Winter sets in...season of poetry

Great Plains Winter, December #watercolor 28 of 31

Now comes the cold season, as winter sets in.
When you grow up on the Great Plains, where the skies are as vast as the landscape, stretching beyond imagination, with so few people, it's easy perhaps to be alone.
But not so because you treasure people more. Sparse population makes encountering other people "an event," writes my favorite author John McPhee writes about traveling in Alaska in his new book The Patch.
The Plains, and winter, and people, become poetry.
My blog friend and poet Kay Lawson Gilbert in Pennsylvania wrote this poem a few years ago, inspired by one of my cabin scenes,

"Out on the plains,

       the snow piled up.

       But inside the cabin,

       the two were warm...

       words were their clothes -

       their bodies a language

        of poetry and prose."

Paddling to happiness

"The Sound of Happiness," 5 by 7 watercolor, 300# d'Arches cold-pressed paper

"When have you been the  happiest?" is not an easy question to answer on your birthday or any other time. Too many years, miles, people and places. I can't paint weddings, or births of children, or...the list goes on.
But approaching each day without a plan for this month's daily watercolor challenge, to paint "Happy," one image came to mind.
Canoes. Canoeing. I was an amateur canoeist at best, and no longer have the red, 80-pound, 15'8" Old Town Discovery   from a few years ago, but thinking about it, lifted my imagination and memories.
It's difficult to be a canoeist in this country--we have almost no canoe water--clear, fresh flowing streams. Other than family trips decades ago to the Illinois River in eastern Oklahoma, my canoe trips were few, other than out to Lake Arcadia, and down two muddy rivers, the Cimarron from near Crescent to Guthrie, and from El Reno down the North Canadian to Lake Overholser.
But my time trying to learn, to be alone on the water early in the morning at first light, or being lost in nature's time down a river alone or with friends or loved ones, those are times of happiness.
I'm envious of those who are expert at canoeing and do so regularly. I know why. There is only your own effort, and no sound except the dip of the paddle and the slight gurgle of the wake.  Time to think, to solve the problem of the next stroke, to view the wildlife, to think. 
One image that stands out is at Arcadia Lake one morning, I was upwind and quietly floated within 100 feet of an osprey sitting in a tree with a fresh catch. Another time, a flight of Canada geese came in low over the brush and landed not far from me. Happiness.

Canoes transport history and craft and philosophy and romance and literature and cultures, one of the most ancient means of transportation in the world. You must read John McPhee's The Survival of the Bark Canoe, about a 150-mile trip in the Maine woods.

• "Everyone must believe in something.  I believe I'll go canoeing." --Thoreau
• "Refuse to accept the belief that your professional relevance, career success or financial security turns on the next update on the latest technology. Sometimes it's good to put the paddle down and just let the canoe glide."-- Simon Mainwaring
• "I thing it much better that, as we all go along together, that every man paddle his own canoe." --The "Indian" in Settlers of Canada, 1844, Captain Marryat.
• "There is magic in the feel of a paddle and the movement of a canoe, a magic compounded of distance, adventure, solitude, and peace. The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open door to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions. When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known." --Sigurd F. Olson
• "Canoe Trip," on selling my canoe--Canoe Trip

My canoe

My radio column "Coffee with Clark" on KCSC-FM about the geese, from almost 20 years ago:

I could hear them before I saw them. At first I wasn’t sure, but then the sound was unmistakable.

I’d just pulled my canoe out of the lake. The sky was gray with the first cool front of autumn, the sun hidden almost on the horizon. A slight breeze. Quiet.

Then they came in low over the still-green treetops, wings motionless, gliding down in formation toward the water behind the leader.

Maintaining perfect order, they swooped in low over the water, rose, banked, wings moving in unison, voices almost quiet. They skimmed the surface of the water, never missing a beat, not slowing down, until they banked again and had scouted the skeletal old trees full of egrets, the shoreline foliage, the beaver dam, the shallow, almost still water.

After the second pass over the landing area, they curled up in the air, breaking formation. Then they spread their wings wide, putting on their air brakes--you could hear the air and wind rushing against those gray feathers--and they dropped down to smooth landings. The first feet skidded into the water with orderly furrows, settled down into the warm water. The rest of the flock followed.

In a few minutes another flock followed, finding assurance in their companions’ presence. 

In less than five minutes the water was full of them, occasionally honking, settling into the shallows for evening feeding and roosting.

I stood there spellbound at the aerial grace, precision, and promise of Canada geese. These early birds are the first harbingers of fall, when leaves turn, the light changes, the breezes rattle brittle leaves and seeds.

Once they were all down, talking to each other, I pulled my canoe up. I wished I’d been on the water in the middle of them, but if I had, they wouldn’t have landed and I would have missed it all. Our lives are richer when we stay out of the way and let the geese have their way. Theirs is the promise of fall.

Pages of February--Life and death on the wing

I've found a "new" John McPhee.
That might not be fair to Hannah Nordhaus because she stands alone as an accomplished writer and author.
But I'd never heard of her until my former student Lauren Vargas on Facebook extolled the impact of her book, "The Beekeeper's Lament--How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Help Feed America."
I can't keep up with Vargas'  continuous consumption of books, but this one caught my attention, because she used the term "non-fiction."
I looked the book up on Amazon, and a review mentioned McPhee, who is my favorite living author. He writes about what I would call "everyday science"--geology, oranges, birch bark canoes, wildlife, conservation, long haul truckers in such compelling narratives  I've read almost everything he writes. He writes for the New Yorker and teaches non-fiction writing at Princeton. As a journalist, I'm hooked. Comparing her to him is just pure admiration.
So I bought Nordhaus's book. She's written for the Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Outside Magazine and more. The book grew out of an article in High  Country News. Her writing reminds me of McPhee's, and is just as captivating.
Unlike Vargas who probably buzzed through the book in a day or two, it took me about a week, enjoying every page.

This is a book about the commercial beekeepers who help feed you as they provide bees to pollinate America's crops...and the dangers to our food supply.
Actually, it's about more than bees--it's about life and dying.
Specifically, it's a story about one beekeeper, John Miller as he travels from California to North Dakota with bees, and his, and his fellow keepers', travails.
It opened new world. How honey is really made? How a hive is constructed? Where the queens come from? The history of beekeeping?  The diseases and dangers to bees? "Colony collapse"? It's all here, with plenty of metaphor to apply to humans too.
First three sentences:
"John Miller isn't fond of death. He takes it personally. A few years ago he even bought a Corvette, as if that could stave it off."
One of my favorite sections is about the declining North Dakota town where Miller sets up shop in June, the chapter titled, "The Human Swarm." Having lived in rural Iowa and Oklahoma, this was personal.
Snippets:
"Rural communities, like inner cities, have ceded membership in the nation's ownership society."
"It was like a sepia, soft-focus campaign ad: morning in an America most Americans have never had the privilege to know."
"We cleave to the way things are, not only to hold back a chaotic future, and not only because that is what we know...There is value in returning to the one who loves you, in keeping the family farm going, in living where you grew up, in keeping bees when no amount of common sense and self preservation can justify it The colony is collapsing in North Dakota, but not everyone is flying off."
There's more:
"He worries that beekeepers have evolved too slowly, 'a room full of old men'--senescent, like worker bees that have outlived their usefulness."
Nordhaus has also written  American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the American Southwest. I'll be buying it.

Country at top of world, No. 119 on the blog

Mountains speak to me, and to many others, but I imagine they speak no louder anyplace in the world that in Nepal, where a reader clicked on the blog this week, making it the 119th country to have done so.
"The roof of the world" sounds trite, and understates this place I've always dream of visiting for two reasons. The first is the mountains. Nepal is home to the world's highest point, Mt.Everest, (Sagarmatha (सगरमाथा) in Nepali, "Forehead of the Sky"), at 29,029 feet, on the northern border with Tibet/China...and the country is home to 240 Himalayan peaks topping 20,000 feet.

It's not all mountains however, with a fertile, humid lowlands in the south. The other reason I'd like to visit is the name of its capital, Kathmandu. That is just so beckoning of adventure and being far away. I've been fortunate to have one Nepalese student here at UCO.
The country is a little larger than Arkansas and a little smaller than Oklahoma. It stretches 487 miles from from east to west, and from 150 to 250 miles wide, landlocked between Tibet--now ruled by China--and India, with a population of about 27 million.

About 80 percent of the population are Hindus, and, although Gautama Buddha was born in the country, about nine percent Buddhist.
The country was a monarchy  from 1768 until 2008, when a civil war ended and a federal multi-part republic was adopted. There is still turmoil between  the communist party and others, and elections are scheduled for this November.
The flag is unique in the world, the only one not a square or rectangle. Based on a design almost 2,000 years old, red is the national  color and that of the rhododendron. Blue symbolizes beach, and the triangles perhaps the mountains, the two symbols the permanence of the universe. (Some Material for this post came from Wikipedia.)
View a YouTube video of a flight over Everest below:

This gives me a chance to quote my favorite writer, John McPhee, who writes about geography. In Basin and Range, he wrote: "When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone."
At the top are 400-million-year-old fossils--the bones and shells of creatures that died in ancient seas--Ordovician limestone. The Himalayas began forming about 65 million years ago when the Indo-Australian plate of the earth's crust moved north and under the Eurasian plate, pushing the rocks up. 
The earth's crustal plates are still moving, India going north more than an inch a year, and the mountains rising up to 10 millimeters a year. That gives you an idea of how long this took, pushing mountains up more than five miles. We are small, and brief indeed.

When books find you, or, a tortoise's tale

Sometimes books find you.
So it was Saturday, as I scrounged through Full Circle Bookstore www.fullcirclebooks.com/ looking at books and waiting to play chess, all the while sipping the free coffee.
I always go to the nature section, by the fireplace, to see books by John McPhee, to check on other non-fiction, by writers like Rick Bass, Barry Lopez. And I usually find something new to consider buying.
This time I found two, "The Great Aridness," about my beloved Southwest, and "The Missing Ink," about the decline of art of cursive handwriting. Turns out I'll save those for later.
Driving down, I was thinking I'd like to find a book by Verlyn Klinkenborg, the thoughtful columnist for the New York Times, who writes "The Rural Life" and "The Urban Life"--literary meditations of life in general, especially rural--the kind of writing I'd like to do.
I didn't even know if he'd written a book, but still was thinking about it. And then, there was this pale little volume  squeezed between bigger books. I pulled it out of the shelf, and there was Kinkenborg's book, "Timothy or, Notes of an Abject Reptile."
Call it serendipity, or chance, or angels, or whatever, but the book was seeking me. It's not a new book (copyright 2006) but it grabbed me immediately. Klinkeborg gives voice to a historic tortoise, whose shell is now in the Natural History Museum in London, written about in journals by an Eighteenth Century English naturalist, Gilbert White. Timothy lived in White's garden in a small village for  years.
Kinkenborg adopts the tortoise in a way, imaging what he thought of the humans who adopted and cared for him all those years. Essentially he gets inside the tortoise's head, with spare prose, giving timeless observations of human and natural affairs, in delightful, fanciful storytelling. 

"So it is with humans. Quickness draws their eye. Entangles their attention. What they notice they call reality. But reality is a fence with many holes, a net with many tears. I walk through them slowly. My slowness is deceptively fast."

I'm assuming he met Timothy by reading about him in White's journals from 1784, and he's posted some of those thoughts on a blog he ended in 2006. http://klinkenborg.blogs.nytimes.com/ Read a little of his work and you can see why I always search for his columns. they're treats of thoughts that brighten days.

Klinkenborg is on the editorial board of The Times, and his columns always attract my attention for the great writing, the images and metaphors about the ordinary things of life. He  grew up on an Iowa farm and lives in Ames, and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton.
At any rate, I'm glad he found Timothy, and that his book found me. Those are the best kind.

Words of discovery--pages in December

• bouillon time, rhumb lines, proscenium arch
• invigliationn sodalites, snoods, anoraks
• Mogador, Levantines, thalassocracies, jeremiads, discalced, Clonfert, niggles,  majuscule, bentic
• Monegasque, tautological, loxodrome, gyre, polymath, escapement, aiguilles, epibentic, brio

I spent an hour looking these words up today. I'd underlined them  as I was reading a new book, and I'd completed four chapters148 pages out of 459, not counting index and other stuff.

Oh, the book? "Atlantic" by Simon Winchester, telling the story of the ocean. First saw it two nights ago at Best of Books in Edmond, after dinner. Had to buy it. Winchester is one of my two favorite non-fiction writers. John McPhee is  still the favorite, but Winchester has written 20 of the kind of books I like to read, with travel, far-away places, geology, geography, history mixed together. So far I've read,  Krakatoa, The Map That Changed the World, and The Professor and the Madman--about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary.  It ain't just history--it's journalism, the story of people.

Ironically, I was looking up those words in the OED today. I found one word not in the OED--"bentic." I did have to turn to the Internet for a few of the geographic terms.

How do you tell the story of an ocean? He starts before the beginning, sprinkling his narrative and smooth writing with lots of geology, and coming forward through the ages into explorers, travelers, discovery and mapping, politics and wars and storms and science and trivia (Did you know Hitler tried to buy an island in the St. Lawrence seaway?) to the present.

Winchester first crossed the ocean on a liner in the early 1960s. His storytelling captivates, mingling facts with humanity. I just make sure I have a pen nearby to underline words I'm not sure of. The chapter I'm in now is about the literature that grew up about the Atlantic--from Anglo Saxons to Shakespeare's The Tempest and more.

The only fault of the book is that it needs a much more detailed map, with larger type for these aging eyes, than the few included. I'll have to get out my world map for the rest of the chapters, and will still underline words, to be looked up later.

Avast!~

Non-fiction

Why don't we call the other, "Non truth"?

Good writing is good writing. I love writing, and reading "truth."
Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, wasn't fiction. It was truth.

Weekly newspapers are called "non-dailies." Why not call dailies, "Non-weeklies"?

So is John McPhee, and sometimes I get close, as with "Losing my right arm."
 http:clarkcoffee.blogspot.com