Your father coming
home late—a cougar
vaulted the road,
blazed up the driveway.
He floored it,
but the lion outran
his highbeams, vanished
on the hillside.
Of course I thought of you.
Who sprang
fully formed into our lives
and died.
All our love to you, Jacob Darsie Putnam: 4/25-28/1989.
****
(“Blur” originally appeared in Poetry East. It is forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press.)
Posted in Bereavement, Chapbook, Cougars, Grief, Literary Inspiration, Mountain lions, Poetry, Writing | Tagged blur, cougars, finishing line press, jake, losing jacob, loss, mountain lions, poetry, wild thing in our known world | 5 Comments »
The Colorado River, which I happen to live beside, is the #1 most endangered River in America. I’m surprised, but relieved, to learn that the other major waterway, the Rio Grande, which also rises here in our watershed state, did not make the top ten.
We think of our rivers as the source of life, of livelihood, of food and water. But when I watch the whitewater, the meltwater, coming down over and around the rocks in the mountain streams, what I see is light.
Light released from the place where it was stored during the dark of the winter.
It’s another reason why I’m sorry to hear that glaciers too are getting smaller over time.
First, that air, not burdened
with oxygen, was full
of light.
Light caught the undersides
of ponderosa needles
and the ragged,
reddish bark of their trunks.
Kim’s chickens feathered
in the silvery
light of the aspen branches.
I lay beside the river
on my favorite flat
rock of old, and the river
brought light
from the glaciers.
A bird came to bathe
in the spray once. No idea
what kind of bird,
but I remember it,
it is caught
in my mind.
Light like ashes unfurling,
smoke released
by light.
There are things
you take for granted,
a high kitchen
window opening to light
careering off cliffs,
the mountainside
a terrarium, pines
springing
from your countertops.
******
(Originally appeared on Western Views, the blog of Western Resource Advocates. You can also find another poem of mine, Global Warming Scenarios: Rocky Mountain Region on the same site.
Lost Valley is forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Advance help the publisher calculate the press run, so please reserve your copy now.)
Posted in Chapbook, Environment, Literary Inspiration, Poetry, Writing | Tagged climate change, endangered rivers, finishing line press, global warming, homesickness, living at altitude, living in nature, lost valley, poetry, wild thing in our known world | 1 Comment »
I’ve lived in Colorado’s lion country for more than thirty years. Possibly, depending on what stories you believe about where and when they’ve reintroduced themselves in Northern New England, I’ve been in their territory my whole life.
Flushed
Running the Highline,
a fleeting thought
of the threat of lions,
turn my head to find
the dogs chasing one.
Tail stretched out long,
a comet through my heart.
It ran; the dogs were safe,
just this painful weight
of coincidence
to bear back down
the mountain.
thought and then
the conjured beast,
the liquid leap
to the tree; again
the long run down,
through all those years
of running through woods,
sensing but not seeing.
(Originally appeared in The Adirondack Review, in slightly different form. Forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Advance orders secure the press run, so please reserve your copy now.)
Find me on Twitter at @lioncaller.
Posted in Chapbook, Cougars, Literary Inspiration, Mountain lions, Poetry | Tagged chapbook, cougar, flushed, lioncaller, mountain lion, poetry, predators, wild thing in our known world, wildlife reintroduction | Leave a Comment »
Sometimes teenagers don’t talk to you. Sometimes this goes on for weeks, months. Sometimes it’s not just a matter of the usual adolescent grunting and shrugging. Because sometimes you don’t even get that.
Sometimes they don’t want to talk to you. They truly seem to have decided that they hate your guts.
In such times, a mother may come to think it is all over. Time is flying by. Even if some healing takes place, many critical months and years may be lost. All the reassurances of her friends—it’ll work out, he’s a good kid, he’ll be fine, all that love you gave him when was three is in there somewhere—feel hollow. The mother knows very well that sometimes it doesn’t work out.
She has no way of telling which statistic she’ll be, which her son will be.
And then one day, perhaps while she’s lying injured, her son goes for a hike. In the evening he comes to her room. The rock he lays on her pillow feels warm from the sun, from his pocket, from the hand he’s kept in that pocket.
Many years later, whenever she fingers it on her desk, she swears it still feels warm.
Cairn Stone
This is the rock he lifted
to lay upon a cairn
in a high place.
This rock, warmed by the near sun,
felt right, somehow, in his hand.
He decided to carry it down
to his mother, who lay in bed,
recovering.
It is so easy to please
a mother. Just to think of her
for a moment, from a high place,
and to carry that thought to her
in the form of a stone.
(Originally published in Paper Street. Forthcoming in Wild Thing in Our Known World, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press. Advance orders secure the press run, so please reserve your copy now.)
Posted in Chapbook, Life Changes, Outdoor activities, Poetry, Writing | Tagged cairn stone, finishing line press, parenting, parenting teens, poetry, teen communication styles, wild thing in our known world | 1 Comment »
Way back in the early days of this blog I posted about measurable publishing progress. Even so it’s sometimes hard to feel as though anything’s happening. A story is accepted by a reasonably prestigious journal. Then publication is delayed; the editors combine a couple of issues. When it finally arrives, there are so many stories and poems crammed into one magazine, you wonder if anyone ever reads the story you polished for five years, or if the whole thing is about the credit in the cover letter for the next piece you send out.
But.
Roll it on. Believe in it anyway. I stood up and read the first half of my most recently published story out loud in front of a thousand skeptical people last year and it went down pretty well, I thought.
So, regardless of what happens next, I am excited that my first poetry chapbook is coming into print right now. 
Over two dozen of my poems have appeared in a variety of journals. This is more than enough to anchor a couple of chapbooks, perhaps even a book-length manuscript. But until I had a fellowship last year, I didn’t have the headspace to pull such a project together.
Finishing Line Press is bringing out Wild Thing in Our Known World in June. It’s available for preorder right now. I wrote about how this works over on my Poetry page, but in a nutshell, Finishing Line, like a lot of small presses these days, uses advance orders to set the press-runs. If we get 100 preorders, they’ll print 500 copies. If we get fewer than that, the press-run will be significantly smaller, and I’ll be depressed.
I think most authors feel a little Amway-ish about the preorder thing, honestly, but that’s how it is now. We have to schlepp our books whether we like it or not. We all have do some of our own marketing and PR-ing—half the time even our cover art and our editing—no matter how much we’d like to hole up and just write.
But I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t believe in what I was writing about, because the amount of energy it takes to write stuff is ridiculous.
If I can get up and read something in front of a thousand people, I can ask you to please buy my poetry book. It costs $12 and the discounted shipping is $2.49. It must not suck too much if the people at Finishing Line pulled it out of a huge pile of manuscripts sent by hopeful poets and decided to publish it.
(How many hopeful poets are there? Well, I went to a panel discussion at AWP in Denver a few years ago. AWP is a conference for people who are getting or have already got a master’s degree in creative writing, including in poetry. Thousands upon thousands of people attend. This talk was on how to assemble a poetry book manuscript. It was given in one of those hotel banquet rooms where they can take out an intervening wall and turn it into a ballroom. They’d removed the wall, and it was still standing room only. There are kabillions of hopeful poets out there, that’s how many.)
A couple of people have said some nice things about this chapbook. Not to drop names or anything, but the award-winning poet Kelli Russell Agodon, who’s been featured on A Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, not to mention in many other prestigious places, and IMO is headed for superstardom, wrote a blurb.
A second blurb comes from historian Paul Thomas Murphy. He’s the author of the New York Times Notable Book, Shooting Victoria, which is about how seven attempts on Queen Victoria’s life probably saved the very concept of the British Monarchy. I want my work to be taken seriously in the literary community, but I want it to be accessible to thoughtful non-poets as well. I asked Paul for his opinion.
Then there’s Coyote. I had one last day to come up with cover art for my book. I had no money for this. I took my son’s camera and headed out for a day of backcountry skiing. Around here that means around 2300 feet of vertical climbing, not even considering the distance traveled or the difficulty of the terrain.
But the shot was easy. There was a deer in the ditch, roadkill, a sad metaphor that haunts the book, and Coyote was waiting in the field. Sitting there in broad daylight. Wild thing in our known world. I’d titled the manuscript long before, after a line in one of the poems.
I’m not a good photographer, but I think that’s all to the best in this case.
I got back in the car and went skiing. On the mountain, I met Neil Bennett, a professional photographer. If my shot didn’t work out, he said I could use some of his wildlife shots for free. I may well do that with the next book. But for Wild Thing in Our Known World, it seemed that Coyote had given me another blurb.
Isn’t that enough for you?
Posted in Books, Chapbook, Coyotes, Literary Inspiration, Outdoor activities, Poetry, Writing | Tagged coyote, finishing line press, kelli russell agodon, paul thomas murphy, Poems, poetry, poetry chapbook, publication, wild thing in our known world | 2 Comments »
Sometimes I try too hard.
Sometimes I’m given to obsessive thinking. Perseveration, looping, or spinning, depending on how technical you want to get. I’m not OCD, but some people have said I have an obsessive-compulsive personality. Turns out there is an DSM diagnosis for obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
This is the kind of thing that comes up when you live with a therapist.
“Drop that ‘D,’” I’ll say, as if he’s holding a gun, or I am. “You’re not going anywhere with that.
“But that’s what it’s called,” he’ll say.
“It’s not a disorder. It’s known as getting things done.”
I like to think of my obsessiveness as narrative drive. Sometimes I apply my energy to chores, but usually that’s a means of clearing the deck for my writing. Then, I try to make sense of things. I loop until I can find a way out into a story.
In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt says sense-
making is key to overcoming adversity. The ability to create a narrative out of disparate events makes for resilience.
(I can grow tired of the way high-functioning people get pathologized. For example, what’s wrong with being type-A? A’s are good, right?)
The trouble is, things don’t always add up. Stories don’t always come together. Sometimes you just spin and spin. If you do this out loud, whether it’s about the great American novel, or about some weird thing your boss said (which might somehow turn up in the novel; who knows), people get sick of you.
I have a locked file in Microsoft Office OneNote called Things That Do Not Add Up. There, I list the things that people do or say that trouble me, but that I do not think will ever be explained to my satisfaction. The purpose of this list is to get this stuff out of my head so I won’t spin. I’m not sure the designers of OneNote were thinking of the program as a mental health aid, but in this one regard it seems to work better than my brain on its own.
Once in a while I sort through it, and something comes out. Usually not anything that adds up for real, but maybe something that clicks in fiction.
Regardless of what technological, spiritual, or medical tools I apply, I’m often unsuccessful at not forcing things. Whether you’re a writer or just any old being hoping to get along with other people, you occasionally go out of your mind trying to figure out the meaning of things.
Yesterday I went down into the basement to file about a year’s worth of documents. I only bothered because I was looking for a specific piece of information, which I never found. I don’t understand what happened to it—it’s too important for me to have really mislaid, even with all my recent moves, but it’s not turning up.
I did find a printout of this verse, though. I used to keep it over my desk in the house in Lefthand. I’m not sure where I found it in the first place.
The Way of Chuang Tzu: Keng’s Disciple
If you persist in trying
To attain what is never attained,
If you persist in making effort
To obtain what effort cannot get,
If you persist in reasoning
About what cannot be understood,
You will be destroyed
By the very thing you seek.
To know when to stop,
To know when you can get no further
By your own action,
This is the right beginning!
Posted in Life Changes, Writing | Tagged Chuang Tzu, Happiness Hypothesis, intrusive thoughts, narrative drive, OCD, OCDPD, OneNote, sense-making | 2 Comments »
Where I live now, on Colorado’s Western Slope, towns are strung out along the confluence of two rivers, the Roaring Fork and the Colorado. Those who live “upvalley” live southward along the Roaring Fork, and generally speaking, the richer they are or the richer they want to be, the closer they live to Aspen. Those who are considered less affluent or perhaps just more blue collar in their upbringing, tend to live “downvalley” along the Colorado River from Glenwood Springs, and west toward Grand Junction.
I’m generalizing, because it’s unrelentingly beautiful everywhere in between. Plenty of people choose to live in many of these spots 
due to professional considerations, personal preference, or historical connections. There are actually quite a lot of professional, artistic, and well educated people living downvalley, but some upvalley people either don’t know this or don’t like to think so.
I live in the middle, in Glenwood Springs, a Victorian town where the Roaring Fork and the Colorado join. If you’ve ever driven through Colorado on I-70 or come through the state on Amtrak, you’ve nicked the edge Glenwood. Perhaps you’ve stopped at the hot springs.
Often when I’m skiing upvalley, where most of the snow is, other skiers ask me where I live. When I tell them, the conversation usually just ends right there. “Oh.”
The right answer appears to be Carbondale (the next town upvalley from ours) or Basalt. (Most people think Aspen is kind of gross.) I wouldn’t mind living in Carbondale. It’s a cute town, closer to skiing, with a surprising amount going on culturally. But whenever someone does this “Oh” thing, I get my back up and feel kind of stubborn about the lower end of the valley.
So imagine how the feelings run about another town, about 20 miles downvalley, called Silt.
Silt is located in the Grand Valley, which deserves its name. Heading west on I-70 from Glenwood, you pass New Castle, the last of the semi-respectable downvalley towns. You go around a bend and the sky opens up into a wide stretch of mesas and light, light, light. Then you hit the triad of strangely named settlements. Silt, Rifle, Parachute.
We lived in Silt ourselves for a short time. I’d told my partner: Please, anything but that town. I can’t live in a place named after mud. Why would anyone call a town Silt? Not that Carbondale or Basalt are particularly attractive names, or that Aspen is all that creative when you look at any hillside in Colorado.
But as a poet, I feared Silt. It sounded like a place where people would just, well, settle. As if they didn’t care what happened to them. Even Rifle, I said, had more of a—I can’t help it—a kick to it.
The rental market around here, though, is very tight, and it’s so hard to find landlords that allow pets. We’re not ready to buy, partly because we haven’t decided on a town. So, my partner wound up choosing a house in Silt while I was out of town. It was seven miles from the job he’d taken as a public mental health therapist, in Rifle. We had a lot to learn.
When I saw the view from our mesa-top house in Silt, I had a hard time complaining:
All my life I’ve struggled to wake up in the morning. But not there. I couldn’t wait to get up and look out the window (the shot above left is sunrise on the Roan Plateau). The days were long, even in the dead of winter. A few months ago, I was back in Boulder to get my ski boots fit at Larry’s Bootfitting, and one of the customers there said, “People talk about the light in Santa Fe, but I think the light in the Grand Valley is just as good.” She was so right.
There were other charms. A few miles from the house—not a bad bike ride, or a quick drive if I wanted to take the dogs for a run on nearby trails—there was a reservoir, Harvey Gap.
Speaking of dogs, Silt has the best dog-park ever. Dogs can get right into the Colorado River, or meander through cottonwoods and thickets. Circling it twice was a 20-minute run for me.
I can say that every single day I lived in Silt, I lived in stunned appreciation for the beauty. Every bike ride had a view for each pedal stroke. Pretti Lane, for instance:
It was only about an hour to great skiing—either upvalley at Sunlight or Snowmass, or downvalley at Powderhorn:
And the climbing opportunities were also great, at the West Elks, only a fraction of which are shown here, or at Rifle Arch, or the more famous Rifle Mountain Park.
However. You need to breathe. And to drink water. That haze in the Pretti Lane shots? Coming from wildfires, which is just SOP these days in the West, but also from ozone and other toxins in the air from fracking and drilling. Whenever I turned on the washing machine, the whole house smelled like natural gas. The washing machine, not the dryer.
My mechanic told me that his kids are not allowed to drink the water in school. That’s the school’s rule. No drinking the town water.
The upvalley people, many of them environmentalists, will say: We need to drill because we must reduce our dependency on foreign energy, so we can get out of these wars. Or as another environmentalist, someone high up in Garfield County administration, put it: We need the revenue. She said, Our county is one of the most powerful in the state, and it has no debt because of oil and gas drilling.
It doesn’t seem to change their minds if you point out that we don’t HAVE ENOUGH oil and gas under our American soil to make a difference in our foreign dependency. A month ago, the US Energy Information Administration dropped its estimate of shale gas reserves by over 40%, after a flurry of internal emails last year expressed widespread reservations about the inflated optimism about the future of natural gas drilling in this country.
A friend who sells weapons navigational systems to Middle Eastern governments, US energy companies operating in the Middle East, and defense contractors told me: Middle Eastern countries have enough oil and especially natural gas to supply the world for well over a hundred years, easily. They play down supplies in order to keep prices high. Whenever they want to change US production levels, the Saudis et al simply cut their prices. That’s because the oil and gas we have cost a lot to get and to refine.
Yet, the downvalley people in Silt and neighboring towns say: Please drill. We need the jobs.
They’re right, they do need jobs. Silt, a bedroom community dependent on drilling, recreation, and construction work, with a fair amount of small-business owners who commute upvalley as far as Aspen, has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the county, perhaps in the state. It’s just that drilling doesn’t seem to be helping with that. The boom economy actually caused the problem by bringing in too many people, driving prices up, and then when the boom corrected, the costs didn’t adjust properly.
It’s always this way in the West. You wonder why anyone ever believes it will be any different. It’s like a cheating lover who promises he’ll treat you right this time.
The price a community pays for the boom time is high. Few people upvalley ever go down toward Silt or see what’s going on there. They’ll say: Oh, I know it’s beautiful. But you never know when you’ll wake up in the morning and have a drilling rig next door.
Right? We know we need the energy, but we don’t want to live with that shit.
.
The trouble is, most of the people who make the decisions about what to allow and what not to allow live in Glenwood Springs or further upvalley. Or all the way in Washington, DC. They don’t really see “those people” who live in Silt or Parachute. The ones who, despite all this drilling, somehow can’t keep their houses. Whose schools are closing on Fridays despite these high county revenues. Upvalley people of course hear about meth use, but it’s usually fodder for jokes and eye-rolling instead of compassion.
Few people realize the long, back-to-back shifts that gasfield workers pull, for example, and the lack of safety precautions on the rigs—probably the original driver of the meth use. Or see that when it’s reported that drilling has “moved” to, say, North Dakota, the families don’t move. The workers, usually the fathers, commute crazily back and forth, often paying as much as $2500 per month for a camper in North Dakota on top of their Colorado expenses.
Meanwhile, my partner tries to help the children in downvalley towns, many of whom experience “anxious attachment,” which in school looks a lot like attention deficit. Some of them are not learning well. They can’t sit still and can’t concentrate, because they miss their fathers and they don’t know what’s going to happen next in their lives. This is on top of losing a day of school due to closures, while their strained parents try to pay for an extra day of childcare.
(Oh, we’re not responsible for what happens with the schools, said the county official. That’s up to the local communities and the state. Hm. I thought she said Garfield County is one of the most powerful counties in the state; why can’t it use that power to get more help for local communities?)
The thing is, Garfield County also wants to sell this region on recreation. On retirement. But you can’t do that if you’re wrecking the climate with oil and gas development, or making real estate investment dicey by destroying views and water quality. Who does want to wake up and find an oil rig next to their retirement home? Policymakers have to choose a direction.
It’s always easier for county administrators to collect revenue from extractive industries and punt regulation/accountability to the feds. If you work more soberly to attract long-term businesses that will employ people steadily and provide benefits, even if wages are lower, you might bring in fewer people, more slowly, overall. But perhaps they will be the people you really want for the region. Perhaps you could essentially Ben & Jerry’s Colorado—realign attitudes, loyalties, and politics simply by treating people better. It would be an interesting experiment. These gasfield workers are amazingly loyal to energy companies who treat them like crap and quite often kill them. What would happen if you took these tribal guys and gave them good jobs?
In another community these guys might be welding ships or building One World Trade Center, under the protection of a union. Right now they’re getting drilled into the ground, blown off 5-story rigs in high winds, and having their arms torn off. They work back-to-back 12-16 hour shifts at jobs that require a lot of focus and then are judged for using meth. Most of them are contractors or subcontractors and don’t have benefits. The tech companies I’ve worked for have had to provide perfectly ergonomic workstations due to OSHA and other standards. I mean, these employers have been worried about us getting carpal tunnel. What is up with the safety enforcement for these highly profitable energy companies?
No one holds these companies accountable on just about any level. They are granted exceptions for flaring wells even when fire bans are in effect statewide. Fracking is unsafe, environmentally. The studies that initially showed that it was safe for drinking water have been discredited. And yet nothing has been done to change any practices, or simply to stop it. The longer this goes on, the harder it’s going to be to attract better alternatives to the region. Who’s going to want to come to a fracked-up place like this?
I miss Silt. I miss the light and the big sky and the fact that I couldn’t look anywhere for one second and not see something beautiful, even if I had to overlook a rig or a wellpad. Glenwood is in a narrower valley and loses daylight much faster. But the water is better, and yes, probably the people are more educated overall, and much more friendly, as I think liberal outdoorsy types often are. I’ve found a community of writers and thinkers faster. But because of the lack of light it’s harder to wake up here. And I suspect that, as far as material goes for me as a writer, there’s less here. Overall, I wish we could have stayed. I wish our landlord’s house hadn’t been foreclosed upon. I wish the air and water had been safe.
Right now there’s a big debate about allowing some drilling to take place closer to Glenwood. No one local really wants that, partly because it would be in wilderness, but mostly because it would mean more traffic through an already overly burdened city infrastructure. However, there’s a back road the big trucks could take. Guess where it goes? Through Silt.
My guess is they’ll “solve” the problem that way.
We’re a little hypocritical about energy, said a Carbondale friend. We sure are. She meant that we take it from other countries, and kill for it. I mean that we wreck small-town America for it.
But not the hip small towns. Just the places where people are asking for it.
****
For a moving portrait of the culture of oil and gas-dependent communities
, please, please read Alexandra Fuller’s absolutely gripping The Legend of Colton H. Bryant, which I briefly discussed in an earlier post.
For more on the environmental aspects of fracking, please check out Western Resource Advocates. They also have a blog.
For more on the community perspective, visit award-winning young-adult author Peggy Tibbetts’s blog from Silt.
Maybe you don’t want to live next to a drilling rig—and I don’t blame you—but if you drive a car or have a thermostat, take a look once in a while.
Posted in Environment, Life Changes | Tagged alexandra fuller, colorado river, encana, fracking, garfield county, glenwood springs, grand valley, silt | 2 Comments »
