One Man's Trash

Highway 101, the West Coast's route from Mexico to the Canadian border, rises along Washington State's Olympic Peninsula and wraps itself in old growth forest, looping to an end at Neah Bay where the American continent tapers into the North Pacific. Further south, where it meets the Hood Canal and State Route 104, you'd find me with my crew of a dozen teenagers in hardhats and red vests as we picked more than 30 years' worth of trash from the lush berms and rugged cliffs along the road.

After I had left the home for the bewildered and my 28-day stay, I found myself near unemployable as my mind began the slow trudge toward sanity, rewiring its synapses, trying to spark without intoxicants. The State was a godsend, viewing my classroom experience a virtue when it hired me to run a clean-up crew of teens. The tipping point was that on Fridays, when the byways in the Olympic Forest were choked with weekend campers and logging trucks, we'd get the kids off the road and treat them to an educational day at an environmental site, a hatchery or recycling facility.

I went to Olympia for a week's training, gathered up my white van with state plates and a flashing orange light-bar, stocked it up with day-glo warning signs and highway cones, hardhats and vests for the kids, and a huge water cooler. We'd start at dawn at the county terminus near Brinnon and Quilcene, mark the road, and begin walking. We'd take lunch breaks along the Big Quil or the Duckabush, watching the wild rivers blast through narrow channels beneath a canopy of trees and giant ferns. We'd bag the recyclables in white bags and take them away, leaving the less savory trash in orange bags along the road for the state highway crews.

I needed humbling: I had been a college professor at a Big Ten university and now was bagging filthy diapers, beer cans crawling with worms and slugs, discarded syringes and secret stashes of porn magazines and whiskey bottles from along the road. But that university professor had graded student papers in the Esquire Lounge and helped himself to pills left by his landlord physician in the forest house where he taught in Alaska, and having the grace of working with kids at their summer jobs, cleaning up the detritus tossed from speeding cars and semi-trucks by drunks and addicts seemed like karma to me.

There were six boys and six girls on the crew--when they all showed up--some from poor homes, all a little distracted and in danger of wandering thoughtlessly onto the highway. So I spent most of the day herding them around, setting out traffic cones and signs, and discouraging the kids from picking up needles and dead animals. Along the expanse of pines and granite between Quilcene and Chimacum we found a discarded deer head, tossed out by a hunter, and a makeshift dump where locals had chucked busted refrigerators, stoves, boat engines, motorbikes, beds and couches.

Someone had made a parking spot behind a wall of wild rhododendrons with a firepit, a lawn chair, and a carton filled with girly mags. We picked up the empty beer bottles and magazines for recycling, dumped out his cache of whiskey bottles and bagged them, too. Along the route we found a discarded appliance box filled with Audubon Magazines.

I marveled at how long some of the trash had aged along the road: tin beer cans that had to be opened with a church key, newspapers and magazines from the 60s, cans and bottles of Bubble-Up, Falstaff Beer, other products long since discontinued in the marketplace.

On the last Friday of the summer, I took money we had received from the recycling center and bought the crew pizza and sodas. I asked if they wanted the balance of the money for their own pocket change. We hugged and went our separate ways. No one had been injured, although once I had to grab one of the girl's shoulders and heave her out of the way of a logging truck that blew down our sign and blasted through our line of cones.

For the remainder of my seven-year stay on the Olympic Peninsula I drove the length of Highway 101, knowing it better than most people, knowing parts of it intimately, and had the satisfaction of doing a full day of work for minimum wage, helping the forest to survive us, and befriending local boys and girls that called out my name when they saw me walk the streets in Port Townsend, waved at me in their caps and gowns.

It was a good first job back from the dead, all I could have hoped for in those early days when hope was but a glowing ember.

Greetings from Hell

A big, burly samurai comes to a Zen master and says, “Tell me the nature of heaven and hell.”

The Zen master looks him in the face and says, “Why should I tell a scruffy, disgusting, miserable slob like you? A worm like you, do you think I should tell you anything?”

Consumed by rage, the samurai draws his sword and raises it to cut off the master’s head.

The Zen master says, “That’s hell.”

When a trust-fund baby moved to Port Townsend to open a small treatment center for wayward, inner-city youth, I was hired to drive their van. It was the perfect job; I could live in wooded splendor of the Olympic Peninsula, sleep late, and report in the afternoon to the pastoral haven the wealthy man created where junkies from America's violent urban enclaves could walk in landscaped zen-gardens or hike trails of wild salal and overgrown ferns through a rain forest that towered above the white caps on Discovery Bay.

It was a mindless job--though certainly not thoughtless--and I was paid to toss around a football, share my experience in recovery with a half-dozen young men, driving them into town for job interviews or haircuts or recovery meetings where they'd stay late and whack around the ping pong ball for hours. I was--my employers said--to "model" good behavior and talk up the benefits of living in the great wide open of the straight and narrow.

My mentor, a retired Marine Corps sergeant with more than 20 years of sober living, ran a more traditional counseling center across town. It was spartan compared to the bucolic one in which I worked, nested in a drab suite of offices behind the bank. He reminded me that working for a recovery farm was not the same thing as tending my own spiritual garden. If anything, he said, I would need to redouble my efforts at quieting my mind and my especially caustic, hair-trigger temper. I did not wear my heart on my sleeve, it seemed, I wore an entire body suit embroidered with stripped electrical wires.

Nonetheless, it all was going perfectly. I was paid to throw a frisbee with the treatment center hound, paid to eat sumptuous meals prepared by the gourmet chef, paid to sit before a roaring fire and read zen poetry while the boys washed the supper dishes, paid to watch movies with them in the plush conference room--all going wondrously until a thug from Seattle, newly arrived, found special delight in breaking my balls. And the harder I worked to turn a diffident cheek, the harder he labored to find a crease down to my open nerves.

The sergeant asked if I could hold my tongue. "You like this job, don't you?" I had to admit that I loved it to my core.

But one night, while I worked alone in the large manor house writing progress reports on the boys' behaviors, the thug locked himself in the bathroom with a boom box and cranked the sucker up until the speakers blared a scratchy, distorted rant of punk terror.

I marked up the stairs, pounded on the door and demanded that he surrender the stereo. It was prohibited by house rules. He yelled out that he couldn't hear me.

I could hear just fine. I heard the other boys, camped in their dorm beds, burning with ecstatic twitter.

So I pounded away, and again, and continued pounding until he opened the door a crack to grin at me, and I forced my way in, yanked the cord from the wall socket and threw the bastard toy down the stairs, where it ricocheted and spun madly in broken pieces on the parquet floor. The kid charged down after it and stood waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.

I hurried past him, dodging a blow, and locked myself in the office, where I telephoned the sheriff, then called my supervisors.

The night passed without further incident and in the morning I was fired. I had compromised the well-being of my charges by leaving them in the lodge while I cowered in the office and, worse, I had created bad publicity for the facility by phoning in the sheriff, generating a public report picked up by the newspaper. Townspeople were already worried about having so many junkies nearby. Some were even locking their doors, something they had never done on the peninsula.

The following Monday I sat, crestfallen, in the student section of an anger management class conducted by my mentor in his office building. We talked about triggers, and how to count to ten, and diagrammed how our expectations of how we were to be treated only fueled our passive-aggressive responses to people who by nature would always let us down.

It was tough to lose my cozy job in the woods; I would not find new employment and was forced to move to the city. But I left my anger management class that night armed with useful tools and new-found optimism and drove off into the foggy winter's night in peace, happy at the chance to reform my ways, driving along the waterfront toward town with wonder and burgeoning confidence until I paused at a four-way stop and a pick-up truck that arrived after me took my turn into the intersection, forcing me to slam on the brakes.

I leaned on the horn and gave him the finger.

Angel Beach

Rain or shine, I would pull on my sweats and windbreaker and drive to North Beach. From my house on the bluff, you took Cherry Street across town to the Chinese Gardens Lagoon and parked at the end of Kuhn Street, where the trails sloped down to the sand or wended up into the forested lanes of the state park. I'd pull a woolen cap down over my ears and set off into the prevailing wind, picking my way between rocks and foam and seaweed.

If you turned west, the beach would narrow and the path would bend around glistening rocks and sun-washed stumps of dead-fall, ducking into the freezing shadows of the bluff, and suddenly out again into the bright sun. You could watch the broad neck of the Admiralty Inlet where specs of cargo ships on the horizon made their way through the morning fog, moving at a crawl with precision through the passage, tendrils of smoke in the morning light, their superstructures taking shape as they neared, their bows pushing a mighty wake before them. You could feel the vibration of their heavy diesels through the dark gray sand as you walked.

On lucky days, I would walk five or six miles west to Glass Beach on the ebb tide, counting herons along the way or laughing at the splashing play of otters as they coasted on their backs in the carpet of the seaweed. When you rounded the bend at McCurdy Point you could see Hurricane Ridge and the jagged spine of the Olympic range where it thrust into the blue sky. If it was a clear day, that is. And yet, on days unfit for sunning, an eagle would round out the sky above you.

When white settlers chose the Port Townsend area for a home in 1851 they found a bustling trade route used by Chief Chetzemoka's Klallam tribe. By the turn of the century, Port Townsend was a booming seaport, and residents used the beach beneath the towering cliffs at McCurdy Point as the town dump. You can still find shards of pottery, bottles, and china at the bottom of the bluff. I'd find marbles, in perfect condition, buried under a few inches of sand. I'd try to imagine the life of a settler's child.

I liked to gather feathers, dried wood, blue and purple glass, and the occasional sea-star shell. Some days I'd carry them home, other times I'd build a small shrine of Earthly delights and pray in gratitude for my new-found sobriety. If I went out early, I'd have the entire stretch of beach to myself. We tried to keep Glass Beach a local secret, but you'd find hikers galore out there on weekends.

If you turned east at the parking lot, the beach trailed off toward the inner curve of the inlet, with the Mount Baker volcano rising into the clouds. To the farthest end, where the peninsula curved south, stood the Point Wilson lighthouse and its booming foghorn. I liked to go this way in the evening, when the beach was still and quiet save for the susurring of the waves and the rhythmic wail of the horn in the dark, misty air. The light would spin its bright eye at you as it swept across the channel.

I'd often stop near the point and sit in the dark and talk to my grandfather. I had lived in Port Townsend about a year when my brother and I visited Uncle Mort in Eugene and he told us the terrible secret of my grandfather's suicide--hidden from us for all our lives. Scarcely fifteen years later, Mort would take his own life.

But here, on the beach below the Point Wilson light, I'd sit and ponder the good luck of my finding a way out, a town where kids shouted to me in the street, and friends called my home if they hadn't seen me in several days just to see how I was. And I'd sit beneath the whirling eye of the Point Wilson light and talk to grandpa Max, telling him how I had come this far, that I had lived through the madness that at times seemed only a paper-thin moment away, how I had found this house on the bluff where Klallam friends helped me build a native sweat lodge, where my dearest friends would come and sweat and pour water, and pray for the earth and our ancestors and our loved ones and, afterward, eat sumptuous food and laugh about how easily it could have all ended in disaster.

One night I sat beneath the lighthouse until dawn and in the the drizzling fog of morning thought I saw an angel perched in a lone cedar where it rose on the bluff. The tree had been struck by lightening and in the shadowy shape of dawn, I saw the slow unfurling of wings where the stump had been cleaved through the heart.

Though I often tried, I never saw the angel in that tree again, though she was there, as certain as the wind-swept bluff and the hissing tide. I don't know where I'm going, but I have ruled out certain options, ending one legacy with my piece in the line. And now, hundreds of miles away, I am forever on Angel Beach, grandpa Max, dear Uncle Mort, a noose and a bullet, and I'm so damn sad that you never found the path that led me home.

Umpirical Evidence

The first time I worked the bucket I got hit in the face a half-dozen times. The hurler was a stout kid, taller than most 12 year-old boys, and his fastball would tail into the left-handed batter. The catcher would duck, or make a feeble effort to reign it in, and the pitch would blast into my mask somewhere between my nose and forehead, bringing tears to my eyes.

I never played organized baseball, and never had a boy of my own, so umpiring seemed the perfect way to palliate the ancient ache to father a tribe of sons. I was in early recovery, having moved from the distant cabin in the woods to a hill-top cottage in Port Townsend that overlooked the golf course and the snow-capped peaks of the Olympic Mountains. My best friend Warren had two boys in little league and after watching a few games, I was determined to get involved. I was embarrassed to admit after a lifetime of playing softball and attending major league games, I had no deep knowledge of hardball nuances and regulations. And I had not played in little leagues as a boy. Hence, I was perfectly qualified to umpire.

Another man at my recovery meetings was a jack of all officiating, working as a little league umpire and basketball referee at the local high schools. He offered to go over the rule book and get me started, and he lived just a few doors away on Willow Street. I learned when to apply the infield fly rule, about the secret world of umpire hand gestures that helped coordinate our placement on the diamond, and how to keep track of the pitch count using a hand-clicker.

I was started at first base, where it was thought I'd avoid tricky calls and the ire of unstable egos. When you had a close call to make, you were to make it decisively and walk away. By and large, the coaches accepted your decision, but the parents in the stands were ugly. How dare you toss out their little angel. Let the boys play, they'd scream. Get some glasses.

The key to umpiring was to head directly to your car in the parking lot at the final out, escaping with your hide intact. Before each game, I would head to the equipment shack and strap on the shin guards, chest protector, ball caddy, and mask, tightening the straps and screws and kneeling to make sure the gear wouldn't cut off my circulation.

When you work the bucket, you crouch behind the catcher, tapping him gently on the shoulder when he blocked your view. These were kids, but the ball could leave a welt on you. I learned that an umpire could set his own strike zone--the imaginary rectangle that marked the location of the ball as it passed across the plate--but you had to be consistent. If you called a strike on a pitch a few inches too high in the first inning, you called the same pitch a strike in the seventh inning.

I went to major league games in Seattle, taking the ferry across the Sound to the Kingdome--to watch the umpires, rather than the players. I saw how the crew positioned itself with hand signals, how umpires walked the foul lines to get the best view of the action, how they turned and crouched to see bang-bang plays at the bags, what they said in conferences between innings, giving each other notes like fine actors.

In little league, you towered over the boys in your black uniform and mask, and you could shatter them with an untoward remark. I decided that when I called a kid out on strikes--letting my voice boom out the call and jerking my right hand skywards--I followed up with quiet, but persistent encouragement that only the batter could hear. I loved them "out".

And someone had to do it, because the asides from a frustrated father could wound you to the marrow. Some dads would operate video cameras from the stands or behind the screen. If they stood behind me, it was certain I'd hear about it. Sometimes I'd turn and walk over calmly, remove my mask, and tell the dad he had better go wait in the car or I would call the game and his son's team would forfeit and lose. Occasionally, a lurker would track me to the parking lot after the final out. There's no adequate explanation for that kind of pettiness.

One August afternoon I had the honor of calling a game in which Warren's boys took the field. Warren came out of the dugout once to argue a call. Whether I had it right or not was inconsequential. I said to my best friend, "I don't want any more guff from you."

"What's guff?" Warren said, his face flushed and rigid, his nose close to mine.

"That's guff!" I said and tossed his ass off the field. Later we howled over it.

In the end, I got promoted to work pony league games. These boys were older, wore real spikes, and ran longer distances between the bases. I never worked the bucket in a pony league game, but I loved doing them. You could hear the runner as the spikes went in and out of the infield sand, and you could hear the ball pound into the pocket of a glove or shoe pop into the bag when the runner passed. It was a joyous, sober summer. One day a bald eagle circled the park and two outfielders fought over possession of a tumbling feather. Some days the fog would slip into the late afternoon and the sun would sport a halo. When the wind was right, you could hear the bell from the buoy off of North Beach and the jangle of halyards from boats in the yacht harbor.

In the end, the calls I received--rather than made--were true blessings. When I walked the hilly streets or the waterfront of Port Townsend in the fall and winter, the umpire gear hung up and locked in storage, kids whose games I umpired would shout out to me from front yards or open windows of passing cars. I was somebody big in the world's smallest town.

"Hiya ump, how ya doing?"

After Sundown

After 24 days at the Sundown M Ranch near Yakima, I returned to my cabin in the Washington woods. You come out of treatment and it feels as if you had slid down a mile-long sheet of sandpaper. If you dropped a glass in the kitchen, you'd weep for hours.

The cabin was still there under the shadow of the Olympic Mountains when I drove up, and the juncos were still around, although they had eaten all the seeds from the 50-pound sack I left spread across the porch. I was home again, alone with myself. But I felt buoyant, able to look at myself in the mirror, and ready to see the world through fresh eyes.

The recovery meetings were in Port Townsend, fourteen miles away, and I began working anew on my flawed novel, breaking at eleven to drive into town. My cabin was on the Egg and I Road, named after Betty MacDonald's book about Ma and Pa Kettle and their chicken ranch here at the base of the Olympics during the late Depression era. I thought it was prophetic that I should be writing my novel again, reborn here on the Egg and I.

You drove down the hill into Beaver Valley, along the narrow winding green road between farms and stands of old growth forest, past small farm implement businesses and auto yards until, finally, the road emerged on a majestic bluff overlooking Port Townsend where the town spread out over rolling hills surrounded on three sides by the waters of Puget Sound. Sails glimmered in the bay and the Keystone ferry steamed across the channel.

The recovery group, on the other hand, met in a squalid setting, in the basement of a furniture store at the rear of a strip mall that overlooked a parking lot with trash dumpsters. You went through a solid wood door into a room thick with cigarette smoke and filled with the din of excited chatter. The black coffee would melt the enamel off of an elephant's tusk.

But after a few visits, I shook hands with John B., and was grateful that he became my friend. He had been a colonel in the Army and now had a small ranch just off the Egg and I in Beaver Valley. He invited me down for coffee and football on Sunday mornings and we'd stand on the back deck, gazing at the snow-capped Olympic mountains, happy that we'd lived long enough to stand here in the cold morning, steam rising from the rain-soaked deck, the horizon shimmering in the warming day.

John worked at a small oil supply company, but his wife Dixie insisted that I come down after writing in the morning and spend time in the barn at the J-Bar-D Ranch. They had four Palominos and one waddled around in the hay, pregnant and uncomfortable. My favorite horse was Laddie. I gave him carrots and he bobbed his head every morning when I walked through the corral in my rubber boots. One time I was late and Laddie stamped his foot and snorted. I tried to hide the bunch of carrots behind my back and he came up abruptly and nodded directly atop my head, dropping me to the turf like a sack of stones. Out cold! It was love, Dixie later explained, expressed in the language of horse.

I had always been all-thumbs and, now with my brain circuits heavily searching to make new connections after years of living in a bath of toxic chemicals, I would simply bang into things. I had bruises and welts all the time though I couldn't quite remember causing them.

It was Johnny's own mistake to trust me with the spreader. But one afternoon in early spring he asked if I'd take fertilizer out to the pasture while he ran errands in town. It was simple, he said. You dumped three or four bags of it into the bin, drove out to the field, and used hydraulics to open the spreader. It seemed straightforward. I knew how to run a tractor from my days on the kibbutz.

But I had no idea how to set the feeder, and after dumping an entire bin of fertilizer on a narrow strip of field, I came back in for more. Dixie looked horrified. I had used nearly half the supply for the entire pasture on part of the field.

John rolled his eyes when he came home. I could see he was damming up a torrent meant for me. But he only said, "there goes that!" He later predicted that the fertilizer would burn the section all the way to China and nothing would grow. But the following summer, to our surprise, the strip grew thick with hay that rose bright and green like nature's mohawk in the midst of the field.

That was about the time that the mare went into labor. I had been on the phone with Dixie every day that week, between my recovery meetings, my walk out to the old growth where I hugged trees and wept in gratitude, and the five pages I would write on the novel. The baby was coming.

Sunday morning, about 8, Dixie called and I drove like a madman down the winding Egg and I, spun out in front of a logging truck, and sat on the side of the road, my heart banging madly until I gathered myself up and drove the rest of the way to the J-Bar-D.

Dixie and a few neighbors gathered at the stall where the mare was pushing out the white envelope that surrounded the foal. In all, it took over an hour, but out she came, stepping with outsized legs into the world, rising to her feet in less time than I could ever imagine, the memory of centuries working on her behalf, rising quickly in nature to escape predators that might come to eat her or the placenta. And before the morning was out, the foal was walking, staggering comically on those spindly legs, wobbly, straining with uncertain eyes to find the mare's milk.

Dixie took the afterbirth to burn and bury in the field, lest it attract coyotes and, afterward, we sat in the kitchen, John B. and Dixie and I, sipping coffee, feeling the enveloping warmth of the fire from the crackling wood stove, smiles all around, three friends peering at the world through new eyes.

There would be hard times to come, and Dixie would pass away, leaving John B. twice a widower. And I would descend into a long depression, now freed from the substances I had used so long to mask it. But there was no hint of any of these things on that day as springtime came to Beaver Valley.

Humbug Dharma

It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust! -- The Ghost of Christmas Present.

It may have been the oddest search for man's soul undertaken by a Jewish man in a Northwest mill town. But I was new to the realm of the spirit and was fanning through the arcana of world faiths that year in search for the puzzle piece that settled my doubt. In our Victorian seaport the mill filled the mornings with the sour aroma of soggy paper. I had little work, so spent my days reading spiritual poetry--Rumi, Kabir, Al-Muntafil, Li-Po--and walked along North Beach where the straits fanned out between Whidbey Island and the cloudy crown of the Mt. Baker volcano.

Rumi advised that when parading through the dizzying aisles of the spiritual supermarket it was important to come home with something. So I crossed the peninsula in search of a meal that would fill me, spending hours sweating in lodges of S'klallam elders, bashing drums at the men's wisdom councils in Seattle, sitting the nervous wreck through an Episcopalian Christmas mass as the priest advised that "we were unfit to eat the scraps that fell from His table", squirming in my seat in synagogues where I remembered the pre-gnostic chants but had no sense of what they meant to me. A year passed and I had yet to find my way.

Christmas was coming again and, pudgy with a heavy beard, it appeared I'd renew my role as local Santa, visiting public places and private homes where I'd issue my hearty chuckle as kids sat in my lap. But the holiday loomed as yet another occasion where I'd feel exiled anew from my Christian friends in town. Instead of feeling alienated, a friend advised, why don't you dive in headlong and see if you can have fun with it? So I auditioned for the town players' production of The Christmas Carol and won the part.

It was the perfect role for an over-the-top guy like me. The Ghost of Christmas Present wore his striking velvet robe and garland, spoke with an overwrought West-End accent, and boomed out grim speeches about doom and destiny and karma. I could relate. Plus, he had two spindly children hidden under the robe that, at the perfect opportunity, I'd sweep open to reveal the shuddering denizens of spiritual failure. How sweet was that?

I had taught theater at the university, but all notions of theory had apparently been lost on me the moment the lights caught my eye. Aside from several stand-still roles, I had never really acted. But as we neared opening night, I had waxed fully into the role, skyrocketing beyond the mark at times that made the director wince. But it was all in good fun--community theater, for chrissakes! And the message, that gluttony and pride goeth before the fall, meshed with my recent readings in eastern poetry. That I was embellishing myself more as a symbol of the very deadly sins rather than a herald of their dangers escaped me the moment the curtain rose.

All my friends and well-wishers packed the front rows on opening night as I paced nervously outside the dressing room, running my lines. I looked fantastic in those robes! The words would flow as nectar from my trembling lips. As Scrooge and I took our places behind the curtain, he tapped me on my shoulder and smiled. It will all be fine, he said.

We were to enter center stage in the dark, I would announce my opening lines, and the spotlight would find The Ghost of Christmas Present, dashing glittering dust over the front rows of audience as we proceeded down left. But the spotlight never came on after my opening, and Scrooge grabbed my elbow and steered me across the boards in the dark. I sprinkled glitter that no one could see and spoke in a frightened monotone, sounding more like a weak recording of the play on an old phonograph record than the boisterous ghost I had been for weeks.

We had traversed the stage fully when I completed my speech and the lights came on behind us, brightening on Tiny Tim's crutch where it lay in the fireplace.

"It may be," I said, "that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child." And instantly I was transported to the pew in the Episcopalian church where I was unfit to eat the scraps from God's table. I felt confidence draining from me like so much foul air and finally, went up on my lines, committing the unutterable sin of silence. Scrooge picked up and improvised like a pro as I stumbled along until, at last, I could open my robes to reveal the girl of "Want" and the boy of "Ignorance" clinging to my legs. It was over.

Afterward, Scrooge joked backstage. It was all good fun. He was a true saint in humbug's clothing. And my friends said I had been fabulous. I was sure they were snowing me. The stage was not for me, nor was Christmas. Let those better equipped to handle it revel in the hour!

It would take another decade before I found my calling in Buddhism and the truth that my friends had loved me, had indeed witnessed a stellar performance--just not the one I had planned for them. To believe that I am powerful enough to control the unfurling of days and nights is to create my own misery. That ignorance and want are my demons. That nothing needs to happen. That between the indelible past and unwritten future there is infinite grace where I am fully fit for all the crumbs--and for the banquet, too--so long as I take loving kindness down from the shelf, tote it home, and wear the world as a loose garment.

Sudden Light

Can't see nothin' in front of me
Can't see nothin' coming up behind
I make my way through this darkness
I can't feel nothing but this chain that binds me -- Bruce Springsteen, The Rising.

The road out of the darkest woods can begin with a flicker of sun through a tree parted years ago by lightening. I had sought out my cabin in the isolation of the Olympic Forest with gusto. I was certain that the world and its people were the cause of my woes. And when I left the cold and dark heart of interior Alaska, the woods of Washington State promised the wilderness I had come to love without the brittle temperatures and malingering night.

The circular cabin had fourteen windows and skylights, so that you were part of the woods by day, when pileated woodpeckers hammered their beaks into the cedars, and by night, when heavy footed critters broke through the underbrush in the utter darkness. I learned to split my own wood, taking chunks of pine or madrone from the stack and getting my back into it. In the early dawn, I would climb shivering from the sleeping loft and blow fresh life into the glowing coals of the woodstove.

By day the woods were dark, streaked with shadows in the fall air. I could walk to the bright sun along a forest service road, and found my way to a grove of old growth cedar where I'd wrap my arms about the widest tree and sob. I had no idea if I was sad or grateful, or whether it was about another thing entirely.

The nearest town was 14 miles away, and I drove to its feed store and bought rubber boots, a new splitting maul, and a 50 pound sack of wild bird food. I shoveled out huge scoops of feed and spread it across my front porch. By mid-day, thousands of Oregon juncos hopped on the hardwood planks, fighting mightily over the seed. At dusk, mule deer with whited tails walked through the clearing, sipping water from the pond. Herons flew overhead, tossing huge shadows across the salal.

It was a bucolic setting I had dreamt of most of my life, a place where I would have the quiet to write my novel, the peace from battling academics who disapproved of the authors I chose to use in the classroom, and the stream of unhappy students who thought they could barter for better grades with sexual innuendo or simply an endless barrage of excuses.

I had surely gone to the bottom in Alaska, where the combination of never-ending dark, cold, and a fling with pain pills made my life miserable. I had begun hearing voices. Once, when students in the lounge were muttering my name, I burst in on their table and demanded how they dared to talk poorly about me behind my back. One of them shrugged and said they were chatting about what a lively, interesting man I was and a great teacher of writing.

I thought the voices and dark would drop behind me as I drove the miles to the Haines Ferry and took the ship to Seattle. But weeks into my solitude in the woods, they found me again, and I had no one else to blame.

Every morning I got the fire going, made coffee, and sat down to work on my novel. It was a sustained narrative about a mental health counselor who had never resolved his hatred for his father. When his lover leaves him, the counselor goes on a quest across country to find her and, so doing, discovers great truths about himself. But even though the protagonist was piling on the miles, the novel was going nowhere.

In the afternoons, I drove to town to pick up my mail--more rejection slips, bills, supermarket coupons--then drove out to the Sound where I walked the wind-swept beach in the snap of fall cold. I had no friends here, and seemingly had lost the ability to make new ones. I tried the taverns, where my drinking companions were farmers and loggers, and none shared my views of the world. I drove back to the cabin lonelier than ever.

After a while, I couldn't even sit to write anymore. I made my morning fire, had breakfast, paced for hours--it seemed--then left angrily in search of companions. Back to the taverns, back to the seeming indifference of my peers, back home at dusk with a carload of sadness and self pity.

On Thursdays, I'd drive to the feed store and purchase the local newspaper. I suppose one would get a chuckle out of the small-town charm, the trifling struggles of country life that hardly made a scratch in the world's most dire ills, and the classified ads for quilting bees, salmon fishing derbies, dueling appeals by the churches, and community theater productions of Thornton Wilder. It had no such affect on me. Each waking day seemed to dogpile atop a mountain of anger.

One morning I took a razor to my face, cutting off a beard I had worn for 15 years. I hated what I saw and briefly imagined taking the razor to my throat. The man in the mirror was a complete stranger. And I saw only pain and terror in his watery eyes. I drove out to Discovery Bay and sat on a cliff overlooking a beach strewn with rocks and broken deadfall. The ashen stumps and branches poked between jagged stones and ribbons of kelp. I imagined my own body going over the edge, falling with the sudden knowledge of irrevocable decisions, and shattering on the rocks. The pain of striking the rocks seemed greater than the pain I was hoping to quash. Or I was just too afraid, and I drove home with a sense of great failure.

I had begun to sleep in, tucking deep in my sleeping bag, too lazy to get up and light the fire. It was only when I saw that the juncos had run out of seed that I rose, pulled on a coat, and went out to empty a fresh sack on the porch. Oh well, I was up. I made coffee and drove into town for a paper.

As I sat in the tavern that afternoon, I read a classified that caught my eye. There was just a headline and address. It said: "Men's 12-step Writing Group, Thursday 7 pm, St. Paul's Episcopalian Church, 1020 Jefferson St."

Other writers! Companionship. Writerly support. Decent conversation. I could dazzle them with my well-hewn sentences and snappy dialogue. I had no idea what they meant by their title, but I assumed that they had discovered the 12 steps in creating fiction that the masses would buy. I showered and shaved and tucked a notebook under my arm and set off for town.

St. Paul's Church stands on a bluff overlooking Admiralty Inlet and the Puget Sound. The water wraps around the town on its way from the Cascade peaks to the Pacific ocean. Across the bay you can see a string of islands and, beyond them, the snow-capped peaks and the Mount Baker volcano. The path to my meeting led from the sidewalk along a hedge of Rhododendrons, through a well-tended rose garden, and to the door to the basement.

When I entered the room--appropriately late to make my entrance--I saw a dozen middle-aged men seated at a conference table. Several looked up, but they went back to their studies, gazing at a coffee-table-sized book as one of them read aloud. I took an empty seat and listened.

I had no idea what in blazes they were talking about, but the language was baroque, strange, and held no terms I would ever describe as literary. They read a series of questions about a higher power, how they viewed this power, and what they did on a daily basis to connect with it. I was baffled and crestfallen.

During the break, the men introduced themselves--John, Jerry, Pete, another John, Curt--and asked my why I was there. When I said I had expected a writer's group, they laughed and I was more uncomfortable than ever. But, oddly enough, they were friendly, had an uncanny twinkle in their eye, made me welcome, and I decided odd company was better than no company at all.

They had an extra workbook and I bought it at the end of the meeting. Reading it at home, I discovered that I had stumbled into some kind of support group. They were drug addicts, or drunks, or had other kinds of trouble. And yet, I was oddly attracted to their company.

I went the second week, too. John took my phone number and called me to see how I was doing. It was the first personal phone call I had received in my cabin. John said he had a counselor for me. I had done counseling. I doubted I could be helped in any way. No counselor had truly understood what I felt; hell, I had no idea what I felt. In Alabama, after I had broken some furniture and terrified my partner, I went to the community counseling center where the counselor told me I needed to develop outside interests, you know, go fishing some?

But John had a good counselor, he said. And now I added a counseling appointment to my weekly meeing with the bizarre-writing society in St. Paul's basement. At my first session, Judy asked me why I thought I needed counseling. I told her what I knew. I reviewed my well-grooved stories and family histories, after which she pronounced me an alcoholic and that she would not work with me until I had been sober a year. She recommended that I visit the community counseling center to get a professional evaluation.

Once more, a woman had rejected me. I was sure about that as I drove home in rage. But I found myself oddly complaint with advice and drove to the counseling center for my appointment. The counselor handed me a questionnaire, which I answered to the best of my ability. Then we talked for a while. I was certain that I had narrowly evaded an addiction to pain pills in Alaska, that I had a long-time love affair with pot, but that I never drank so much that alcohol was a problem.

The counselor had a different idea. She told me there was a bed at a treatment center in central Washington, that the state would foot the bill if I willing to drive over there tomorrow. "You need to say yes when you're willing," she said, "because this moment may never come again." Surely, this was a dire measure. But my mouth--quite unattached to my mind--said yes and I drove back to my cabin in the woods thinking that some small piece had fallen in place and that I might not have to kill myself.

The next morning I got up without lighting a fire and packed my car. I put two volumes of poetry on the seat and a suitcase of clothes and toiletries, then went back to lock the cabin. I emptied the entire bag of feed on the porch. If the seed ran out before I had completed my 28 days, the juncos would have to go it alone.