The other day, I met a bear… September 14, 2012

Yesterday there was a bear up a tree in someone’s yard along the main drag out of Niwot, CO, the little town I live in.

A lot of wild creatures have been driven down from the mountains into the more populated flat areas, since the recent heat and fires have brought difficulty in finding food. Bears need to stock up their fat supply for the coming winter’s hibernation. You can already feel fall crackling in the air here.

Police tape was up and officers patrolled around the fenced yard all day, to keep the streams of watching people at bay and the traffic moving.

Instead of shooting the 300-pound male down with a tranquilizer gun (which would undoubtedly leave him seriously wounded from the high fall), officials there said they planned to wait till night when all the two-leggeds left for bed and just let him come down. I praised the Fish & Game guy for that choice and told him I felt reassured by it. He looked surprised but pleased.

And the strategy worked! The bear was gone by morning.

Wonder where he is now?

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The great photo above is by Matthew Jonas, as published in the Times/Call, a Longmont CO online newspaper.

No wonder the bear has that look on his face – there were loads of paparazzi, including myself. But the best of my iPhone pix only show a dark blob:

If you want to keep bears away from your home, don’t leave out delicacies that will likely attract them such as tasty, fat-laden birdseed and fruit that has fallen from trees. Or if you would like to attract ursine visitors, go collect these from your neighbors and strew them about now.

By the way, you do know that old call-and-response camp song that the title of this post refers to, right?

Derecho July 2, 2012

East of Niwot, Colorado, at the edge of Hwy 25, I may have experienced the early wisps of the powerful storm known as a “derecho.”

My friend Maria Gutierrez and I had just gotten out of the car to enter a coffee joint when a few raindrops began to hit us. We noted this as welcome coolness from the ongoing heat.

A couple of moments later, as we were choosing a table to sit at, the building we’d entered was suddenly slammed with crazy howling winds slinging rain and mud. The winds were so strong that men could not open the glass doors inward against the pressure. We were all trapped inside the building. (Of course, we did have coffee, so this could be worse.)

Out the other window, the one toward the freeway, we could see things flying by. Lots of things; large things. I was glad we were no longer driving in my little car – it could easily have been pushed across the highway into the other lanes by that intense wind. The sky looked dark and striated, like films I’d seen about tornado weather.

After awhile when the winds had passed, the first new people coming in commented, “What on earth happened to this building?” I went outside to look. Both the entire building and all of the cars outside, including mine, were absolutely covered in thick mud. Wild!

Later, I read in the news that an enormous storm had caused a state of emergency across a wide swath of the U.S. on June 29, 2012. Called a “derecho,” it was said to have spanned from the midwest on to Washington D.C. – but I think we got the beginnings of it in Colorado. I have certainly never seen anything like it before.

Above is a photo of the storm in its glory from NWS meteorologist Samuel Shea.  More images and videos can be seen here: http://bit.ly/OQnljC

Rocksong October 10, 2010

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Tonight I go alone

to the Stone-People-Lodge

To the drumming in the lodge

To the people calling, chanting

down the bones of ancient eagles

and the deities of granite near

a pregnant fir tree humming,

offering sap that danced out freely

in the Dreamtime of our mothers

who perceive us in their future

which is Now, as we are waiting

in their lodge of seven colors

like a rainbow bridge of feathers –

insubstantial in our bodies;

only present in our yearnings

in our brayings

in our dreamings; there

our bodies they are gleaming

with the cleansing

and the healing

and the long-awaited joining

with the elder tribal peoples

sister raven

grandma mugwort

So then will come the sound of angels

tying all our lives together

in the falling of their fire

and the raindrops in their wingsong

Burning breathing

smokedeyes squeezing

as the tears release from from spirits

at the deaths of all our baggage

We are joined by silver navel cords

to all of Our Relations

we are dancing in the Moebius strip

of despairing elation

Dance the memory of Realtime

Dance the flow of sap in pine trees

Dancing out of sacred lodges

in the sun,

never alone.

***

This poem was written to the sound of an internal rattle while waiting for a ride (in a shopping mall, of all places) several hours before I was to go into my first Inipi ceremony with the late Wallace Black Elk. Everything that came in the poem also later came to pass in the tipi.  It was nice of the spirits to provide a program!

Art Car September 2, 2010

The Leafy Wonder! Owned by Tom Devlin. Head Car-tiste: Tina Fields.

How does an art car get born?

Like a lot of interesting things in this world, this one came about through a series of events which culminated in serendipitous beauty, but originated in what could reasonably be seen as small disasters.

Act I

Hanging out playing music in the back garden at a friend’s harvest party, several of us were suddenly disturbed by the sounds of a car screeching and crashing. At first the sentiment of most was that we shouldn’t go out there, since that might seem invasively gawking, even ghoulish. But since I have a bit of emergency medical training, I went out to the street to see if anyone was hurt – and discovered that one of the cars that had been destroyed was mine. An elderly gent had had some sort of stroke and lost control of his car. First he glanced off the side of one parked car on the side of the road, then embedded his Prius into a second car further down. The impact pushed that car (which turned out to be our fiddler’s) forward, where it whacked into a third car – mine. My mind later reveled in the oddness of this: a four-car wreck with only one driver involved. While safely parked in a suburban residential neighborhood, my beloved Jeep Wagoneer got “totalled.”

The word is in quotes because that Jeep was a 1987 model and thus made of steel, so even though the Prius that did the deed crumpled up like an old aluminum can, the only real damage to my Jeep was a tightly fitting front fender with a slight hunchback, a mushed-in back fender, a hatchback that would no longer stay shut, and broken left tail lights.

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Jeep, “After” repair. (Note the foreshadowing here.)

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However, due to its age and the little detail that it had around 276,000 miles on it, the insurance company reckoned it would cost more than the car is worth to restore it to pristine condition. But it was still in beautiful condition and ran well. So while I agreed that trying to bring back its flawless youth was silly, I still wanted to be able to drive it awhile longer without getting a ticket or asphyxiating.

So I bought my own car back from the offending driver’s insurance company (!) and with the money, purchased the needed replacement parts online from a dedicated Jeep junkyard. All I needed now was skilled mechanical help to put it back together.

Act II

My friend and former colleague Tom offered to do the repair work. Because our place of work had closed down and we were both pretty broke, he generously offered to do this labor for trade.

My trade would be to turn his VW bug into an art car.

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Tom Devlin with his bug, before…

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This car was one ugly beetle. Its exterior was half a sickly jaundiced yellow with some primer sections and some black spots and some old reddish patches that looked for all the world like old dried blood. And to top all this off, it had a smattering of enormous black rubber spiders glued to its hood. I wish I had a close-up – wait, no I don’t. Major creepy!

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I figured I was doing a public service in catalyzing this vehicle’s transformation to beauty.

We talked about a leaf motif.

Tom had the idea of covering it with REAL foliage, like a moveable jungle planter! Imagine driving down the road on your daily commute. Getting hungry while stuck in traffic? Simply pluck a fruit from the vines growing on your fender! Ahh. While amused and somewhat enchanted by this idea, I was thinking that there is no practical way for such a thing to endure the windspeed of car travel.

But it turns out that others have dreamed the same dream.

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In the end, however, we decided that painting was the way to go.

Act III

We did some research into materials and wound up buying regular semi-gloss outdoor house paints, albeit the most eco-friendly sort we could find. I chose the hues. In preparation, Tom sanded and primed the bug, taped the windows, and gave it a base coat of the light yellow. Meanwhile, I drew leaves in three sizes and shapes, one for each color, then cut out foam stamps of them for folks to easily use.

Then we held an art car painting party.

The invitation to Tom’s friends and family read:

Invitation to Join In on the Creation of an Art Car!!!

Tom Devlin’s Bug will transform into a Leafy Wonder under our hands

Sun Sept 14

11 am – done

[address]

All art materials provided.

Beverages & munchies welcome.

Wear paint-friendly clothing.

rsvp/questions beforehand to the head car-tiste Tina Fields, [phone #]

[Directions to site]

***

***

We were too busy to take many photos, but here’s one of the car in progress. It was a real community affair. Tom’s mom is stencilling on the hood. I’m placing the flow and hand-painting in leaf edging details on the driver’s side. Several other car-tistes also had a hand in it. When the day’s work was done, we all enjoyed a table laden with celebratory potluck goodies.

Tom later completed the fenders and worked his wizardry on other details as well, including juicing up the interior some.

Act IV

Here’s the final product on the streets!

The Leafy Wonder! Owned by Tom Devlin. Head Car-tiste: Tina Fields.

***

Tom’s renovated bug received many hearty resurrection welcomes, transformed as it is from the decaying insect underworld into the Leafy Wonder, a lovely Art Car. He gets comments about it everywhere he goes – and now, they’re exclamations of appreciation.  Plus as a bonus, he can always find his vehicle in the parking lot.

Postscripts:

* Tom is all fired up about this and now wants to make more of these. If you want to have an Art Car Party too, write me and we’ll set something up!

* Postscripts to Act I:  Aside from a couple of bruises, the elderly gent did not seem hurt by the accident, which had taken place at a very slow speed. We found out his address – just a few doors down – and fetched his wife, who hadn’t known he was out with the car. The ambulance came shortly thereafter. His Prius, which took the blow for him, was *truly* totalled.

* My Jeep wound up lasting one more year, then I traded it off in the Cash for Clunkers program. The gummint gave me $4500 in trade for it. (Woo-hoo!) I was quite sorry to see it go to its death – it still looked beautiful, ran well, and might have still had another year left on its transmission; but then again, it might not. It would have been better, I think, to put those old cars to some limited use, perhaps with a special “clunker” license plate, rather than destroy them. But this Jeep was exactly what the program was intended to bring in. It had been a good car that served my family and others well for 22 years.

RIP, beloved 4-wheel drive and hello, new Honda Fit in the appropriately named hue of ‘Revolution Orange.’ This is my first new car, and also my last. By the time “Acorn Squash” is 22 years old like the Jeep was, I figure we’ll not be using cars any more.

But for the time being, along with walking and biking and train riding, etc., when we use our cars, we may as well enjoy them. It felt great to extend the life of a beloved old car like this VW bug, and through simple and inexpensive artistic means, to help others appreciate it too. It was also great to barter time and skills, thus enhancing both our lives without the need to involve money.

May the Leafy Wonder enjoy many more springs.

Wild Horses August 1, 2010

I was born in that most unfortunate time for birthdays in this culture, smack dab in the dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s. Nobody wants to have parties then; they are partied out and waiting only to rally one last time on New Year’s Eve. Kids born around this time of year get a single “Christmas AND birthday” present, unlike those born in times of holiday famine like August (unless you count the old pagan celebration Lughnasadh/Lammas, which no one does except me and a select few of my choicest friends.)

But I was fortunate: I grew up in northern Nevada. Yep, you heard that right. It was great. For the winter holidays, my folks and I would get into the frosty car with a thermos full of hot chocolate, and drive around the desert to see the Xmas lights that people had erected on their houses. There were competitions between entire neighborhoods to see who could put up the most spectacular light show. And the desert air is so crisp and clear that each light shone gloriously, no matter how small.

But the main reason it was cool to be in Nevada for that is that after the periphery tour, we had the downtown casino lights to go see as well – which, in my child’s mind, left all of the homemade Santa tableaux in the dust. They were spectacular! My parents thought this a ridiculous idea since these lights are up year-round, but they endured indulging my desire once or twice.

Instead of complaining about the lack of official parties, I used to pretend to myself that the light show was all in honor of my birthday. Even if it’s silly, still I think there’s some psychic benefit to be had from turning a story toward maximum joy.

***

One year, when I was grown and feeling nostalgic for this ritual after my folks had moved away, I asked a friend to take me around to see the holiday lights on my birthday. He generously opened the door of his nice pickup truck, and off we went to Hidden Valley. This was the ritzy area of town where the wealthier folks really strutted their holiday stuff.

As an aside, I always wondered where people keep all the decorations during the off season – I mean really, you’d almost need a second home just to store it. There were enormous 12′ Santas complete with sleigh and the full contingent of plastic reindeer; rows and rows of huge light-up styrofoam candy canes lining their walkways; artificial trees large enough to sport beach balls as decorations; several windows full of animated dolls all lit up, running lights spelling out “Merry Christmas” and “Joyeux Noel” and “Feliz Navidad” and “Ho Ho Ho” and “He Is Risen!” but interestingly, we never saw “Happy Hanukkah” or Merrie Solstice” or “Have A Pleasant Enough Kwanzaa.” Nevada is a conservative state, after all, albeit with libertarian dreams.

But I digress.

So we’re driving around, looking at the lights, which really were spectacularly beautiful; colored gems glowing like hope in the clear crisp air. Sometimes I love American excess. And suddenly, I saw a horse in the front yard of the house we were looking at. There was no fence. “Whoa!” I said (no pun intended). “Someone’s horse got out. We should help. He could get hit.”

“That’s a wild horse,” my friend said. “They’re a nuisance out here.”

“Stop!” I urged.

He did. It was, after all, my birthday.

I got out of the truck and walked slowly toward the horses, taking a sort of edgewise path toward them so as not to startle them.

When I got closer, I could see that there were a number of them: they were a small herd. Their hooves crunched in the snow and their breath steamed in the cold air. The people in the house a few feet away remained oblivious to their night visitors, sealed in behind their closed curtains. I felt amused by the horses’ apparent enjoyment of the taste of winter lawns and hedges. This was one of the best uses I’d seen lawns put to yet.

I slowly approached the horses. The head stallion moved to check me out, keeping himself between me and his mares, ready to give the call to flee, never taking his eyes off me.

He lowered his head to catch my scent. I decided to make it easy for him. I stopped moving and deliberately breathed a slow breath out in his direction. He stopped. Then he gave a breath. He took a small step closer. I mirrored him, taking a few slow steps closer too. He backed up a step, then stopped, but stretched his neck in my direction.

For maybe five minutes, we slowly came toward each other in this dance. Bit by bit, he let me approach. Once I reached out my hand toward him, but he didn’t like that, so then I kept them at my side.

When I got within a few inches of him, I stretched out not my hand but my head. I looked him in the eye, and then I breathed into his nostrils like horses do with one another. He looked surprised. He reared up a bit, then settled back down, snorted, and breathed back into mine. It was then my turn to be surprised, as we continued to breathe into one another’s nostrils, sharing this breath.

He did not smell like a regular horse. He was also shaggier than a domesticated horse, and stockier in build than I’m used to seeing. Mustangs are descended from Iberian horses, so it’s said. He was indeed special; something different and wild. Perhaps it was his diet that gave his breath this distinct scent, or perhaps something of his mixed genetic code, or of his wild spirit – who knows?  I just know that this silent sharing of breath was one of the most lovely birthday gifts I could ever receive, and I felt that it was a very positive omen for my new year of life to come.

We stayed together for what felt like a long time, or perhaps outside of time, just breathing. He then let me gently touch his soft nose and rough burred mane with my hand.

My friend, emboldened by my fortune with this horse and the continuing nearness of the herd as they witnessed their leader’s response to me, decided to approach as well. He, too, wanted to experience communion with a wild stallion or mare. But when he came within around ten feet of us, they suddenly scattered and ran.

This was many years ago, but I’ve never forgotten it. Growing up in Nevada, the wild mustangs had always run in my imagination. Now I knew one much more intimately, as well, and felt blessed by the encounter.

***

For years now, the wild horses have been captured by the government agency Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and sold off to the highest bidder who can use them as they will: love them as pets, break them for use as laborers, or, after one year of ownership, sell them as pet food. The BLM rounds them up with helicopters, deliberately causing terrorizing stampedes in which many individuals get harmed and families are destroyed. After capture, despite a real attempt to give good care, numerous horses die in the holding pens.

To me as a native Nevadan, it’s a bit heartbreaking to see the mustangs penned up out there in the desert where they used to roam free, their own sovereign nation. They are pictured on the Nevada quarter-dollar, a symbol of our own freedom. Some say they are an invasive species, which would be technically true since they were brought to this continent by the Spanish sometime around the year 1500. For this reason, they say, the horses have to be removed. Of course, most of the people who are saying these things are not exactly native to the area either. The real reason for the capture is economic: the feral horses compete with subsidized cattle for the sparse grazing available on our federal lands.

But many feel solidarity with the horses, and are working to keep them free. One such is the popular childrens’ author Terri Farley, who was also briefly my writing teacher years ago. It was she who brought my attention to the following article from the Lompoc Record, July 30, 2010:

Wild horses, elder stallion friends "Commander" and "General." (Photo by Laura Leigh)

Return to Freedom wins control of 8 wild stallions from BLM

“Eight wild stallions captured this year in a Bureau of Land Management roundup in Nevada’s Calico Mountains have been rescued by Return to Freedom’s American Wild Horse Sanctuary near Lompoc.

Return to Freedom placed the winning bids for the horses in an online BLM auction, said Neda DeMayo, founder and CEO.

“These elder stallions represent leadership and wisdom for the Calico herds,” said DeMayo. “These noble horses, once free on the range and now held captive, symbolize the tragedy of the federal wild horse program.”

Return to Freedom will try to reunite the stallions with their mares and restore, if possible, some of the family bands that were destroyed in the BLM helicopter stampede, she said.

“This rescue is a gesture of restitution for what has been taken from these horses and an affirmation of our commitment to fundamental change in the BLM wild horse program,” DeMayo said.

Between Dec. 28, 2009, and Feb. 4, BLM captured 1,922 horses from five herd management areas in the Calico Mountains Complex in northwestern Nevada. More than 140 horses died as a result of the roundup and an additional 40 heavily pregnant mares spontaneously aborted, according to DeMayo.

In April, Return to Freedom partnered with Soldier Meadows Ranch, which owns lands and grazing allotments adjacent to the Calico Complex, to offer a proposal to return many of the captured horses to the range. The proposal would provide a cost-effective model for on-the-range management of wild horses in order to avoid mass roundups and removals every few years, DeMayo said.

Although BLM did not respond promptly to the offer, the agency has recently indicated a willingness to meet, she said in press release issued Friday.”

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To learn more about the wild horses and their current situation: http://www.wildhorsepreservation.org

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Beautiful Allergens June 21, 2010

Once I was camping on an offshore island in the Atlantic when we learned a big hurricane was due to hit. Being a westerner with experience in earthquakes but not in hurricanes, I felt great trepidation about this. We listened to emergency radio broadcasts so we could determine where our location was along its path, and decided to hunker down there rather than risk the ferry ride back over open sea to the mainland.

It turned out that the storm had begun to turn aside a few hundred miles below ours on its path out to sea, so we only got smacked by the tail end as it curled on by. But holy cow, even that was unbelievably windy and wet. I was sleeping outside in a zipped-up bivy sack, and at one point it felt like I was parked beneath a waterfall; like someone was standing directly over me and dumping buckets of water out right above my face. The hurricane’s power was awesome and the experience the fodder for some great complaining adventure tales. (As all travelers know, the most miserable experiences make the best stories – after they’re over.)

Later, back in a town, someone pulled up satellite images of the hurricane. The point I’m getting to is that when we got to see the storm from the perspective of above instead of in the middle of it, my attitude toward it changed. When seen as a whole entity, this hurricane was an enormous creamy white and blue moving spiral, like a galaxy made of water. I was awestruck. If I had to die young, I thought, a person could do worse than to be done in by such glorious beauty.

Yep, this is the one! Hurricane Dennis, 1999. (Image: Wikimedia commons)

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As above, so below; in the small the great. Relatively few of us get smacked by hurricanes, but many of us suffer from allergies.

Now the magic of electron microscopy can show us the beauty in this as well.

Sailing the tiny seas, “Micronaut” Martin Oeggerli has found a way to capture these gorgeous photos of pollens, showing us a glimpse into one of the remotest ecosystems left to explore.

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Forget-me-not pollen (Image: micronaut.ch)

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Sea Pink [Grasnelken

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Daisy pollen (Bellis perennis). (Image: micronaut.ch)

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What is pollen exactly?

To put it in simple terms, pollen is a seed plant’s equivalent of pre-ejaculate and sperm. (If you’re shocked, go further and ponder Loren Eiseley’s mind-blowing notion that flowers invented sexual desire as we know it! But I digress.)

Pollen consists of powdery grains and a hard shell that holds them; you can imagine it as being sort of like a capsule vitamin. The pollen grains (microgametophytes) produce the male gametes or sperm cells, and the pollen shell protects the sperm cells while they’re being transported from flower to flower. The pollen grows on a flower’s stamen (the part in the flower’s center that sticks out like a penis, capped by the anther), and are taken by bugs, birds, winds & sniffing noses to another flower’s pistil or carpel, the the equivalent of a yoni with its ovary buried deep inside.

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Flower parts (Image: http://www.uic.edu/classes/bios/bios100/f05pm/lect15.htm)

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As nature loves to experiment, pollen grains show as much diversity in their sizes and shapes as mammalian penises. Some pollen grains are equivalents of whale or horse penises, large and smooth; others like cats’, small and barbed. Some pollens are shaped like balls; others like coffee beans, dragonfly heads, or doughnuts, all of which can be witnessed below:

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Petunia pollen grain (Image: micronaut.ch)

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Babiana (S. African plant) pollen grains on an anther. (Image: micronaut.ch)

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Pine tree pollen

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Pollen grain from an Akazia or Myrtle Wattle (Photo: micronaut.ch)

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You might think that the prickery looking ones would cause the worst allergies, irritating the sinuses. But surprisingly, some of the smooth ones are terrifically allergenic to humans. Witness the Alder tree’s pollen:

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Oeggerli’s photographs, more of which can be seen at his site, www.micronaut.ch, offer this small consolation:

Pollens might make our noses miserable, but hey, at least they’re beautiful.

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Birch pollen grain (Image: micronaut.ch)

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Women’s Laughter June 7, 2010

I recently returned from a weekend trip to Nevada City, where I called a contra dance. This sort of gig is not at all worth it if you think only in terms of money: the pay barely covers the gas for the 7.5-hour round trip drive. It’s a community service, really, albeit a joyous one. But in terms of friendship? Priceless. Serve your community, get served back – with a cherry on top.

What a delight to make new friends with the Monterey-based band The Crabapples (excellent trad music made by smart, funny, warm-hearted people). How lovely to breakfast on what must surely be the best waffles in the universe, containing nuts and mystery ingredients including sweet potatoes, for God’s sake – whoever heard of such a thing? – and covered with strawberries fresh-picked from the garden and blueberries too and yogurt and real maple syrup, made by my medium-old dancing friends Eric Engels and Lisa Frankel (medium-old in terms of how long known, not geriatricity), while sharing stories around a table set for ten.  And how wonderful, on the eve prior, to re-connect with very old friends Kate Winningham and Glen Garrod. I co-raised Kate’s oldest child back in the end times of Disco. You know that it’s a heart connection when you don’t see someone for 13 years, yet being with them again is as easy and sweet as if had only been yesterday.

During the visit, Kate gave me a copy of this poem. It kinda sums up one of the great delights of my life – and hopefully yours, too.

(If you are one of the women with whom I’ve laughed like this, consider this post a big fat thank-you specifically for you. If not, pass it on to your gigglesisters. And when are you coming over here?)

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Women’s Laughter

Talking the night away

Kitchen sink humour

Laughing like drains

Cackling like crones

.

Hooting like owls

Howling like wolves

Gut wrenching

Belly laughs

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Filthy jokes

Foulmouthed

Spitting it out

Old bags and bad girls

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Table thumping

Trivial, tribal

Tremendous

The power

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Of women’s laughter

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– Cora Greenhill

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Pictured in the photo: Alice Murphy, laughing.