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The Gift

The Gift

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.  The gift.  The gift lovingly and impishly prepared for me by my loving and impish wife for my birthday nine years ago.    The best of gifts and the worst of gifts.

She presented me a 24×36 inch piece of light blue poster board adorned with two flaps, two six-inch squares of purple construction paper folded at the top and taped to cover whatever it was that lay on the poster board beneath.  The flaps were labeled “Door #1”and “Door #2..”  It was just like “Let’s Make a Deal.”

“You may choose one,” she said, “Door #1 or Door #2.  Open the door and what you see will be your birthday gift.  But you can only choose one door, you will only get one one gift, one and not the other.”

“Door #1, Door #1,” my grandsons, Jack and Sam, urged.  “Door #1.”  What door should I choose?  What thoughtful and wonderful gift might be revealed (because my wife’s gifts are always wonderful and thoughtful)?  But what of the door I do not choose?  What precious gift would I forfeit … forever?  Door #1 or Door #2?  As with all the very important decisions I am obliged to make, I stalled at the brink, not wanting to make the wrong choice.  Finally, I went with my grandsons.  Door #1 it is.

I lifted the flap and there it was, a most thoughtful and wonderful gift indeed.  There, beneath the paper door, glued to the poster board, was a photograph of a Caribou, a Current Designs Caribou, the kayak of my dreams, a Greenland-style sea kayak, quick and responsive and gorgeous.  I had paddled a Caribou in the Union River estuary in Ellsworth one weekday evening the summer before when Cadillac Mountain Sports was hosting a boat tryout.  I fell in love with the boat immediately and knew I wanted one … someday.  But someday had come!  I was really going to have a Caribbean-blue Caribou of my very own!

“Open the other door,” my wife said.  “See what you could have had if you had chosen the other door,” my loving and wicked wife said.  I lifted the flap of Door #2 and a lump grew in my throat and tears filled my eyes as the image beneath was revealed: the photograph of an Australian Shepherd puppy.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.

That summer on our return to Maine, I picked up my Caribbean-blue Caribou at the Cadillac Mountain Sports store in Ellsworth and have paddled miles of ocean in it with great delight ever since.  But no puppy.

Until that next fall, when we drove to Hazelton, Iowa, and as I knelt on the floor of the garage at the home of Cloverfields Aussies to greet the litter of ten-week old pups, the blue merle male who would soon bear the name Toby ran to me and jumped up to eagerly lick my face.  Because my wife is most certainly the giver of thoughtful and wonderful gifts.

Old Snow

Old Snow

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Old snow has lost its poetry
the feathery flakes dusting fronds
        of fir and spruce in dazzling white
become gritty granules of grey ice
        humped in dirty piles along the edges of roads and driveways

No harbinger of spring, only its precursor,
winter stubbornly refusing to give way
        when its time is up
warm and sunny days belied by still cold reminders
        of Maine’s longest season

Old snow has lost its poetry
no longer a hibernal playground, just a nuisance,
        clogging ditches and slogging woodland paths
not a thing to wonder at but
        only to wish away

Alas! to have left glory and beauty and wonder behind
your only merit the fading memory of
        what you once were
now sullied and unsightly and unheeded
        you are nothing but an unwanted vestige

Home

Home

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There is one thing in my life that, for better or for worse, I cannot change, one thing that has powerfully shaped my sense of identity, that I am rootless. Born in Pasadena, raised in Philadelphia, in town and in suburbs, then scattered across midwest and northeast in adolescence.

Grade four: Oakmont School, Havertown, Pennsylvania; best friend, Hunter Clouse; no girlfriend. Grades five and six: Red Cedar School, East Lansing, Michigan; best friend, Carlos Malferrari, girlfriend, Pam Nystrom. Grade seven: Huntingdon Junior High School, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania; best friend, Stephen Katz, girlfriend, Liz. Grade eight: East Lansing Junior High School, East Lansing, Michigan; best friend, David Backstrom, girlfriend, Kathy Lockwood. Grade nine: Hamilton-Wenham Regional High School, Hamilton, Massachusetts; best friend, Charlie Barker, girlfriend, Holly Cone.

Six years, five different homes, five different schools. Dear friends made and lost. Always letting go. Always starting over. Always the new kid. No place to be from. No companions to grow up with. No extended family because half of the extended family is half a country away and the other half is a whole country away and I know little, so little of their stories.

Who are you? Where are you from? Who are your people? Where is your home?

        “O Lord, you have always been our home.”

The Lord has been my home. From the age of four, I have known that before I was my mother’s son, before I was my father’s son, I am a child of God. That is where I live and breathe and have my being, in a space, spiritual and material, that is God’s own creation. Everything I see, I see through that lens. Everything I am or strive to be is measured against that sense of belonging.

For better or for worse. I am grateful, so grateful, for always being home, always being held in God’s embrace wherever I am, whatever may befall me. I am grateful, so grateful for a rich and varied life, for friends from Brazil and India and Argentina and Liberia, Jewish and Mormon and Hindi and Buddhist, musicians and athletes and scholars and thespians.

But I crave roots. I crave a human identity: ethnic or cultural, familial or regional. Which is why I was thrilled to discover, among my father’s papers, years after his death, a genealogy and family tree researched and published the year I was born by a cousin of my father’s mother, Jessie Laing Sibbet. Nearing the age of seventy, after retiring from my life’s work, after traveling three times to Scotland and falling in love with the land and its people, I have learned what I never knew, that I am one quarter Scottish, that my people come from Markinch in Kirkcaldy, that there is a place from which I come, at least from which a part of me comes.

I am hungry and thirsty to know more, to let this wanderer see where the journey began, to push down roots, to lay claim to a home, which though never was nor never will be where I live, is mine.

Free

Free

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The latest from my Tuesday morning writers group. Our prompt this morning was: “Describe a time in your life you felt entirely free, truly yourself.”  This is what I wrote …

It was beautiful. The world was beautiful, the world that was my kayak, a paddle, the amniotic waters of Blue Hill Bay, and whatever happened to hold my gaze as I floated along the Brooklin shoreline.

I had launched that morning from Center Harbor, sliding my kayak into the water from the pebbly beach below the Brooklin Boat Yard, intending to paddle the fifteen or so miles to the South Blue Hill town wharf. I slipped past Chatto Island, paddling south and east down the Reach. My arms and torso settled into a steady rhythm, boat and body melded, a single machine, quiet and smooth and efficient.

I paddled past the Torreys, the Babsons, Hog and Harbor. It had been an hour or so, I suppose, but time and even distance mattered little. What mattered was simply being there, dipping my fingers into the cool waters, feeling the glide of the boat under my hips, delighting in the marine paradise that is Maine.

Turning north around Naskeag, making steady progress across the mouth of Herrick Bay towards Flye Point, the easy rhythm continued uninterrupted, and I marveled at how far I had come already, so quickly, so easily, and with such joy. Halfway already!

As I neared the base of Harriman Point, I celebrated the day, this wondrous and beautiful day that I had chosen for my expedition: light breeze, calm waters, smooth sailing. I had no more finished this thought, when I looked ahead to see a dark and angry and turbulent shadow rushing toward me down the bay from the north, a sailor’s cat’s paw multiplied a thousand times.

I beached on Harriman’s Point scouting the route that would take me across Blue Hill Bay to the wharf. What did I have left? Four miles, five miles? I waited for a lull, but no lull came, just more wind, relentless and furious. I thought of hiking overland, but I had no phone, no way of letting my wife know where I has landed, where to find me.

So I launched.

There was no smooth and easy rhythm now, but an all-consuming fight for survival, no steady progress, but a battle for each yard, each foot, each inch. Right blade, left blade, dig, dig, stroke, stroke, pull, pull. Soon, all too soon, arms and upper body and will were exhausted, but I dare not break this new and frenzied rhythm. If I stopped paddling even for a moment, I would lose all my precious gains or be swept back onto the point. So, dig, dig, stroke, stroke, pull, pull.

I still waited for a lull, but wind and surf only grew more intense, twenty-five knot winds and three foot waves. Right blade, left blade, dig, dig, pull, pull, never stopped, but at the same time I had to fight to remain upright, all the time imagining where and how I and my boat would be pushed by the storm if I were to capsize, and whether either of us would survive it.

Wind blew into my face and waves crashed over the bow and gunwales of my boat, drenching me in cold and salty ocean. I screamed at them. I screamed aloud into the wind and waves shouting at them to leave me alone, to let me go. Every moment, all my moments, were now the same, the ocean, my boat and me locked in eternal struggle, the sea forcing its will on me and me refusing to relent. This was my life, this is my life. I had never been so trapped, so held against my will, so threatened by irresistible powers so far far beyond my own. And I had never felt so free, so much myself …

Eggemoggin Reach Review book cover

 

Also, we have just published Eggemoggin Reach Review Volume III, an anthology of poetry and prose from members of the Deer Isle Writers’ Group. I have five poems and two essays in the anthology. The book is available through Blue Hill Books.

Memory speaks

Memory speaks

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sometimes memory speaks unbidden
        unwelcome intruder
        harping haranguing harassing
        suffering no rebuttal
        to its damning accusations

sometimes memory speaks summoned
        happy companion
        buoying brightening blessing
        empowering the miracle
        of tasting the same joy twice

sometimes memory speaks uncertain
        unreliable witness
        hedging hemming hawing
        groping for shadowy apparitions
        that elude discovery

sometimes memory speaks in conversation
        incomparable interlocutor
        delineating defining delighting
        weaving disparate moments
        into a seamless story

and sometimes memory speaks simply
        simply speaks
        enfolding encouraging enthralling
        transfiguring a life mundane
        into something ineffable

Happiness

Happiness

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A piece written this morning for the Deer Isle Writers Group …

Happiness lives in the space created by all-consuming beauty, all-consuming because in that space, in that moment, the beauty itself, whether perceived by eye or ear or nose or mouth or hand, or somehow, simply, strangely known, is everything. The beauty is, is all the world to me in that moment, and I am happy, though it is not even exactly true to say that I am happy, because, in that place, in that moment, I have no awareness of “I,” the beauty, the overwhelming beauty simply is, and I am somehow gifted with briefly being in the same place and moment as the happiness that is, with or without me.

The stone, the rock, the enormous erratic, perched on the granite ledges extending into the water from McGlathery’s eastern shore, seemingly out of place, is very much in its place. It defines, commands the place, but would be other were it not in that place, that numinous space, surrounded by human activity, but regardless of it, ledges washed by the tides, visited by ermine and gulls, islands emerging near and far from the ever-restless sea. When I turn the corner and see it, when it is not just that I see it, but that in that space and in that moment it becomes the world, all the world, there is happiness.

The frenzied, but careful and ecstatic, interplay of cello and violin and piano, creates its an irresistible gravity that draws me, draws everything, into its orbit. The ears are piqued, are pleased, by the sounds, but it is the heart, the loins, the stuff of being itself, and of my being in so far as I may share being itself, that is moved, deeply stirred, transported, transformed, awash with happiness.

The waters of the creek run clear and cold and powerful, iridescent, translucent, an uncanny green, flowing, rushing, ceaselessly careening down the rock-strewn river bed bearing waters from glaciers high above on the flanks of Mt. Baker into the the ever-burgeoning Skagit River. I watch, I look, I become the looking, there is only the looking, the flowing, the sparkling, the cavorting, the dancing, dancing, dancing of the waters. And there is happiness.

I hold the two broken halves of the crusty bread in my hands and I say the words, “This is my body,” but it is not my body and not my words, and, though it is my hands, it is not my hands that offer this bread. I am, in that space, in that moment, consumed by a giving, an inviting, an all-consuming, but all-creating loving, that is so much beyond what I can give, beyond whom I can invite, beyond what I can create. I am invited into that space, into that moment, along with all who surround me in that sanctuary, and, indeed, with all who surround us in the sanctuary that is the earth. There is in that space, in that moment, a being, a loving, a beauty that fills us and binds us to each other and to the One from whom flows all the beauty and all the love and all being. And there is happiness.

Katahdin

Katahdin

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Katahdin looms — imposing, intimidating, unnerving — its implausibly enormous bulk dominating the skyline.  Katahdin is no singularly outstanding feature of this wild landscape; it is the landscape, and all the rest — forest, stream, foothill, me — we all lurk in its shadows.

The enchanting voice of my Maine muse, Carolyn Currie, cantillates from the speakers of my Santa Fe: “Red hawk’s rising on the back of the wind and she’s circling with an answer and I finally understand how to begin.”  Red hawk’s rising.  I play the song again and again as I make my resolute approach to the campground and trailhead at the base of the mountain.  Red hawk’s rising.  It is my mantra, my rallying cry, my anthem, as I steel mind and body for the quest that awaits me.  I will not soar like a hawk on the back of the wind, but I do intend to rise.  If it will allow me, I intend to rise to the top of this fabled mountain.

Fabled, renowned, iconic, Katahdin surely is, but, today, none of that matters to me.  Today, Katahdin is not Pamola’s mountain or Thoreau’s mountain or even the mountain of innumerable Appalachian Trail thru-hikers celebrating the denouement of a two thousand mile odyssey.  Today, it is my mountain.  Even surrounded by dozens and dozens of other hopeful summiteers, I climb alone — not to conquer an adversary or meet a challenge or check off an achievement on some life list.  No, any such motive would demean, demystify, devalue the majesty of this mountain.  I climb not to overcome Katahdin, but to be deemed worthy of meeting it, of learning some of its secrets, of being welcomed for a few unforgettable moments into its numinous space.

The trail begins, beguilingly beautiful, following dazzling Katahdin Stream as it ascends gently among birch and spruce and hemlock until reaching fifty-foot Katahdin Stream Falls cascading over a series of granite ledges.  The impressive cataract is well worth the mile and a quarter hike from the trailhead.  Undoubtedly, many a casual Baxter visitor ends the journey here, contented with traversing this splendid wilderness path and rewarded by the spectacular visage of the falls.

Beyond the falls, the climb begins in earnest, ascending four thousand feet in five miles.  The trail is relentlessly steep, up and up and up, not walking a steady incline, but scrambling over ledges and boulders among scattered glacial erratics.  I feel strong and stronger yet as the path grows steeper, taking some pride as my sixty-something body overtakes more than a few twenty-something or thirty-something bodies along the way.

I emerge from the trees at the base of the Hunt Spur, the crux of a Katahdin ascent via the Hunt Trail which also serves as the terminus of the Appalachian Trail.  Steep and long and difficult, the Hunt Spur is a naked ridge of jumbled boulders — car-sized, bus-sized, boxcar-sized.  Though marked by blue blazes painted on the granite, the way up is not always clear; every step must be carefully puzzled out, clambering over and around and between the massive boulders.  The climb is physically demanding, but even more mentally exhausting.  The immensity of the mountain, the unsettling exposure, the demanding route-finding, and the unrelenting steepness make an ascent of the Hunt Spur a daunting endeavor.

And a profoundly satisfying endeavor.  I crest the top of the ridge and step out onto the Tablelands, a wide, flattish, tundra-like landscape.  I walk steadily, part of the long procession of hikers following the trail roped off on both sides to protect the fragile alpine ecosystem.  We wind our way over the plateau, pass Thoreau Spring, mount the short summit ridge, and we are there.

I am there, standing atop Baxter Peak, surrounded by dozens of other happy climbers, but still very much alone, alone surveying the breathtaking panorama — Pamola and the Knife Edge, Chimney Pond and the Cathedrals, alone steeped in the joy of this moment, alone celebrating this mountain which has now become a part of my story and I a part of its story, Katahdin, my mountain.

home

home

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As soon as I cleared the last of the spruces and stepped from the needle strewn path out onto the granite ledge and scanned the panorama stretched out before me, green and grey and blue, I knew I was home. There were Cadillac and Newbury Neck, Long Island and Naskeag Point, Isle au Haut and Eggemoggin Reach and the Camden Hills. I could name them all, but it was not the naming that made this home. No, it was this space without edges, beautiful and mysterious, readily seen but not readily known, a space so much bigger than me, so much uncareful of me, yet unquestioningly including me, that made itself home. This is no house built of human hands, no hall or office where I strive to prove myself worthy. No, this is a home so much older, so much wilder, so much truer, a space, a place, where stripped of the need to perform, shorn of the need to prove or to be approved, that I remember, that I remember what I am, that I remember who I am, that I am home.