-05:00

Nestled in the red banded mesas of Northwestern New Mexico is the Zuni Pueblo, largest of New Mexico's nineteen Pueblos and, being geographically isolated, the most traditional. The Zuni, like the Hopi and other Pueblo Peoples, descended from the Ancient People, sometimes known as the Anasazi. Culturally and linguistically, the Zuñi (according to the Spanish) or A:shiwi (their tribal name, Shi'wi, meaning “the flesh”) are unique among the People probably because of their isolation.

The Zuni have lived in this area for at least 1,300 years. When the Spanish invaded around five hundred years ago, led by none other than the tyrant Coronado, the Zuni lived in six different villages, but after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Zuni retreated to the top of the mesa Dowa Yalanne, Corn Mountain, for twelve years. After the return of the Spanish and a "truce" offered by the general Diego de Varga in charge of the reconquest they came down from Dowa Yalanne and established the present day Pueblo, Halona:wa known simply as the Zuni Pueblo.

Through the continuous attempts of Christianization first by the Catholic Spaniards and later the Mormon and Presbyterian homesteaders, the Zuni have remained autonomous and deeply spiritual. The People of Halonawa are mostly artisans of silver, ceramic and fetishes. The snake and horny toad fetishes my mother bought in Gallup when I told her I was trans were made by a Zuni artist. The snake and horny toad actually appeared to me at dawn the day I was to return to Texas.

Beginning on the full moon, the A:shiwi began their annual fasting in preparation for the summer solstice, called Deshkwi, in which no money can be exchanged. A few days before I arrived, the A:shiwi danced the solstice Rain Dances.

Shevy drove me to Black Rock, a "suburb" of federal housing four miles outside the Zuni Village so called because of the outlying fields of rough volcanic igneous. I will be house sitting for a family who works with the hospital literally up the street. Everything is red except the deep azure of the sky, the ground, the mesas, the houses, the rock half walls and community buildings. From their yard, you can see a dried up reservoir to the East (Yuna:wik'o, Wolf) and to the South (Donashi, Badger) sits the sacred Dowa Yalanne, Corn Mountain, or DY according to the white people. Corn Mountain is a two mile walk from the house.

The father of the household, an osteopath at the hospital, got home late and had to return to the hospital to finish paperwork. He informed me that many of the patients he receives have been beaten to a pulp, mostly from domestic violence, or have complications from alcohol, such as cirrhosis.

At the end of the night, the mother told me that "They really like heavy metal here." Apparently, metal bands play in their garages up and down the street.

I silently rejoiced. How very like home this would be.

The rain woke me this morning, pouring from the downspouts. The midsummer Dances called forth the green. The swallows dipped and glided around the house. I put on coffee and saw young Zuni running through the tall grasses before the red and green mesas, down the foot trails that run throughout the whole area. A Zuni Spirit came to me, a strange centipede with tall spidery legs like an Asian Dragon. The insect clamored toward my toes and then away to the corner of the room.

I pulled a book from the shelf and read of the Spanish Missions, Our Lady of Sorrows, one of which I remember seeing late one night on the way to Candy Kitchen and being spooked like hell. My sister, Sashenka and I had planned to camp in the Manzano Mountains State Park. But it was late at night and the cemetaries and missions that were nestled in with the brown camping signs were haunted with an evil that spooked us so terribly that we decided to drive though the night to Shevy and Max's instead of staying there. This book finally told me why these missions haunted us so. The Native People were enslaved to build these missions, inspired by fear with hanging galleries and whipping posts.

Staring out at dawn on the mesas, I could not help but mourn. But the memories of last night's Rainbow Maidens, sacred also to my Scandinavian ancestors before they too, much longer ago, were subjected as mere savage Pagans, danced in the same sky before the Zuni Mountains. The Rainbow Maidens reminded me of the great Strength.

Flight to New Mexico

2009-06-18T12:36:00.009-05:00

Ma and I arrived at the DFW airport, which is literally the size of Manhattan, early enough to get turned around in the clover weave of terminals and not be late for the flight. We finally reached my terminal and I checked my guitar and backpack right on the street. I bid farewell to Ma and went on through Security.

As my Smith Corona passed through Security, the woman screening flagged me down and asked me to step aside with her. The guy behind me joked, "Whatchu got in there? Samurai swords?"

"Yeah, not too many people use these anymore." I replied.

The Security personnel were friendly and curious. "What is that? Oh, a typewriter? How do you open it? Are you a writer? How old is this thing? Do they still sell ink ribbons for these things?"

It passed the time as they wanded it for potential bombs and bullets, all the while the intercom's insipidly pleasant female voice warned of the High Terrorist Threat Level. "All unattended luggage will be confiscated by Airport Police." The disturbing reality of this Big Brother in airports is always surreal for me.

By the time I was finished with Security and reached my Gate, they were already boarding my group. We buckled in for the flight and the soothing female voice on in intercom stated that we would be landing in Albuquerque in about an hour and forty minutes with the lovely temperature of 64 degrees. Having dealt with the first rounds of near 100 degree Texan weather, all passengers in the plane, including myself, sighed contentedly.

Indeed, the clouds were gentle and cool, with Albuquerque subdued and surrounded by blooming desert mountains. The Century cacti are in full gorgeous bloom. On the way to Candy Kitchen, my brothers and I stopped for a while at a rock shop called Mama's Minerals. Shevy had to pick up jewelry supplies, so we spent a good while browsing. Max and I talked him into getting some hand-carved skull for amulets.

The drive home was pleasant and rainy. They have a new wooden sign at the corner of Sunburst Lane. The gardens that I helped plant before I left in the late spring are sprouting up. I met the new kitten, Aspen, who is a little adorable terror. Shevy made beef fajitas and they caught me up on the latest country gossip.

The pop-up camper is Queen Squishy Cat's abode now, which pleases her because she no longer has to share a trailer with two other cats. She slept with me all night and was very satisfied with getting absolutely all the attention.

This morning we ate fresh bread and jam for breakfast. I stepped out of the trailer with my mug of Yuban coffee and smelled the juniper and sand, sagebrush and wild flowers. Fiddles and lilting voices floated out of the trailer, recalling ancestors from across the Atlantic.

Shevy said in earnest that he missed me and Max gave me a Finntroll shirt, his form of affection. Love welled up in me like blood from a mortal wound. More than any place I've been, this place feels like home.

The wind whispers tales from across the Divide through the pines. The wolves howl at night under the piercing stars. Beetles crawl through the shadows of the gnarled trees, through scraggly orchards and rock-lined beds of kale, cabbage and spinach. The flaming wildflowers are firing up all around the rock shrine circle, erected by my brothers for the ancient Norse deities.

Shevy just made me an amulet strung with leather cord out of one of the skulls and fossils he got yesterday.

Tomorrow I go to Zuni to see the house and family where I will be care-taking a garden, a cat and a dog for the next month.

Texas Rangers Game and the Sunday Brunch Culminating in a Motorcycle Ride

2009-06-15T17:52:00.003-05:00

Saturday Amanda's dad Brad gave us tickets to the Texas Rangers game in Arlington. The Rangers played the LA Dodgers. I had never been to a baseball game before. Sara, Chris, Amanda and I all drove down together. We pigged out on Sonic beforehand. I had chili cheese tots and felt vaguely poisoned with sodium and meat product. But it was good. The Stadium was huge, and walking up in throngs of Texan sports fans, hearing loudspeakers and the Star Spangled Banner, I was struck by the overwhelming feeling of history. Here I was, a country heathen not so well disguised in the midst of the citizens of the Empire in the Coliseum. Between my obvious queer appearances and Sara's loud remarks making fun of the war and some things about Iranians, the large redneck sitting next to Amanda was squirming in his seat. Amanda told Sara to pipe down, "We're in Texas!"

The game was slow. After four innings no one scored. Sara and I mocked the corn syrup content of the margarita drinks being sold by the walking vendors. She said something to the effect of feeling like she was getting diabetes just watching the people eat. One of the lights wouldn't come on so the game was delayed. We entertained ourselves with paper fans folded out of the baseball program. We bounced an alternating oompa dance to the baseball organ. Finally three scantily clad young girls ran out onto the green to toss free shirts at the restless crowd. More cheers erupted than sounded for the actual game. Sara and I donned elitist musketeer accents and said silly things like, "Unhand your shirt, wench!" But no shirts were tossed our way.

An hour and a half later the lights still weren't on so we became bored and left to go drink at home and watch the lightning to the north. Via internet phone Chris retrieved that the Dodgers won 3 to 1 with one home run each. All in all, we had a fantastic time.

Sunday morning Ma knocked on my door announcing the commencement of brunch-making. I helped her make cheddar biscuits while she cooked off bacon, potatoes and eggs. Her boyfriend Gary joined us to eat. It was delicious. The best meal I've had so far, though I have been sampling some tasty Texas wares such as enchiladas, chicken-fried steak, BBQ and fried catfish. My mouth is still watering.

Mom invited me to take a ride with Gary on the motorcycle. I accepted. With my mother calling "Hold on!" we rode off to see the country roads west of Denton. The wind was cool on the sweltering day. The sun beat down and wafted up from the cycle at every stop. Sweat beaded on my back and chest. We rode through wildflowers and past streams. Butterflies and birds flew around us. We stopped to pick horsemint for Ma. He joked about popping a wheelie and I wished he would have. A great blue heron took off in flight at a stream next to us. On the way home he joked that I should jump off a block before and pretend I fell off to Ma. I hopped off ungracefully and presented the mint to Ma.

A nice end and beginning to the week. A nice farewell to Texas, for in two days I fly to New Mexico.

Sired in Storms

2009-06-11T10:46:00.005-05:00

My sister came over last evening with a twelve pack. I'm leaving Texas again in a week. A vague sense of urgency comes over me when I'm about to leave family. I have to keep reminding myself to stay present instead of going over all the things I feel I must do before getting on the plane or the train West.

It was well before dusk when the sky began to darken as we talked over Tecate and through drags of Bugler and Bali Shag. Old fears, old shames, old regrets began to unknot themselves slowly as we spoke. Little whips of wind started up. Lightning flashed in the distance, an odd golden light came from somewhere beyond the clouds. Each flash of lightning left a quick and true smile on my sister's face.

My mother drove up and parked just as we were speaking of the tribulations by fire in which our family was forged. She walked up, sat down. Gramma walked out with the poodle in her arms. Thunder rumbled. We spoke of our blood bond that was smelted in such a furnace that siblings of other families remarked on our powerful alliance with each other. This bond would grow more powerful as we continue to open to one another, as we continue learning to use the hammers and blades we were smithed into for creation rather than destruction or rather than carrying ourselves without use, as if our vigorous inception was a only a burden.

Lightning cracked and the thunderclap came fast behind it. The wind began to rise and out of trees arose the ascending wail of the storm siren. "What does that mean?" my sister vocalized. I said something about a tornado warning. Mom told me to check the weather radar before shutting down the computer. We dashed indoors and there was no tornado, but a wall of high winds and lightning that had already knocked out power, tree limbs and traffic signals. An oil well had been struck by lightning.

We battened down anything that could be blown away, scattering here and there. The rain came down in torrential sheets and the trees began to bow before the wind. I raised my arms to the sky, beamed and yelled out loud, "Now this is rain!" Laughing as the downpour drenched us to the skin, Shannon and I ran around to the back of the house to see the gutter spout cascade an absurd amount of waterfall into the back porch, which was already a few inches deep in water. We came inside sopping wet, slapping drops on the brick floor. We toweled and changed.

The front passed us quickly. We ordered pizza and ran for another twelve pack. Mom announced leaving for her boyfriend's house. She kissed Gramma on the forehead and Gramma mumbled disapprovingly, "Now hurry back." When Mom was driving away, Gramma muttered, "Boyfriends. You can't live with 'em, you can't live without 'em." Shannon and I laughed.

We ate and drank and smoked, listening to tremors of thunder, watching the storm die down and the sun set. Gramma went to bed. My sister looked into my eyes and in her smile was her heart. The beauty overwhelmed me and I spilled over in gentle tears.

We Unashamedly Villainous and Wicked Heathens

2009-06-07T16:41:00.002-05:00

A talk with a dear friend this morning led to the roots of the word heathen. She had heard the word mostly in a socio-political context without the religious connotations. I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and reacquainted myself with the etymology. I looked into similar words: heretic, villain, vulgar, wicked and pagan, to be exact. All except heretic (which comes from Greek āίρετικός, meaning able to choose) have roots in words meaning someone from the country, a rustic, a farmer, a peasant.

The word heathen, dating to at least 971, is the oldest as far as being used to mean a non-Christian. From the OED,

A. adj. 1. Applied to persons or races whose religion is neither Christian, Jewish, nor Muslim; pagan; Gentile. In earlier times applied also to Muslims; but in modern usage, for the most part, restricted to those holding polytheistic beliefs, esp. when uncivilized or uncultured.

The word has generally been assumed to be a direct derivative of Gothic hai{th}i, HEATH, as if ‘dweller on the heath’, taken as a kind of loose rendering of L. pāgānus (orig. ‘villager, rustic’, later, after Christianity became the religion of the towns, while the ancient deities were still retained in rural districts, ‘pagan, heathen’).

The first known recording of word pagan as being a non-christian heathen hearkens from around 1440 in Morte Arture. It is from the classical Latin pāgānus, meaning of or belonging to a country community. It's earlier forms are payen and paynim, meaning the same thing, recorded in a Kentish Sermon around 1275. The word itself probably dates from the 4th century, further back than heathen, but was used before in the Roman Empire to mean just a countryman or civilian.

Vulgar(from Latin vulgus, meaning common people) and villain (from Latin villa, country house, i.e. one from a country house) date from the 14th century. The word wicked (derived from OE wíc, town, village or farm) was first found recorded around 1275, not surprisingly, as an adjective for wifman (wickede wifman).

Well, hell, I'm proud to be among cuntry folk!

The Indigenous Norse

2009-06-06T15:18:00.004-05:00

This is a great blog on the indigenous Nordic people called Saami. The music can be overwhelming, but it's incredibly well-researched, though sometimes translated confusingly. It's multi-lingual and packed with references and photos. Fun! I just wish I could read half the links...

The Saami

My brother in New Mexico is practicing Nordic shamanism. Next time someone says "I have a problem with European Pagans practicing shamanism, isn't that appropriating Native American culture?" I shall refer them to this blog, which says among other things, "Rock carvings and rock paintings indicate that Shaman practicing in the Nordic and the rest of the Saami areas go back to the Neolithic period and even further."

They even used a drum, called runebomme, and a striking Thors hammer rune-carved of bone!

Here's the post on shamanism:

Saami Shamans

And just what, you may ask, do these interludes of science and history have to do with Western Rambling? It helps me put the present in context. Then I can look back later and figure out why exactly a week in the Texas Hill Country in a cabin lit with oil lamps and watered with rainwater catchment, while buffalo grunt outside, made me think of my ancient ancestors in Scandinavia...well, really, it makes sense.

Pappy's Guitars and Cypress Valley, Texas

2009-06-06T09:55:00.024-05:00

My Ma and I drove down to stay with my brother at Cypress Valley Canopy Tours, where he is so lucky to be running a farm. The Texas roads were exciting.

Cypress Valley is a beautiful place, nestled in the Hill Country west of Austin and near the Pedernales River. The creek bed is overgrown with palm ferns and old growth cypress trees, littered with fossils and quartz.

My brother has a cabin out there in a field next to the buffalo with his own (scorpion and hornet infested) outhouse. We used a shovel to dig holes for our business.

I found myself enamored with the buffalo, as if I was seeing an old friend for the first time in centuries. Zeus, who cannot be seen in all his glory, came down to the field as a buffalo, and I was open-mouthed and paralyzed as this god stood before me.

And the farm: My brother Ariel has planted the Three Sisters: corn, squash and beans, as well as tomatoes, eggplant, and an assortment of other vegetables. He raises chickens, two goslings, four top bar bee hives, and helps care for four horses. Every Saturday he takes his produce to the Austin Farmer's Market. I helped him plant, lay irrigation, feed the animals and mulch some beds.

Bees! Yay!

A thunderstorm moved in the night after Ma left and my brother and I stayed up late talking and listening as the wind thrashed the aluminum roof and thunder rolled through the sky. Ariel has an outdoor shower on his porch which I happily used when he was off running errands.

I got to take a zip line tour of the canopy and jump into the lake like Tarzan on a rope!

On a more personal note, just before we came down to the Hill Country, an old family friend had just returned the heirloom Les Paul guitar that our father had promised to my brother Ariel. In a briefly emotional moment, Ariel got to play the guitar for the first time in years.

Likewise, Ariel had a guitar of our father's that I had always wanted to play, a hollow-bodied electric. Ariel never played it on account of having a handmade Rosas from Spain. Ariel entrusted it to me and I took it back with me on the bus.

Thanks, dude. I love you.

Medical Articles on Hormone Altering Chemical Pollution

2009-05-30T13:25:00.006-05:00

According to Peter Eisler of USA Today, "Two billion pounds of insecticides, herbicides and other agricultural chemicals are applied each year to fields, gardens and forests in the USA. That accounts for a third of the $33 billion spent annually on pesticides worldwide."

And in 2003 Bush exempted pesticide companies from lawsuits!

Did you know that the half-life of DDT, the one of the most toxic pesticides ever used, is 57.5 years in temperate soils? It wasn't banned in the States until 1972...

Scariest part is that it will take a few more generations for all of its' effects to blossom, as it were.

I know I've had at least one conversation with all close to me about estrogenic environmental pollutants. Other than pesticides, whats the other huge estrogenic product? Plastic. We put everything in plastic, including our water, which with we absorb toxins through our skin more readily than through our digestive system.

There has also been research on linking higher levels of estrogen to cancer...

Here are the articles...

Developmental effects of endocrine-disrupting chemicals in wildlife and humans.

Compounds in Plastic Packaging Act as Environmental Estrogens and Can Alter Genes in Breast Tissue

Activation of Estrogen Signaling Pathways Promotes Cancer

Is industry creating more trans queers unwittingly through endocrine disruption? Ironically, it's just what mother nature needs for human population control...she is a dynamical system prepared to balance our amplifying feedback loops...

Farm Fresh Organic Produce!

2009-05-29T13:33:00.007-05:00

The first few markets have been slow, but it's given my sis and I a great opportunity to just hang out and catch up on life. But the eggs have been selling like hotcakes... Saturdays 7:30am to sell out! N Locust and Ferguson at Soho Salon near Texas Woman's University in Denton, TX! Come and get fresh local eggs, veggies and greens!

Today I Found an Ancient Scroll

2009-05-28T12:45:00.002-05:00

haha! Our old Dungeons and Dragon's dungeon map!!!

All American Farm Lunch

2009-05-28T12:20:00.003-05:00

Gramma has trouble eating anything that isn't soft on account of her teeth being gone. She likes coffee and mayonnaise and it was a running joke growing up that if you go to her house for lunch she'd offer you SPAM or Vienna sausages in the can (Wienies, she'd call em). I made her this today with veggies and herbs from Cardo's Farm and a package of Annie's mac n cheese. I just chopped the beets and turnips and boiled them in with the noodle water. When the roots were slightly tender, I added the noodles, cooked the noodles in with the roots, then drained it, mixed it up with the cheese, and added chopped fresh dill, fennel and parsley. Gramma likes it better than the blueberries and cheerios she hardly ate this morning. It's half past noon and she's still working on her morning coffee and eating bites between cutting squares for the quilts we're all going to get some year...Christmas 2012?

Home on the Range

2009-05-27T21:25:00.008-05:00

Sis' Prize Turnip
Prize Prickly Pear and White Not-Picket Fence
The Earthbag Dome
Rooster
Skull
The Toilet TP and Guard Eli
Annie the Cow

The Texas Roses are Blooming

2009-05-27T19:48:00.001-05:00

Lightning Storms

2009-05-27T08:31:00.002-05:00

As the sky bruised up with oranges and purples from the setting sun, the air became heavy and thick with humid static. Little lizards scrambled as I opened the door. The flashes and rolls of electric blue were distant. It wouldn't be until later, when I was sleeping in bed that the wind would rear up and Thor would crack the sky with his hammer as if it was a midnight egg.

Why It's No big deal to Miss Portland

2009-05-26T13:17:00.002-05:00

Some things I miss about Portland, OR

2009-05-26T11:35:00.001-05:00

Of Crows and Bacteria

2009-05-25T10:08:00.000-05:00

Sashenka posted these talks from TED. These are really interesting presentations on the intelligence and communicative systems of crows and bacteria, respectively.

Bonnie Bassler on how bacteria talk

Joshua Klein on the intelligence of crows

The Von Raven Legends

2009-05-24T19:17:00.000-05:00

Both my mother and father can be traced back to the raven, a bird of death and transmutation. On my father's side, we have traced the raven quite literally through the name. Before Texas, we began in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Great-grampa lived as well as the two generations before him. I never met him, but I heard he was an amazing old-timer and true cowboy who even had an Indian name: He Who Moves Slowly Through the Woods. My Great-great-great-grampa Ernest Gottfied died in Shelby, Michigan, but had come through New York (where he married Anna Ophelia Greene) from Herne, Germany where he was born in 1836. He was most likely fleeing the German Civil War that resulted in Prussian rule. In Germany they were blacksmiths, miners and papermakers, decidedly working class. Finally, in the deep, dark past of the 13th century, we allegedly hearkened from Ravensburg, Germany, home of the famous knight Herbord von Raven (his castle is pictured above). Most likely he was a brutal landlord who killed Pagans. At Darmstadt, Germany in 1767, a Von Raven founded a Masonic clerical order involving theosophy, alchemy and magic. True to the Masonic tradition, though, the knowledge was kept secret and the inside circle was considered superior to all others. Legend has it that one of our ancestors was a Knight who served in the Middle East in the 13th century, who probably slaughtered natives who didn't worship Christ. Lord...not too much has changed...

On my mother's side, the raven has appeared beautifully (and brutally) in the myths of her motherland.

Our gramma's maiden name was Ramey. The Ramey family, originally Remy, was from France. Many Remys became Huguenots, Protestants who broke away from the Catholic Church and the Pope in the 1400s. They worshiped in secret and began to be persecuted and massacred by the Catholics. Among the other Huguenots in exodus, Jacob Remy left France around 1654. Tens of thousands of our ancestors were killed because they were Huguenots, including Jacob's father, Pierre.

There are possibilities of the Rameys having roots in Gallic Druid tradition, the mysterious, archaeologically controversial, order of mystical healers, teachers and mages. The Gauls were a Celtic Pagan tribe in northern France, Belgium and Rhineland (Herne, where paternal Gottfied was born, is on the Rhine). The word Gaul, like the word Viking, may have been derived from a word meaning "pirate" or "raider". They put up quite a fight against the Roman Empire, much like the other Celtic tribes.

On a side note, I find it interesting that our paternal heritage is, for the most part, a patriarchal Christian order of Germanic Knights. I can almost see them in full pitch black armor on black stallions breathing fire and beheading peasants for the Church. On the other hand, our maternal heritage is one of Pagan rebel tribes, fighting the Church and Empire. I can almost see them dancing among the stones and drinking mead with faeries. But that's an awfully dualistic view and I digress...

Our great-gramma's maiden name was Lankford, which goes further back to Cornwall, the beautiful southwestern tip of Britain. The Cornish and the Welsh are the most clearly descended in blood and culture from the Pagan Iron Age Britons. Folklore speaks of faeries, giants, sorceresses, piskies and small people. The Danish Vikings, who were allies and probably interbred with the Cornish, brought stories of dwarves and elves. In Cornwall stand ancient monoliths testament to Celtic native princes' deeds. Standing stones, called menhir (literally "long stones"), are strewn by the hundreds amongst cairns and barrows alive with ghost and faerie stories. One great granite pillar is named Mên Scryfa or Screfys (which means "written stone").

A passage from Antiquities of West Cornwall by Ian Cooke says of the stone:

The inscription, probably made long after the menhir was orginally erected, reads
RIALOBRANI (Royal Raven)
CUNOVALI FILI ('Famous leader' or 'Glorious Prince')
The raven is a bird of carrion, linked with death and the battlefield and was believed to have magical power for those who worshipped it. The raven is one of the forms taken by the Irish Morrigan, goddess of war and death.

Celtic legend links the name of Bran (in RialoBRANi) to a ancient British warrior king, keeper of the cauldron of immortality, whose decapitated head continued to have powers of speech and was later buried on the site of the Tower of London, where ravens still live. Bran also appears in Arthurian legend under a variety of names and he was a Celtic solar war god.

The story of RIALOBRANI (Ryalvran) is clearly very ancient. An invader attacked the Glorious Prince, seized his lands and occupied the Lescudjack hillfort at Penzance, which protected the harbour. The defeated royalty fled possibly to the area around Carn Euny or the hillfort of Caer Bran (Raven Castle). The Royal Raven tried to reclaim his territory and a battle took place, but Ryalvran was killed and buried by the stone which apparently was the same height as the dead warrior.

The height of the stone that is legendarily the same as the warrior's is nine feet. Other legends say that he was buried with all his weapons and treasures, even that he was not dead but sleeping beneath it, ready to answer Cornwall's call in time of need.

The picture above is 2,500-year-old Chûn Castle, built on a summit near Mên Scryfa where the Royal Raven was buried.

More recently, the myths of the Raven is alive and thriving in Cornwall. This was posted in Gorseth Kernow News in 2002:

Due to habitat changes the Chough (pronounced "chuff" or, traditionally, "chaw") has not bred in the wild in Cornwall for 50 years, but a pair has now been sighted. It is a Raven with a red beak and red legs. The pair are thought to have come from Ireland or South Wales. It has been Cornwall's national emblem for so long that the Welsh word for a Chough is Bran Gernyw (Crow of Cornwall). It is believed to be the guardian of the spirit of King Arthur who will one day return to free his people.

No less...

Transilience and the Navajo Blessing

2009-05-23T20:01:00.000-05:00

The juniper, pine and desert earth smelled of the watery hint of night burning off when we started out in the car to Gallup, New Mexico. Dawn transmuted the sky from jet to azure, the sounds of coyotes to birds. The three of us, my mother, brother and I, breathed in and smiled with the green mesas of the Zuni Mountains while the prairie dogs poked up on the fringes of the road to watch us pass. The day before, we had punctured a tire on a piece of igneous rock in the middle of El Malpais, the volcanic badlands filled with nothing but sharp rocks, cinder cones, spiky shrubs and carrion birds. We changed the tire and were going to get new tires in Gallup. The drive takes about an hour, but we were looking forward to the views and conversation. We would descend about one thousand feet, so the trees and vegetation would transform slightly.

Somehow, we got on the subject of gender and pronouns: the duality of gender in western society. I already had told my brother, who is also transgendered, about my acceptance of my leap across, beyond, over gender lines. A couple of times in the last few days, my mother, who only seen me a few months ago, had not recognized me standing in the yard. She thought I was another man from the community visiting. In a convoluted oblivion of words, I finally told my mother that I am transgendered. I felt I had not told her clearly enough, but my brother was backing me up and she was confirming that something was different. I reminded her that I had not changed, only grown more comfortable with myself and talking about my identity as somewhere between man and woman. Through the car journey, we explained that hormones and surgery were a form of body modification to feel more oneself, not a form of self-denial. She runs a beauty salon and so saw that people liked to shape certain physical aspects to feel beautiful: plucking brows, coloring hair, building nails sets. Make-up, hair and nails are modifications people choose that shapes their gender. I told her I am choosing to pursue taking testosterone to androgynize my body. My brother and I explained a bit of biology and social bias. I recommended a book to her, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights by Deborah Rudacille. Some biologists now say there should be at least five genders. Socially, the Western dualistic power structure, whose proponents feel threatened by feminists, queers and all types of civil rights activists, is rooted in the perpetuation of the view that things cannot change from one realm into the other. The working class cannot be allowed to have the power of the landowner. Women cannot be men. Trans people embody everything that threatens the hierarchies, down to the very notions of what it is to be human. Here's the key, I reasoned to her, I do not want male power, rather I want to destroy the wall. Our explanations seemed to placate her concerns. We approached the city and our conversations drifted to other subjects.

We dropped my brother off at the college, the car at the tire shop, and mom and I wandered downtown Gallup on foot. The sun was relentless and we ran out of water within thirty minutes. A Zuni man stopped us on the street and showed us the stone fetishes he had hand-carved. She was drawn to the snake and the horny toad. The snake was carved in a coil with a feather etched in the side. It represents wind and guards the garden. Snakes shed their skin and snake medicine is the alchemy of transformation. The horny toad is sacred, good luck. When you come across one, you rub it on your heart. She bought both.

We picked up the car and my brother and went for supplies. My brother and I went into Thunderbird, a jewelry supply store, and Ma stayed outside, perhaps to smoke. We took a while inside and when we came out she was seated next to a Navajo elder with his hand clasped in hers and her eyes nearly brimming. Her manner was as if she'd known him her entire life. She introduced us as her sons.

The man shook my hand, looked long into my eyes, and stopped himself from speaking. I was left with insatiable wonder over what he was going to say when he shook my brother's hand. Without letting go, he took my mother's hand and asked us to join hands so he could bless us. We closed the circle and he began speaking in Navajo. The sounds of the language came like a waterfall in a arid canyon as his hands shook from alcohol. A few words were in English, something about Jesus Christ, blessings, a safe journey. Ma let out a sob. He blessed us again, taught us how to say hello in Navajo: Yá'át'ééh. Have a safe journey, he said again, his eyes fervent and smiling.

We got in the car. I was blank with overwhelm. Ma said she had showed him the horny toad and he opened up to her with excitement and rubbed the fetish against his heart. She had told him that our family had gone through many hardships. She had endured decades of a marriage that created an abusive and dangerous home for her children. She told him about a time when a coyote had crossed in front of her. He told her that to undo the mischief the coyote makes when he crosses your path, you must draw a line where the coyote walked across before you pass the coyote's trail. He asked her if she had done that. No, she hadn't, but now she knows.

One hundred and fifty years ago, Navajos were forced to leave their homelands and walk over 300 miles to a New Mexico fort, where they were imprisoned for four years. Thousands died on the journey.

Safe journey, I remember him saying repeatedly.

Two days passed in a daze and it came time to leave New Mexico for Texas with Ma. Our last night in New Mexico we spent in the Valleys of Fire. I still had the blessings of safe journey in my head. The morning we were to break camp in the valley and return to the land of my birth, we decided to take a walk up the hill to the overlook. We walked with the sun up through the stones. Ma kept talking about watching for snakes because she had seen a rattler last time she was here. Sure enough, a snake crossed our path. It was harmless, but it brought my gaze downward, where, just off the path sat a horny toad sunning on a rock . I moved closer and it grasped the ground tightly every time I moved in, but it did not run. Ma said they were docile, you could pick them up and they would hardly squirm, she remembers that from growing up in El Paso. I timidly reached for it and picked it up. It was a little startled but stayed in my hand. I opened my shirt and held it against my heart.

With dawn, the coyotes' howls transformed into bird's cries and the ravens began to feed on yesteryear's shame. That was the day I came home.

Our First Farmer's Market!

2009-05-23T15:02:00.000-05:00

Today Cardo's Sprout Farm had their first farmer's market at the lawn of Soho Salon in Denton! This is the farm where my sister has worked and lived for years. They operate with biodynamic principles, have a cow, over a hundred free range chickens, a garden for the CSA that just started up and wheatgrass and sunflower sprouts. I've had the honor of being more involved volunteering the past four years when I'm not traveling elsewhere, from chicken harvesting to helping with the construction of an earthbag dome shelter. Yesterday I helped my sister harvest and package vegetables, greens and flowers for bouquets and today we ran the very first market day on the lawn of my mother's beauty salon. We didn't come close to selling out, but it's the first day. Also, what's more important is the community involvement, sharing the priorities of growing your own food and supporting local farmers. We sold all nine dozen eggs, all our beets and quite a few greens. The rest will go to charity. We'll have market every Saturday at 7:30am and every Wednesday at 6pm at Soho Salon on the corner of Locust and Ferguson. Sundays are Community Day at Cardo's Sprout Farm in Ponder, 10am to 4pm. Thanks everybody for your support and we hope to see you Wednesday evening!

P.S. check out my brother Max's blog...

http://wyrmwood.blogspot.com/

Conan the Barbarian is from Texas

2009-05-21T13:55:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I found this photo in Gramma's room. She tells me her brother worked on an oil rig in Cross Plains, Texas, where her whole family lived a at least a couple of decades.

Gramma says, "I had one aunt that was with the FBI and she came to Cross Plains and examined a bunch of things. Well, there was all thangs, bootlegging and what all...there was a lot of stuff goin' on about the oil. The guys runnin' the rigs. My brother worked on a rig. That's kinda dangerous work and Cross Plains was a pretty good oil field for a while. There was a boom, what they call a boom, where everybody comes to try to get a job and this and that...It wasn't making mother very popular that her sister was with the FBI. We had to keep a lot of stuff quiet. There was just a crowd that lived in Cross Plains and then there was one that came in, you know, that lived here and there. They were working the oil fields. They were just living kinda, you know, away from home and takin' thuh best of it."

Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, moved to Cross Plains in 1919. Gramma says he stayed at their house for a while. Apparently, gramma's mother Flaura and Howard were friends and shared an interest in writing. The oil rig roughnecks, whose carousing and living outside the law attracted even the attention of the FBI, must have had an impact on his writing, soon to be popular for pioneering an entire genre of swords and sorcery and most famous for his character Conan. There were enough stories in the boomtowns to inspire the weirdest of fantasy.

In 1936, while Gramma was a senior in college here in my hometown of Denton, Robert, suffering from lifelong depression, shot himself with a .38 pistol upon hearing his mother was in a coma. He died at age thirty in Cross Plains, Texas, where my Gramma and her family spent at least twenty years.

To Climb More Trees!

2009-05-21T13:00:00.000-05:00

I climbed this tree today. I don't climb enough trees. When was the last time you climbed a tree?

It's the International Year of Astronomy!

2009-05-21T10:44:00.001-05:00

Check out this website! It's a beautiful collaborative project by scientists from around the world, designed to bring astronomy to the masses!

Portal to the Universe

As a kid, I avidly learned the constellations, kept journals of the moon phases and followed the planets as they moved through the sky. One year, my parents got me a cherry red handmade ten inch reflector telescope on a Dobsonian mount. It came with the complete volumes of the Burnham's Celestial Handbook. I now had an excuse to get out of the house at night!

In 1994, when I was thirteen, the skies implored me to look repeatedly and I have not stopped watching since. May 10th, 1994, I watched the annular solar eclipse with my family through a piece of welder's glass. I sketched the sun every few minutes until the eclipse passed completely. Later in July, I watched the larger fragments of Comet Shoemaker Levy 9 hit Jupiter through "Cherry", the telescope. Like the 13-year-old I've been since, I let out cries of "Whoa!" and "Dude!" as dark plumes of impact the size of Earth spread across Jupiter. The estimated energy equivalent of Fragment G was 6,000,000 megatons of TNT (about 600 times the estimated arsenal of the world). Then, that August, the Perseid Meteor Shower rained hundreds of fast, bright meteors through the sky, caused by particles from Comet Swift-Tuttle burning through our atmosphere at around 132,000 miles per hour. One large fireball seared halfway through the sky, left a vapor trail that stayed for seconds after it burned away and could be heard crackling through the air!

In March 1996, the Comet Hyakutake passed very near Earth with its incredibly long tail, becoming the brightest comet seen since Comet West in 1976. Then almost exactly a year later the extraordinarily bright Comet Hale-Bopp passed Earth with its amazing display of split dust and ion tails. If Hale-Bopp had passed as close as Hyakutake, it would have been the brightest comet ever witnessed through human recorded history.

I feel lucky to have witnessed these things firsthand, not through books or television. These experiences allowed me to begin feeling like a part of the universe.

Earth is such a beautiful cell, but the body of the universe is magnificent, so keep looking up!

Ma and Gramma on Love

2009-05-20T21:49:00.000-05:00

Ma, aged a year shy of fifty, whirls up and cries to Gramma, "Oh, Sara, I think I'm in love!"

Gramma, aged three years shy of one hundred, replies, "Oh no, well, you'd better think!"

We didn't have a TV then, but we had a Commodore 64...

2009-05-20T20:44:00.000-05:00

Yeah, you weren't the only one, everyone had a mullet that year.

Evening with Gramma

2009-05-19T21:35:00.000-05:00

“I can see my fingers. They look pretty awful. They look like carrots. They really do look like a bunch o' carrots.”

“Well, it looks just like what it is, a pile o’ mess. We don’t know what we’re doin’ with all these squares. I guess we’re making a quilt…three quilts.”

Candy Kitchen, New Mexico

2009-05-19T14:04:00.001-05:00

Candy Kitchen is named after the Candy Kitchen Ranch at the end of my brother's road in the Zuni Mountains of northwest New Mexico. According to legend, in the prohibition era Candy Kitchen Ranch made candy as a front for a speakeasy operation. The candy store accounted for all the sugar they were buying to make booze. The ranch is now a wolf sanctuary, so at night you can hear the dissonant howls of the pack on the hill.

My brother and his partner live in an old Spartan trailer with their three dogs, Hansi, Ogi and Sparky, two cats, Squishy and Thorne and some odd chickens.

I stayed long enough to help them haul water a few times from the neighbor's well, plant a bed of cabbage, chard and kale, dance around a maypole, help install a swamp cooler in their trailer, milk a neighbor's goat, drink the rest of Max's homebrewed honey beer and catch a meteor so bright in the ink black sky that I could see it crackle, break and vaporize.

I left Candy Kitchen for north Texas a week ago. The smell of juniper and the sounds of ravens' wings stays with me even though I'm now surrounded by the lush Texan jungle of this year's rainy spring. If I stayed too long my feet would begin to root with my heart there. Ah, but brother, my heart is a colony...

I do feel more at home out there in the country than in the city. This realization has been dawning on me for a lifetime and is now becoming too powerful to ignore. Yes, I am excited about returning to study at the university, yes, I am in love with the libraries, but as a permanent home, I cannot take the city. Since I was little I knew that what I wanted was to learn food and shelter for myself. The greatest pain in studying history was recognizing that most of the peoples of the world have been subjugated and homogenized by the empires of the earth. To a certain extent the schools and libraries are struggling to replace the learning that we have lost from the oral traditions of our elders. It's not that this education is necessarily oppressive or meant to belittle traditional knowledge. But, separated so far from our native knowledge, this booklearning is the closest we can come to learning again what we have lost from tradition. Closest, of course, next to listening to nature around us, to what the trees and animals have not forgotten, what the stones have held for longer even than the trees.

Gramma's Ninety Seventh Birthday

2009-05-18T17:32:00.001-05:00

It's been a beautiful and crisply cool day for mid-May here in north Texas, so I drove Gramma and the poodle Elliot around my hometown Denton, where she graduated college. She always talks about the University of North Texas and, as she graduated in the 1930s, it has grown a lot since she had been there. It's been the rainiest spring in about one hundred years, so the grass and trees are green, sprouting against the clear blue sky. Gramma put herself through school in the middle of the Great Depression, graduated with a degree in art and managed to get herself a job teaching in west Texas. She's an amazing woman who, with her knit hood and wooden staff, looks every bit a wizard sage. We ate homemade pumpkin ice cream from Beth Marie's and sat on the old 1895 Downtown Courthouse lawn.

She recalls, "I was in a dorm just one summer. One of the girls staying in my dorm was in the New London School Explosion. Her roommate was just gone. She had found her roommate and put her in the car and made her look like she was drivin' the car. I guess you just don't know what you're doin' with somethin' like that. You see she shoulda been helpin' people instead of doin' somethin' crazy."

At the time in 1937, the New London School Explosion was the second deadliest disaster in Texas after the Hurricane in Galveston of 1900. A gas leak caused the explosion and 298 people died. It was after this disaster that the foul smelling mercaptan began being put in gas so that its odor would give away the leak.

"My dad was a Methodist minister. He retired from an injury in the Spanish American War...One time he was walking along Octavia Street in Denton (Octavia street is actually in El Paso, Texas, where she moved in the 1950's) just a huggin' another man. Turns out they were in the war together."

"We (she and her parents) had a boarding house. It was just a little boarding house but it was for college boys...and one of the boys got married and brought his wife over. When they left, the girl started drivin' the car. That was the biggest sight. They didn't know what in the world to think...That was just a treat to see a girl to drive a car. It wasn't long after that that I drove a car."

"When I was out of school I wanted the biggest salary I could get. My first teaching job was Monahans, TX. Shoes, tires and 'bout everything were rationed. I think gasoline was too. You just couldn't buy stuff like that...people that were in the army, they could get around but...I had to drive across Texas and I had three flat tires. I had to buy them on the black market. By the time I had my third one I was almost there. I just got out and walked the rest of the way into town."

"There was a carbon black plant there (in Monahans). So there were lots of young men. I took my meals with a young lady and she had those men over too. Some of 'em didn't have to go (to war), cuz they had important jobs for America like gas...But most of 'em did go."

"I went with a bunch o’ girls who wanted jobs (to the Pyote Air Base). I went out just to be with 'em, I didn't want a job. But the man wanted me to drive a scooter on the base. He wouldn't take anyone but me. I told that man I didn't want a job and he said, "Sign that girl up!" Army guys do any kind of way, I do believe. But I did like that job. All I had to do was deposit the money at the bank on the scooter. I had about more guards than needed. 'Bout ten guards."

"Funniest thing that happened to me in Monahans was at the airport (sic). Well, I was drivin' a scooter and the soldiers went all at attention to watch me on the scooter...and boy, did they laugh when the dogs got at me on that thing. They just stood at attention and laughed. They really did think that was funny. A girl drivin' a scooter and a dog after her. They prolly got reprimanded for it."

She worked on the Rattlesnake Bomber Base in Pyote, Texas. It was constructed in 1942. After WWII, more than 4,000 bombers and planes, including Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb, were sent to the base to be melted for scrap.

"During the war, we (she and her first grade class) went out into the field to pick up iron and they put it on the troop trains to make ammunition."

"The air base was pretty big. A lot of 'em got killed just trying to learn to fly. That was differn't flyin' than flyin' for pleasure. I was drivin' from Monahans into Pyote and one pilot landed his plane in the middle of the road in front of me."

"I was a USO girl. Not a very good one, but...you had to be (in the USO) to go to some of the dances and I really liked to go dancing so...The air force was always pretty good at payin' for things. They could get whichever band they wanted...more than some of 'em. But they'd get the best. You met lots of people but they were just here one minute and gone the next. That was the bad thing about that. Maybe they'd be there long enough to be there for the date and be gone that afternoon. They went straight from that place to where they were goin'. In the air force you don't wait for a troop train, you just take off in a plane. Get back the next day. Maybe. Maybe you'd get back. It was pretty sad."

"But we won the war."