Crush Pad

Over the last three months I've been working a 'crush' -- a harvest -- for a winery near the coast in Sonoma County, camping on my buddy Jeff's property among the coyotes and the coyote brush, and hence been too beat or too out of internet range to post anything. But here is a little poem that gives, I hope, a sense of the long hours on the crush pad.


Sunday



The women at the sorting tables             

shift from leg to leg

as
  
   cumbia plays

on a radio tucked                                  

into the big one's blouse,                      

hands spiraling in grapes.                                  
                                                               

A quick laugh, a glance

at the white bins

dense with fruit.



If you go fast            
   you can go                                           
  
in the grass                                        
behind the dumpster.  



A bite of sandwich, a sip

of coffee,



another quarter ton 

    tilted from the forks,                     

straining juice into the hopper.


Every second counts                

when you lean back

in the worn seat, search

past the roll cage 



to pine trees
  
   in gold light

over the vineyard,

cirrus clouds

shiftless on an ocean breeze.  

Bus Ride to Los Angeles

The five hundred miles of irrigated fields and orchards that is the Central Valley comes to a stark finish at it's southern end, enclosed in brushy sunbaked mountains. The highway planks upwards: the bus groans in low gear. At the side of the road a man fans his hat at a steaming radiator while two women talk into their cell phones. The bus climbs and passengers sleep, worn by the long ride from San Francisco, the heat, memories of a fog-fringed coast. Evening light streams ruddy through the windows, casts deep shadows into the high, gouged ridges. Over Tejan Pass (4100'): the reservoir brim-full with snowmelt pumped across valley from the Sierra Nevada: a king's table set before starved mountains.

The bus ride has made us family, our wandering lives braided together for eight hours of travel. Sharing a mini-table, sitting hip to hip: an elderly black woman in knitted green headscarf talks on a cellphone to her reflection in the window; an Asian woman in designer sunglasses chats across isle to a young woman that could be her daughter; a young white guy with purple hair and painted toe nails, purple legwarmers cut away to allow his feet into flip-flops, sketches in his oversized notebook, endearing himself to the other women with his feminine, eccentric, yet good-boy ways. They want to see what he's drawing. They adore his nails. He responds with a joke: “Oh, I just love your nails,” an older woman says to a young woman, “But I'm too old for that whore look.”

The women laugh. They share the gummy bears he's brought with him. He's the white weird son they never had. Then, slowly, they go their separate ways. He slouches into his drawing, the mother returns to her daughter, the black woman closes her eyes and falls deeply asleep, mouth agape, under waves of weak light.

Beside me sits a young woman from Wisconsin who's returning from a weekend in San Francisco to her masters in composition courses at UCLA. “David Lang,” she offers when I ask her for a must-know contemporary composer. “Post-minimalism; space, but musical.” She's a touch awkward; hunched at the shoulders as though forever at a piano, at study, at ease only in solitude. She accepts a piece of chocolate only after I insist. I imagine the verdant fields and gentle cows of her home state – not these barren ridges, a harsh overture to the urban counterpart that awaits her. I imagine a tenderness, a sensitivity which forces a degree of escapism of her, a retreat into the formal abstractions of music, the constrained geometries of the heart.

Two toughs in punk-skate décor sit near the driver. Black trucker hats bearing Thrasher in electric green thread. Black Levi jackets, sleeves cut off at shoulders, studded with pins, stitched with appliques, one of which directs the observer to Fuck Off. The bigger tough pulls out his Gameboy. His olive skin glows in screen light, his dark eyes go pliant, soft, human. The other tough yelps into his cellphone: “We barbequed and shit. Man, I heard you hurling in the bathroom.” Life in LA has roughened them. The city wears you down, yet to matter at all you must declare yourself, usually in the most conspicuous way of all: fashion and attitude. You must show how much you don't care by how much you do.

And eventually they too fall asleep, adrift in the dream wagon where we are all brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, angry and shy, disfigured and beautiful, suspended from our lives, entrusting our homecoming to the orange-haired benevolent butch at the wheel. The big woman reaches overhead, throws a switch, then barks into a microphone. She wants to thank us for being such good riders. She wants us to be safe. She wants us to know it's been a pleasure. And by her frank voice, we know she means it.

Notes from Telluride MountainFilm Festival

There's snow in the mountains — on the high glaciated valleys, the steep black faces etched with white couloirs — and dandelions in the meadows. The lush canyon floor shimmering gold and willow. Gauzy bands of leafing aspen on the hills before grey loping ridges, massive peaks adrift in the sky. It's easy to feel you're flying in this country. The thin air, the dreaminess. Telluride is the most picturesque mountain town in the American West, hands down. A Victorian mining town set within the Alpine grandeur of the San Juan Mountains. A great community of artists, activists, not to mention mountaineers and outdoors men and women of all stripes. And not a bad place for a documentary film festival either.

MountainFilm. Alright, maybe the analogy is as hippy as the longhairs who took over this town in the Sixties and Seventies, but attending MountainFilm is a bit like getting a deep massage — a spiritual massage, if you will. You know it's good by the sore spots worked over, the aches as well as the pleasure experienced. A mix of apprehension and relief, doubt and elation, sorrow and hope for our troubled race causes you to seek an equilibrium, a balanced understanding of world issues. A good movie, any good story, can cause you to root against your established views.

The documentary Pandora's Promise had just that affect: causing my views to swivel. While I've been open to the possibilities of nuclear power, I've generally been skeptical of it. Yet Robert Stone's film walks us through a sober examination of the history of nuclear power, the facts of infamous disasters like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima, and parallels that story with the transformation of views of several leading environmentalists who now believe that the only way to arrest greenhouse gas emissions and still provide power to the globe is through carbon-neutral, safe, third and fourth generation nuclear reactors. The movie both upended my preconceptions and gave me something I don't often feel when considering environmental issues: optimism. It's not the end of the discussion, but an urgent call for us to get talking fast.

The documentary Uranium Drive-In, directed by Suzan Beraza, had me hoping that the stinking uranium mine would finally be approved, just to get the locals' economic suffering over with. Watch that movie and you weirdly put aside your environmental worries for southwest Colorado as you sympathize with the poor families, the desperate community, the mine workers starving for a paycheck. Forgetting the geologic, you see things through the short lens of their lives. And short as life may be, human suffering is bottomless.

The best movie of the festival, if you ask someone who saw only six of them, was Gasland 2. It was more intense than Gasland, more dire, more evil grand scheme for world domination. While in the first documentary Josh Fox left some room for the possibility to do this nasty thing, fracking, right, the sequel takes a dark turn. The nations' leading expert on concrete casing claims that ten percent of all hydraulically fractured wells will fail upon installation, and when you track the data out to thirty years, that percentage climbs to fifty percent. The oil industry, eyeing massive shale deposits around the globe, is greenwashing themselves with “clean, natural gas.” Meanwhile the EPA, in an about face, is withholding test well data from landowners and communities who have benzene and methane bubbling through their aquifers. You know it's bad when not just poor folks but even rich ones with ten million dollar homes are getting nowhere in their lawsuits against the energy companies. You know it's bad when the mayor of Dish, Texas not only abandons his home but the Republican party because his drinking water is now stinking water.

We met Anna's friend, the filmmaker Ben Knight, at his office in town: a hermit's den in the attic of a narrow Victorian, snowy peaks leaning into the window. He was hard at work editing DamNation, a Patagonia-funded documentary which he's been filming and editing for the last couple of years. We sat on the floor of the tiny room and caught up: life, art, the migratory patterns of mutual friends from Chicago to Colorado, Idaho to San Francisco. Ben has a subtle, attentive character. You can imagine him patiently behind the camera, attune, watchful as a fisherman for any movement on the line. He showed us a cut from the movie: a beautiful dense six minutes unfurling the history of dam building in the States, from the first reclamation projects of the 1800's to the latest dam removed in Puget Sound. “That six minutes of film took four months of work — shooting, researching, and editing,” he informs us. Four months to create six minutes! It was affirming to know that we writers and painters aren't alone in our solitary struggles with our medium. Dedication, diligence, doubt, moments of delight — all for the dream that drives us, all to produce a bit of beauty in the world. And in Ben's case, for the world, and its betterment. We left him to his work, alone in his perch, watching through the telescope of editing at the details of an epic landscape, the valleys and rivers of a great and important film.

Needing some raw physicality after all that movie going, I went to play soccer. If you're in the mood for some sadistic cardiovascular punishment, try pickup futbol at 9,000 feet on the full pitch at Town Park, with a ball that plays fast and skipping in the thin air, with guys from Peru and Argentina and Mexico who've acclimated to the high altitude. We divided teams, shook hands, kicked off. A quick-footed game full of good passing and deep runs. The first twenty minutes I was breathing so hard I thought my lungs would shred. A diaphragm cramp had me doubled over on the sideline for a spell of recovery. The next hour I came around, but still you had to be strategic about your sprints. There's only so much oxygen up there to go around. The beautiful game, made more exquisite by the gleaming stadium of peaks surrounding the pitch; a game played so high in the sky it makes Azteca Stadium seem like it's at sea level.

Days after the festival, we hiked the Jud Wiebe trail right out of town. After the foot bridge over a crashing creek, a steep and steady climb up the canyon side. Red rocks and leafing aspen, a slate sky behind electric green trees. After ten minutes Ada was tuckered out. “Daddy, uppy,” she begged, slumping on the trail, immovable as a ruined mule. No amount of prodding or cajoling – or the sight of her mother and grandmother Claudia disappearing around the next bend – could influence her. Soon I was the mule, loaded with a suddenly cheery princess on my shoulders, holding her by the ankles as she sang out the swollen letters carved into aspen trunks. The trail ran west a half mile, then switch-backed grandly onto a terrace of white sandstone. Wild iris, some kind of purple-petaled daisy in bloom. We sat on an overlook, drank water and ate nuts, snapped some pictures, held Ada back from jumping off the ledge into the clouds. High ridge lines saddled with snow; steep mountain faces lined with couloirs. A strange contentment to be sitting there with family, not tempted by the peaks. I still hear their call, but for now, for once, the summits don't taunt me as they once did. These days I've got other mountains on my shoulders.

Report from Treefort

Boise. Les Bois. City of Trees. City of Treefort. When Captain Bonneville crossed the Snake River Plain in 1833 he spied a ribbon of trees along a river pouring out of the mountains and cried: les bois, les bois! The US Army later erected a fort on that river. The fort became a town, the town a capital, and the capital a fort again, a rendezvous point for alternative bands and music lovers across the West.

A steely, windswept day. Anna and I venture out of the house in as much turmoil as the weather is making of town: scarves flying, daughter crying, a beer stuffed in the toddler bag. From the hills we can hear the soft pounding of music playing downtown. We're excited to go. We need to go. Tangled in family life, it's not often we get out to hear live music anymore. In fact if it wasn't for Radio Boise playing in the kitchen, I'd be hard pressed to name half a dozen contemporary bands. So there's urgency in our departing. We have to go, if only for a couple hours to walk among new faces, if only to catch second-hand songs over the fence of the main stage, if only to get out of the house. Greater adventures have been started with less.

All of downtown is a bustle. It seems San Francisco's Valencia Street has been diverted into Boise. Wool, beards, tight jeans. One could be cynical, but it's refreshing to see the different people, the band vans, the new and renewed fashions. The Linen District has been cordoned off and a vast tent erected over tables set up with regional wares. We stroll about, buildings echoing, food trucks smoking. The organizers have stepped it up this second go around with more bands and venues, artful touches about town. We like the oversized Treefort emblems set on tripods of cottonwood trunks. They stand at strategic corners, totems of festiveness. The raw weather, instead of dampening spirits, has concentrated them. There's a cozy, bundled holiday feeling in the air. A feeling that Boise is, strangely, at the center of things; that it's exactly the kind of off-the map, semi-desert city a festival like this needs. A city situated, geographically if not quite culturally, halfway between Portland and Salt Lake City. Surely Boise could use the festival. There's long been a respectable music scene here. But you might not realize it until you crossed five hundred miles of sage country to find local bands like Youth Lagoon or Built to Spill playing at the El Korah Shriner Club.

We go to The Modern for a drink. The gas fires are burning in the courtyard. I love the place for many reasons, not least of which is that I can bring our daughter here to sit outside with us. We find a table near the fluttering warmth of a fire. The sun moves in and out of the clouds. Anna orders prosecco, I a PBR, the poor boy's bubbly. We grow warm with drink and companionship. Friends pull up chairs, sit on the massive sandstone blocks that flicker like contented volcanoes. Ada traipses up the stairs to the veranda where she calls down to us like Juliet. Who is everybody liking? Foxygen, Karaoke from Hell, Emily Wells, Baths. Everyone's relaxed, recuperating, ordering rounds of sustenance: the wild mushrooms and chevre tart, the celery and smoke cocktails. There's so much to see. You have to be strategic, advises a friend: get in lines early for your favorite bands and don't get greedy for everything. There's just too much. Too much in our little ole Tree Town. We toast to that.

That night I have The Pass. Not just the Treefort kind but, the priceless Get-Out-of-Jail kind that comes rarely to a parent. I bicycle back downtown to the main stage. There's a good crowd. El Ten Eleven is getting started. I buy a beer and stand back in the cool afternoon sunlight. Wispy locus trees silhouette the sky above the stage. Up to me walks Al Heathcock. Now here's a guy you want to catch music with. It isn't too loud to talk. We catch up, talk books and shop. He's just come back from a book tour in the Canadian Arctic. Wind and ice in all directions. A Chinese guy there for the conference had left the village to take photos and the next day Search and Rescue found him huddled in his car under snow drifts, barely breathing. Al's ears still ring from the split second he lifted his flap and the wind frost-burned his drums. “It's wild out there,” he says in his very Chicago accent, “a choice setting for some beauty-ful dark stories.” And the locals were good to him. They fed him seal fat and played odd jokes on him. They called him their English Writer.

We listen to the bands. El Ten Eleven is good, a bit like Pinback, but prone to jammyness. They need an editor, we agree. The gal from Yacht is foxy, a remembrance of things 80's. They're catchy, but the synth stuff wears thin after a while. The show wraps up with The Walkmen. Now the heavy hitters come to stage. The lead singer hits and holds high notes attained if not by nature then by sheer will, emotion, angst. He's fleeing a ruined past, chasing visions of gold and turquoise. When it's over my mind shimmers with the intensity of the performance. I've been rapturized.

Or maybe I just need to get out of the house more often. Go West, not-so-young-anymore man, go West. And if you're already there, then go up, into the trees, and look out at the great world below in wonder. Build a tree fort up there and others will come, a great many others, bringing their quirky talents and music to your windswept town, bringing color, a touch of spring, melodies from the coast, like migrating birds stopping to sing from the high branches.   

Shifting Greys

Morning fog clings to the trees, encloses the black figures of houses, telephone wires, bare limbs in a gentle grip of clouds. We have lost our house. It happened so suddenly. One morning we're negotiating the price with the landlord, our excitement tempered by cautious restraint. A night later he calls to tell us that a couple from Seattle has offered him twenty grand more than we could ever afford, in cash. After two years of taking care of the house as though it were ours, believing in our hearts that it was, instantly it was not. I fought for a day, scrambling with mortgage brokers to see what we could summon to match the offer. But it was hopeless: a day of death throes.

And now the house is a ghost house, a house of shifting greys. The ideas and visions we had imbued the rooms with have been spirited away. Everything appears flat, lifeless, like a wall scraped of it's mural. I look away from views that once charmed me, rooms that tempted me with dreams of us living here, Ada growing up here. Or rather, I can't look into them the way I once did – the way you can't look into the eyes of someone who's betrayed you. A jolt of fate, or crude circumstance? Yellow stalks in the garden we planted last May; the leaf-strewn mounds sleeping until spring. Fog curls away from the warming earth; our souls pull away from this place.

As we ate breakfast, a great-horned owl swooped down from the trees, a shadow gliding out of the fog, to perch in the sycamore tree before us. He saw and didn't see us. The V of his intense eyes; the agile rotating head atop a lordly mass of feathers. He perceives everything, he sees through everything, the apparitions of this world. He is a lesson to us. An admonition not to be fooled by figures in the mist.