Category Archives: Rural Life

The Soundtrack of Life

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This is the Flying J Travel Plaza in Winnemucca, Nevada. I’ve pumped a lot of gas here. This was the first gas station where I noticed music blaring out of overhead speakers. Whether you’re in the mood or not, vintage pop music invades your space. Most of the playlist harkens to my high school years and it seems to be all the songs I tried to avoid. As I fill my tank, I glance up at the looming black speakers and wish the fuel would pump faster. “Please let me get my gas and get out of here!” I plead to the cosmos. Why must some of the worst music ever made live on, and on, and on?

Since the sound system at Flying J shoved its way into my consciousness, I’ve become more aware of the music that lurks in stores. The offerings in small towns across the Intermountain West focus on classic rock, country, or pop singles from the last century. This background music has invaded my foreground. It makes me melancholy, a strange emotion to associate with an everyday shopping trip to town.

I inadvertently found my way out of the music-induced malady at the library. It was the last stop on my errand list. I’d never paid much attention to the library’s collection of music CDs but the cover of one caught my eye. Six guys, dressed head to toe in colorful robes, scarfs, and turbans, stood under a tentative-looking tree. A playa stretched out behind them toward desert hills. The cover type was not in English. It said Tinariwen Tassili +10:1 in letters that looked like the kind spray painted onto shipping crates. I was sure I’d never heard a song off this album during high school, or anytime since. I checked it out, took it to the car, and popped it in the stereo. Let’s just say Tinariwen drove the muzak out of my head in a hell of a hurry.

I never knew I liked Saharan blues music but this nomadic Tuareg band from North West Africa understands how to sing the desert primeval. The one song with a scattering of English lyrics describes the singer’s enduring love for the jealous desert and closes with the sound of the first rain in five years to fall in southeastern Algeria. Anyone who’s lived through drought can relate, no matter where their desert lies.

Tinariwen writes the soundtrack for the Ténéré, the desert of all deserts. But now they’re part of the soundtrack of my life too. They’ll never make the playlist at the Flying J, but that’s okay. Now when I’m there, I leave the window down and the stereo blasting, just to neutralize the ambient sound waves while I fill the tank.

 

Twenty Thousand Invitations

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Will you ever bring a better gift for the world

than the breathing respect that you carry

wherever you go right now? Are you waiting

for time to show you some better thoughts?

~ William Stafford

Music students at Sisters High School in Central Oregon were offered a chance to put a William Stafford poem to music. The assignment grew out of a statewide celebration of Stafford’s 100th birthday. The students, all members of the Sisters Folk Festival’s Americana Project, performed their compositions at the Sisters Library on January 26. I wasn’t prepared for what happened.

Several of these teenagers created songs with such brilliant phrasing, one felt Stafford must have meant these poems to be sung all along. The musicians entered the poems and danced around, exploring the acoustics. For two or three minutes, they became Stafford, there in the room. I remember leaving the concert thinking, “I want an assignment like that!”

But adult life has a way of descending into mediocrity. Our artistic souls get lost in the chores.

But wait. Isn’t that what Stafford refused to do? He woke up and wrote every morning before dawn, whether he felt like it or not, whether he had an “idea” or not. He crafted essential poems before most of us were awake. He was a conscientious objector to mediocrity.

But that’s not really it. One of the meanings of mediocrity is to be ordinary. Stafford relished the everyday, the blessed ordinariness of life. He was suspicious of the precious. So, what makes his work so compelling for me?

I’m intrigued that he gave himself the daily assignment of being a witness. He got out of bed in the dark and set about appreciating what he’d been given to work with. He ended up writing twenty thousand poems. Only a fraction of them became refined enough to publish, but he welcomed them all. And in many of his poems he invites us to give it a try. Wake up and welcome your thoughts — all of them. William Stafford has written us twenty thousand invitations.

Horticultural Espionage

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I was once a spy. I guess that’s what you’d call it. I agreed to smuggle seeds. This wasn’t contraband. These seeds weren’t illegal. It was more like a hostage situation. These seeds needed liberating, and I was just the person to do it.

My mission? Obtain a dozen chestnuts from two venerable trees growing along an obscure back road in California’s Mother Lode. I was to locate the sixty-foot-tall trees and keep watch on the ripening nuts so I’d be there when they plummeted to the ground.

Why? Back then, a large commercial nursery claimed to be the exclusive source for ‘Colossal’ chestnut trees and charged exorbitant prices for their nursery stock. A handful of scrappy organic farmers decided to bring ‘Colossal’ back to the people. It’s what Felix would have wanted.

Pioneer horticulturalist Felix Gillett birthed the ‘Colossal’ chestnut in his Barren Hill Nursery in Nevada City, California. A French immigrant, Felix began importing plants from Europe around 1870. He undertook an ambitious breeding program in which he crossed the best of European and Asian varieties with native North American stock. The results rocked the early California agrarian world. He’s been called the father of most of the perennial crop agriculture in the western United States. But unlike his contemporary, Luther Burbank, Felix Gillett’s contributions were largely forgotten. Which is ironic considering that hundreds, if not thousands, of his trees continue to produce fruit in backyards and backwoods to this day.

Just ask organic farming guru “Amigo Bob” Cantisano who, for the past forty years, has searched old homesteads and mining settlements for hardy survivors of the plants Gillet offered. Amigo Bob found so many of these heirlooms that he created the Felix Gillet Institute to document, propagate, and sell again Barren Hill Nursery’s hardy stock. (I suspect Amigo Bob is channeling Filex Gillet.)

The parent trees I gathered chestnuts from thirty years ago are still alive and healthy. They still drop seeds so hefty that a tree squirrel would be advised to wear a helmet during harvest season. I didn’t think my efforts to get those chestnuts into the hands of budding agricultural preservationists was any great feat, but recently I noticed ‘Colossal’ seedlings available from at least a dozen nurseries in a wide range of prices, coast to coast. What do you know? Our grassroots horticultural community is keeping Felix’s vision alive — and I was a small part of it.

Mission accomplished.

Wassailing the Orchard

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There must be thousands of ways and reasons to light up the long dark nights of winter. In the western islands of Europe, where most of my ancestors hail from, they lit bonfires in the orchards and wassailed the trees. Wassail comes from the Old English meaning “to be hale” or “be whole”. The islanders toasted the health of the trees and asked for an abundance of next year’s crop.

Unfortunately, my ancestors didn’t do a good job of keeping this tradition alive when they came to America several centuries ago. But why should that stop us? Wassailing is too much fun to lose in the dim recesses of our ancestral past. How does one go about reviving a vague agricultural tradition? Well, there’s quite a discussion about wassailing on the web. We are not alone! It’s ironic and encouraging how well modern technology works to preserve archaic practices.

So, we cobbled together a wassailing ceremony to bless our little orchard of apples and apricots here in the high desert. We lit a fire, ate popcorn, drank hot spiced cider and shared it with the tree roots. Each person thought of a blessing or a wish as they visited each tree and tied a piece of yarn to a branch. We sang wassailing songs, and made noise to drive away any bad spirits. Finally, our youngest family member climbed the strongest tree and left a piece of toast dipped in cider high up in the crown. Afterwards, we huddled around the fire as the cold night settled around us. No one wanted to go inside. We couldn’t stop watching the sparks drifting up toward the crisp stars.

Next morning, I crossed the frosty grass to admire the trees festooned with scraps of yarn — the cheery affirmation of our relationship. We take care of the trees, they take care of us. I thought about how every bright strand secured a wish. The orchard will glow with our benedictions until spring birds take the faded yarn to build their nests.

 

The Lowly Rock Jack

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When the ground is too sandy or rocky to sink a fence post, you gotta come up with an alternative. A wire basket filled with rocks is the favored solution around here. Throughout the West there are variations on this theme. Where wood is plentiful, the rocks might be corralled in a square or triangular box.

Different regions have different styles and names for their rock-assisted fencing contraptions. I’ve heard them called rock jacks, rock cribs, or gabions. There are probably more names than that. I like rock jacks. It seems to match their utilitarian nature and appearance.

Most rock jacks are hardly noticed as one speeds past them mile after mile across the rangelands. But there are a few out Steens Mountain way that rise above the ordinary. Leave it to those Oregon buckaroos to jazz things up with an occasional hubcap.

 

God’s Magpie

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 Between
Your eye and this page
I am standing …

Bump
Into me
More.

~ Hafiz

I’ve heard it said that our eternal life intersects our mortal experience every moment. We’re seldom aware of it but every now and then we’re offered a glimpse of this expanded dimension. It’s possible to come around a bend and … surprise! Your eternal nature greets you — your forever friend. Something like this happened to me when I met Hafiz for the first time.

Hafiz lived in the garden city of Shiraz in ancient Persia. He left his earthly body in 1389 AD but his physical departure hasn’t stopped him from scattering his crazy, funny, spiritually sane ideas over the earth like a continuous meteorite shower for the past six hundred years. Why hadn’t I encountered this luminous outpouring before? I must have been ripening toward an appreciation of Hafiz’s shoot-the-lights-out approach to celebrating the Divine.

Why
Just show you God’s menu?
Hell, we are all
Starving —
Let’s
Eat!

~ Hafiz

Hafiz and I met unexpectedly — of course. He wouldn’t have it any other way. On a summer road trip from Northern Nevada to Colorado Springs, I stopped at a Trappist monastery outside of Old Snowmass in the Colorado Rockies. Saint Benedict’s is both a working ranch and a retreat center. The monastery cultivates hay, contemplative prayer, and silence. They also have a small bookstore which is where my rational mind said it was going. (I’ve always been a fan of Thomas Merton — a Trappist monk — so I figured I’d buy one of his books.) My heart, however, suspected this rationale was  a bunch of hooey. My real reason for visiting was a fascination with the monk’s commitment to keep conversation to a minimum. Writers tend to cherish places where silence has the upper hand.

I followed the gravel road to a cluster of buildings sheltered in a grove of fluttering aspens and gregarious magpies. No one else was around. Walking up the path, I followed signs to the bookstore and opened a heavy door. Peering in, I saw light from a wall of tall windows washing over shelves and tables loaded with books — my heaven.

Thomas Merton made a good showing among the metaphysical titles, but so did Mother Theresa, the Dali Lama, and Rumi. The Catholic monks of St. Benedict’s had eclectic taste. It was a contemplative’s candy store. So many points of view! So many prospective guides! I told my mind to shut up — and my heart to speak up. I was honing in on something …

Next to Rumi lay a mustard yellow paperback with frilly Victorian-style graphics. This? It looked a little stuffy and academic. I was skeptical. 

I almost judged the book by its cover but something compelled me to look inside. After reading a smattering of poems, I fell under Hafiz’s spell. He made me laugh. He made me think. He showed me the hidden world in plain view. Here was my beloved in a future life; a brother from before we were born; a companion I’d always sensed but never known.

I put the money for the book in a small wooden box the monks had left for that purpose and hurried outside. I needed a place to land. A few wooden camp chairs waited beneath the aspens. A magpie alighted on the back of one and then took off. I nestled into that chair. It looked across the high mountain valley toward Mount Sopris. Taking a deep breath, I opened the book and dove in …

 I am
A hole in a flute
That the Christ’s breath moves through —
Listen to this
Music.

 *
Why complain about life
If you are looking for good fish
And have followed some idiot
Into the middle of the copper market?

*

The
Great religions are the
Ships,

 Poets the life
Boats.

 Every sane person I know has jumped
Overboard.

 That is good for business
Isn’t it
Hafiz?

See what I mean? No piety here, but an infectious honesty whose cackling irreverence reveals the sincere reverence of a true pilgrim. That summer afternoon, I wandered in these heady poems for hours as thunderheads billowed above me unnoticed — until it started pouring.

The rain reminded me that I needed to continue my journey but I left that remote valley far richer than when I arrived. I’d spent the better part of a day touring eternity with my new friend Hafiz, the Sufi magpie. What an eye-opener.

Listen: this world is the lunatic’s sphere,
Don’t always agree it’s real,

Even with my feet upon it
And the postman knowing my door

 My address is somewhere else.

 ~ Hafiz

(Some critics claim Daniel Ladinsky’s English translations are more Daniel than Hafiz. For me, it doesn’t matter. I admire the teamwork between the 14th century mystic and the 20th century craftsman. Together, they rock.)