Dream #1: Choir of Wind-Blown Voices

It seemed to be a kind of music festival, but with band members milling about aimlessly, some in blue and gold uniforms, others in street clothes, some holding brass or woodwind instruments or drums, others empty-handed. In the background voices were singing. But was a choir performing or practicing? 

Either the piece was experimental — I found the music jarring and irritating and wanted only to get away from it or have it stop or at the very least cover my ears — or the conductor and various sections had completely lost track of each other. Musical phrases that sounded as if they should be sung in interlocking beats and measures were ahead of or behind each other, so that instead of harmonies the sounds came in unexpected, overlapping discords.

In a moment, then, my hearing of the choir changed, and the music came to me like ocean waves in a storm, each wave crashing over another before that other had reached the shore, although these waves of sound, being airborne, while still commanded by the winds as are ocean waves, were being blown about yet more haphazardly, and I realized that this was the intention of the music. And now I wanted the voices never to stop and never to sort themselves out and come together, because for now they were an entire universe of breezes and zephyrs, trying out what worlds they might make, and for now all was possibility, all was freedom, all was whirl, and no beauties had been foreclosed by the actualization of any others.

11/19/2019

Back to the Ghost Town

Return to the West, VI: Back to the Ghost Town

How often this past winter I have returned in memory and imagination to last winter in Dos Cabezas! It would not be everyone’s dream getaway, as it was, quite literally, a ghost town: we had to drive fourteen miles (to a real town) to find so much as a cup of coffee, let alone library, post office, and stores; we only met four neighbors during our entire three months’ residence; we had no cell phone signal; and traffic on the two-lane highway past the cabin was limited to other inhabitants of ghost town and neighboring ranches; travelers between Willcox and the Chiricahua National Monument; U.S. Border Patrol vehicles; and cows.

“Cows,” the generic Western label for adult cattle, regardless of sex, and whether natural or “fixed.” Cows and calves. Beyond the area of scattered houses and adobe ruins the land was fenced to keep cattle in, but Dos Cabezas itself, paradoxically, was open range, with cattle guards across the highway at both ends of town. Anyone who wanted to keep cows out of their yards or gardens had to put up their own fences.

The cabin we rented sat high off the highway. It looked down on the highway in front and off through the wash to the mountains in back. In front were two big metal livestock gates, painted green, but no fence surrounding the property. Cows could, and therefore did, come right up to the door. Cow patties could, and did, appear anywhere the cows went.

Javelinas, locally known as “pigs,” were a different matter. Classified as a game animal, javelinas could not be killed except by hunters with a proper license, and permitted numbers were limited, which was a problem because the pigs were notorious garden raiders and despoilers. Coyotes, on the other hand, not classified as game, could be killed without a license in unlimited numbers by various means. No doubt there was a logic to the distinction, but it escaped me.

Our neighbors had gardens and so were pestered by javelinas. We never saw evidence of them around the cabin. Coyotes we heard in the distance regularly, but we were used to that from northern Michigan. Birds, lizards, once a rock squirrel – those were the wildlife we saw. Since we were there in winter, we were not troubled by rattlesnakes or scorpions.

The ghost town, at any rate, was open range to animals wild and domestic.

Once laid out in a grid, with streets and house plats, the ghost town had once had its own school and post office and stores. In its early days, it was on the stage line; later a railroad served the area. Mining was responsible for the boom years, but no great amounts of gold or silver or copper were ever taken, and at last hopeful prospectors went elsewhere, leaving the town to wither and die. Old railroad ties used as fenceposts were one sign of the past, coils of barbed wire another, but the most obvious and picturesque were the ruins of adobe houses and stores. Crumbling adobe walls we looked to as a landmark stood at the bottom of our driveway. Elsewhere nearby, rotted wooden sills marked places where buildings had stood, craters (some fenced to keep cattle from falling in, others unfenced) all that was left of old dug wells. Antique automobile carcasses begged to be photographed, so as not to be forgotten.

Across the road from our cabin was a B&B, but that house, like our cabin, was set far back from the road, and we never saw anyone we could identify positively as B&B guests. Next door to the B&B, also a long way off the highway, was the home of a young couple; the husband was a mechanic, but his shop was in the town of Willcox. As it happened, our 2000 Toyota needed work more than once, and that mechanic was a lifesaver. Once I walked across the highway and up the drive to their house, hoping to meet the mechanic’s wife, but no one came to the gate when I called. Oddly, their dog, lying silently in the shade of the house, did not bark once at my presence. I call that odd because that dog barked every morning about 5 a.m. and at other irregular intervals through the day and night. He barked long before the rooster crowed the sun up. But when a stranger came to the gate? Silence.

Not far past the B&B and the mechanic’s house was the home of the French-Canadian handyman and his wife. Monsieur Jean, as we called him, was another of our Arizona lifesavers. It was Monsieur Jean who replaced the nonworking refrigerator in the cabin for us and loaned us a television and hooked up the antenna to bring in, without cable or dish, as many as twenty stations, including PBS. We owed much of our knowledge of the neighborhood to Monsieur Jean and his wife, a very cordial couple.

Another neighbor, who had inherited from his father property that met, at the corners, the property where our rented cabin sat, was Señor Dan. Some days I would be outdoors talking with Dan while David was deep in conversation indoors with Jean, and later we would compare notes and share what we had learned. It was all “Dan says” and “Jean says,” and I tried to make notes so as not to forget it all.

Those were the neighbors we knew to greet by name, neighbors with whom we conversed: Jean and Cheryl, Dan, and Jared. Others we knew only through stories those four shared with us.

Dan told me people in Dos Cabezas pretty much left each other alone except for the annual cemetery cleanup, an event that included a potluck meal. The cemetery and annual cleanup and potluck seemed to be the community life, from what we gathered, but maybe the ranchers had their own social life. We heard there were some arts and crafts people, and perhaps they got together now and then. But there was no gathering place in the ghost town – no church, no community center, no fire hall.

Still, it was a place, with an identity distinct from Willcox and the rest of Cochise County. People with history in the ghost town felt the ties keenly, particularly those with relatives buried in the old cemetery.

It was a mile from our cabin to the cemetery. One day I suggested to a friend visiting from Michigan that we walk that mile and back. The wind was strong and piercing, and by the time we got back to the cabin the air was filled with horizontal snow, the only snow we saw in Arizona except for what remained high on mountain peaks.

From either direction, approaching either from the north-northwest, from Willcox, or from the Chiricahuas to the south-southwest, entry into Dos Cabezas was clearly delineated by a cattle guard across the highway, a sign announcing Dos Cabezas, and another sign saying “Go Slow – Save a Cow.” From Willcox, the road climbed, and from Chiricahua one wound down into lower elevations, but either way, the cattle guard and signs clearly marked the edge of the ghost town. Whether ascending or descending, from wherever else we had spent the day, when we reached the signs and the cattle guard I felt, happily, that we were home again, but the feeling was most intense when we came from the Chiricahuas, late in the evening, and the scattered lights of houses and ranches sparkled quietly on the darkling desert below us while the stars twinkled in the blackness above. Dear little ghost town!

That feeling lasted three months, until the morning came for us to say good-by to the high desert and make our way across the Great Plains and the Midwest and around the Great Lakes to our home in northern Michigan, there to take up, once again, our well-established life, rich in friends and meaningful work. For months, the ghost town felt almost unreal. And then our Michigan winter came upon us, and my heart began to look back West.

Longings for Elsewhere

Return to the West I: Longings for Elsewhere

During my midlife graduate study of philosophy at the University of Illinois, from time to time I was invited to francophone dinner parties given by the bilingual secretary of the French Department, whom I knew through mutual friends. Besides Americans for whom French was a second language, guests were visitors to the Illinois prairie from Canada, Belgium, Algeria, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and other French-speaking African countries, as well as from France. Those international evenings granted all of us a most welcome temporary illusion – that of being in Paris, dream capital for all enamored of the French language and culture.

When I had first arrived in town, I’d been told that Champaign-Urbana was a wonderful place to “get work done” because there were “no distractions.” While scholars at the Chicago campus might be challenged by temptations of the city itself, no such danger existed downstate.

After one of her delightful dinner evenings, my French-speaking hostess remarked rhapsodically, intending neither irony nor humor, “Champaign-Urbana is such a wonderful place! There are so many people here who desire to be elsewhere!”

Desiring to be elsewhere....

What I remember of my birth state, South Dakota, comes from a later visit, a camping trip in my seventeenth summer. My memories of growing up center instead on Joliet, Illinois, and while the memories are far from being nightmares, for years there I longed to escape, and once escaped have never contemplated permanent return. As a child, I spent long, dreamy hours on the front porch, gazing west across the cornfields on the other side of the road (soybeans in alternate years), yearning for wild open spaces where I would not be hemmed in by suburban streets and land cultivated for agricultural crops. No one would have known it to look at me, but in my imagination I rode a galloping horse toward the setting sun.

But it is no fault intrinsic to Illinois that the Land of Lincoln felt like a prison for me. Illinois was cast in that thankless role in my personal story, I see now, because of the facts of childhood dependency, adolescent longing, and, later, the suffocating constrictions of graduate study. No doubt I would have had the same longings for escape in Albany or Phoenix, had circumstances other than place been the same.

For years, Michigan was the dream. From the time I was twelve years old, our family camping trips took place along the Lake Michigan shoreline from Indiana to the Straits of Mackinac. Camping – vacation -- escapes from school and housework and all ordinary strictures of urban/suburban life. Sun or rain, regardless of temperature, in Michigan we lived the outdoor life that fueled my dreams, so it is little wonder I saw Michigan as embodying those dreams, that life. At the age of eighteen, I moved to Michigan at last.

Having a dream is one thing. Living it is another. Reality is always a mix of light and shadow. But I have not been disappointed living the dream. Michigan is home.

It took a while, but working year after year in jobs often experienced as miserable servitude I managed at last to find a way of being in the world that has remained with me, for the most part, ever since. That is, wherever I am, living or visiting, I try to be fully. After all, if I could afford to travel endlessly, would I not devour every strange sight and sound and make the most of every moment? So why not do that wherever my here is on any given day?

In Kalamazoo, then, on long walks or bus rides through the city, I came to see every building and alley and tree, in every detail, as unique and fascinating and delightfully foreign. The same was true for me of Cincinnati during two years I spent there. In the beautiful northern Michigan county where I have lived and worked now for over two decades, I am astonished at how many people will spend hours puffing away at indoor exercise rather than walking the roads and woods around them.

There is so much to see in the world, and the scenes are never the same two days in a row – they change from one hour to the next. For every one of us, life is too short to contain all possible experiences, and these are not limited to sight alone, either. I have imagined being without sight, without hearing, and how much delight would remain in the fragrance and touch of a June breeze here at home, sitting outdoors below the linden tree in bloom.

“We’re here now” has been my mantra for years. Being here is not something I want to miss.

And yet – and yet -- .

By December of 2014 we had been four years at home without any significant travel or time away when unexpectedly a possibility for adventure appeared. Someone we knew owned a cabin in southern Arizona, and we could rent it for the winter. The very modest price put it within our reach; the price was modest in keeping with the cabin and its location. We would know no one and have few neighbors -- all the better, as far as I was concerned, because as soon as the property owner casually tossed off the phrases “ghost town,” “high desert,” and “open range,” my heart throbbed with old cowgirl dreams.

I had not, as an adult, yearned for Arizona. If anything, to be honest, I was somewhat impatient with Michigan friends who jumped ship for the winter to head for the sunny warmth of the Southwest. Certainly, I had no desire to spend months quarantined in a trailer park or a condo, but a ghost town a mile above sea level with cattle roaming through the yard? Vivid images filled my imagination, and while negotiations were in abeyance it seemed that all my happiness depended on spending winter in the high desert.

We went. We saw. We explored. I fell in love. In the spring we came home again. That was then, and this is now.

Home happiness has never kept us from having travel dreams. Over the years we made actual travels, too,. One September we flew to France, a place we had each loved for a long time, finally joining our separate loves of Paris and discovering together new regions to the south. Another year, in the spring, we drove across the Canadian Shield to Montreal, an exciting and cosmopolitan North American City it had long been my dream to visit. The Florida Everglades were wildly different from northern Michigan, as was the fascinating Gulf Coast, where we spent a couple of winters (yes, it must be admitted – winters away from Michigan) in the tiny “Old Florida” settlement of Aripeka. Coming home one spring from Florida, we passed through the vibrant beauty of Savannah, Georgia, which featured youth as well as venerable age. And twice we followed the course of the Mississippi from Illinois to the Twin Cities of Minnesota, crossing back and forth from one bank to the other, hungrily devouring every sight along every bend of the river.

Back at home, we relived adventures and dreamed of returning to this or that place, of relocating somewhere else for part of the year, and of exploring new places not yet experienced. The imaginary lives we have lived are beyond number. How many times was it love, and how often mere infatuation? And how does one tell, except over time?

As teasing, reluctant northern Michigan spring advances and retreats following a blessedly mild winter, I look forward to the joys of the unfolding season. Still, I must confess my heart was not fully here in the cold and snow just past. Again and again it returned to the scruffy, hardworking, struggling, unglamorous scenes of southeast Arizona: the ghost town, the playa, the cow town, the isolation, the open spaces, the cows and horses and mountains.

I wonder how I will feel when spring has fully arrived, when the woods are full of the sweet, ephemeral blooms of wildflowers, when it is time to dig and turn the garden and inhale the fragrance of living soil. Will those long-beloved sights and perfumes banish my longing for the dry, dusty high desert?

If not, can I possibly write a travelogue while going nowhere? Can I transport not only myself but also anyone who cares to read my words to another place? Can I convey anything of what enchanted me in a part of the country not known for wide appeal to tourists or snowbirds?

“Be thinkin’ about it,” the announcer kept telling to the young rodeo riders waiting their turn in the arena.

I’m thinkin’ about it.

Dear Young Ones

Parents, step-parents, and grandparents, we have come to an age where the greater length of the path lies behind us. It is a strange realization, one that prompts me to tell you a story. Isn’t that what old folks do? Tell stories to the young ones? Here’s mine, and I make no excuse for its rambling nature or scanty conclusion.

A couple of decades ago, David and I made an expedition to the other side of Michigan, “the sunrise side,” where both his parents were born. Out in the countryside beyond Tawas we found his father’s old one-room school. We explored on foot the nearby area where his grandfather’s farm had been, though no trace of it remained. A short drive away, we found his grandparents’ graves in a little country cemetery. 

By chance, also, in a restaurant on the shore of Lake Huron , we ran into one of his distant cousins, a bald man with the unforgettable name Waldemar. He was sitting in a booth next to ours, and when the waitress addressed him by name, David said, “I wonder if that could be my cousin Waldemar.” It was, conversation ensued, and in the end Waldemar gave us directions to the homes of a couple more cousins on nearby farms. All these cousins, I should say, were of the first-cousin- once-removed or second-cousin relation.

The first old farmer we tracked down, Howard, lived with his wife at the end of a tree-lined dirt road in a most picturesque setting. Their farmyard featured among its outbuildings an old log barn like nothing I’d ever seen before, and to the north of that barn, concealed by a pretty line of trees, was a charming small brook. Howard and his wife make us welcome, and Howard climbed up into the loft of a newer barn to retrieve a piece of furniture put aside for David years before, a rustic twig table made by David’s paternal grandmother, who died before he was born. (We still have that table. You all have seen it.) I always thought we might return to Howard’s farm, so steeped in family history. We never have, but we sometimes speak of it, and David tells me stories of going there as a little boy, stories of fish-head skulls nailed to a shed wall, of driving a horse-drawn sulky (is there another kind?) down the dirt road when a wheel came off – but those are not my stories, not what I want to tell you today.

The other old farmer, Herman, a man well into his 80s, lived at the end of a long driveway going straight south off the east-west two-lane highway. Herman’s house and outbuildings sat out in the open, exposed to the sky like farms on the central Illinois prairie. We were not invited into the house but kept standing outside to talk with Herman, who stood on the stoop, just outside the doorway, his wife standing behind him, inside the door, silent. Herman might have invited us in (or he might not), but he was on his way out, hot on the trail , he told us, of a neighbor’s spotted pony he wanted to buy, and so we took our leave.

Our memory of Herman and the spotted pony entertained us for years. We would laugh and shake our heads and ask each other what that old man in his 80s thought he needed with a spotted pony! Lately we understand better and no longer laugh, although we still smile.

And this is what I want to tell you. It will probably come as quite a surprise, and you may have trouble believing it’s true. No one , no matter how old, ever gets over wanting that spotted pony.

David watches the special features that come with movies on DVDs , telling me, “I learned a lot,” as if he will be directing a movie in the near future, and I read farming magazines as if I’ll very soon be bringing worn-out soil back to fertility and breeding livestock. When we travel together, we assess strange towns and wild landscapes as if we might start new lives there. We picture to ourselves and to one another the wilderness cabins where our novels will be conceived and birthed. In conversations in strange motels we imagine the furniture re-arranged, paintings and bookshelves added, picturing a whole life we might put together in that one room. You have no idea how many parallel lives we have going!

No doubt you see us as completely settled into our chosen grooves, the dreamy painter and bookseller, content to be what we are and as we are for the rest of our lives, not at all busy launching new careers or building new houses or setting off for distant parts of the country. (Maybe even another country! A houseboat on the Seine!) Not very likely, is it? After all, how much energy do we have to make serious changes, to make new beginnings? How much savings do we have socked away for acquisition and startups?

We’re not deluded, young ones. We know what’s real and what’s feasible, and we do not regret the lives we have made. At the same time, our fantasies continue to blossom in ways that would astound you. It’s a jungle in there, fertile and crowded with possibilities of all kinds, and in that largely shared space – because a shared life is built on conversation -the two of us are still young and vibrant and full of dreams.

You cannot fully grasp what I’m trying to tell you, never having been as old as we are now, but I thought I should give you at least this little hint. It will better explain, perhaps, my excitement over that old scythe from the farm auction and David’s satisfaction in buying the bright-orange rowing scull. In his mind, he is skimming over Lake Leelanau, you see, and in mine I am mowing our back meadow by hand, like one of Tolstoy’s peasants. And it goes way beyond that! In imagination we are writing and directing movies together and applauding one another’s published novels. Every road we drive down leads through towns and past houses we look at with an eye to their possibilities for us. Can we see ourselves there? Could we make a life there? What would that life look like? He envisions a smooth, empty road in front of his Hayabusa as he cruises at 100 mph, and I become the world's oldest jockey on my lightning-fast Apaloosa.

Our projects at home may appear small to you these days – insignificant and barely there. You may puzzle over my modest pile of old bricks and David’s four stout wooden posts and wonder, if you even notice them, what we hope to make of such small beginnings. Ah, but if you could only see our future with our minds’ eyes!

Spotted ponies! Spotted ponies by the thousands, still out there on the horizon, thundering along the ridge, raising clouds of dust!

11/1/2015

A Math Dream That Was Not a Nightmare

Why would my dream life be invaded by a geometry problem? The setup was a line segment, and the question that invaded my dream life was, how many lines could intersect that line segment? At first I imagined the intersecting lines to be all perpendicular and parallel, and my dream thinking was that the number of possible intersecting lines could not be infinite because (1) the original line was only a line segment, and so not itself infinite; and (2) while lines have no breadth or thickness, it seemed to me (but this could be only commonsense thinking, which doesn’t always translate to mathematics) that there would have to be space between the lines or they would simply fill in -- ??? But they would not turn the group of lines into a solid, because there would still be no thickness, or depth.... Does plane geometry care at all if a surface is blank or filled in, or (and if I had to bet, I’d put my money on this second disjunct) does it only care about lines and points?

Ah, but points have no length, breadth, or thickness! A point is not an object but a location. So even the line segment could have, it seems, an infinite number of intersecting, parallel, perpendicular lines. Do you buy it?

Next (still in my dream) I started wondering about intersecting oblique lines. (What would be the smallest conceivable angle? Would there be such a thing?) Would this generate a larger infinity of intersecting lines? Can infinity come in different sizes, bigger and smaller, or is infinity just always that -- infinity?

Finally, dragging myself out of the dream and into wakeful consciousness, I searched around for a way to ask the question that my geometry dream had posed, and here's what I came up with: What is the maximum number of lines that can intersect any given line segment?

Here’s a question and answer I found online that has bearing on my dream, but before following the link you might enjoy thinking about the question yourself. I mean, there's no exam involved here, not even a pop quiz.