Coyotes and Handkerchiefs

22 February

An afternoon of steady light snowfall, a good fire snapping in the hearth, Caruso singing from the record player, and Ada sleeping soundly in her jumper. (One moment she's leaping for the moon, the next she's flopped over her saddlehorn snoozing like a drunk cowboy.)

Yesterday we went to see La Boheme at the Egyptian Theater – a surprisingly good show that had the tears soaking my shirt collar long before poor Mimi's death. The soprano who played her, a Greek with a clear light-filled voice who looked not unlike Maria Callas, had me reaching for my handkerchief with every aria. It's pathetic how often one cries at operas, if only because as drama they're so goofy on the surface. If you only read the librettos you'd find the stories lacking, unrealistic, maudlin, verbose, etc. But add the soaring music, the compressed experience of a theater house that reduces all the world to a single poignant drama, the beauty of the human voice shaping cathedrals in the air, the loss of yourself in that beauty, and before you know it tears are trembling from your lashes and emotions and memories long put away are tremmoring up to the surface. In a way opera is good therapy. Was it Sophocles who said great tragedy must be cathartic in the end?

Opera is so peculiar, what with all its silly yet effective artifices. The mere movement of acts is a lesson in story arc. I love how you'll hear some famous, bittersweet passage of music and what is actually being said onstage is “my feet hurt, take my shoes to the cobbler.” Or “the old man has stamina,” or some other sexual innuendo that Italians can't refrain from. You're reminded of who opera was really written for back in the day – not just the ladies and gentlemen in the box seats, but the poor sops in the back row reaching for their flasks and hankies.

1 March

More snow! We're making up for a scoreless first half of winter. Yesterday it dumped all morning, heavy as a down comforter thrown over the neighborhood, the black trees silhouetted in white and looking very Victorian.

Here's news: have been working a desk job, the first in my life. I'm a project manager for a certain green building company in town and for once I'm not sweating at hauling lumber or a fire pack. Strange to see the hours go by and nothing of material mounting in front of you. Oh, things are getting done, but they're like spiderwebs, intricate and invisible until you walk through them and gunk up the works. The spiderwebs are built of phone calls and emails and bids coming in from contractors and more phone calls and meetings with clients and the only time you get up from your chair is to lean over the plans or pace the office like a house cat watching the snow tumble down through the wrought iron limbs of the maple trees outside the window, hoping to catch sight of the mailman.

Not that I'm not liking the job. It's great, actually; fine people and a good opportunity to learn something new. Something so new that the change in duties is akin to an anthropological experiment. I figure by the age of forty everyone should have swung a hammer or worked with their hands somehow; so to be fair, the same life-criteria must go for having worked an office job. I simply never knew what it was like. There's that restless feeling of a school boy looking past his books out the window at the day outside, envious of the squirrels, the delivery man barreling past in his yellow truck. I can stand staring at a screen when writing only because when writing I'm somewhere else. I'm skiing with or putting on motives or pouring a drink for one of my characters. I am on the other side of that window, leaving the school books behind.

But office work doesn't leave much play for the imagination. It's numbers and hard lines of plans and none of that Byronic stuff that so distracts a dreamer. It's work, and one must work doing it, and I welcome the chance to test my strength at it. Though this is no ordinary office job: I'm working with people in the trades who are salty characters any writer would be glad to know; and we're building something quality, a house not some pyramid scheme, and once this big remodel gets rolling I'll be on site much of the day, back to using my back, surely cursing enough to clear my soul of the abstracted spiderwebs, refreshed for the comforts of the office again, where I can save my hurting knees for the slopes.

7 March

Why is it we constantly want what we don't have? When we get older and look back that want is called nostalgia. And when we're young with the world before us the urge is romantic. But when we're somewhere in the middle, with fire still in us but the woodpile lowering, when we see how certain things are playing out and must decide whether to accept them with some contentment, or to fight on at risk of overlooking the good things one does have in life – what do we call it then? Sentimentality? A heightened tendency to bawl at the opera house?

Speaking of romance, in the early hours the coyotes and horned owls can be heard calling and hooting for each other longingly across the hills. A yellow warbler pair hovering at the bird feeder. First spears of crocus appearing in the yard. A waft of warm weather from the south and like a good bird herself Ada refuses to stay indoors. Springtime is her favorite new word. Though I want is the champion phrase of the day. Can't say I blame her, considering the season, the near end of winter when the faintest smell of sunshine drives the bugs to hatching, the redwings to trilling, and every species of teenager to wearing short-shorts in mid-fifties weather. I want is what nature puts in us to roust us out of winter, the season and the stage. The photo of W.C. Williams as an old man smiling among the plum blossoms comes to mind. And the yank of Ada wanting me to quit writing comes to hand.

Occupy Boise, Part 2

C. sat at a wooden picnic table sipping coffee in the wintry morning sun that warmed a corner of the Occupy Boise grounds. The sun lit up the tesselated face of the old state courthouse, its Deco tower rising with monumental grace above a quiltwork of tents and canvas structures and hand-painted banners. Across from C. sat M., who smoked a cigarette and nodded in agreement as she spoke.

“The police were pretty good, actually,” she said, fluttering long red-painted fingernails from her broad hands. “They blocked off the streets and guided us right through downtown. It was a march to remember all the homeless that died this year, twelve of them, and two counselors, too. Did you ever know —?” she mentioned a name I didn't recognize. “He was a sweet old man. I even tried to set my mom up with him. He just liked to go sit by the river, under the bridge that was his place. He'd have a drink and watch the river. So sweet. He was one that died.”

“Because of the cold?” I asked.

“No, that was in June. I don't know how he died. But it was for folks like him that we marched, to remember them.”

As C. spoke, her voice began to deepen with trust, her big brown eyes settled on me and her hands calmed in her lap. She found her coffee mug and took a pleased sip. “So you're a writer, huh? You know what someone should do? They oughta do a biography of everyone here. Everyone's got a different reason for why they came. You can't pin it on just one story. That's why I'm starting my nonprofit — for the mentally disabled. It's called Dream,” she glowed proudly. “I wanta talk about the issues we're having around here, and the politics that's going on. But I want it to be nice, you know? Not like Disneyland nice, but community nice, without the mean politics. I even got a television show I'm starting.”

“A television show?”

“Yeah, on community access. I'll get people from the community and counselors to come on and talk about stuff that matters to us.”

“You'll host it?”

“I will,” she said confidently, then laughed: “A friend said I'll be the Oprah of Boise.”

We got up to walk around and keep warm. M. had left us to get more coffee from the mess tent. Ada, who had remained cuddled in my arms, feeling shy before the strangers, now wanted down to walk too. The many different types and colors and conditions of the tents – some neat as a nun's habit, others wind-sunken with fallen leaves, were of great interest to her. “Look,” she pointed, “there's a funny man.” And sure enough, there was. Seated on a foldout chair was a halloween skeleton, the words “We the People” bandaged on his head, and “Citizens United” painted on a butcher knife burried in his ribs. “Yes, a very funny man,” I said, directing her attention to the stout stairway leading up to the courthouse foyer. Ada loves stairs the way monkeys love monkey bars.

While C. went ahead to the communications tent, where she hoped to show me their internet connection and library, Ada and I scaled the stairs and rapped our fists on the brass lamp posts. C. returned shortly and invited us into the communications tent. She held back the flap door, and the gamey smell of a season spent camping in the cold was enough to make me hold back a charging curious Ada. I looked in and nodded at the sullen young man sitting before a computer screen amid a small floorspace crowded with blankets and piled clothing and manuals and a forlorn guitar standing against a canvas wall.

“That electrical chord is coming from the courthouse?” I asked, stepping back into the cold clean sunlight.

“Yes, they been pretty good about it.” C. dropped the door flap, sensing my reluctance to enter. “We got to keep the place clean,” she said admittedly. “There's a rule against drinking. Of course, at night some of us go off to have a drink.”

We started to walk again. “There's the library tent, and the clothes tent.” A man strode by carrying two tall thermoses. “Hot cocoa, anyone?” he called. He stood the thermoses on the ground and removed two styrofoam cups from the stack in his arms, poured cocoa into the cups and handed them to us. I kneeled beside Ada, blew on the hot drink, and let her have a sip. “Made it myself,” said the man. “Ground the cinnamon myself too.”

The man, a fast-talking type, a pastor, I would soon learn, jumped into conversation with C. about the grand assembly the Occupy members were having in an office in the Capitol building. “So many ideas,” he said, “so many points of view. The problem with the left is we work at it from the outside. Everybody's on the outside working towards a common idea. The right is already in lockstep. They start narrow and work out from there.”

“David's working on a story,” C. informed the pastor.

“Yeah,” he studied me. “A story for who?”

“I won't know till I write it.”

“Well you better get it right! The other day a couple of journalists from Salon came down here, and there happened to be a bunch of Tea Partiers here too, and guess who they interviewed? The woman asked all the questions and the man wrote the story and got it all wrong.” The pastor began to rant, a little abstractedly, about politics and media misperceptions of the Occupy Movement. I liked his ideas but I didn't like his ranting, abstracted as it was.

Thankfully Ada, bored, squirmed away from us and ran back to the solid white stairs. The girl's instincts are sharp, alright. I thanked the pastor for the cocoa and excused myself. C. caught up to us. She put her big hands on her knees and bent forward to Ada. “This is for you, Ada,” she said, and handed her a small cloth American flag on a stick. Ada watched C. to make sure the gift was indeed for her to have. “That's right, you keep it,” smiled C. Ada looked at me. “Can we put it on the bike, daddy?”

A Short Posting

Ski season is here. After months of arid blue skies we've finally been hit with a series of storms across the Northwest. Six inches of snow in the Boise valley were slushed away with days of rain, but the Front is still white and billowy. I had the afternoon off, and Ada being with her grandmother, I jumped in the truck and sped up to Bogus Basin for a few hours of skiing. To the south, the valley was hidden in clouds, but the backside of Bogus was in sunshine. It's a great feeling to look down on clouds: clouds threading apart in the rosy afternoon light, nearly within hand's reach; the sky opening to the north above rolling white-blue mountains and the white shards of the Sawtooth Range some sixty miles away.

It was Monday and just about nobody was up skiing. There was a four to six inch layer of new powder in the trees, enough to make my legs forget that this was the first telemark venture of the year. Perhaps the nice thing about the late snow arrival is its nearness to Spring. We don't have months and months of snow to dig through, and the tinge of warmth in the air gives both an elated spring feeling and a sense of urgency, even sentimentality, to those of us who love being in the snowy mountains. Of course, the dry winter will cost us. Summer and its fires will come. But for now it was good to have a dose of the white stuff, watch the spinning gold of the clouds against the pale blue, and forget the concerns below.

Occupy Boise, Part I

18 December 2011

Yesterday Ada and I went to visit the Occupy Boise campsite, located downtown on the grounds of the old state courthouse. As we entered the patchwork of tents and canvas structures, some trimmed out festively for the holidays, others bearing cardboard signs (Pardon our dust – we're building a better world), a small group standing by the mess tent noticed us and waved. I waved back, and Ada, in my arms, felt emboldened to do the same. One of the group approached us. She was a smiling, dolled-up middle-aged woman who might have stepped right out of a PTA meeting. Following behind her were two others: an old thin black man, and a scruffy white guy who looked tired and dowdy as if he'd just finished a long shift in a factory. Through the tent flap I could see a man stooped over a griddle cooking breakfast for others huddled at the tables. The morning was frigid and except for the breakfast being made, the grounds were quiet, the private tents closed protectively against the frozen sky and the thicket of bare trees overhead.

The dolled-up woman reached out her hand and brightly made introductions. I sensed in that moment their ownership of the grounds, as well as their hope that here was someone — a someone who would bring their young daughter here — who had sympathy for their cause. But politics was not the first thing out of their mouths. The woman looked polished for a reason. She had dressed up to come down here and support the Occupiers, and despite the cold, wasn't it a great day to be alive?

“I don't stay here during the week,” she said. “I only come down weekends to help out. Isn't it great? It's important for our country. So I come down and do what I can.” I asked what that was. “Oh, mostly talk to people. Get the message out. There's a big march on Monday, from the Anne Frank Memorial. You should come, bring your girl,” she enthused, glowing like a cheerleader. I asked what she did, and she upended my expectations by telling me she was a real estate agent, living in the small town of Marsing, an hour away by the Snake River. “We've all got to do what we can,” she nodded at Ada, as though acknowledging the child was doing her part just by being here. “All of us, to take back our country from the corporations and the rich who control it. You know, we've all got more in common than you think. The other day a guy came down here, a tea-partyer, and after we talked awhile he realized we were in the same boat. You just gotta focus on the same problems we all have. This one here's a tea-partyer, too.” She motioned to the white guy, who was talking earnestly with the black man. You had the feeling that all about the grounds quiet determined conversations about the betterment of the country were simmering in the tents and over the breakfast tables and among those standing about slapping their sides to keep warm. “Or he was a tea-partyer. He was just looking for something to grab on to, politics-wise. Then he lost his job. And here he is.”

The men joined us and for a while we talked politics while Ada, to my surprise, watched on without boredom, intrigued by these characters. We began to stroll, compelled by the cold to keep moving. There was a big common tent for gathering and socializing, an open tent which held clothes racks full of sweaters and second-hand garments, a row of port a potties, and other tents situated for the common needs of the grounds. A thick-gauge electrical chord ran to the common tent from an outlet at the side of the courthouse, and I remembered something I'd read about the city, to the dismay of many on the right, allowing the Occupiers to use their power. In all, the city had been fairly accommodating to the Occupiers, compassionate, you might say, to their suffering in the cold.

The old man and I fell back and I asked him where he was from. “San Francisco,” he said. When I told him Ada was born in the City, how we'd lived there for many years, he paused, his face lighting up, and smiled grandly into Ada's eyes. “You from San Francisco too!” Ada can be very cautious around strangers, but now she returned the old man's deep smile.

“You know,” he said proudly, “I have a boy, too.”

“Does he live out here?”

“Well, he was in Snake River,” he waited for me to recognize the name.

“The river?”

“The prison. Over by Ontario. He done seven years there.”

“And that's why you came out here, to be near him?”

“Yes.”

“But he's out now? He's doing alright?”

The old man's face lit up again, a radiant sad joy: “My boy is doing good. My boy is doing good.”

We walked about under the leafless oak and silver maple trees. The old man talked dreamily of San Francisco. Boise had been good to him — “the people are very nice here” — but he longed to be back near the water and hills of the bay. He spoke slowly, precisely, and the space between his words was the dream space of the open road, the careful space that one develops around themselves after years of being alone and wandering. I could tell the old man had a great love, or at least a great memory of love, for his boy, and he needed to be near his son in order to give body to that love. His son was living in San Francisco again and soon he meant to move back there. I hoped that he would, but I couldn't help feeling that it was all just more dreaming, the story he told himself and strangers to give some narrative to his life, some texture just out of reach.

As we circled around to the mess tent, Ada began to get cranky. She was cold and restless. The other two had gone inside the mess tent for breakfast, and the old man and I stopped to say our goodbyes.

“So I guess you'll be leaving for SF soon?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” he said adamantly. “I got work to do still. I'll be here till spring, at least.”

Fragments of Franzen

15 November 2011

“The solitary I as a writer is forever trying to reach the solitary I of the reader.” — Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen was in town the other week to give a talk at the Egyptian Theatre. The Deco-era venue was filled to capacity and the excitement in the air was only faintly dampend by Franzen, who, after bounding on stage with a ruffian's flair, informed us rather stiffly that he couldn't, “for contractual reasons,” discuss his recent novel Freedom. There was a collective pause, and I swore I heard the crowd collectively wonder: then WTF are we here for?

But Franzen soon warmed up. He began reading from a “lecture” regarding the four pestering questions authors must answer “as payment for the privilege of speaking in public”:

1. Is your fiction just “thinly-veiled autobiography”?

2. When and where do you work?

3. Who are your influences?

4. An author interview I read said when writing, the characters take over. Does this happen to you?

Before we get to his reply, it's helpful (as a visual aid, if nothing else) to note how interesting Franzen is to watch on stage, both for how intensely he considers a question, and for his own self-aware position within the question's setting. He seems to be as frankly, and at times as nakedly and uncomfortably, self-conscious as some of the characters in his novels are. But he's equally, on the strength of his capable intellectual probing, as confident. You see him vacillating between the two states, talking through his thoughts, examining the air above the audience and then the floor at his feet, taking an apple from his leather valise and considering it too before taking a bite, pacing slightly as he hems and haws over a question, moving by degrees from doubt and dark humor to a revelation that is only occasionally ironic. The man seems a mix of impulses: wry and irreverent one moment, then good-hearted, even perhaps guilt-addled, the next. Is that what happens to good Midwestern boys when they go to live in Manhattan?

As for Franzen's influences (question number three, for those still hanging in there), he doesn't consider Tolstoy or Kafka or Roth to have any more sway over him than the bands or music (a mention of Stravinsky) or the movies he loves, though clearly these writers are dear to him. We are, I hazard to paraphrase, a product of a mosaic of cultural influences, and whether the effect is shattering — Elliot's The Wasteland comes to mind — or a constructive harmony, is for us to materialize through our art, and not stunt by fixating on the sources of inspiration. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't be aware of, or well-versed in, those sources. But Franzen, like Richard Katz in Freedom, seems to harbor an embarrassed revulsion of all things fetishized, of all things obvious. One's modesty must be equal to one's capabilities. “Sure,” he or Katz might say to the fawning questioner, “I like those (insert favorite writers/bands). What of it?”

For those kinds of details — where and when one writes, what music one listens to while sharpening their pencil — are not only fixations, but distractions from the spirit of a thing. According to Franzen, a writer doesn't so much take from the particulars of their exterior life as they receive from the current of their subconscious. Writing is a “deliberate dream”, flowing from one's nocturnal self. Kafka never experienced metamorphosing into a beetle; his story is an extension of states of consciousness explored by the author. For a novel to be worth anything to writer or reader, the writer must grapple with the conditions of the soul — particularly the follies and weakness therein — and bare some truth through one's investigation. And if an author achieves this, completes the exploration, then the geography has been mapped, the mission completed, and therefore in order to write a new novel the author must — and these are Franzen's words — become a new person, for they need new terrain to write about.

Here I thought Franzen might be stretching it. What if one's soul is vast and contains multitudes, as Whitman's does? Surely a soul with hordes of dilemmas and weaknesses and passions and loves and derangements could provide a hard-working author with enough sustenance for more than one book. We do grow and change and come to know more of ourselves over time. And that, I think, is what Franzen is requiring of the writer: to know your vast self and its many, sometimes contradictory, states; to write with your eyes wide to your dreaming soul.

(Which, I must insert, all sounds a bit more romantic than I find Franzen's work to be.)

But this is a question all writers must ask themselves (and these are my ideas here): are they revealing truths in their work? Or at the very least, are they exposing insights into the struggle to do so? Fiction writers face a particular dichotomy: they are at once writing truthfully about stuff of the imagination. And through the artifices of fiction. As Steinbeck said, “A novel is a true story that didn't happen.” To a degree, of course, fiction must be artful. But across that line lies artificiality. And shy of that line, the work becomes autobiography. Which isn't to say it's no longer meaningful, but the genre changes. Or if it doesn't — if the novel stays a novel and that novel stays a good one — the more you suspect the plot to be the experiences of the author, the more a mystique grows around the author. The novelist becomes a kind of hero in the Hemingway model. And maybe it's this role, this mystique, this obviousness, that Franzen is uncomfortable with; one he wishes to dispel with a claim that only thirty or so pages of all his fiction is directly relate-able to his life.

The strength of what I took from Franzen's lecture is this question of truths revealed and wrestled with in a novel. Truths that issue from your spirit's innards, and not necessarily from the trimwork of your day. Speaking of innards, the last book I read before Freedom was Yonder Stands Your Orphan, and the two books couldn't have been more different. While I savored Barry Hannah's swamp-rich, perverse and lovely writing — characters who could “sodomize and puke on [each other's] back, and still respect [each other]” — by the last page I had to ask myself what the point of Yonder was. A thrill-ride, a gorgeous pulp fiction verging on mystery? Being a fan of Cain and Thompson, I'm all for those qualities, but in the end I need some sustenance, some structure built on insights, to make the nastiness go down less cheaply. (Even the roughest moonshine still has some moon it, right?)

On the other hand, while I sometimes feel Franzen's characters to be over-intellectualized, too thoughtful, I at least trust that he's working through his scenes to get at some revelation, deep or quotidian. Hannah's tweaked characters, by contrast, at best exude a drop of truth only after some sick or euphoric contortion: a murder or molestation or barge wreck often larger than the capacity of the author to divine through. Which isn't to say I don't like Hannah. The fucker is funny. And it could even be argued that he rides his subconscious more freely than Franzen does or prescribes. But I need those revelations. For these days, being the pious family man that I am, there isn't much room to wedge in reading, and the book that gets pried open each night before sleepfall had better be good, had better shoot some truths into my slipping soul, or else it's stealing from my dream time. And Kafka wouldn't like that. Nor would Franzen.

An Inch Away

15 September 2011

“And it seemed to them that they were within an inch of arriving at a decision, and that then a new, beautiful life would begin. And they both realized that the end was still far, far away, and that the hardest, the most complicated part was only just beginning.”

Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog”

In Chekhov's stories there's always that wisp of happiness just out of reach, sensed, experienced in flushes, but unsustainable, as though by nature true happiness is incompatible with everyday life. And Chekhov's poor lovers, to have any chance at such happiness with each other, must reveal their affair and upend their marriages, which they cannot bear to do. Or can they? Is there a surge of courage, a will to take on “the complicated part” in that last sentence? Or is the complicated part a matter between the two of them? Each time I read that final passage I see it in a different way. I'm left in as much limbo as Anna and Dmitri are. Where is the beautiful life only an inch away?

This early morning, still dark, another shrill bird call woke me – something between an owl's pulsing hoot and a cranes shriek. I've heard it before, always before dawn, and still can't name the mystery bird who's call is as witchy as a coyote's. Anyhow, I couldn't get back to sleep and got up quietly and went to the kitchen to make coffee before sitting down at the lamp beside the window to read. The calm of the early hours was never so serene and vital as it is now with little Ada tearing up the house. All the same, as the trees start to silohet against the greying sky, I get excited for her to wake, to be pulled out of my solitude by the sound of her soft footfalls charging down the hall, her drowsy call for daddy, her tousled hair and the downy smell of sleep on her neck as she lifts her arms around mine. We're never so alone as when we sleep. And never so alive as when the family rustles up together for breakfast at the table, the door open to the cool morning. Am I being too sentimental? Is this a rebuttle to Chekhov? Either way, it's his fault: he put me in this mood.

Some find Chekhov cold, but I think they don't understand him. Or maybe they don't read him at the right time of day. There are certain writers who are not just a reading but a state of mind. When they describe a tree in March coming into leaf against the brown hills you see it precisely. You see it like the leaf was in your hand, the branch bent to you, a current of warmth moving over the hills through the brisk air. All good writers get their voice into your head, of course. But some clear your head. Some are like meditation, settling you and opening your perceptions from within. Chekhov is one of those, as is Hemingway on his good days, Tolstoy. And of the contemporary writers I know, Per Petterson goes on that list. His Out Stealing Horses is one of the best books I've read, ever. I can still smell the pine sap on the boy's hands after a day of felling trees with his father in the summery Norwegian woods.

Maybe I should end on that note, that image. But another comes to mind out of nowhere:

On the radio the other day was an interview with an American journalist who had spent six months in solitary confinement in Libya during the ongoing revolution. He said solitary was the most agonizing, maddening experience, and that what kept him sane were his dreams. When he dreamt, his cell dissapeared and he was no longer alone – and so his dreams became a deeper reality to him. I imagine that his waking hours in the cell became a kind of dead slumber, a grey interlude to pass through, before the meadows and family get-togethers and cocktale parties and seaside hikes and love-reunions and rowdy football games of his dreams.

And I imagine the coldness of waking into that cell. The waking from your family and from the strange lush bird calls outside your window, from your child singing out for you to get up, to the nothingness of a prison cell. And I can't imagine much worse for a person to go through. I don't know why that tangent came to me. I don't want to be dreary. But sometimes it's the sorrows and vulnerabilities of the human experience that come to you when you're thinking of your child. You could cry for heart-joy thinking of them, and from heart-sickness, because they connect you through their big souls to all the human race. You cannot dream or hope or worry for your child without dreaming or hoping or worrying for all the peoples of the world.

Or even for a couple of fictional characters in a story written a hundred and forty years ago. Good literarture connects us; as do our early mornings alone to the lifting darkness; and the sound of our kid's pattering steps down the hall.

Our Times are Everywhere

5 July 2011, Boise

In early morning the first light stirs the birds and their various calls – lush, clattering, whistling, begging – wake me with the dream-sensation I'm somewhere in Brazil, in a dripping rain forest and not the high desert of Idaho. After a few thunderstorms to bring in the solstice, summer is finally here. We leave the windows open to the cool air until mid-morning when the sun flashes off the trees and makes you glad for their shade. In the afternoon it's best to be down by the river or in the hammock on the north side of the house, where you can see through the leaves to the hills in the sun losing their wild-flower mauves to that sandy beige that is the color of heat in this town. Stegner called the West a semi-desert with a desert heart. It's in summer here that that heart starts to beat robustly, pumping salt from your slick limbs and buzzing a dry heat in your ears if you're not lucky enough to be under trees or in water. You've got to do like the birds do around here: sing in the mornings and wait till sundown to dive after your dinner.

Do we Americans tend to be less satisfied with our stations in life than those of other societies? And are we Far-Westerners still less satisfied when it comes to where we live? How much of that insatiability is human nature – our evolved tendencies to roam, to chase the horizon – and how much of it is a product of our consumer culture? Humans are a restless, curious, imaginative bunch: dreamers of distant lands, greener meadows, better-protected mountain passes. And the constant advertising and materialism thrown at us only adds fuel to that fire. So it's sometimes hard to know what's a genuine urge of the spirit and what's a whim blown your way from an ad while you weren't paying attention.

Anna and I wonder a lot about this restlessness, especially because we're in a constant state of it. We're fairly happy here in Boise, what with a good house on the edge of the hills under the trees. We've good friends and a great active community of artists and parents and outdoorsy types around us. And vitally, Ada is happy here. There are all the parks and trails and kid friends in the neighborhood she could want. If we were having more success in our fields of writing and painting would we be more content? We might be a bit happier, or filled with a larger sense of purpose, but I doubt we'd feel more content. We might then merely want more. I don't mean a larger house or better car. Not that kind of stuff. But more of the success that acts as an inlet to relevance in the world – more relevance and more importance. I won't kid myself: I'm no genius who deserves to be canonized. I'd just like to be better involved in, and pertinent to, our times.

So how do we do that? Where are our times and when is the next direct flight there? Jump over to the Middle East and report directly from the Arab Spring? Get down to New Orleans to see the transformation of the city after Katrina? Hurry over to Montana to moniter the Exxon pipeline spill into the Yellowstone River? Sell everything and move to Berlin and join the amazing scene there? I envy journalists for their always being on the front edge of history, reporting from the first page of the next big story.

But our times are everywhere; our times are what we make of them, are the significance we create in the place we're living. It's not a question of moving geographically but conceptually within the moment of the age. When you get into step with a great idea or solution or movement of the day you're suddenly whisked ahead at the speed of the present, in touch with the horizons of the zeitgeist, and there's no need to go anywhere else but more deeply into where you are.