(BP) July 7, 2014
Note the short form of the date: 7-7-14. Huh? Pretty simple math there. I'm more amused by how those 7s keep popping up in my life. I remember a bright warm July 7th day in the Year 1977 (77 back then) when I lucked onto my first crane nest in a marsh on Crex Meadows State Wildlife Management Area near Grantsburg, WI. I took Lyn to see it or maybe she was my luck that day. It's too long ago now.
Today, I'm typing this blog post from my new house in Klamath Falls, Oregon. I probably would have waited for another day, but somehow the magic of the date forced my handand here I sit writing something, maybe nothing poignant or enlightening (that's probably redundancy itself in those word choices, but on I go).
It's hot here these past few days. When I moved here I had checked the monthly average temperatures and I'd like to remark now that average temperatures for a day or a month or a year remain meaningless. When you live a day in a place with a history of average temperatures on the books you find that this 99 degree day is way off the average temperature for the month of July in Klamath Falls. In person, one could wonder why the hell I picked this spot to live in, when I could have lived anywhere I could afford the rent and that works out to be just about anywhere on a city to city basis. (There's a ghetto in just about every city these days you know and I can afford rent in a ghetto). Tess, poor Tess is in a "Dog Days" frame of mind and activity. She rises, moves around the house, twirls a bit and lays back down as if she might have found an escape from the heat her coat holds against her pink skin. I try to imagine how hot it is inside that dog that uses a tongue for an air conditioner while our entire skin has the ability to sweat and, given some air movement, cool us down. I should buy her an air conditioner, give her one of the spare rooms in this three bedroom house and treat her like the dignitary she believes she is around here. The nights are supposed to be in the low 60's this week. Moving toward the high 50's as the week melts away.
I just now finished a reading of Pablo Neruda's poems; "Odes to Opposites" selected and illustrated by Ferris Cook and translated by Ken Krabbenhoft. Whoa! I'm still in a state of 'stundedness' which is not a word probably, but who says it ain't? I get my organic juice from such reading. Damn! He just takes a word, like; "Spring" or "Joy" or "Secret Love" and writes these 'follow the bouncing ball' kinds of poems of which any one of them would allow me to wrap up my poeting career before my death and sail off into the sunset grinning like the demon I am suspected of being cloaked in my heathenistic birthday suit. Ahh, but Neruda's not like that. He's like Walt Whitman in his commitment to 'his song' and that it might just be important that somebody reads it, absorbs it, reacts to it in a joyful manner and lives happily somewhat thereafter. Neruda can't help himself he writes to us. He has to do this writing life he's lived. He gets up early, writes and throws the musical score of his words out there hit or miss, for better or worse, for richer or poorer until death do take him apart. My reading is, for me, like playing a game a bingo where at the end of every poem I yell out; "Bingo!!!", but no one hears me and I don't get a pile of cash or a free pass to the next pancake and sausage breakfast put on by the Knights of Columbus. I get a vortex in my gray matter and I have to shake my head in disbelief of his effort to make me understand what he calls his calling, 'writing about the wonders of the world' just for us. I'm too stupid to be a poet. That's why I call what I sometimes do with words in a free-verse poetic format, "poeting". Yes, that makes me a work in progress rather and a polished gem like Neruda. He writes poems. I write at them. Like an amateur archer shoots at a target with a "bullseye". My target is a flushing out of my collected memory on a subject with hope of a "hook" somewhere near the end that will make me joyful and maybe someone who reads it will admit that they "get it" (what ever that means).
So. Here I am. Klamath Falls, Oregon or Bust for at least a year (or I pay a penalty for breaking my 12 month lease). I seem to have lost my sense of migration. My focus on "migrating" until I find a home: My "boll weevil" experience has ended for the time being (that's us humans you know, "time beings"). I'll admit to some projects in the works. A memoir about my dad's life of course. That is crawling along at the speed of a tortoise, but it's on my mind often. I'll keep at it and have to return to Minnesota for a bit more genealogy work and some verification of the lies I'm telling in it up to this point. Books take time and money. We'll see which I run out of first.
I also have this nifty project going on Norman Maclean's story; "USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook and a Hole in the Sky". That is a great story and of course I left all the data for that one back in Hamilton, Montana. A great excuse to go back there and dig a bit deeper into the history of that story so I can produce something to satisfy myself for what Norman's writings have meant to my desire to be a writer.
The latest find is a story poem about the Japanese bomb balloons they sent our way toward the end of WWII. Near here is Bly, Oregon where a monument commemorating five children and a Sunday School marm. All were killeed when they found such a balloon and it exploded after one of them messed with it while on a picnic in the woods about 10 miles NE of Bly. I was consumed by the little history I found on that event and have now laid down and outline of a multi-part poem to keep that story alive as it deserves to be written about for it's irony if not it's tragedy. They were the only war casualties on American soil during WWII. I'm closest to the data for that piece so it'll keep me digging here for the joy-juice I need to finish that project.
Yes, that's why I'm here. No matter where I stopped in my migration, the purpose was to enter the writing life and pay my dues until I get released from this desire I have to write, to be a "writer" even if this blog or some e-Book is the result of my time and effort. I mean what else do I really have to do I? f I can get a jazzed up about dates like 7-7-77 or 7-7-14, I mean, come on...
So here's to a great adventure almost finished. I plan to travel to Portland, OR; Olympia, WA; and Marysville, WA yet this summer, but I've already driven back to Hamilton and picked up my belongings and toted them back here to KFalls. I'm settling. "Sticking" is what it's called out West. Yet, as Ry Cooder keeps singing in my ear, "How can you keep moving if you don't migrate too", seems to rise up within me every so often and if it don't stop I'll be "on the road again". We'll see or at least I will. I'm not sure who is reading this or paying any attention to this one man band. STOP.
