Tote That Pack, Run That Dog

Spring is sneaking up on us this year.  Cagy critter not taking any chances that we will get all carried away and try to turn dirt in the flower beds or the garden.  Tess and I have been walking all winter along the Bitterroot River in Hamilton.  Yesterday felt like spring might be hatching.  I stuffed a little weight in my backpack, grabbed a water bottle (Tess can drink out of the river), found a little bag of jerky and we were off for our first five-miler of the year.

I drove the SUE BLUE RUE to a game and fish fishing access, parked and Tess and I piled out as if we were heading into the Bob Marshall for a week.  Bridge to bridge I estimate a five mile hike for me and twice that for Tess of course.  All went well, some aches at sundown and a pill each and we slept like babies.  I'm going to try to do every-other-day like this for a week to give Tess a chance and, well, me too ya know, to get the hang of it.  I'll keep increasing my pack loads and soon get her a pack to carry her food for those two or three day hikes I'm planning now and then this summer. 

So, the real work begins for a summer of Travels with Tess. 

Winter Passing The Baton

I hear the cars going past this little house I rent on Main Street.  A rash of snowstorms plopped down on Hamilton like a child jumping into his parents morning bed.  Buried for days it seemed; all white and shovel bent the neighborhood worked away at it daily last week.  The enthusiasm for shoveling was out of nostalgia that, "It only lasts a few days.  We don't get much snow in Hamilton, you know?"  Yet, by about day 10 of snow every night and shoveling the fluff of it every morning the snow carolers came later and later to the sidewalks of Main Street to meet their public obligation of clearing the way for the odd pedestrian.  And now, today, the slush sounds like a concert tympani section giving its cymbals irregular dulled collisions as the slush is thrown against my car and the neighbors and the rest.  Rain, too, gets in the mix and, "She is a mess out there, Tess.  We should wait for our walk today.  Maybe post a blog to slow us down a bit."

I welcome the finish of it.  Winter is not my friend so much anymore.  It's beauty never frowns or smiles as Baudelaire would say of "Beauty".  And soon it'll be dry as hell and turning toward hot and the sullenness of this little valley will return to its comfortable prognostications of what is "normal".  

I have enough to do rain or shine.  Shine is nice though as Tess comes home from the "run" a bit more wore out and not quite so muddied as she'll be later today sniffing the rivers edge and calibrating every organic bit of matter that comes within nose range.  If noses were Glocks, we'd all be dead, given dogs like Tess with her absolutely certain sense of smell.  I wondered about that yesterday with my cribbage partners at the River Rising Coffee House.  "What if we could see smells?", I asked them.  "Well", one responded, "we can see some."  I could not answer this.  I did not have the data he did for such a response.  I did suggest we could see things that smell.  "But", I continued, "What if we could see the smell itself? Wouldn't our world be a bit tipsy then?"

It reminds me I have to get busy on a poem that came knocking on my noggin in thoughts of death the other day.  No!  I'm not lingering there in the graveyard much anymore, but people keep dying in the neighborhood and their obits seem to want me to read them, especially those young lives lost that had so much more going for them at 21 or so than I did.  And now they will not flower as I once did.  While now I find myself in the vase on the mantle a bit dehydrated from neglect, petals dropped and brown, calyxes curled to a crisp. "What if our soul is outside our bodies? What if everything outside our bodies is our soul as we like to imagine a "soul" being a something or other that has a type of permanence?"  I know, I have to think about the frailty of that brain fart.  But, when they come, I'm lost for a while in thought about the idea until I figure out whether the poem really wants out or is just teasing.

All my teaching says to look "in".  Now, I'm pretty certain after so many years of getting data from "out there" and so little from "inside" to work with, I can only assume I'm on to something worth a few lines and a bit of dream-scaping.  As this body that drags my brain around gets into shape for the last kick at the cat and I don't sense a soul so much "in there", just thoughts and memories and some days some serious gurgling from my guts I get a tingle to write to the soul that might be "out there".  And maybe that old adage that, "Her soul has left her" is a bit short on the answer.  Maybe it never was in her.  Maybe it was always out there and that's why our brain keeps poking us to get off our asses and get out of the blackness of the interior and get hunting for sun-ripened huckleberries this late July.  I know when Mike is picking and eating hucks there ain't no doubt in my mind that his soul is rubbing off blue on his fingers as he stuffs his face in the bear's patch on that far away rim overlooking the Clarks Fork Valley below his perch on high.