quizzical sense earth far more fascinating place than allowed it to be
In my reading I often come across a short collection of words by an author and I say to myself. that might work as a haiku if I could connect it with something.
In my adventures, I often come across a scene and take a photo and I say to myself that might work with a haiku if I connect it with something.
We had taken a walk today along what is called Fish Haul beach on the north end of of Hilton Head Island.
This is the location of the one of the first successes the Union Army and Navy had back in 1861 in the Civil War.
You can look out over the waters where Port Royal Sound and the Atlantic Ocean come together and I said to my wife that take away the few cottages you could see, and this is what it looked like back then except there were 40 warships under sail, moving a circle as they fired some 4000 shells at Confederate forts on the Phillips Island to the north and Hilton Head island to the south.
The shelling lasted about 4 hours and all the Confederates ran away.
“And nothing has changed,” I said again.
It was an extremely low tide and we were able to walk further back along the salt marshes behind the beach front.
We came to a pond that we have looked at for years but never from this side before.
There were dead trees and reeds and marsh grass and sea shells.
It was place and a view new to us.
And I thought …
In a few hours, the tide will come and rearrange all this.
Nothing in front of us will stay the same.
This view, what we are seeing, will never been seen in this way again.
And I thought of this passage from True North by Jim Harrison.
“ … [the] quizzical sense that the earth was a far more fascinating place than I had allowed it to be.
I was not inclined at the moment to blame anyone else for the number of ways I had been single minded in the wrong direction.”
I told my wife I wanted to stay at the point until the tide turned and wait as long as possible amd leave just before the tide cut us off.
I wanted to see it.
My wife stared at my and shook her head and walked back the path out of the marsh.
I have this quizzical sense that the earth is a far more fascinating place than I had allow it to be.
I am not inclined at the moment to blame anyone else for the number of ways I had been single minded in the wrong direction.
briefest moments can have explosive power that overwhelm the times
Back to Jim Harrison, but then I am driving to work so Mr. Harrison is much on my mind when I sit down at me desk.
In the sometimes painful book True North (Grove Press, 2005), Mr. Harrison writes:
The easily perceptible linear thread through our lives causes a basic misunderstanding when we tend to give the same weight to years, months, and days.
The briefest moments can have an explosive power that overwhelms the time around them including what preceded them.
It occurred to me that my own point of view was unique on earth but this was not a comforting idea. Wherever I stood and looked I was the only one there.
The easily perceptible linear thread I thought was very good especially on a warm humid morning in January in the Low Country of South Carolina.
I drove the east towards the ocean into a thick fog bank that reduced my world to about 10 feet in front of me and 10 feet behind.
Nothing was easily perceptible.
Everything was hidden, even the great Atlantic Ocean that covers 20 percent of the earth’s surface.
I got to work and parked in the quiet of a gray, wet morning in January in a summer resort town.
Quiet.
But there was this sound in the background as I walked the path to my office.
I couldn’t place it.
I figured out that through some freak of acoustics in the fog, I could hear the ocean.
Couldn’t see it, but I could hear it.
Moments that can change lives can cause a basic misunderstanding when we tend to give the same weight to years, months, and days.
Our own point of view is unique on earth.
Wherever you stand and look, you are the only one there.
But keep in mind this.
In one of Anthony Bourdain (if there was ever a literary complimentary combination like that of bacon with eggs it would be Bourdain and Harrison) shows, Mr. Bourdain spent the day with taggers, those folks who decorate subway cars in New York City.
These fellers described how they would paint a car in a certain pattern and then sit in a certain location with their buddies, a place were their point of view was unique on earth, and wait for hours and hours for that specific car with that specific pattern to come by.
Sometimes, when a train with car showed up, it would be going the wrong way and the pattern would be on the side away from that their point of view was unique on earth.
The briefest moments can have an explosive power that overwhelms the time around them including what preceded them.
And sometimes, those moments are facing the wrong way.
The truly goofy part of my illustration of the taggers is that THEY KNOW they missed the moment as they say the other side of the car.
How many moments, explosive moments, come and go, never revealed.
Can you march to a different drummer when you don’t hear the drum?
Lots of thoughts for a foggy morning.
To be honest, I just liked the painting Mr. Harrison did with his words.
I continued down the beach past the path to my tourist cabin toward the estuary of the Sucker River a mile or two distant. The moon’s sheen on the water followed me as I walked for reasons not clear to me. It occurred to me that my own point of view was unique on earth but this was not a comforting idea. Wherever I stood and looked I was the only one there. The few sounds of the village diminished, and I mostly heard my feet in the damp sand, and then a loon call ahead in the estuarine area. To the left far out in Lake Superior the lights of a freighter made their slow passage to the west. I heard a coyote out on a forested promontory called Lonesome Point and single dog.
the meals in your life are numbered and the number is diminishing
Food.
Jim Harrison.
Guilt.
Great way to start the day.
I live in a country that is somewhat obsessed with cooking, eating, weight and weight loss while at the same time unthinkable numbers of people, children, unthinkably go to bed hungry.
I read and enjoy the author, Jim Harrison but of late I have been listening to his work while I drive to work.
Audio versions of a book make sure you hear every word.
I think I have developed a mental screen that allows me to read Jim Harrison and filter out the worst of Mr. Harrison’s … earthy soliloquies* … while focusing on his word play, sentence structure and word painting observations on life that make him one of my favorite authors.
When I LISTEN to his work, read out loud and mispronounced (If I hear MACK-i-NACK one more time …) you cannot ignore those earthy soliloquies and gee whiz but he can get to the edge of social ridiculousness and go over.
And starting my day thinking about food and Mr. Harrison leaves me with a feeling of guilt.
So what to do?
Should I feed the hungry?
Should I make an apology for Mr. Harrison?
And I have only been up and about for 30 minutes.
So I heave a sigh and I say out loud a line from the Savannah based movie, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
The line that goes … “Two tears in bucket … mother f*ck it.”
(Okay so I faded on spelling it out … but it’s a word we have all heard)
And I am going to comment on the dinner my wife made last night.
And I going to quote Jim Harrison without apology.
Last night my wife slow cooked a pork tenderloin in barbecue sauce and made pan fried sweet potatoes with Parmesan cheese and served it with rice.
There are meals where I can lose myself in the food, the flavors.
I look up, mists clear from my eyes and time has passed and my plate is empty.
I think of that Ben Franklin quote, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy.“
There are times when I feel that way about food.
I remember the place in the Bible where the picnic cloth filled with food comes down in front of Peter and God says, “don’t say anything I made is bad.“
There were no man made food additives or improvements included in that spread.
Nothing ‘fat free.’
Nothing ‘reduced calorie.’
Take and eat, said God.
I enjoyed my dinner.
I was reminded of other good, great meals, both simple and extravagant in my life.
I wondered how many have I had?
How many good, great meals does one get to eat in life?
I thought of a line from Clarence Day’s Life with Father where Mr. Day writes, “I adjusted my cap and walked on, thinking over this future. The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be a civilized man. After all, I had had a very light lunch, and I was tired and hungry. What with fingernails and improving books and dancing school, and sermons on Sundays, the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man got to eat were not worth it.“
Then I thought … How many good, great meals do I have left to eat?
And I thought of this passage from the 2011 essay, Chef English Major, by Jim Harrison that is reprinted in A really big lunch(New York, Grove, 2017)
Cooking becomes an inextricable part of life and the morale it takes to thrive in our sodden times.
A good start, and I have given away dozens of copies, is Bob Sloan’s Dad’s Own Cookbook. There is no condescension in the primer.
Glue yourself to any fine cooks you meet.
They’ll generally put up with you if you bring good wine. Don’t be a tightwad.
Owning an expensive car or home and buying cheap groceries and wine is utterly stupid.
As a matter of simple fact you can live indefinitely on peanut butter and jelly or fruit, nuts, and yogurt, but then food is one of our few primary aesthetic expenses, and what you choose to eat directly reflects the quality of your days.
Your meals in life are numbered and the number is diminishing.
Get at it.
Have to admit food is not the part of my life that it once was.
Sorry and sad to say that since moving to the south and its pollens and mud flats, my nose is not what it was and flavors are not what they were.
Oddly I get the subtle flavors of seafoods like shrimp and scallops over the blunt heavy flavors of a good steak.
Lucky for me I live near the sea.
Nevertheless, I appreciate food and the good foods and flavors that God has packed into that picnic cloth.
Again, I thought of a Jim Harrison passage.
It is a from one of the first essay’s of Mr. Harrison that I read and one that got me into the Harrison’s camp.
This is from the 1989 essay, Hunger, Real and Unreal that was reprinted in Just before dark : collected nonfiction, (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1991)
.. one day at lunch I told some plumpish but kindly ladies what I thought was a charming story of simple food. One August, years ago, I was wandering around the spacious property of a chateau up in Normandy, trying to work up a proper appetite for lunch.
Two old men I hadn’t seen laughed beneath a tree. I walked over and sat with them around a small fire. They were gardeners and it was their lunch hour, and on a flat stone they had made a small circle of hot coals. They had cored a half-dozen big red tomatoes, stuffed them with softened cloves of garlic, and added a sprig of thyme, a basil leaf, and a couple of tablespoons of soft cheese. They roasted the tomatoes until they softened and the cheese melted. I ate one with a chunk of bread and healthy-sized swigs from a jug of red wine. When we finished eating, and since this was Normandy, we had a sip or two of calvados from a flask.
A simple snack but indescribably delicious.
I waited only a moment for the ladies’ reaction. Cheese, two of them hissed, cheese, as if I had puked on their sprouts, and wine! The upshot was that cheese is loaded with cholesterol and wine has an adverse effect on blood sugar. I allowed myself to fog over as one does while reading bad reviews of one’s own work.
I read this bit to my Mother and she laughed and laughed and laughed, shaking her head the way she could.
Let me circle back and sum it all up.
Food is a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy, but the few chocolate éclairs that a civilized man gets to eat may not be worth it.
So?
Quoting Mr. Harrison again, “Eat the delicious fat and take a ten-mile walk. Reach into your memory and look for what has restored you, what helps you recover from the sheer hellishness of life, what food actually regenerates your system, not so you can leap tall buildings but so you can turn off the alarm clock with vigor.”
Hoffman Family Picnic – 1964
*scenes of a sexual nature that may or may not have anything to do with the plot …
piled ice, snow, every thing looked raw except when you knew what it meant
There wasn’t even a trace of green in the landscape but then it smelled like spring in the fifty-degree temperature and the sight of the mounds of snow on the north sides of houses, shacks, and log cabins, and the drifts along fence rows, and the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan and the ice piled on shore on the westerly sides of the forested peninsulas out into the lake.
It was more the contrasts in the present that attracted me to this paragraph.
Its a line from the fifth Brown Dog Novella, He Dog, by Jim Harrison.
I grew up in Michigan.
I grew up in West Michigan when the Lake Michigan was a 45 minute drive away and more times than I can remember, I made the drive out to see Lake Michigan covered in ice.
Trips to the ice do stand out though.
Once when my wife, then girl friend, said to me that I was going to get her out on the ice.
Then I pointed out to her that we had been walking out on the ice for a couple hundred yards.
There was also the time I went through the ice when I was about 12.
I yelled HELP, I’M THROUGH THE ICE and my brother Jack, who had driven us out to the lake so was nominally in charge yelled IS HE KIDDING.
My brother Pete got to a place where he could see me and his eyes bugged out and he yelled NO!
My point being that when I read, “the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan and the ice piled on shore on the westerly sides.”
But that isn’t exactly accurate.
I mean I wasn’t reading.
I was listening.
I was listening to the audio book as I took a lunch time walk at work.
In my head, I was along the frozen shoreline of Lake Michigan.
My feet were making their way towards the Atlantic Ocean.
Both places were about 55 degrees.
I heard “… the sight of the mounds of snow on the north sides of houses, shacks, and log cabins, and the drifts along fence rows, and the glistening drift ice far out on Lake Michigan.” I saw the December empty streets of a summer Resort and then the glint of the sun off the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
The beach was almost empty.
I don’t know what Kings and Presidents get paid or how much money those billionaires have, but I don’t think they get to walk along an empty beach at lunch time too often.
It was quiet.
I could see forever out past Tybee Island.
I could hear the waves.
I could hear the putt putt of a shrimper going past not too far off shore.
I could hear the gulls.
It all sounded a but raw except when you knew what it meant.
present hard enough to deal with – couldn’t handle notion of future
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort. The more central struggle in life was between water and beer. Too much beer, he knew from many years of experience, tended to be hard on the system.
Once again another quote from The Brown Dog Novellas by Jim Harrison, New York, Grove Press, 2013.
The Brown Dog Novellas is an anthology that contains all five of the Brown Dog stories and as those read this will be aware, it is the book I am listening to as I drive to work.
Since the first thing I do once I get to work, after I make sure my computer and all the other tech stuff I need for day is up and running, is to think about writing this.
Mr. Harrison’s words are fresh on my mind.
I am in an office on the knife edge of America.
A couple of blocks from me is the Atlantic Ocean.
As Mr. Thoreau said I have the rest of the country behind me.
A couple of blocks from me is the Atlantic Ocean and sitting at my desk, looking at a computer screen, I could be anywhere else in the world.
And the words of Mr. Harrison are fresh on my mind.
I read all the Brown Dog stories when they were first published and I must have read then all dozens of times.
It was reading the first Brown Dog in Woman Lit by Fireflies and the passage where Brown Dog is driving the ice truck down the hill in Grand Marais, aiming to make it into Lake Superior, that I knew Mr. Harrison and I would be get along.
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort.
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time is a quote somehow connected to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson but I have not been able to trace this to an actual citation.
There is a ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ quality to both statements.
The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future.
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
Someday I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.
I guess it is good to remember that there is no place like home.
