Category Archives: inukshux of the high desert

JAPHY RYDER DREAM SONG

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JAPHY RYDER DREAM SONG

In 1976 I was a student at CSU (the college in Ft. Collins).  The student newspaper had an announcement of a poetry symposium to be held on campus in a few days.  Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been interested, but Gary Snyder was to be a featured participant.

I wasn’t as swept up nor taken with the mythos of Jack Kerouac like some of my friends, but read practically everything he penned that I could get my hands on.  The Dharma Bums — my introduction to Japhy Ryder/Gary Snyder.  Having read Big Sur sometime before, I had thought and hoped Jack’s self-destructive tendency had been transformed — but those books were written in reverse order to that in which I had read them.  Anyhow …

The article showed a recent picture of Mr. Snyder.  He had become quite “hippi-ized” — counter-culture — kinda like me.  Had I not seen that, I would have assumed he was still the crew-cut part-time log-cutter/outdoorsman I had pictured from The Dharma Bums.  And so …

A couple days later while wandering the seemingly-labyrinthine hallways of the C S U student-center trying to find the room where Gary Snyder was to be part of a panel discussion, I encountered another lonely wanderer, looking for the same venue.  Recognizing the fellow from the photograph, it was like a miniature lightning-bolt hitting my brain.  Gary immediately exuded a scowl of annoyance in response to my ocularly-telegraphed kindred-spirit stare.  Never-the-less …

We strode up and down the stairs and hallways, talking about what, I don’t remember — free-associating, I suppose.  Probably about how lost we were.  Our time together was maybe fifteen minutes.  I’ll remember this for as long as I can (to quote the “Because I’m Blond” contest winner in Earth Girls are Easy).  We arrived fashionably late (?) for Mr. Snyder, at the hushed and expectant venue.  Everyone turned to look, and I felt important because, as I sat in the audience, I think everyone assumed I was with him, and special, somehow.  To remove any doubt, I kept my mouth shut.

A CSU professor was the group moderator and I probably couldn’t have told you a week later what aspect of poetry this panel, perhaps six or so people total, was supposed to be about.

But I do remember Gary telling one story.  The Papago Indians resided in the Sonoran Desert, spread out over present-day Aridzona and el estado de Sonora.  They lived there because they had to.  More powerful tribes lived in the adjoining lands with more water, better climate, hunting grounds, and cropland.  The Papagoes didn’t have much in the way of physical possessions.

The most important and valuable thing a person could own, a “possession” as it were, was a song.

I suppose “rich” Papagoes had many songs.

How they acquired a song varied, and the songs would usually come in dreams.  However, to merit/deserve/make oneself worthy of such an impartation, a Papago would have to do something heroic.  One might hike all the way to the sea and bring back some salt.  Or go beat up on some warriors of another tribe.

When one Indian was real good friends with another, and wanted to make a gift, he’d give his friend a song.

About two years before, Betty and I were vacationing/hanging in Mexico.  We had gone on a prodigious train- and bus-sojourn from San Carlos to Mexico City.  On the return leg of our journey, we each were beginning to become quite ill.  Forty-some hours in an enclosed (windows up ’cause it was January) crowded bus with many people exhibiting symptoms of “el grippe” and buying mystery tacos and dulces-de-cabra from street vendors — “you do the math.”

The flu, probably.  A severe, head-clogging, pain-filled, tedious, foreign flu.

Jaunty at the start of this trip, it seemed we crawled back to my parents’ half-completed house in San Carlos.  The night we returned, we discovered that the ‘local’ train station was more than 20 miles away.  We did hitch a couple rides to halve the distance, but at midnight — and even in north interior Mexico, it’s cold after the sun has disappeared in the middle of ‘winter’ — we felt we had no choice but to burrow into our sleeping bags just out of sight of the road.  Dante, when chronicling the descent into the underworld, would have had to be creative to outdo the next incident of our seemingly inexorable downward spiral.  Sometime between laying down and first light, I thought the banditos had crept up and were proceeding to kick the poo-poo out of us to get our attention.  No … a small herd of semi-feral burros was picking its way through the frigid lunarscape, stumbling over us, and not gently nor quietly.  I thought things could not get any weirder.

A merchant with whom we had conducted occasional business drove by just after sunrise and soon we were ‘home.’  Our condition and spirits would have benefited if the house had HOT running water.

We were too weak and tired from our ordeal to do little else but try to sleep.  It was so bad that late one night, as I was tossing and turning and occasionally moaning as if that would help, I did an experiment to “pass the time.”  I lay still for as long as I could, trying to sink into sleep, but concentrating as best I could on just passing the time never-the-less.  I lay for what had to have been at least a couple hours.  I looked at my watch.  Two minutes had passed.

I did sink into a pain-free sleep later that night.  I was in a cave.  It was pitch dark.  I couldn’t see anything, but the input from all the other senses gave me as clear a picture —  no, clearer — than that which could have been garnered from sight alone — if this location was outside in the light.

I knew that I was seated on a rock ledge in this cavernous room right at the edge of the ocean.  The cave would have significantly different aspects depending on low tide, or high tide.  The sounds of the ocean, lapping and all the nuances of waves in among rock and coral walls, was vivid.  As was the slap-in-the-face smell of the salt-air.  I felt the breeze, stirred by each wave and the echoes, moving my hair.  This was a large possibly basket-ball-court-sized space, and I was not alone.

They were singing, many dozens of people — in a language I surmised to be the local indigenous aboriginal tongue.  This was not the past, nor any time in particular.  It was like I had been transported to a dimension adjacent to, but not under much, if any, influence of the world-as-we-presently-know-it.  I was NOT in our children’s iPad Internet-centered text/twitter/cellphone world.  That world was ‘there’ — somewhere else — but I was in the primal realm that Carlos Castaneda had tried to illuminate to all his readers.

Several layers of chanting, humming, weaving in and out.  A solo-ist would intone the next line of melody, and the others would join in, point-and-counter-point with increasing layers of background chorus.  The song swept over me, along with the sea-breezes and salt-cave smell and rhythm of the waves.  At the time I didn’t think this, but I was a biological electrical appliance, what with all the various currents going around and through me.  And everybody and everything else.

I wish I could say that I woke up and the flu was gone.  But I did remember the song for several months.  I still hear snippets and suggestions and hints, but not very often.

innunguaq ramblings

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INUKSUIT ramblings

(“i used to make wombats”)

Ah … a span of time without anchors.  A day off from work!  No chores at home either (leaky faucets, doors not plumb within frames, unsightly detritus on the premises).  Spouse off to her job ’til the dark evening hours, weather not too hot nor too muddy nor too frigid to be outdoors.  Time to go ramble, with the dogs.

We (well, the dogs have little choice, they bark and lean over the sides and sometimes poop in the back of the truck) drive a short distance from the house.  I go to trailheads where the likelihood of encountering others is slim, partly ’cause that’s the way I like it, and the dogs need time to be free-spirited unleashed beasts without boundaries.  Reducing the possibility of bothering karmically-challenged people who worry about strange dogs intruding into their sacred spatial arenas. The buttheads.

I’ve brought two cigars for this trip.  And filled-up the brandy flask.  No telling, really, where the muse will take us, long as whatever it is ends by dark-thirty or earlier.  I did tell Betty a different destination, but the almost-usual last-minute decision dictated elsewhere.  I park 6.5 miles from the house, but it could be a few thousand years away.  After a half-mile along a trail, we’ll diverge.  Chances are after another half-mile, we’ll see little or no indications of other people having been there.  Cows, maybe.  This is Federal land.  And where we’re headed, there aren’t supposed to be any trails…

I used to make wombats.  I don’t know why I ever embarked on this pastime, nor do I remember my first wombat.  A back-country dog-hike was not ‘good’ until I found a spot to spell out “W O M B A T.”  (In rocks. on the ground.)  The less likely anyone will ever see it, the better.

An inuksuk (plural inuksuit) alternatively inukshuk is a stone landmark or cairn built by humans, used by the Inuit and other peoples of the Arctic region of North America.  The inuksuk may have been used for navigation, as a point of reference, a marker for hunting grounds, or as a food cache.* 

Now wombats are on the back burner.  I had been considering, experimenting, constructing ‘test’ inuksuk, or inunnguaq (if one wants to get technical as that is the human form of the Inuit cairn-expression).  And about two weeks ago the muse, or the subterranean intradimensional influences, or the mental/psychic/emotional equivalent of a long-overdue quasi-artistic urge, manifested in an inuk manner.  I found the spot, the materials were available, an inuksuk assembled itself … with some help from me.  The dogs just wandered around sniffing and digging and occasionally checking on me and then wandering off again.

So we wander.  I have a general area in mind.  A ridge beyond where even I occasionally sojourn.  Perhaps the ridge after that.  It just depends — on the so-called muse, and, of course, the muse would take a good location and decent construction materials into account.

We cruise up the trail, and where it turns to continue up the ridge just north of Highway 141, we don’t.  Zigzagging down across the next valley and up the slope to the next ridge.  Then down, and up the next ridge and we’ll proceed with the muse-gates more receptive and open on the other side.

I see human boot-prints, and am glad somebody else forsakes the established trail to bushwhack.  Whoever it is, an artifact hunter? worse yet, someone with a gun? or a random itinerariless wanderer with an agenda as vague yet esoteric as mine? helps me decide that we go yet another ridge.  Beyond the pale, whatever that means.  Actually, I wonder if anywhere on this earth is beyond the pale, what with the GPS eyes in the sky and the ever-more accurate precise mapping of everything.  Personal, and I’m sure, general experience has shown that one can not just tweak, but whack the pale out of the park with the right mix of psychotropics.  But that is not to be seriously approached with my preferred combo of brandy and cigars …

Pale out of the picture, the horizon looks as it probably did a few hundred, nay, a couple, three thousand years ago.  The circum-polar landmark potential beckons.

Dogzeneye survey the ridge-top we’re on.  The inuk-spot location optimization does not exactly call out for action.  The dogs become pre-occupied with pee-mail nexuses and bones to chew on, olfactory delights.  I decide that a rock ledge half-way up from the valley bottom to the top of the next ridge north is our candidate location.

But it is not.  There comes a time when the line in the sand has to be drawn, and attaining the 5th or 6th (it’s easy for me to lose track) ridge-top north of Highway 141 will either be THE SPOT and if not, we’ll back-track to one of the more-promising locations considered earlier.

It is breezy, nay, windy on this ridge.  The approaching winter storm is stalled a few miles to the west.

The word inuksuk means “something which acts for or performs the function of a person.”  An inuksuk is often confused with an inunnguaq, a cairn representing a human figure. There is some debate as to whether the appearance of human- or cross-shaped cairns developed in the Inuit culture before the arrival of Europeanmissionaries and explorers.  The inunnguaq is distinguished from inuksuit in general.*

I begin the

inunnguaq creation by following a process I initiated a couple weeks before.  Gather material, pile it around ground zero.  Choose big blocky chunks for the feet.  These have to be stable!  Take care that the leg-pieces are also flat and preferably square-ish.  You will need a couple or more large flat ‘body’ pieces to rest on the legs — and not of the inferior quality sandstone which would break to pieces if you dropped it from waist-high.  Be sure there are several thin small pieces for shims and ‘chinking.’  Take care to locate strong and long rectangular rocks for the arms.  Enough solid preferably cubic blocks for the upper body and to weigh down the shoulders.  A collar-bone section, upon which the neck pieces and, finally, the head can securely rest. 

Periodically, rock the structure-in-progress gently with one hand and note where shims or ‘chink’ pieces should be inserted to dampen sway.  You do want this to withstand a windstorm, not to mention death by bird-perch.  Granted, if a cow were to bump into it … I’d need either a half-dozen labor crew and/or construction machinery to make an inuksuk that large!

The dogs have little or nothing nearby in the olfactory delight availability, maybe the wind or impending storm has them apprehensive, and they are glad to leave.

There is a customary Inuit saying: “The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls.”

(By believing that all things, including animals, have souls like those of humans, any hunt that failed to show appropriate respect and customary supplication would only give the liberated spirits cause to avenge themselves.)*

I do not exactly backtrack, and make this a circular, not out-and-back, wandering.  I’m not tired, the dogs are more energetic than I, there is yet another cigar and the brandy flask has heft.  Unlikely, but perhaps my diet of recent has been mostly comprised of souls.  No wonder my seemingly sedate existence is paralleled by the great peril a millimeter away.  So I build a smaller inuksuk up but across the valley from the ridge-top one.

Later on, I spell out a ‘wombat’ on a windswept hilltop much closer to the car.

* thanks to Wikipedia.com for selected excerpts

the original InukThingy of Whitewater

the original InukThingy of Whitewater

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the original InukThingy of Whitewater

wind blew it down. it was rebuilt. (i learned to “chink” pretty good)

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Betunada & the Wombats of the Desert (“old” post — August 2009)

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BETUNADA & THE WOMBATS OF THE DESERT

Do YOU ever feel not tired?  Good! (if the answear wuzz yess).  Seems my personal energy-quotient ranges from very very tired to a sort of energy-limbo upon which the shadow from the Tired Tree is soon to be cast.

Sometimes, like a couple Satyrday nights ago, I go out of my way and lock on, acquire, a goodly dose of the fruit of the Tree.  It has been about six months since I pretended to play hockey.  So … the arena had a pick-up game then.  I have been waiting for the first opportunity to actually put on and try out all of my equipment.  Yes, I finally have all (or so I thought * ) of what I need to play goalie — having never worn the “upper” protection out on the ice.  I still needed help getting dressed (could not get the jersey on, and had trouble with practically everything else.  Hey!  It’s been over 6 months since I did this goalie thing).  Also, there was a sort of lame-accomplishment-pioneer (?) aspect –>  I think I’m the first over-60-year-old to be a goalie there.  (Locally, there are more than just a few excellent 60+ year-olds — but they’re “out” on the ice).

*The other goalie who played, one of the local college team’s G-men, said that I should consider acquiring goalie-breezers.  Goalie breezers?!  Well, I didn’t know until I had played a season-&-a-half that there were goalie skates.  And I might eventually get a real ICE-hockey goalie helmet — though the college guy said he’d GIVE me a spare he doesn’t use anymore.  Hmmm…

Next morning it felt like my left heel had a chipped bone, or a bone bruise.  Really painful to walk.  That, coupled with a nagging knot in my right hamstring, plus the congestion from the flu which takes weeks to finally go away, results in pretty much the physical (let’s NOT start in on the mental) mess which is me.  Sorta normal.

And the pick-up game the following week, a college player gave me some breezers.  Much nicer and newer than Tom’s old ones I’d been using.  And this was yet another game with only one other goalie, a fellow who is also trying out for one of three spots on the college team.  He was not as sure as the fellow last week that he’d be on the team, but after the game I tried to assure him that he would be.

Which is to say:  compared to the previous week, my statistics were much worse.  Last week, at one point I had three times more saves than goals allowed (yes, I know, that in the NHL if your GAA is less than 90% you probably would be kicked down into the minors, and THAT’s against NHL players! — but heck, consider there’s ME and a bunch of local NHL wanna-be’s…).  The last week I was lucky to barely have more saves than goals allowed.  The reason is … the local college team was to begin it’s try-outs real soon after this pick-up game, and I think some of the coaches suggested to new/unknown players that they should participate in tonight’s “pick up.”  The coaches sat in the stands, evaluating.

Enough about me.  You?  Are you basically just waiting to grow older and die?  THAT could be the one-sentence summary of where I’m at.  Oh, I’d like to think I actually aspire to various avenues of continuity, but I’m probably just kidding myself.  Results in the same thing.

(Actually, I don’t really dwell on, or believe the previous paragraph.  But it makes for the frolicking, fun-loving, predictable conversation from me that my work-mates and the occasional social contacts have come to expect.)

Wedding day for the son, Tom, until recently seemingly somewhat far off in the future, has popped up bobbing in the waves about a month from our bow.  The daughter, Rachel,  and her guy Benjamin (together are they “the Rachamin” or “Benchel”?) seem to have settled into their present lives — still planning exotic trips and ventures and ad- and mis-ventures, of course.

I had something happen a little a couple weeks ago which was a first:  I don’t think I have ever had a ‘normal’, ‘adult’, open and sincere conversation with any of my youngest brother’s (and his wife’s) kids.  Well, if I personally am capable of the ‘adult’ flavoring of conversation… never-the-less, the youngest of the three encountered Betty and I in the big-box electronics store.  He initiated contact (Betty said she wouldn’t have recognized him) and we ‘caught up’ on stuff for perhaps 20 or so minutes.  Maybe it was 15.  His girlfriend was real pleasant, too.  I think I’ll start referring to him as his real name.  Maybe he inherited some of the non-prevalent genes and aspects of that side of the bush.

Did I?

Should we talk about work? and yes we should, ’cause, as I have probably stated in prior posts, Betty and I would be having a much more interesting life right now had I not, more-or-less (actually “more”) resumed my prior job.  Serendipitous.  Timely.  Oh, someday we’ll intimately KNOW ‘want’ and ‘deprivation’ (other than the deprivations we suffer from and Lord forgive us ’cause we don’t know it!) and ‘real hunger’.  and thirst.  and sadness.  cheap hangovers.  more sadness.  self-pity.  envy.  coveting the neighbor’s ass (wait!  i already do that!).  well, i don’t really WANT any donkeys.  we had one once.  it was okay.

Work actually is interesting, and a continual challenge.  And, after about 5 months, the commute is getting a little bit … tedious.  It’s like I work 10 or 11 hours a day, but it beats the alternative.  Recent local newspaper headlines said that there’s more than 9% unemployment in River City!

I spend a little time on the job checking personal email and thinking about beer.  Not quite like being home, but I get pulled that way real easily.

So what about Betunada’s wombats?  of the desert, no less.  I don’t make ’em as often as I could, but the average is one or two a month.  The Benchel sent a pixure of a New Zealand wombat.  I should have done a wombat in Mexico (¿ is ‘wombat’ ‘wombat’ in español?).  Instead I made a dead guy in the jungle out of rocks, a hat, and two tennis shoes.  Someone (or something) later came by and dis-assembled it.  Picture available upon request (of the pre-dis-assembled dead guy).  I haven’t really said anything about the wombats, have(n’t) I?

The first wombat I “did” was many years ago.  Betty and I had gone cross-country skiing with a few of our ‘mates and after a while we were separated.  B ‘n me were on our way back to the car when I stopped to survey an open gently-sloped expanse on the hillside across from the ridge we were on.  And so … with Betty surveying from the spot where I initially stood, I skied down and across the valley, making a single-track line on the hillside opposite.  I tracked-out the word “WOMBAT” in the snow, and she would shout out what parts of the word needed more legibility.  I skied back out on the initial under-line and we went home.

That night our ‘mates phoned us and I answered saying “wombat.”  I heard a laugh and whoever called apparently turned to others in the room and said “yes, he did it.”

Gus Rilfillan called a week ago, 10 p.m. wednesday nite.  He said he ‘had to’ call as he was about to attend a Freddie MacGregor concert.  He and I and our families listened to F M many years ago at a Sunsplash Tour on the Hopi Reservation.  Gus took pixures of Freddie and I, and Freddie and my daughter.

Encountering a schoolmate of mine on a routine random desert walkabout a couple Sundays ago:  Betty and I responded, so to speak, to an ad in the real estate portion of the paper and drove out south(east) of Palisade to survey a proposed large-acreage development.  Horse Mountain Ranch.  We figured we had to get the dogs out on a ramble, so the proverbial two birds with one stone, or one truck-drive.  The only other party out there was a guy (and his friend) who was a frequent customer at her store, back in her “store days.”  And he graduated from the same h.s. as I, a year earlier.  I remember him as a drummer in the school band.  We talked and reminisced and he drove back down the road while we walked, me limping ‘cause of the suspected heel-bone spur.

Do you ever feel doomed?  Even slightly?  Seems that for me there’s an almost continual undercurrent of that.  Goes against what I’d think would be/should be whatever I should be integrating from reading the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.  Oh well…  what does “against the day” mean?