Labor Day

My friends at long last got back from two months of travel in Europe. This included a stop in Iceland first, an extended tour of Norway, a stopover in Copenhagen (one of my favorite cities in the world), extensive travel in the British Isles, that being Cornwall, Wales, and on up to Edinburgh, my home of heritage, then a trip up to the Isles of Skye and Lewis, a week in London, several days in Paris, and a tour through the south of France.

Hmmm....maybe next time I can do the traveling and they can stay home.

They got back on Tuesday.  I spent sixty three days and nights alone with the  animals and property.  Exactly the same amount of time Jack Kerouac spent on top of Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in the summer of 1956.  My time was nothing like the isolation Kerouac endured but at least now I have a sense of how truly long he was up there.  At times it seemed interminable but when I picked up my friends at the airport, it felt like no time at all had gone by.

Now I'm halfway to my next destination in eastern Oregon, along the southern Cascades, south of Bend.  I didn't want to do the whole drive in a day, fighting the Labor Day traffic, so I just crossed the Columbia River to the Oregon side and am spending the night at a glorified truck stop.  It's loud but I don't care.  I never travel without ear plugs.

My friends needed some time alone at home after mostly traveling with other couples the entire time they were abroad.  And I just need to get away from their place for a while.  Turns out they're traveling to Mexico for three weeks later this month, so after a week in Oregon, I will jet up to Seattle and visit some old friends.  I lived in Seattle for over twenty years, from 1978 to 1999.  It's changed a lot.  Too dense, too many people, too many problems.  But then, I will only be there two days.

I'll then make a short jaunt north of Seattle to Camano Island to visit another old friend and then head back over the Cascades for my next house-sitting gig.  After that, who knows?  I have to plant myself somewhere and find a new job.  And write a book.  That'll take about 4-5 years.  But I'm planning it out in my mind, can see the overall structure of it, so I'll start making notes on it this winter.

Since I've been on a poetry kick of late, I'm going to do another.  This is not one I wrote myself -- it's a poem written by someone else.

Thirty years ago I had a friend, a woman I worked with, who was very much a mixed bag.  She had grown up in a small wheat-farming community in eastern Montana, as I had in Washington, so we both had that in our backgrounds.  She was a polyglot and spoke several languages -- Spanish, Russian, Crow, probably French or Italian, had lived in Baja California and had traveled solo as an import buyer in Guatemala when it was quite dangerous.

During her stay in Antigua in Guatemala, she wrote a poem -- in Spanish -- about her experience there.  I happen to love Hispanic poetry so I was intrigued by what she'd done.  However, she refused to translate the poem into English.  With her permission, I took the original in Spanish and worked with a few friends who were fluent in the language to get a rough, literal translation, which I then cast into a poetic version in English.

I don't recall her response to my translation except to note that I once read it in public, a reading which she attended, and I noted her presence in my intro to the poem.  It really is quite a beautiful poem.   So with that understanding, here is an English version of the poem -- I'm sorry to say, I no longer have a copy of the original in Spanish.  I think I will not use this person's name, as we ended as much less than friends.  Just know that I am not the author of this poem, but I still respect its wonder and beauty.

Antigua

I step from my dreams into the night,

         yet

it seems peculiar to be out-of-doors,

   beyond the reach

         of my room.

Such fresh air, an evening sky

  intensely punctuated 

     by tiny stars

and the memory of a volcano

that hovers over me by day

          like a guardian.

I push through the dark, a somnambulist:

      my feet

    find directions

    I don't intend.

On this cobblestone street

         there are no lamps.

Alone, I search for the senora

   who sells sweet atole'

     in the square.

I need the warmth of her potion

   the pulpy thickness

      of the corn

    to fortify me

          in this distant land.