At a Motel 6 at Gold Beach an Amish family pack their car. This is Rumspringa: their taste of the outside world, ‘running around’. In theory, there’s no adult control. There can be parties, mobile phones. Most find the taste enough and return.
The teenagers quietly obey their parents. The teenage boy has a beard that looks like thick fuzz. His sister has a pale blue dress and white headpiece that is both beautifully elegant and reminiscent of a dystopian novel. Are they leaving or returning? They seem in a subtle hurry, not drawing attention, just leaving. Heading south on Highway 101 through the southern Oregon countryside. We cross an invisible line and the car radio now rants about how false evolution is. Callers urgently state their claims, preaching to the converted. Apparently in Texas, they found dinosaur fossils with human remains or footprints. Megalodon sharks might still be alive, not ancient after all. No one knows what tonsils are for, you know. Or the appendix. We all stopped changing after The Flood, which wasn’t that long ago. The next morning in a coffee shop in Gold Beach. An animated old man holds court with a group of reverential peers, all entranced by his sardonic-tongued preaching. "Nearer we get to death, the more a church is our waiting room and the Bible our instruction manual." He starts describing a local woman as short and unattractive. Snuffled giggles from his complicit disciples. Sigh from a young woman listening at a table nearby. He nods her an apology. The cafe owner sits down and confesses her mother’s many heart problems, depression, numerous other ailments. Good days and bad. She sighs, heavy shoulders. “They fixed her heart. Old ma be haunting us for a few more years yet!" In a queue for the power boat tour of Rogue river a man talks about his first wife being Catholic. "But we had a bun in the oven under six months, so got married." His second wife is Jewish and he’s grown to really appreciate Judaism as he was always interested in Israel. We all board the boat and surge up river, into God’s own country.
0 Comments
Herzlich willkommen auf der Wildmoos Alm brauhaus, 1338m.
It’s two days after Valentine’s Day, and my wife and I sit in the main reception room of the Wildmoos Alm brauhaus, wondering where exactly in the world we are. We had traipsed up the mountainside from Seefeld, the Austrian Winter Olympic town, snow crunching underfoot, the sky a hungry blue, our breath silky ice. Now we’re jammed elbow to elbow with hikers, skiers and snow-tourists while Elvis, Abba, John Denver and Austrian folk music play. A jocular waiter weaves through tight tables with beer, trays of schnapps, bowls of strudels, meat dumplings, saying, "Hello, Johnny" to other English tourists. Not us. We are invisible, for the time being. Above is the crowning glory of Evangelical Alpine hunters: Jesus on the cross and stuffed outcasts from Noah's Tirol travels. Under Our Lord’s wounded feet, two shocked grouse; to His right, a devilish looking ram's skull and horns; to His left, a defunct cuckoo clock and the grinning head of a boar with a bell below his neck and a scarf made of dry viper's skin. Under His holy nailed feet half a brown bear rearing out of the wall, mouth aghast in silent road, claws scraping the air, as surprised as we are to be hanging out here. Nearby, clamouring for a space next to the Saviour, is a strange assembly of regional Germanic acolytes: antlers, foxes on their hind legs, stoats in glass dioramas, framed paintings of falcons and deer, photographs of Bayern Munich FC and a random assortment of past wedding guests. Around Purgatory there’s an even stranger retinue: a huge straw-filled Tirol bear, corn cobs drying from a rafter, witches flying from the eves and locked in glass cabinets topped with a marmot, a goose, a wooden Tyrollean farmer; an indoor conifer tree hanging with fairies, flowers, children's tokens; bundles of mistletoe above a corner table. I don’t remember when we left or if we ever did. We are still sitting in the main reception room of the Wildmoos Alm brauhaus, wondering where exactly in the world we are. Jesus looks down at us and sighs with divine disappointment. Gokotta (Swedish): the act of waking up early with the purpose of going outside to listen to the first birds sing.
February begins with a colleague’s observation that it’s nice to hear birds singing in the trees again. After the suffocation of winter, the birds have remembered their voices; the dawn’s returned to its former glory. The birds have been brought back from the dead. Now I am listening and trying to learn. I am trying to feel as resurrected as they are, as hopeful for the sluggish sun, as passionate for my place on the branch of life. What we hear as melody is the birds’ urgent purpose: to stake out a territory, to attract a mate, to declare dominance to other males. How lucky for us that this accident of evolution by sexual selection gives us such pleasure. It is a beauty born of a mystery: how do birds learn to sing? Do chicks listen to their fathers? Are the notes somehow sowed into their DNA? Young cavorting male birds-of-Paradise have to practise their dance moves. Do our blessed songbirds have to practise their singing? And what of the birds that do not sing? Do songbirds make all the other species jealous? Of course not, for this is a human emotion. They compete within their own species, in their own trees. There is no past or future for birds, just the singing of the now. The songbirds don’t need us to listen to their singing in the mornings. They don’t care if we smile or sigh or even interrupt them. We cannot better them; we will always be their students. Their singing is for me a memory of childhood and wood, of torn time mended and the spool wound back. A blackbird’s refrains and trills are reassuring. I am still a boy. An orange moon rises in a pastel sky over the western alps to be snuffed out by grey clouds. The birds erupt in excitement from conifers and silver birches, as they did when I was a boy. Even when a pigeon coos, a sparrow twitters, a gull cries - I am a boy again. The birds always bring me back. To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. From ‘Auguries of Innocence’, 1803 An unfurled question mark answers the point where our infinity begins. Standing on the beach, studying the way the sea greets the horizon, the way the clouds pour out in smoky angles as it created at the edge of the world. Cracks in the clouds creating all kinds of layers and moments of illuminations; shafting bolts of light and spreads of gloom. No wonder William Blake stood here at Felpham and thought the sea was talking to him. Illusions of sunlight and wind singing and cloud play must have fluttered through his imagination. This is one of those seemingly unremarkable, passable places where Human and Nature can face each other, taking turns to speak and listen. Looking at this horizon you can sense the world turning under you. The tides tug at the feeling that you are a part of something grander but also indifferent; ancient and renewed every day, beyond and before human. The waves swirling, pounding, reeling back over and over again. A swell and release that cleanses buzzing minds. A gift that is unknown in its giving. That mourning cry of the gulls is a rallying call for your memories, a reminder that you have stood here many times before. Going backwards, you understand it less and less but enjoy it more and more; back to a happy childhood scrabbling around on the beach with no concepts of horizons and hunger. Just building model fortresses with a material worn down from ancient rock over millennia of wind and water. Dredging out canals and fighting the inevitable swell of sea water - human versus nature, a slowly but happily losing battle. What the sea takes, it will give back tomorrow. Here on the horizon a line being drawn between the time before I stood here and the now. The now being stretched to almost infinity, suggesting so in the shallowest of curve. The future remains uncertain, questionable and unnecessary. The horizon is enough. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
Categories |