Category: essay

Personal Blog #203 Part 11: Sunny Southern Colorado

Why the Mountains Are Always to the West.

IMG_1261

This is me riding shotgun through what was once called The Great American Desert, though it’s really a steppe, the eastern slope of southern Colorado. Much of my childhood was spent in this country, though I have not lived there since my freshman year of high school.

Sage, cactus, and grasses are a threadbare cover to the land I grew up on. The mountains are a grand presence in the west, impressed upon me to the point that any time I encounter mountains, no matter how they are actually oriented, the lizard part of my brain automatically labels the direction of those mountains “West.”

I still have family there, so I still go back. I’m glad that I do, because I love Colorado. I love its clear night skies and summer thunderstorms. I love being in the mountains south of Florence, where my Mother spent part of her childhood, in a dirt floor cabin, going to school in a one-room schoolhouse. My very favorite wildflower in the world grows in meadows around where my mother grew up. It’s called Indian blanket, and its ragged beauty is extravagant.

Indian Blanket

My roots in the Arkansas Valley run deep. My grandparents are buried there in the Fowler Cemetery.

IMG_3455

My brother and mother live there now. Though I haven’t lived there in decades, no place on Earth better deserves the appelation, “home.”

From the Corner of My Eye, part 3

Note: This should have been posted days ago. Sorry about that, but here it is!

You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.

How does a reasonably intelligent, well-educated person, interested in and accepting of science, who views themselves as rational (whether it’s true or not) and mindful, come to an experience like this one, and what do I (being the person described above) take away from it? How do I process and interpret it?

Here’s another question: how can I write about this experience and not completely destroy my credibility? If I’m being honest, I have to start by admitting that for some people’s purposes, I can’t. A true skeptic is going to want far more than my say-so, and I don’t have more than that to offer. I have my eyewitness account, which is not objective proof of anything.

I’ve spoken to Matt about it since. He remembers that day but not clearly. He remembers that I told him I saw a pixie, and that I agree with his friend that there may be fairies in those woods, but not that a damselfly followed us. As time goes on, the incident lives only in my memory, though it remains vivid.

Now, I wouldn’t say I’m a skeptic, though I wouldn’t describe myself as credulous, either. I’m willing to examine or to re-examine any idea and I don’t believe most things in this world don’t have have clear-cut “yes” or “no” answers.

Are there fairies? Probably not.

Giovanni_map_mars

Is there other intelligent life in the universe? I’d say that there must be, almost certainly. In this century, we have discovered hundreds of exoplanets – planets beyond our solar system – in our nearby galactic neighborhood. We’ve even begun to find the little, Earth-like worlds that might bear life similar to our own, though we haven’t yet found that life.

Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or dead? Yes. My understanding of the uncertainty principle is not that the unseen cat in the box is both alive and dead, but that because we don’t know one way or the other, we have to include in predictions we make involving the cat in the box both possibilities, with the knowledge that the cat certainly is in a single state, alive or dead. Until we know one way or the other, both might be true.

Is Schrödinger’s cat undead? We have no prior example of this condition available, so the probability of a zombie cat inside Schrödinger’s box is pretty much nil.

But in my memory is a clear image of a five-inch-long, quite handsome, fierce little blue man with gossamer wings.

Maybe I’m a little bit like Percival Lowell the astronomer, in that I’m captivated by a romantic notion. Lowell took something he misunderstood and turned it into his life’s work, and swayed not only generations of young dreamers, but got the University of Arizona, among other bastions of respectability and learnedness, to support his search.

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, using a new, higher-powered telescope developed in the late nineteenth century, spent a great deal of time studying Mars at a closer level of detail than had previously been possible. He made a number of discoveries about the surface of the planet, including a seasonal change in the coloration of some regions of the surface, a darkening that seemed associated with the warmer temperatures of Martian summer. He discovered the immense Martian sandstorms that can cover the entire surface of the planet for weeks at a time. He also noticed some deeper channels cut into the surface of Mars that ran in straight lines for long distances. He called them “canali,” marking them on the beautiful hand-rendered maps he made of the Martian surface.

Lowell, an American planetary astronomer of some renown, saw Schiaparelli’s maps and became obsessed with the notion of the Canals of Mars, envisioning them as immense artificially-created waterways, marvelous feats of engineering created in an effort to conserve water by an ancient and advanced civilization, purposed towards saving a desertified, dying world.

Schiaparelli, learning of Lowell’s enthusiasm, wrote to him, explaining that “canali” was the Italian word for “channel,” referring to striations observed on the Martian surface without any inference of intelligent purpose intended or necessary, and furthermore that he had seen nothing to suggest that the canali were, in fact, evidence of intelligence, much less the advanced engineering marvels Lowell was busy convincing himself and others that they were.

No matter. Lowell continued to pursue his obsession, to the point of getting the Lowell Observatory at Kitt Peak in Arizona built with the intention of exploring the surface of Mars as closely as possible.

Over time, the dream of Martian canals has faded and died, though it burned brightly for a time in the popular imagination. From Lowell’s misinterpretation of Schiaparelli, we have been gifted with enduring adventure classics like H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars and ten more books featuring the former Civil War Captain John Carter, and the contemplative Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, the story of a human infant, sole survivor of a failed Martian expedition who is raised by ancient and mysterious Martians, who comes back to Earth to become a prophet for the modern age. The book was controversial and influential in its time, and would not have existed but for Percival Lowell’s misreading of Giovanni Schiaparelli’s work.

Lowell was wrong, we know that for certain. In fact, it was known at the time that Lowell’s ideas were probably fanciful. But it’s also true that his fancies have left a mark on reality. If I’m like him, it’s in my willingness to entertain an idea that holds little objective merit, for reasons of my own. I’m different from him in that I don’t have any particular ambition to convince people that my fanciful ideas are real.

I actually hope what I saw never proves to be real. How disappointing it would be to have the existence of pixies, unicorns, or other such creatures confirmed by science: perhaps more disappointing than if someone were able to prove the negative, that fairies are, indeed, mere products of fertile imaginations and romantic hearts like mine.

From the Corner of My Eye, part 2

You can read part 1 here and part 3 here.

My current favorite place to view the night sky is at the homes of my friends Matt and Jack, who live in the old, low mountains west of Hartford, Connecticut. They live on a three-and-a-half-acre lot, in a beautiful old Victorian farmhouse. Matt and I will often walk out into the back yard to where there’s a large open area about fifty yards from the house, to look up at the sky.

During the day, we’re likely to see bunnies, deer, wild turkeys, shrews, chipmunks, squirrels, crows, hawks, bobcats, foxes, and even the occasional black bear. They have a bird feeder set up on a pulley system to keep the squirrels away. It hangs just outside their kitchen window. It’s better than television. I’ve seen blue jays, woodpeckers, nut hatches, sparrows, finches, and orioles. Matt says he has identified over 80 different species of birds out his kitchen window.

They have three catalpa trees, horse chestnuts, a Kentucky coffee tree, fruit trees, a grape arbor, a mimosa tree that they had to cut down a year or two ago, but which seems to be coming back now. There’s mock orange, Joe Pye weed, hydrangeas and so many beautiful flowers. Out in the back half of the lot, where Matt and I go to stargaze, they let some sections grow wild, alternating with places they mow for the sake of wild plants.

They have a fragrant carpet of wild mountain thyme. There are ramps in early spring. Milkweed grows there, so they also have tons of butterflies. There is a vernal pool at the back of their lot. On a spring night, you can listen to peepers and bullfrogs mixing in with the chirping of crickets. I feel a sense of magic every time I visit. To stand in that yard is to steep in deep layers of time, to know a convergence of worlds.

Beyond their property line is a mountain — what a westerner like me would call a hill — tree-covered and stony, crisscrossed with old stone walls and other signs of old-time life. There’s a railhead that runs along the back of their property, the rails themselves long since pulled up, noticeable only as a topographical feature as you walk through the woods.

At the time the house was built, the surrounding area was farmland, but as agriculture in this country moved towards the greater expanses and more arable land in the west, the woods have slowly reclaimed much of the land that once grew corn, beans, grains, and tobacco, or pastured livestock. The low stone walls, the railhead among the wooded hills, and a few houses like that of our friends are the last remnant of that time.

The current woods that now cover the hills of Connecticut are a shadow of what was there before there were farms all over that part of the world. The Pequod and Wampanoag Indians, who held the land before the farmers, managed the land differently, but well. When the first Englishmen visited this area, they marveled at the abundance of wildlife here, never perceiving the methods the Indians used to foster that wildlife in its abundance, clear-cutting some of the undergrowth, leaving thickets in other places to make it more hospitable to the wildlife that is just coming back now.

In the forest across the road from the house, a little stream wanders through; trails thread back and forth between the neighboring houses, in and around the gently sloping terrain. One late spring day we walked a bit deeper into those woods than usual. Matt had been told the week before our visit that the neighbors would be away, and that we were welcome to come swim in their pond.

We crossed a fallen tree over the little brook that wound through the woods. I had seen fish before in little eddies and pools, the calm places in the stream, but today, we didn’t linger long enough to spot them. We had a destination: the swimming hole, one of two ponds on the neighbors’ property we were visiting.

As we came out of the forest into a beautiful yard with a sprawling hourse, two ponds and a horse corral, the sun dazzled us a bit. Walking past the smaller of the two ponds on the lot, I spotted a couple of dragonflies flitting around, and we stopped briefly to admire them. I also noticed a couple of blue damselflies hovering about over the open water. We watched them as they swooped and hovered.

While scanning the scene, I caught a glimpse of something odd about a damselfly out of the corner of my eye. It seemed to change shape as I looked beyond it. Using averted gaze, I saw something that I’ll admit I’d wished to see.

The damselflies were blue on top, black underneath, with a silvery stripe dividing the two regions of their bodies, and wings very much like a dragonfly’s. In my averted gaze, the colors did not change, and the wings also remained. But I saw a little man attached to those wings, in very clear detail. His skin was blue, except for a silver stripe running down his side. He had shoulder-length, wild blue hair and a blue beard. Both were streaked with black. He was shirtless, wearing rough cut black trousers, and carryied a lance made of a sliver of wood, held parallel to his body. His gaze was focused on the pond; he was hunting. From his stillness, I gathered he was hiding behind an illusion.

I turned to Matt and said, “Oooh!” but then stopped.

“What?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I replied. I looked back at the little man and once again only saw a damselfly. I walked away towards the other pond.

Matt followed, asking again what I’d seen.

“You’ll think I’m nutty,” I said.

“No, really,” he insisted. “What did you see?”

We were a good distance away from the dragonfly pond now, but I still resisted talking about what I’d seen. But as we approached the wharf and deck at the near end of the swimming pond, I relented. “I thought I saw a pixie,” I admitted, and described him.

Matt thought about it for a second, then said, “I have another friend who thinks there are fairies around here, too. He insists he’s seen them.”

“Have you ever seen them?” I asked.

“No.”

He shucked off his clothes down to his swimming trunks, and dove into the pond.

I didn’t swim that day: I love to, but I hadn’t brought anything to swim in, so I sat on the edge of the wharf and stuck my feet in the water, calmly kicking back and forth. He told about his and Jack’s friends who owned the place, how they were prominent environmentalists, and that the first time he had met one of them, the woman had ridden up their driveway on the roan mare in the corral.
I gushed a bit about how beautiful the place was. Eventually, Matt climbed out of the water, sat in the sun for a bit, then dried off and put his pants, shirt, and boots back on. We started walking home, past the corral and the dragonfly pond.

As we passed the pond, a damselfly came towards us, and flew low above our heads for a good twenty yards as we walked halfway to the line of the woods. Then it turned back. Neither of us mentioned it or looked at the fly, which had been hovering about a foot above my head. We continued on through the beautiful woods, over the brook, across the road, and back to the house.

–to be concluded

southern_damselfly_coenagrion_mercuriale

From the Corner of My Eye, part 1

First of three parts

You can read part 2 here and part 3 here.

Lyra

Say you’re out in the country. It’s a cold, clear, still night: the best kind of weather for stargazing. You look up and see such a multitude of stars that it shocks you, especially if you’re an urban dweller and don’t often get away from the ever-present glow of humanity. If it happens to be a moonless night, you can see the Milky Way like a glowing cloud across the sky. You might see planets, perhaps one or more of the next three out from the sun: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, the three of the visible five most often seen once the sun’s glow has completely faded from the sky.

Mercury almost never rises high enough to be seen past the last remnant of sunlight. Venus does, at times. When visible, it’s the second brightest object in the sky after the Moon. When ahead of the sun in processing across the sky, we call it the Morning Star. When it trails behind, it’s the Evening Star. When you wish upon a star, most often you will – either knowingly or unknowingly – pick Venus: beautifully white and pure, never twinkling even on the windiest night, brighter than any other star in the sky. I’ve wished upon the Evening Star many times.

If you’re lucky enough to live where the ambient light is low, and if you love the night sky enough to develop some intimacy with it, to know where the planets are to be seen at any given time, to know constellations like Orion, Cassiopeia, Pegasus, Ursa Major (the Big Dipper), and Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper, which includes Polaris, the North Star), you may see other objects in the sky. Some are always there if you know where to look, and some appear only briefly.

I’ve seen a supernova. When I was sixteen, a star in the late-night summer sky appeared in the constellation Lyra where there hadn’t been one visible before. Over the course of a night or two, it became the brightest light in the sky other than the Moon, surpassing the Evening Star. Then in a couple of weeks it faded to invisibility.

I’ve seen meteor showers: the Perseids in August, the Leonids in November. The Perseids are so named because they seem to generate from a point in the constellation Perseus, and the Leonids from the constellation Leo. Once, I saw a bright light streaking across the sky, a fireball that left a glittering ribbon trail long enough that I couldn’t quite cover it with the width of my hand held at arm’s length. I watched it travel all the way across the night sky. In the news the next day I learned that it was a Russian satellite that had re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in a blazing fireworks display that I’d marveled at along with many others who happened to look up that night.

I’ve seen the northern lights: Aurora Borealis. I’ve seen the comet Kohoutek and Halley’s Comet. Comets are objects that are best seen using averted gaze, meaning to deliberately see out of the corner of your eye.

Other objects you can see with averted gaze are deep-sky objects, far beyond our solar system. Some are visible with the naked eye, and others you can see only with a telescope. The brightest and most well-known of these were catalogued in the late eighteenth century by the French astronomer and comet-spotter Charles Messier.

The brightest and most famous object in Messier’s catalogue is perfect for teaching yourself how to use averted gaze. In the late summer and autumn sky there is a large, bright rectangle of stars that represent the constellation Pegasus. Trailing away from one point of the rectangle is a double strand of stars that make up the constellation Andromeda. Old celestial maps often showed Andromeda riding Pegasus, and the trail of stars has sometimes been depicted as Andromeda’s hair. In Andromeda’s hair is an adornment, like a jeweled barrette, that Messier included in his catalogue as M31, and which most of us know as the Andromeda Galaxy.

If you can find this object in the night sky, visible at 9 pm near its highest point in November, try this: locate the little cloud of light in Andromeda. It won’t be particularly bright, but it won’t be too hard to find on a clear night. Look a little bit to the left or right of it, not too far, maybe the distance of a couple of finger-widths at arm’s length or less, but focus your attention on the faint, fuzzy cloud of light. It should reveal itself as a larger, more vivid, lens-shaped object.

Averted gaze works because it brings a different part of the retina into use than that part more accustomed to receiving all of the light you focus on in a day, in all of your days, and which your brain is used to translating into sense and meaning. A less-used part of your eye will be more sensitive, but your brain will be less able to filter out things it interprets as nonsense. The light your eye takes in through averted gaze will not be as focused and clear, but with practice you can sharpen your acuity for this way of seeing. Astronomers of Messier’s time made beautiful drawings of the planets, revealing startling details while peering through low-powered telescopes, using this technique.

–To Be Continued

My Third Short Poem Week

winter haikus

I did a couple of poetry weeks last season and enjoyed them immensely, so I thought I would give it another go. The first form I tied was the American Sentence: the second was a Welsh quatrain form called Englyn Cyrch. One of the things that spurred this return to short form poetry was that someone tweeted out one of my Englyn Cyrch last week.

I enjoy the “mathy-ness” of short poem forms. When you only have seventeen or twenty-some syllables to say a thing, you have to choose every word carefully. My intention is to make these particular very formal styles sound as conversational as I can. Sometimes I even manage it! When I applied to Lesley’s MFA program, my cover letter was intentionally exactly 500 words long. It would have come off as cheesy if any of the language had seemed forced, but I don’t think it did: I got accepted into the program, at any rate, and have since graduated with an MFA in creative nonfiction.

Having done other sorts of short poem, I thought I would take this opportunity to try my hand at not haikai, not hokku, but haiku. I find, as I research the form, that to this point my “haiku” have been more a variant of the American Sentence than actual classic haiku. There are a couple of rules that I forgot, though I remember being taught them in elementary school. To wit:

  1. A haiku should be about a particular season.
  2. It should contain a single image
  3. It should evoke a particular emotion
  4. For my purposes here, at least, there should be no enjambment

In addition to the math, there are content rules! That sounds like fun, and it turns out it is, though it may not seem that way considering how dark these haiku are turning out to be. I hate winter: I tell everybody I’m Seelie, and it is definitely that half of the year — between Beltane and Samhain — when I am happiest. I experience seasonal affective disorder and I’ve sometimes been very depressed in the cold, dark months. Consider these haiku my attempt at catharsis.

If you’re feeling inspired, I invite you to post your own haiku in the comments here. And keep an eye out: I’ve invited a couple of friends to contribute a haiku each. Kelly Fig Smith‘s poem appeared earlier today, making her the first person other than myself to contribute to this blog. Tomorrow, Stacy LeVine‘s haiku will grace this page. I’m very excited to share their work with you.