Stacking Apple Wood

So many of the earlier posts in this series celebrate bucolic pleasures; this year between the lines we feel the pressure of recession: harried relationships, hurried tasks, and for a few people horrid choices, especially around the animals Quan cares for. There are dozens of abandoned horses around the state and the shelters are filling with rabbits, cats, and dogs of people who are moving to find work or simply cannot afford to feed them any more. Of course times are tough all over, but the poorer regions of the poorer states see the effects more deeply. The lobster prices are down, so is tourism, and so is demand for paper pulp, so we can feel the contraction of the economic cling wrap around us Mainiacs, bringing us closer together but hampering our movement.

Though not immune, I am very lucky to still have work, and a sailboat for that matter. But somehow I have not been able to write of my summer sails – it seems frivolous. They were mostly up and down the river in any case, a repetitive and solitary pleasure when, afloat, I could steal a few hours from keeping the business and the place afloat. When I took it down to be stored for the winter before I left for overseas, the eagles I wrote about have left, and the islands are aflame with October leaves alive in the northern blue sea and sky. Tycha and I, a bonded unit with a single mind at the end of the season, make our sails blades to slice the substance of the wind, bringing her across the white chop ahead of the storm. I was shivering solidly as I rowed with clumsy hands ashore to the boatyard against the sere breeze for the final time.

While I was in Amsterdam, the leaves turned to patches of rust, and Quan and a friend cut down the old apple tree. I had not quite consented to this; I have quite a history with those two trees. At about 10 I tried to smoke corn silk under the one they cut, and first heard some dubious lore about sex (“No, my parents never ever did that!”). The second one held my treehouse, and that one I definitely vetoed – many a pirate battle, western last stand, and GI heroism had emanated from that simple box and ladders set in a crook overlooking the garden, and I am not ready to let it go. But with 50 years of growth, they were too much shade for the tomatoes, and the womenfolk wanted them down. The apples were only good for the horses anyway.

I guess we compromised with the one, as it was a bristling plug of firewood stacked against the stump when I came home. It takes a bout one tree each year to keep the fireplace and sauna going, so this year that’ll be this tree. Next year actually, because now comes the wood palaver – you want the newer wood in back to dry, and the older wood in front, but with a minimum of fuss. We created a new front row, and tucked the half-cord or so in behind. It’s an act of respect for the tree, almost fitting it together again with your hands in the stacking – square on square, and the round ones into the V’s.

The tree was centered in dry rot, and needed, I admit quietly as the truck empties and we sweep out the bark and the lichen, to come down. Some of the wood near the rot is already dry and goes on the front row. Apple burns hot, and is good to mix with other wood. This evening, we burn a few sticks to ward off the damp – such a cheery smell! This morning, with snow on the ground, it is hard to pack short-sleeved shirts for a week in Phoenix.

When I was 10 or 11, I remember as I look at the remaining tree with frosting on its remaining leaves, I came upon my little sister and her friend in that treehouse, with a brown golfball of a steaming turd laid on the rough pine floor, the girls’ 4-year old eyes wide with fear fighting with giggly pride. Though one part of me intuitively understood that this was normally exploratory, the other part – it was the 50’s – stood aghast. That part went and told my mother, who handled the situation with relative aplomb. But that I went and told has always been an act of which I was secretly ashamed – at my weak need to seek another authority than my own native common sense.

Paint

Can’t be all work and no play on these trips, so after the conference ended I joined Christoph and Riccarda for tour around what’s open of the Rijksmuseum, Some days you want Van Gogh, but today it was Rembrandt I was craving, and I was not disappointed. As dark and smooth as Dove chocolate, Rembrandt’s paintings crawl out of the murky edges, gradually filling in until he finds his center, imbued with unearthly light. It may be just a portrait of Dutch burghers, or the Nightwatch, or a commissioned portrait of some self-important notable, or his own endearing self-portraits, but the dude knew his paint, and made faces luminous.

Willem Heda has got to be the still life artist of the millennium – a table full of random shiny objects, each reflecting the all the others perfectly and subtly. And the brushwork on some of the trees in the landscape series, and the ships with sails flying in the naval depictions.

But in the end, I have to go back and stand in front of the ruffled collars and their faces, unafraid of wrinkles or of character, and certainly not flattering, but suffused with an illumination that is simultaneously profound and oblique, single-pointed yet permeating capable of ignoring or simply implying whole stories and areas of the canvas while bringing one telling detail so the fore with no more than a prick of photons. Rembrandt – it’s more than a toothpaste.

Lost walk

After dinner with a friend, I decide to walk back from downtown to my hotel at the Vondelpaark (pronounced fondle-park and apparently, according the number of used ‘Charles River Whitefish’ in the bushes, living up to its name).

We had eaten very hot Thai in a funky dive downtown, and my first few streets were very much the red-light district. In the outer reaches of canals, the women are older and blousy and heartbreaking in that they are still in the red-lit windows. The girls downtown are much hotter, in studded bras and butt-floss, crooking you in with the finger of one hand, while they talk on their cell phones with the other. Nearly 40 years ago when I was here, I was too naive and scared to take them up on their offer, but now – however much I know about feminism and equal opportunity – I cannot see these girls as anything other than my potential daughters – what if Misty took a turn here? Ay-yi! After a while I cannot even look any more, these hopeful faces atop the black-lighted perfect bodies – it’s all incest and incestuous, and I strike out up a main canal with my blinkers on.

It is not more than 3 miles, I would say, but Amsterdam is so curvy and confusing and (I have noticed this in the woods as well) I have a tendency to veer to the left. Thus, while it seemed I was crossing the canals in the right order, etc, I was actually headed over to east Amsterdam, and when I found myself bordering an industrial district, I realized I had gone badly wrong.

It took me two hours to get home (and I have foresworn the ‘coffeeshops’ after my one encounter with the GMO hybrid carefully cultivated weed they purvey here, so being loaded was not the reason). I don’t usually get lost; it is in fact hard for me to get lost, but this city leaves me wondering whether I should be going this way or that way down a main road I encounter, and a bus map on a signpost orients me enough to get me near. Finally I recognize the National Theater and wend my way successfully to my hotel and gratefully to my bed.

A few other rolfers we happened to meet at the restaurant were on their way to a sex show. Apparently they watched several couple make love. How boring could that be? The mechanics of lovemaking can be acrobatic or interesting, but hardly erotic or edifying. Or am I just too old? or too snuggly comfortable in the depth of gentle connection that characterizes Quan’s and my leftover steam from the volcano of our earlier days? I find it all a little sad, a little amusing, a little despairing, and not at all attractive. I have become adamant about fidelity (more to oneself than the other person) in my older years, but it is without prudery or moral ascendency, but simply as an expression of inner integrity. May writing this not bring me to the fall that goeth after pride.

FRC Day 2: Series: Sliding and Sticking

Here are some highlights from Day 2, though the coup de grace on the old anatomy was delivered by Jaap van der Wal, but more on him later.

The theme of the day was the sideways connections of the fascia within the muscle. Jst how does the muscle convey its force to the fascia and vice versa?

Carla Stecco of the famous Stecco family started the day by tracing the ‘trellis’ (I would say onion bag) arrangement of the fascia at rest, with additional ‘crimping’ in the tissue. Dense irregular tissue is not ‘irregular’ at all, but has a variety of directions at very precise angles for dealing with the forces. What slides, and what is fixed?

How much is the thoracolumbar fascia a sense organ and how much a force transmitter? asks Jonas Tesarz.

Jean_Paul Delage, working with Guimberteau, shows the cells in the paratendon (what we used to think of as the sheath).

Peter Purslow showed great pictures of the honeycomb of the endomysium, showing the same angle of fibers Stecco described, which go longitudinal when the muscle is stretched, and go circumferential when the muscle is contracted. Interestingly, while the endomysium is well-equiped to transmit force, the perimysium – which is continuous with the epimysium – is poorly constructed to transmit force – so what it is for?

Amsterdam

Although I think of myself as moderately well-traveled, I realize with surprise that the last time I was in this city rescued from the sea was 1970.  I was in Venice in 1984, and have recently been in St Petersburg, so I am familiar with canals, but Amsterdam has a unique feel – all the houseboats and sails seen through buildings.  I have been in and out of Schipol but that doesn’t count – except seeing the tulip fields from above, that was cool – swaths of yellow or red or pink..

But now the train is rocking gently along the bank above the waterway toward the central station.  The rain has followed me from New York and the wet streets are speckled with yellow leaves after the technique of Seurat.  Tiny cars crawl over the bridges, and the pretty girls and serious, quiet men go about their business in this live-and-let-live town.

Coffeeshop

When in Rome… Gathered up in a group of Canadians, I’m hanging on the back side of a bicycle, tootling around the canals in search of night life. The difficulty of getting people motivated goes up geometrically as the number of people goes up arithmetically, so indecision was reigning and my ass was getting sorer so I made an executive decision for ‘Kelim’, a Turkish restaurant.

After patliçan and lamb, we slide over the road to a ‘coffeeshop’.

Having not been in Amsterdam for nearly 40 years, how could I expect it to be the same? There’s a menu of various kinds of weed and hash, along with papers, tobacco, and raspberry leaf for those allergic to tobacco. They even sell perfectly rolled joints for those with fumbly fingers. One of my companions is an expert, and negotiates our way through the various choices of afghani or moroccan or these crystals or that White Widow whiff.

One or two hits later I am floored by this strong European stuff and have to quit this hole in the wall dive with its loser patrons and stale air to walk it off on the streets. Predictably, my companion and I got lost and ended up on a several hour walk through Amsterdam – catching up, solving the problems of the world, gossiping, and laughing our heads off but shaking them at the poor sad women who sit in the windows overlooking the canals until a man comes in and they close the curtain,

We finally make it back through the winding park to the hotel, on the ground again. Once was great, but now let’s refocus on the task at hand.

Pumpkinfest

I am not given to local festivals or local theater.  In theory I support them, so I am reluctant to say this, but in practice they are excruciatingly insupportable.  And I have been a participant, most recently in the Oyster Festival that, in my father’s name, raises money to support education about the river on which we live.  All great, and you can catch up with friends too, whom you ought to have seen but oddly haven’t for a couple of years.  It’s actually sitting through a warbling production of Guys and Dolls in this day and age when Marlon Brando or Nathan Lane are available at the push of a button.  The live part simply doesn’t make up for the lack of practice part.

But the other day, the time and tide were right for a trip upriver.  We call it a river, even though I essentially live on a very slim 12-mile bay – completely sea water, flushed 90% each 24 hours by the two tides.  Usually I head down, toward the sea, as that is where the wind is.  But today’s west wind blows over water and fields alike, and I know it won’t run out.  It takes me just over an hour to twist my way six miles up to Damariscotta, hard over some of the time, belting on a beam reach past Glidden Ledges and the oyster farms my father spawned.

Past the tricky final mud flats and into Damariscotta Harbor, I made it onto a mooring and rowed ashore for the Pumpkinfest.  By then it was four pm and the crowd was thinning out in the late afternoon chill, but I walked around to get a snack and see the carved pumpkins.  The largest pumpkin was there too, a huge if slightly deflated 1210-pound monster (“Ooh,” quipped an English voice beside me. “that’s as big as two Americans!”).

It was just before five when I set sail again, laying off from the mooring to get some speed, but then laying back for a run down river.  The shadow of the earth began to gather in the east, and I rounded the turn to home (Soup!) in a chill and gathering gloom.  It was a treat though – such clear air when it blows from the west – and as the sun went down it shone up for a moment, and there was a red-hot skillet under the cast iron clouds.

Kew with Martin

An unavoidable extra day in London yields a most pleasant result: a day-trip to Kew Gardens with my friend Martin, Zen priest and master garden designer – he is the author, with his wife Alxe, of Landscape as Spirit (http://www.amazon.com/Landscape-Spirit-Creating-Contemplative-Garden/dp/0834805383/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253279658&sr=1-1). Given his background in designing massive gardens with waterfalls, lakes, and huge stones all over the world, the chance to see Kew – the living result of the Victorian need to collect and categorize, in this case botanicals of every description – through his eyes is not to be missed.

Martin and I go way back to when he was my student in the early 90’s, but our deep friendship dates from the time when he picked me up and gave me a place to recover in the aftermath of my family break-up.  Over these two decades, I have seen him flush and destitute, secure and ass over the edge, 30 employees and none, in the bosom of his family and wracked with grief as tragedy overwhelms – and he always has the same calm demeanor, philosophical attitude, childlike curiosity, and Buddhist detachment that many people claim but so very few inhabit.  My brother, mentor, and friend.

Along with mowing lawns, I have generally ‘graduated’ myself for many years from taking subways whenever and wherever.  As Kew is way south at the suburban end of the District Line, the Tube is likewise unavoidable, but the London Underground has improved in the years since I lived here – the cars cleaner and smoke-free, and on this day there are no delays.  There is “Mind the Gap”.

Martin is dressed in new Zen robes (polyester and wrinkle free), which make him look priestly and striking amid the downdressed Londoners.  His small porkpie hat and large-knobbed walking stick adds to the eye-drawing mix.  His wife Alxe, English by derivation and East Coast by education (and therefore more conservatively attired), is a small but forceful woman who likes big dogs (who have thankfully been left home on this 50^th birthday tour of England).  Through the miracle of SMS, we meet without hassle.

The street from the Tube to the park is lined with identical row houses, but they must be pretty pricey given the BMW’s, Mercedes, and even an Aston-Martin in the drives.  First stop inside the gate is the Palm House, a huge white metal and glass arboretum with the largest of the plants – huge palms of every description scrape the ceiling.  It is so humid inside that I shed my sweater and Martin is constantly wiping his camera lens, and it’s a relief to slip outside again to the row of mythical beasts – the Griffin of whatever, the Yale of Broadhurst, the Lion of England – all rampant and holding an heraldic shield passed down through generation from Tudor or Plantagenet titles.  What a lot of nonsense the Queen must have to know!

The waterlilies are next, huge leaves like boats and exquisite blossoms.  The young fella in his waders has a bucket sitting in one of the tray-like leaves, spooning out the duckweed with a net.  Most of these only bloom for a few days, and many only at night, he says, and require a singular beetle to come in and get the pollen when they are open and transfer it to a male plant.  It is one of the best arguments for evolution – God would never have designed something this messy, haphazard, and imperfect.  But then again, God did.

Although it is certainly Kew as I remember it from the 80’s, there is much that is new: the Princess of Wales Conservatory (Augusta, not Diana) replaces temporary greenhouses of succulents in a huge new building of six different climates: Step through a door to enter a desert full of cactuses, another to luxuriate in varieties of orchid, another to wilt with the tropical ferns, another to peer into the carnivorous plants, and another to tiptoe under the vines.

Another new element was the Treetop Walkway, which takes you 100’ or so up into the canopy, making me nervous as it swayed.  I could not keep from looking down through the mesh floor to the forest floor way too far below.

Aside from the new rock garden, which did not meet Martin and Alxe’s design standards (too boxy and unimaginative), and the new Japanese gateway (good, but not up to what I saw in Japan), everything we saw in this Eden was good.  The trees – huge and from all over – were especially welcome.  Kew was hit with a huge windstorm some years ago that took out hundreds of unique trees and left the head gardener in tears, but no damage was in evidence now.

The surprise, that Martin dragged me to unwillingly as I was getting ‘museum feet’ in the late afternoon, was the gallery of botanical art.  Though I was prepared to be bored, the marvelous watercolours and drawings easily straddled the utility-beauty gap, consistently conveying more than any photograph could manage.  Especially amazing was a moss painted onto the reverse side of a windowpane; I had to peer over the top to reassure myself it was not just moss stuffed in behind glass.  Others so captured the essence of the wild grape or fig or magnolia that you could palpably feel the artist’s love.

I am not a gardener or a farmer, though I work in the garden and live on a farm.  I am an urban dweller, even in my town of 600 souls, hooked to the internet and cell phone, with an embarrassing wealth of friends spread over every time zone.  Martin meditates for hours to days on the spot of a new garden before beginning the design.  I admire and even envy him his inner space, but plants move too slowly for me; I like the pace of humans, as destructive as they are.  For several hours, I slow down to Martin’s pace with Martin’s eyes – the slow shaping of the landscape over decades into a vision that matches the setting, the plants, the climate, the people – it’s such a gift, to see through another’s lens!

Federer v Del Potro

It is getting later and still later here in England; the hour of the taxi and the long travel tunnel looms, but still we sit mesmerized by the unfolding battle of the US Open finals beamed from New York.  The quality of tennis is the finest I have ever seen – long volleys of terribly fast and perfectly placed shots on the new blue court until someone is outdone and makes a mistake.  Federer had the upper hand the whole way, winning the first set handily, and being only edged out of the second in a tie-break that seemed stacked against him, getting the third with only a little more difficulty, 6-4.  He is angry, though, with Del Potro and the officials – Del Potro is taking too long to make his call challenges, throwing Federer off.

My friends are for Federer (for no better reason than that Del Potro is ‘too swarthy’ – a foreigner – isn’t Federer German?); I take Del Potro’s side (for no better reason than he has the most integrated shoulders I have ever seen). The fourth set was a titanic struggle, in which Federer had a number of break and match points, where he could have put Del Potro away, but the young Argentinian – tired to the point of sometimes looking asleep between the points – always found a way to reach inside and keep himself alive – and the fourth set again went to him in another high-wire tie break.

We are resigned to stay with it until finally in the 5^th hyper-dramatic set, with our fingers tingling and our stomachs tight, Del Potro bests the older but petulant Federer.  The Argentinian fell on his back in exhaustion and disbelief that from so far down he has pulled it off – won his first US Open at 20, beating the cold, intemperate, but highly disciplined champion.

Earlier this very day I was railing against the watching of sports, the voyeuristic slump of the observer rather than the total involvement of the player – but this puts paid to my notion: this is a pas de deux that satisfies as much as any dance.

Carillons

Walking upt’ the pub of a Monday night, and suddenly the bells on the church next door start a round of bell pulling. At first tentative, then resolving into scales, and then building to a wild burst and flow of peals in the (I think) hexatonic set of harmonies. Apparently Monday night is bell practice night.  At first it sounded pleasantly cacophonous and quintessentially C of E, but then I began hearing melodies and syntactical development within the cascades of notes.

I mention this to my walking companion, an old friend, superb jazz musician with encyclopedic knowledge and a fierce ear: “Isn’t it funny how your ear imposes order on random but related sounds?”

“Not ‘alf” he replies, “But this is choreographed – these sequences are written out – there’s about eight of ‘em in there, and they’re playin’ it.”

“You’re joking! There’s about 5 notes to the second – no way they could be pulling ropes and timing the clapper hitting the bell that precisely.”

“Nevertheless…”

I defer to his knowledge of both music and England, but I am still not sure that what he says is remotely possible. I am sure that we are meaning-making machines, and that we will impose meaning – subtly or foolishly, for better or for worse – on the random series of events we call a life, a relationship, or even a set of ocean waves of sound breaking against our ears. I hear voices in the actual ocean waves when I am sailing, and hear and feel my cell phone ringing when it isn’t – why should I not impose familiar patterns on these happy clanging rolls of sound?