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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

September 7, 2009

A lovely evening tonight.

Around 10pm, I went out to take a bag of spruce shavings to the horses to bed down their run-in shed. The air was cooling enough that I wore my horse club hoodie, but I still wore shorts. The sky was still clear—had been clear since Thursday—and there was a deep aqua light in the northwest sky, fading to cobalt to the south. It was deep dusk, but I could see well enough to drag the black plastic bag of shavings under the fence to the run-in shed and divide it between the two stalls. As I walked back to the corral, I could see Sam’s coat gleam in the fading light where he nibbled the last of his evening’s hay. Mattie, in her side of the corral, was a blacker spot in the deepening darkness. Above the southeast horizon floated an egg-shaped gibbous moon, pale orange, as if about to hatch more of the deep yellow birch and aspen leaves that we’re seeing increase each day. As I walked past Sam, back to the house, it felt like a pause in time, as if the season had hit a balance, a perfect pose like the moment a dancer poses in arabesque on pointe and we catch our breath and believe she can stay in that balance forever. I could stay in this season forever if it would delay what is to come.

We were haying all weekend. Yesterday we went out to the Quist farm at the end of Rosie Creek Road, the fields spread out green on a rolling bench of land along the Tanana River. To get there, we drive along a pot-holed dirt road through spruce and birch, past five-acre “homesteads,” then suddenly there’s the farm, the green fields striped with darker raked hay or dotted with squares of ten bales that tip out of the small trailer towed by the baler. Yesterday, the hay was still too wet, so today we gathered up another crew: Mike, Ira, Tobin, Peter, me, and rattled through the dust and potholes to the farm, then filled the trucks one-by-one with brome hay. The bales were still a bit heavy but dry enough that they (I hope) won’t start to mold before freeze up.

It was nearly seventy—not too hot, but warm and dry enough to dry the hay. We took turns tossing and stacking, and those of us not driving a particular truck, sat on the bales as we drove along the field from square to square. Rufus the farm dog came running up to check on us sometimes, and at the end of the field, a flock of a half dozen sandhill cranes moved slowly over the cut grass, their necks snaked down to find insects in the dirt.

When we showed up in our yard with truckloads of hay, Sam whinnied. He’s in the front side of the corral today, though I’ve been switching them about once a week to keep them entertained. When Mattie’s in the front and hay arrives, she leans into the fence and stretches her neck as long as she can to grab a mouthful as the truck backs up to the hay barn. Sam stood and watched intently, waiting for us to bring some to him. This says a lot about the difference between the two.

After we stacked the hay—the harder part of the job. I made a big bowl of penne pasta with tomato and Italian sausage sauce and carrots and purple and yellow cauliflower from the garden as finger food. We sat on the deck in the gathering dark, looking out across the river at the Tanana flats—gold patches of bright birch and aspen, dark streaks of spruce—the gold and dark green together are especially dramatic now. I said, “Sometimes I wish it could stay like this for a whole season.” Usually these colors fade in a week or two, usually with the first September rains. Then I realized that if the yellow were around long enough, we’d get tired of it and long for snow—or, as I am now, for spring again.

Robert Frost knew about yellow things: “Nothing gold can stay,” he says in his tiny poem about early spring leaves, dawn, and the sweet melancholy of transitions. For now we revel in the gold of our leaves–like the sun reflecting back to us twice—and we store it up to get us through the dark winter days ahead.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

August 28, 2009

We’re into late summer weather here. Early fall, really. On the willows growing out of the side of the bank and along the roads and riverbanks, there are starting to be a few yellow leaves like bright commas among the dusty green.

Overhead, the sandhill cranes flock and circle, their wide-stretched wingspan, long necks, stick legs behind. Today, I walked to campus from the parking lot and a V of geese straggled overhead. They called to each other with that slightly desperate, questioning call they have, as if they are always lost: “Which way? I thought you knew? Now what?” The cranes sound like they are having more fun. They gargle out their call as if the air were delicious to them. I watched a group of them yesterday, circling on an eddy of air, revving themselves up for the long flight to Brownsville, where they overwinter in the fields and the Laguna Atascosa wildlife refuge. There were young ones among the flock and they seemed to be teasing each other, brushing wingtips and rolling away, then righting themselves and doing it all over again.

A friend once told me that when cranes fly over, it’s good luck. We’re out standing under cranes as much as we can right now, storing all the luck we can.

And we sure do seem to need it. I’m still reeling from the loss of my friend, mentor, and colleague, Roy Bird. And then there’s Teddy Kennedy, whose life in politics has been an ongoing presence in the political consciousness of a whole generation. And then there’s the rain, the cold, and, the true mark of the coming of fall in the Interior, dark nights. We mark the end of summer with the sighting of the first star. It usually coincides with first frost.

We’ve avoided frost here in the hills, but some friends have lost their gardens already. I still have red and green romaine, purple and orange carrots, cauliflower, zucchini, crookneck squash, broccoli, kale, potatoes, and, in the greenhouse coming ripe just in time, luscious Chianti Rose tomatoes.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem after a walk in Creamers’ Field among cranes, called, “We Tempt Our Luck”—the cranes, the first hint of winter chill, and the boy in the poem who was writing to save his luck all wove into the poem. It’s now the title poem of a chapbook of poems that is just out from Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press, in Virginia (see Writing Links for their website). Now, I’m thinking about how much hope it’s possible to have, cranes or no cranes—then thinking of Teddy, who was a committed optimist, or he wouldn’t have reached out to as many people or crossed as many party lines as he did. I’ll dedicate some of my back-to-school energy this fall to his memory and to Roy, who reminds me to speak truth to power and to do it from my most genuine self.

Yesterday, speaking of hope, I went out on the deck as the light was beginning to turn that watery gray it gets when it’s about to pour rain or when it’s serious that night will come soon. I could see an orange tinge to the sky, flat with clouds. Somewhere behind me the north-west setting sun skipped over the northern curve of the earth and shot a ray into the rusty gray sky, arcing a perfect rainbow across the sky. Because of the orange tint in the clouds, the blues and greens were tough to pick out. But the reds, yellows, oranges glowed. A strange beauty, after much gloomy rain.

Today, a scrubbed blue sky. And the cranes.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

August 7, 2009

Smoke, a Journey, and a Horse Named Cindy

A few weeks ago, my brother called and asked how I’d like to come to New Jersey in August. Having grown up in that part of the world, I told him that New Jersey in August was part of the reason I live in Alaska—the garden is ready to harvest, the horses are in shape, mostly, and summer is winding to a close. Still, he’s a quadriplegic and needed help for a week only, and as we were making plans for me to travel, the smoke from spreading wildfires settled across the Interior, dropping ashes on our cars, the garden, the horses’ coats, blocking the sun and making it difficult to breathe. Everyone in the household, including visiting dancers, seemed to have smoker’s cough.

So, I agreed, and now, here I am, in a condo in Voorhees, NJ.

As I flew out a few days ago, I could see a wide column of smoke from the plane window—perhaps the Murphy Dome fire or the Railbelt fire; it’s hard to tell direction from a jet. We passed by Denali and over along the Alaska Range and into Canada. All through the mountain ranges, we could see smoke drifting through the valleys. The peaks we flew over seemed brown and more bare of snow than usual. The snow itself looked dingy and smoke-tan; the glaciers streaked with dark rock. I was astonished at the extent of the smoke. Some was from smaller fires that we could see pluming up from the trees; the rest seemed to be blown along inland by the prevailing winds. I was reading an old collection of Alice Munro stories, Friend of My Youth, appropriately Canadian, given the land we were flying over. When I looked up again, we were over Minnesota: green squares of land bordered by rows of darker trees. No smoke.

So, now, New Jersey, a place I left long ago. To make the trip more interesting, I made appointments at two dressage stables: Holly Tree Dressage, and Transitions Farms, one to the northeast and one to the southeast of here. Yesterday, I drove to Holly Tree to take a lesson on Cindy the Quarterhorse.

Driving is not my favorite activity—I prefer riding. Here in Western New Jersey, the roads are often the remnants of old farm roads, widened a bit to accommodate urban sprawl. The names: White Horse Pike, Eveham Road, Old Indian Mills Road—have been the same for two or three centuries. But they intersect broad, fast “highways” built in the 50s and 60s and linked with traffic circles (known other places as roundabouts). And, as happens in other places, too, directions often depend on some prior knowledge of the place. So my first mistake was to assume that I had made a wrong turn when I seemed to be headed south even though I needed to go north. Fifteen miles the wrong way later, I was straightened out by a friendly woman in a gas station. I made it to my lesson an hour late and having covered more than twice the road I needed to. The way back was worse, since I reversed the directions I needed and kept turning the opposite way I should have.

But the ride was great. Cindy is a chestnut Quarterhorse, a well-trained lesson horse. I was warned she might throw a fit when she realized I wasn’t a total beginner, but it was mild. We worked on applying the leg (inside leg to outside rein—one of those sayings in riding that takes time to actually feel in the body), and on canter, then I cooled her off and let her graze on the lawn by their outdoor dressage arena.

The place was built in the late 60s/early 70s as a race horse training stable. The barn is long and made of cement blocks with an indoor track making up the aisles of the stable. While I was there, a girl with pink hair was riding a series of colts around the track, accustoming them to life under saddle. The colts, Thoroughbreds, were tall and long-legged with that muscular, knife-like quality that racehorses have. They were alert and curious, if a bit skeptical about the world of work they were being introduced to. A dark bay colt, with a crescent of white showing over his eye, dumped his rider into the dirt of the indoor track on his way past the barn door. Another girl caught the reins of the horse and everyone there rushed over to see how the rider was. She got up and brushed off, and the business of the stable went on. Outside the barn, the farrier had pulled up in his truck, and I later saw the colt standing fresh from a hosing down, having his shoes pulled and his feet trimmed. The rider, by then, was on another horse breezing along the outdoor track with another rider and her horse.

Cindy and I were in the grass by then. She seemed glad to have at the green stuff. Her back is far better muscled than Mattie and Sam’s—the advantage of a year-long riding season. Her coat was silky and still short, unlike Sam’s which has started to grow, anticipating fall. She went back willingly to her stall, but I guess she’d rather have stayed outside on grass or in turnout. I’ll ride her again on Monday. Tomorrow, I take a new set of directions to Elmer, NJ, to ride Clovis. Wish me luck!

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

July 28, 2009

ASRA is in week 2 and the kids are writing along.  Here’s a poem that I wrote in response to a journal prompt the other day:

Farm Stand, Snow Hill

I can see the top of the plank

that holds cantaloupe, slices of watermelon,

tightly wrapped corn–the green seersucker

husks, the ragged brown tassel–every

splinter jagged through white paint,

every fly walking squat-legged,

tapping its tongue on sweetness.

My grandfather’s hand rests on my head

as he talks.  The man with the fruit

looks down at me from shimmering

air.  They laugh.  I feel the heat

on parts of my hair that stick

out from his shading

hand.

“There,” the man says,

“she’ll like this.”

He hands down a white paper

dish.  In it, golden, glistening

the perfect hexagons

of wax pressing against each

other, ragged at the edges,

honey so sweet I cough

on sweetness, then chew

and chew and chew.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

July 7, 2009

Here in the Interior, we’re having unusually hot and humid weather. Usually our air is dry, which makes both hot and cold temperatures more bearable, but now we’re in wildfire season, and, all throughout the Interior boreal forests, fires are burning and smoke drifts across the valleys and up the riverways, bringing with it humidity and the lingering smell of wood smoke. Looking out across the valley, the hills and the jagged tops of spruce trees fade into a blue-gray haze and the air feels heavy to move through and breathe.

Still it’s not as bad as it was a few years ago, when the smoke of six million acres of fires hung over the Interior for nearly a month and people stayed inside or went out with scarves or facemasks over their mouths and noses to keep from breathing the air. That summer, during the worst days, Mattie and Sam would stretch out flat in the sand of the corral to nap, stay cool, and breathe the clearer air along the ground. This isn’t nearly as bad as that.

We’re not used to heat here—85 above zero is hot for us—and it’s a bit debilitating. And we know that these long sunny days (it still never gets totally dark here and won’t till the first week in August) are a brief respite from winter and we want them to be perfect so we can spend as much of our time outdoors as we can—on the rivers, at fish camp, at night baseball games, hiking, gardening, riding. This clear but smoky weather is supposed to stretch into next week, and, though we complain about the heat and smoky haze, we’ll complain more when it finally rains if the rain lasts more than a day. We want it all.

Which is one answer to any questions those of you outside Alaska may have about our soon-to-be-former governor’s recent erratic behavior. In summer, Alaskans are manic, frantically trying to accomplish as much as possible: gathering firewood, catching fish for winter, gardening, and trying to fit in as much fun as possible. We don’t sleep much, not only because of the light, but because we know we have to get it all in before the rainy days of August or the first frost of September. Our summer is driven by winter. So, perhaps, this has affected the governor, too. Sarah’s gone fishing, and we’ll be picking up the pieces in Alaska for some time to come.

In the mean time, there’s mulching, dealing with slime mold, staking tomatoes, composting horse manure, riding and training, getting in some trail rides, barbecuing on the deck, and sitting in the first base bleachers at the Goldpanners baseball games, tooting out the tune of Happy Boy on kazoos during the seventh-inning stretch. Smoke or no, Sarah or no, summer is good.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

June 30, 2009

Busy days in the garden and greenhouse.  After days of rain clouds, we have blue sky again.  The horses are so bored by rainy weather, they have chewed a post on the pass-through between them nearly through.  At night I hear Mattie chewing at it, rattling the metal fence attached to in in a rhythmic clanging.  Sam eggs her on.

Now it’s back to the garden and back to riding.

Here’s a poem from a few weeks ago:

——-

Visiting Sue Dean’s Garden


Irony is a rock garden:

light filters through petals,

the sky-colored poppy,

the deep pink fireweed,

a rose, an iris, the extravagant

plumes of fern—all glow

in June sun, against the cool

chocolate planes of quarried

rock. You point

here and there, to small plants

growing, tiny flecks of yellow,

or white, or pale blue flowers,

name them and the ones

who gave them to you.

Among them, a pond

that rocks outline lies still.

An insect floats there; algae

spreads. The plants sprawl out:

years of re-blooming, covering

the rough edges of rock.

You dream as you walk,

and speak of dreams.

We could sit here all day,

listening to the hum and buzz

of insects exploring sweet

caves, flowers, letting sun

fall on our arms as we bend

to pull out what we don’t

desire, tuck what we do

into dirt.

We slice fruit, nibble cheese,

turn compost, hope

for more and more to bloom

to rise from what hard things

rocks are, what nourishes

from decay.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

June 8, 2009

Late afternoon. I’m on the deck surrounded by packs of petunias, pansies, brachycomes, lobelia, all waiting to be clustered together in pots to bloom through our short summer. I’m sitting in the shade of a market umbrella—the large kind found at outdoor restaurants, and it casts the only shade on the deck till the sun slips behind the hill and behind the house. The dog is stretched out flat on the deck, lying as still as he can, hot even in his recently shorn coat. Sam and Mattie, out in the corral, linger by the water tank, feinting at each other with their noses in a game of water tank keep-away.

The thermometer on the post of the hay barn read 95 degrees today, though the thermometer in the shade under the deck read 75. This is about as hot as it gets here, and it always takes us by surprise. We drag a bit, wait for the cool of evening as the sun dips nearer the horizon, knowing that at this time of year, there will be hours of silvery light to come.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. The house was quiet, but the sky had the soft luminous quality of near dusk—a rare time elsewhere, romantic, even, in its briefness. Here, this light stretches on into the night, from 10pm till 3 or 4 am, when we’re back to regular daylight again. Here, below the Arctic Circle, the sun dips beneath the horizon for a few hours even at solstice, but it’s only a dimming of the light, like the subtle dimming of light caused by a solar eclipse. The air cools, the trees exhale faint moisture into the evening. The scent of flowers—and gardeners here are crazy for flowers—lingers in the evening, mingling with the smell of barbecue and fish smokers.

This place looks so much different than it did a month ago, right after snow melt and river break up. The trees are thickly leaved—deep green and shiny. The cottonwoods release their fluffy seeds into the air, floating on the breeze like big soft snowflakes. Except for the lack of humidity, it feels s almost tropical. I always feel like we’ve just slipped a bit geographically—as if, for the summer months, Alaska really is in the spot reserved for it on some maps—off the coast of California.

Now, a bit of breeze, the first cool of evening. The ground, though warmer now, enough so that we can grow our gardens, still harbors the remnant coolness of winter. Even the manure pile, which my gardener friends have been carting off for compost and soil amendment, has a wedge of snow or ice at the base of it. So when the sun slips behind the hill or the sky clouds over, we feel the chill in the air, the reminder that we still live in the north and, manic as we are with light right now, we never forget that these days will pass soon.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

May 21, 2009

Spring? Here in the Interior we leap from winter to summer with a brief period of bleak brown and gray—-the soggy earth and the quickly melting snow—-in between. In the past three days the leaves have gone from tiny newly furled lemon-lime leaflets to shiny dark-green leaves. The woods are full of their flashing, the twittering of birds–not the electronic kind, but electric with the urgency and joy of mating.

After two weeks of Master Gardener class, I’m now ready to put the garden in, and, like every year, I feel three weeks behind, though we’re still a week and a half away from our traditional planting date, June 1. In the greenhouse, the tomato plants are growing sturdy stems and richly green leaves. The peppers are coming along, as are the broccoli, kale, eggplants. It’s yummy to write this, but they are all still tiny green leaves with a long way and much potential for misfortune to come before the yummy time actually comes.

I’m still starting seeds in the greenhouse—-lettuce, beans, things I could plant outside–but I’m trying to cheat the season and the potential for a late frost by planting them under the protection of the fiberglass roof. I also have flower sets I bought from a local grower, so the greenhouse is sweet with the smell of petunias and heliotrope.

This is an energetic time of year, fueled by the intensity of long sunlight. Thinking back to the dreamy slow winter days when I started this blog, it’s clear how the seasons in the Interior affect the psyche. In the winter, I’m introspective, writing in a near dream state, engaged with the senses in an inward way. Now, on the verge of summer, I’m so active—-gardening, riding, dancing—-that I fall asleep exhausted and wake a bit stiff (why I’m sitting and writing right now), then head out to do more digging, raking, brushing, saddling, riding, etc.

Last night, driving home near midnight, I was struck by the silvery light everywhere. I nearly wrote, “in the sky” but, like the light that radiates off the snow in winter, summer evening light seems to come out of the land itself, not from the sky. We are in the best time of year, two full months of these “white nights” when light lingers after the sun has slipped briefly behind the hills. It’s a long twilight that lasts for hours before slowly brightening into morning and sunlight again. On Solstice, the sun will dip below the horizon for three hours, but the light stays strong enough that we have our Midnight Sun baseball game every year from 10pm to whenever with no artificial lights, even when clouds complicate matters. Some years, when it’s a well-matched game going into extra innings, we sit in the stands watching as the sun lifts back up from the hills again, around 2am. We’re tired the next day—-if it’s a work day, everyone drags through it—-but happy to have seen something wonderful.

This time of year, I wouldn’t trade Alaska for any other state I’ve ever lived in—-and they all have their good qualities. But now, in all this sun we feel purged of the discontent that built up like a sludge in our hearts through the winter. The blood thins a bit in the warmth and runs more quickly. The skin absorbs and processes vitamin D—-they say it contributes to contentment. We grow our gardens and eat everything fresh we can get our hands on.

Jeter the dog sleeps by the open door to the deck in his newly shaved summer coat. The warblers call to each other. There’s a flute on the radio—-maybe Mozart—-and a slight breeze plays across the keys of the computer. All’s well here.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

May 7, 2009

Things That Go Fast

This past week, for one. Last Friday, after a dance class taught by my dancer son, Ira, we all sat out on the deck at the Pump House swatting early season mosquitoes and watching the Chena River rush past. There were small ice floes, some just flat sheets of ice, some upended pieces that had once been frozen to river mud, now showing the bottom, tinged with red-orange silt and cratered from air pockets trapped there. A few ice sheets had ice chunks sitting on top of them where they had split off of another ice sheet and been shoved one atop the other when the river ice upstream had broken up. The river had been nearly still just the day before, the water rising where it had backed up from ice jams down river.

“The ice must have gone out in Nenana,” I said. We watched branches and more ice chunks float by fast. Then, upstream, we noticed something black, triangular, bobbing at intervals, and moving more slowly than the rest. From time to time it would rise from the river as if to see where it was going, then sink back to a low profile. As it got closer, we could see that it was the corner of a flat object, possibly a shed roof, floating with the current but trailing some part that created drag—or maybe reached the river bottom—and caused the whole thing to lift up occasionally. We watched it for a long time, a slow, unseasonably warm evening beside a fast river.

When we got home, we discovered that the ice had gone out in Nenana at about that time, freeing the Tanana and its tributary, the Chena and flushing the Interior of ice, dead wood, shed roofs, and other detritus that had ended up near the riverbanks. It’s so unusual for the ice to go out at night that only two people had chosen that time and will split the pot. Other years, dozens of people have split the pot, so this was a good year for the winners.

And the next day, another fast thing, Mine That Bird, an unknown horse who came from the back of the pack where, it turns out, he was just cooling his heels, biding his time, waiting for the cue from jockey Calvin Borel to dash past all the tiring favorites and run away with the race. I watched the race on a grainy screen at the Exhibit Hall in the Center for the Arts where horse people were gathered for a tack swap. Next to me, a 10-year-old girl, who knew all the details of her favorite horse and several others and who sat riveted during the race.

Friends who ask me about my feelings about horse racing expect me to talk about abuse or illegal substances, but I’m a bit goofy about watching Thoroughbreds run. They are lean, fit, high-strung horses–teenagers, really–and they love to run. Young colts in the wild race and play together; horse racing takes advantage of this impulse. And horses are honest—to see them stretched out running so fast just because they can—it makes me smile. The Kentucky Derby is all about potential. These horses are growing so fast at three years old that they will be completely different horses in a couple weeks for the Preakness, and even more different—some of them even taller—by the time the Belmont Stakes rolls around. I like to watch them all. They send me back to Mattie and Sam, determined to work through our stuck places and get them and me fit for the riding season. They remind me that anything is possible and to enjoy the moments of summer (and winter, but that’s another subject) as fully as I possibly can. The excitement of the crowd reminds me that it’s time to crawl out of my winter hole and share these moments with my friends.

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The View from Mattie’s Pillow

April 29, 2009

Finally warm weather. The snow is mostly gone, though still piled in a ridge where it slid off the roof over the past month, and still spread in shady spots in the woods. The corral is now mostly wet sand, boggy in spots where water is still draining off the hillside above, and pocked with the holes Mattie and Sam’s hooves have made when it was softer. Today I examined what had looked like a big patch of unmelted snow and discovered it was Sam’s white winter coat spread out in a spot where he had been rolling.

The tomatoes are four inches high and in their flats in the greenhouse. Soon I’ll be transplanting them into larger pots, one stage away from their final pots–square kitty litter containers, good for saving space in a small greenhouse. I have lettuce in a pot for the deck and a pot of basil I couldn’t resist planting. The deck is warm, the sky is blue, the geese and cranes are staging for their last push north to the nesting grounds. Spring, really, finally.

For those of you who associate spring and flowers, however, spring here is a grimy pause before the bursting-forth of summer. The ground is still soggy, not quite melted below the surface. The trees are still mere sticks, except for the willow catkins or pussywillows, the first hint of what is to come. The roads are muddy and flooded in spots. Everything is brown and gray without the relief of snow. The migrating birds passing overhead: geese, cranes, swans, ducks-are what we have instead of daffodils and crocuses.

Downriver, the tripod still rests in ice, though there are leads in the river and the ice is too soft to walk out on now. If this warming trend holds till Saturday, the ice will go out in Nenana and someone will win a share in the Nenana Ice Classic.

This year, again, proves that there is no predicting spring here in the Interior. When we bought our Ice Classic tickets April 5, only three weeks ago, we were all complaining about what a cold spring it had been. It seemed foolish to predict breakup before May 1. Now, an early ticket just may be a winner. It could be going out now while I write this.

We’re all waiting. Once the ice is gone, our brief spring will start and go. In another week it will be early summer, with bluebells and wild roses, pasque flowers, robins and thrushes, and all the wonderful work of gardening, conditioning and riding horses, and sitting on the deck with friends into the long pale night.

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