slow glowing

place energy

Like any good blog entry, this one wanders.

A. and Jordan are bicycling down the coast; they started in Portland and are now somewhere south of Santa Cruz. Two weeks ago after a week of posts to the craigslist rideshare board, I wrangled a last-minute ride up to Arcata to join them for a week or so’s ride back down here to Marin. I didn’t bring my camera, and my little camera, which I’d loaned to A., was stolen out of his panniers somewhere in Oregon. So I have no photographic documentation to offer, which every once in awhile is probably not a bad thing at all. At the beginning I was thrilled to be riding my bike. I love my body when it is moving. A few days later I was exhausted through-and-through. In Gualala, ninety-six miles from the farm and a day and a half before I had to be back, I called it quits. On Sunday morning I took a bus to Santa Rosa, got lunch with my dear friend Matt, and, after I missed the bus that would’ve gotten me to San Rafael and then to Olema before dark, asked him to drive me all the way home, which he very kindly did. A few hours after I arrived, just as I started to worry about them, A. and Jordan pushed their bikes up the driveway and through the gate.

(edit: A and Jordan after their 96-mile day—)

So: I couchsurfed; battled headwinds; stuck out the rain; stared up at redwoods; climbed to the highest point on the Pacific coast bike route (its not that high); rode down the hill all the way to the coast, which stretched out magnificently ahead of us for a few hours until it started to rain again. (The three of us also talked on and on amongst ourselves and with anyone who would listen about food and diet and veg*nism, but that is a story for another blog entry.) The physical difficulty of it surprised me. Sometimes I don’t quite believe that this is the same body that carried me over the Rockies and the Appalachians less than a year ago. Trying, now, to turn that shock & awe into inspiration. Gotta move my body.

During the trip I started and finished reading one book and started reading another. The first book was Mink River, a novel by Brian Doyle, a Portland author. I had seen two rave reviews for it in two unrelated spaces within a few days, and then when I was in Portland I saw it at (of course) Powell’s, and so I picked it up. I loved it. It is engrossing and beautiful, and somehow even the rain in this novel is invigorating. It is magical realist and synaesthetic (for example, one of the characters can smell pain). It is about a fictional small town on the Oregon coast and some of the human and animal folk who live there. That’s it. It reminded me of what I was trying to do during my senior year of high school, when I wrote part of a magical realist novel that tried for the same kind of compassionate omniscient style that Doyle makes look so easy. Except (I thought, while I read), Doyle’s novel is rooted in a place and a history that he seems to really know and feel, and he is not making the mistake I made of trying to be universal—which means he manages, quite nicely, to speak broad, even universal, truths.

But on further reflection I think the difference is more that Doyle is a writer with willpower, and I was a seventeen-year-old with dreams (and of course that is a very big difference). The Paris I wrote about was just as real as Doyle’s fictional Neawanaka, if a little less dimensional (and probably quite a bit less believable). It may have been a more real place for me than wherever it was I really was. When I was in high school I lived in Tacoma, Washington. Neko Case sings this great ode to Tacoma called “Thrice All American” (”it’s a dusty old jewel in the south Puget Sound”) and a few weeks ago someone had the album on in the kitchen here. When the song played, I laughed and said “I went to high school in Tacoma!” But my nostalgia was essentially an affectation. I remember the school, of course, and a few interchangeable landmarks: the park by the water, Tully’s Coffee, or Thriftway, which we would walk to after school mostly to walk somewhere—I can’t remember what on earth we bought. Maybe the local public high school, where I took my SATs, but again this is an affectation so that when the movie Ten Things I Hate About You comes up in conversation (which is, you know, all the time?), I can grin and say, “hey, that was filmed down the street from my high school! I took my SATs there!”

Anyway, I wasn’t there. I was in Paris. I had been there, for real, a few times before (yes, I was, and remain, incredibly lucky and privileged), with my mom and once with a large school group in middle school. Somewhere in there I fell in love with the idea of it, or something. Paris was my obsession and constant daydream. My email at the time was parisdreaming@hotmail.com. My email before that was stqce@hotmail.com, which is the typo you make if you’re an American trying to type “stace” (my family nickname) on a French keyboard. I read books about Paris, but only books that waxed as romantic about the place as I did. I fantasized about buying a one-way plane ticket, living in a one-room apartment on the top floor of an old building with a hidden courtyard (like this:

yes, exactly; the Paris of my dreams was extra-saturated and over-exposed just like this photo I took), lighting candles in front of Jeanne d’Arc’s stained glass window at Sacre Coeur. A few months after I gave up on the novel, my parents gave me a plane ticket (round-trip, though) for my spring break, and I went, alone. I was unbearably lonely and spent most of my time in museums, exaggerating my interest in the art in order to feel better about going back day after day, because I felt that it was okay to be alone there. (Plus, if you’re under 18 you can get into most Paris museums for free. I saw everything at the Louvre. Everything.) In the light of Real Paris, the Paris of my dreams faded away.

In Portland I started to learn how to apply the dream-place energy to the real-place and make magic happen. What I felt for Paris was powerful but unanchored. What I felt for Portland was more productive, though just as romantic.

All that to say that I am thinkin’ a lot about place, and place’s place (!) in the sacred question the thread of which I follow with my life and living: where is freedom?

And also that Mink River is excellent and may take you to unexpected places, like Paris.

Tomorrow it will be three years from the day I got hit by a car.

breath

(wait a minute for it to load!)

le plus petit escargot

un escargot s’en allait à la foire
pour s’acheter une paire de souliers.
quand il arriva, il faisait déjà nuit noire;
il s’en retourna nu pieds.

un escargot s’en allait en vacances
pour visiter l’inde et le japon.
au bout de sept ans, il était toujours en france,
entre paris et dijon!

ce petit escargot que nous avons rencontré aujord’hui m’a fait pensé de ce chanson adorable dont andrew m’a enseigné l’année dernier et que nous avons tous les deux chantons avec les petits à l’école française de portland. cet escargot a eu un aventure aujourd’hui un peu comme l’escargot du chanson!

this little snail that we met today made me think of this adorable song that andrew taught me last year and that we both sang with the little kids at the portland french school. this snail got an adventure today a little like the snail in the song!

(my rough translation—)

a snail went to the fair
to buy a pair of shoes.
when it got there it was already black night;
it went home barefoot.

a snail left on vacation
to visit india and japan.
after seven years, it was still in france,
between paris and dijon!

horsetail breaking through a thick cob bench

(plants are so cool.)
(too bad about the bench, though.)

foxes

*

this morning, while i stood in the door frame, about to step into the sunshine out of the yurt after tidying it up, i paused for a moment, and two fox kits slid out from underneath the building just a few feet away from me, trotting off into the trees surrounding the creekbed across from me. it was pretty much the Cutest Thing I Ever Saw.

the other night when i left the bunkhouse to walk to my tent to go to sleep, i saw two eyes lit up nearby. my headlight revealed an adult fox, crouching behind some wood scraps, ears up, looking at me as i looked back. we both stared for a moment before i gave in and turned first, leaving the fox behind me in the dark.

one of them took one of our chickens a few evenings ago.

hey there

my unruly hair is finally long enough to pull back into a ponytail—or a bunnytail anyway. after a scattered day with my mind apparently still hangin’ out on i-5 somewhere while my body went about my duties here, i’m here again and i’ve got rose blossoms tucked behind my ears. today i made whole goat’s milk ricotta (my first solo foray into cheesemaking), rooted a bunch of cuttings (fingers crossed), and made veggie tamales with christine. here’s some photos and stories from before and since my brief jaunt to portland and back.

*

calendula:

*

artichokes and cardoons:

*

last week this poor gopher snake got caught in the netting we have over our strawberry beds to keep the birds out. we’d just been weeding that bed in the morning, and we found the snake when we came back after lunch—but he was already dead and stiffening by the time we got him cut free.

*

yesterday we discovered a bunch of poison oak amidst the weeds around an asparagus bed that we reclaimed from the hemlock and horsetails a couple of months ago. so we brought lupe and bodhi (update! this is how her name is spelled! i should have guessed) up from the barn and tied them nearby, hopeful that they’d mow it down for us. solo and uma came with them, of course. the goat-powered weeding didn’t go so well ’cause the mama goats were distracted by the kids, but boy did the kids have a good time! they dashed around the fire circle on the long planks we use as benches and jumped on and off of a little platform nearby with great delight.

*

roses:

road trip

where i spent last wednesday night:

where i spent thursday friday saturday sunday monday nights:

where i spent last night: back in my little yellow tent.

hey portland, i miss you already. thanks for the good times; you know you’ll always be (a) home to me. <3 <3 <3