Just a little music here to wake up to. Got my cup of coffee, listening to Molly. Watching her play -- shit, I can't even think that fast! Got her bib overalls on. Good girl. I'm about to put mine on, fill up the side-by-side with five gallon buckets of grain, the dog'll ride shotgun and we'll head out to the pasture, cross the creek, and feed the calves.
Love Molly's playing. Good way to start the day.
As I've said many a time, I live in a landscape that most people would call barren, that cattlemen would call rangeland, and that farmers gave up on because of sparse soil and too damned many rocks. Basalt.
9 to 17 million years ago the North American continental plate was so far east compared to where it is now that the Pacific Coast was somewhere along the Idaho Panhandle and the region in which I live, the Palouse, was sitting directly over the "hot spot" that currently sits under Yellowstone. Yes, we formerly sat atop a supervolcano for several million years.
Well, guess what happens when a supervolcano erupts? Thousands of square miles of lava, 30 to 50 meters deep, spreads out over the land, destroying habitat and creating what must have looked like another planet -- miles of nothing but barren, black, smoldering lava that would slowly over time harden into basalt. Then centuries, thousands, millions of years of dust blowing in on the wind, creating a topsoil that originally was several hundred feet deep. Still is, in places. Such soil makes this area one of the most fertile wheat-producing regions in the entire world.
So much lava erupted from this "hot spot" super volcano over a period of several million years that the entire Columbia basin is covered by thick layers of basalt, which are so heavy they bent the earth's crust, and this whole side of the state from the middle over to Idaho, and the southern 50% of the east side, slopes all the way down to the Columbia River. Think of a giant bowl. That's what the southeastern part of Washington state is, emptying into the Snake River, which empties into the Columbia River, which empties into the Pacific Ocean.
The continental plate continued to drift but it must have been at an angle rather than directly west, because where I live now sits about 500 miles west of Yellowstone's hot spot, whereas the Idaho border -- formerly the West Coast of America -- is maybe 400 miles from the ocean.
All that hundreds of feet of topsoil sitting above that basalt got washed away, again covering an area from Spokane over to the middle of the state and all the way down to the Columbia, in a cataclysm very similar to the super volcano's eruptions. A massive flood that emptied an Ice Age lake up around Missoula that was a couple of thousand feet deep and said to be as large as lakes Erie and Huron combined, all came rushing down from the Clark Fork River in Idaho, where a massive glacier ice dam had backed up the lake. Either the pressure of all that water was too much or it floated the ice dam until it broke. A torrent of water that held 10 times all the water in all the rivers on Earth today -- think of that! -- came flooding down and covered about third of Washington state, moving so fast and in such volume that it literally scoured the earth bare and blasted basalt rock away, creating eddy patterns in the earth and the rock itself.
My buddy Steve and I were trying this week to imagine what this landscape looked like prior to the floods. Because I can tell you what it looks like now. Mesas dot the landscape, and you'll notice that all the mesas stand the same height, which means that they used to be ground level. Everything below, all those sculpted canyons of scab rock, as we called it as kids, long river channels, waterfalls larger than Niagra, vast backed-up lakes, and the Columbia gorge deepened further as this incredible volume of water moved unrelentingly towards the sea.
I think this was a flat, vast prairie much like the Midwest. It seems to extend from about mid eastern Washington, through eastern Oregon, all the way down into the great central valley of northern California.
Steve, his wife Ann, and I all went fishing a couple of days ago on a lake that was probably created by those Ice Age floods. It's about fifteen miles long, at least four hundred feet deep in places as the channel was fashioned by the flood, and bordered on both sides by massive basalt cliffs. The basalt came in several different layers -- or several different eruptions -- and you can see them stacked one atop another. Each layer, as I said, is maybe 30 to 50 meters high. At least four different layers, sometimes five, all about of the same depth and stacked on top on each other, building to the last, or top, layer creating a bluff several hundred feet high.
So there's rarely a shoreline along this lake, but instead these sheer cliffs. If you bring your boat close to the cliff wall you can see how the water scoured the rock and literally tore it apart as it ripped and roared through the channel it was carving.
Because there is really no shoreline to this lake, there's nowhere to build, which has been a fortunate occurrence because there are no resorts on the lake and no cranky landowners forbidding anyone to dare trespass on their little stretch of beach. Just miles of bluffs. Occasionally you can spot a portion of a wheatfield way up on top. Wouldn't want to lose my brakes when navigating that field way up there.
Anyway, down at the southern end of the lake there is of course an exiting creek and a couple of makeshift boat launches. There are always about a half dozen vehicles parked there. It's popular with fishermen, kayakers, and water-skiers. I've rarely ever seen people water skiing on the lake. It's usually the more bucolic boaters trolling the middle of the lake for trout or nearing the rock walls for bass.
We were in the middle. Steve and Ann fished off either side of the back of the boat and I steered while we trolled. All the modern gizmos showed us the depth of the fish (about twenty feet) and the shallower regions of the lake that I steered clear of. It was hot but late afternoon. Tank top and shorts type weather. Sandals or clogs on bare feet. The dog perched atop the bow, alert to every bird on the lake. Steve and Ann batted .666 -- they caught six fish, but lost three just as they were trying to net them. It was a friendly interfamily competition which Steve won, 4-2. All together, about ten pounds of fish. The dog pawed them in the creel and drank her fill of the water.
Just a few days before, there had been a 1,200 acre fire along the west side of the exiting creek so there was lots of ash and debris in the water. There's just something about being in a boat on the water that's calming, given good weather. The conditions were mostly windless with an occasional, thankful breeze. Almost glassy. We spent about four hours on the lake, which is only seventeen miles from the house, so is easy to get to. I grew up about 5-6 miles southeast of this lake and went to junior high in an old brick school house a mile or two south of the lake. Where my mother had gone and graduated with the class of '37, My 8th grade class was the last graduating class of the school before it closed and consolidated. The class of '67. The school's torn down now, more's the pity. It was an interesting, three-storey building with a full, sloped theater on the top floor, where we staged the plays I wrote and lip synced to the latest Beatles hits.
Steve was having trouble with the motor so had been working on that for a few days. We took the boat out for a trial run last night, this time on a lake that's about 13 miles north. It's a very different lake, incredibly shallow (about twenty feet throughout), maybe five miles long, with a couple of run-down resorts and one small campground. The state maintains a really nice boat launch so we put in there and did a 30-40 minute tour of the lake, engine wide open. Still not working quite right. A lot of wildlife. Several group of pelicans. Deer standing in the water along the shores, drinking their fill after another hot day. Two cormorants booked by us like we were standing still. We were doing 26 mph and they quickly sped by so they must have been flying at least 35 mph.
Steve and Ann were going to take the boat and go camping down along the Snake River this Tuesday but alas, something's still amiss with the engine so that trip's off. I would have stayed home with the dog and fed the cattle. Will still do that one day this week while my friends do an overnight fishing trip with another couple who live about forty miles north. That's close in this neck of the -- well, basalt.
And such is my life at the moment. In between the boating trips I did two solo days where I broke down, off-loaded, stored and stacked eight pallets of freight entirely by myself. I don't mind working alone but that is quite a workout for me. My back is stronger but boy, does it ache. Alleve is my friend.
And that's it. Life on the farm. Today's an off day, so will mostly read, rest, write, and maybe go in search of a cup of joe and a Sunday paper. Ta.
This may be the one Jimi Hendrix song that I like. He did a fantastic version of Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" but that's for another day. As I wrote a few years ago, the hippie movement displayed an evanescent and haunted sense of spiritual despair -- because that was underlying the culture of the day. What could anyone say about today?
Chas Chandler, Jimi's manager, says this song was thrown together late at night when he told Jimi they had about twenty more minutes of recording tape left and Chas wondered if Jimi had any other song fragments to work on. Jimi quickly laid down several guitar parts for this song. I don't know if the lyrics came first or later but they're quite poetic and fairly surrealistic. To me, it's obvious that when the wind cries "Mary," it's equivalent to asking for mercy. The spiritual desperation of which I spoke. I quote the lyrics below even though they're not sung on this rendition by Jamie Harrison.
I chose this cover because I like this guy's sense of touch. He's not simply playing the notes that Jimi played; he's capturing the feel of Jimi's playing. For instance, near the end of the song, he spontaneously riffs in a way that is reminiscent of Hendrix but isn't a copy of the record -- it's Harrison inspired by Hendrix and paying homage to the song in his own way. I like that. Takes balls to pull it off.
The original rendition of Jimi's follows this. Here goes:
After all the jacks are in their boxes
And the clowns have all gone to bed
You can hear happiness staggering on down the street
Footprints dressed in red
And the wind whispers, "Mary"
A broom is drearily sweeping
Up the broken pieces of yesterday's life
Somewhere a queen is weeping
Somewhere a king has no wife
And the wind cries, "Mary"
The traffic lights, they turn blue tomorrow
And shine their emptiness down on my bed
The tiny island sags downstream
Cause the life it lived is dead
And the wind screams, "Mary"
Will the wind ever remember
The names it has blown in the past
With its crutch, its old age, and its wisdom
It whispers, "No, this will be the last"
And the wind cries "Mary"
It's a beautiful morning in the Palouse, with the sun shining not too hotly -- yet -- and the breeze blowing through the leaves, birds swooping, and nary a cloud in the sky. I'm sitting on the front steps of the house, under the eave, with the front porch door wide open, sipping my hot cuppa joe and munching on my toasted english muffin -- breakfast of champions. I'm a champion of the mundane, I guess, and celebrate the wonderful ordinariness of life just as it is.
My most recent employer somehow failed to schedule me for the next four days. So, whilst everyone else will be going nuts getting ready for the 4th of July, I have four days of quiet and solitude with which to reflect on life a little, do some reading, some writing, and some stretching of these poor, sore muscles of mine.
It actually has been a week of subliminal reflection because it was sometime this week four years ago that we learned -- by letter -- that my oldest sister Julie had passed away. My dad, my mother, and my oldest sister all died in the month of June so although I've always loved this month, its sunny nature has now an undercurrent of sadness running throughout. Dad died on June 3rd, 1987, Mom passed on Dad's birthday (June 25th) in 2015, and four years ago my oldest sister joined them, sometime in the last week of June.
Julie had distanced herself from the family. My two other sisters hadn't seen her in five years. I had seen her the previous two summers simply because I just showed up at her door and braved being eaten by her two English mastiffs. Julie had ceased responding to emails, voice messages, or phone calls some years prior. No one could reach her. So I just showed up on her doorstep.
I remember the last morning I spent with her, after a visit the previous afternoon. First, I took her out for coffee. Then, at her request, I took her out for breakfast. Finally, a few hours later, I took her out to lunch. It seemed she didn't want to let me go. I think she knew this was the last time she would ever see me.
Julie was the wild child in the family. Usually, in terms of family dynamics, the first child is supposed to be the do-gooder, the achiever, but my second sister outdid my first at being the good child, so Julie reacted to that by becoming the rebel. She burnt all the bridges. In late 1966, early 1967 Julie dropped out and joined the burgeoning hippie movement. She did all the drugs and told me about her experiences. She asked my mother, an RN, for birth control pills. She lived communally. I didn't see her for four or five years at one point. She moved to Seattle and lived her entire adult life there.
It was a life of hard knocks. Her high school boyfriend, a strapping, 6'4" blonde surfer named Dan, was drafted into the army, became a helicopter pilot, and was shot down and killed in Vietnam in 1966. Julie went and saw Dan's parents and they unwisely told her how Dan had died -- he'd survived his helicopter crash with a broken collarbone and then was shot in the back when running away from the wreckage and killed. Who needs to live with that image for the rest of their lives?
I think that drove Julie's plunge into drugs. No one knew how to help. My Dad just shouted at her and drove her out of our house. She was orphaned.
It got worse. Julie married and her first husband was abusive. She became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy with a massive heart defect who died on his fourth day. Not long after, her husband was hitch-hiking, was picked up by a driver and they both died in a head-on collision. Julie was in her mid-twenties by the time all this had happened.
As you might suspect, she recoiled from life, put on weight, and became largely agoraphobic for many years. But even throughout all this pain and heartache, she pressed on, married again and worked steadily all her life.
I got to know Julie better when I moved to Seattle in the late Seventies. I lived there for the next 21 years. It was here that I became familiar with Julie's wicked sense of humor -- it's hard to characterize the flavor of her humor -- it was wicked and sardonic but it was never really at another person's expense. It was really aimed at the ridiculousness of life. We had many a night watching either sci-fi or horror movies and laughing our way through the entire evening. Her husband was always writing a book so he was off in the den or had his head in his research, Julie and I on the couch eating peanut M&Ms. After I explained the simple rules of football to her, she became a rabid Seahawks fan and could shout at the screen with the best of crazed sports fans.
Eventually, Julie learned how to drive, bought a car, and finally she and her husband bought a house. It was trashed by her animals -- always a herd of cats and usually a dog or two. But it had a wonderful little creek abutting the backyard and was a stone's throw from Lake Washington. A lovely location.
Julie's original litter of cats had a mythic dimension to them. The mother was a small black-haired siamese with a ball and socket joint at the end of her spine which gave her a swiveled gait. Her name was Sheba and she ran on primal instinct and little else. When she ate her little plate of canned cat food, she would yowl loudly as though she'd just made a bloody kill. The father was a huge thirty pound tomcat who looked like a manx. If he deigned to sit in your lap you'd pet him just to keep from being eaten. The dog paced and when the tomcat got annoyed with this, he'd hop down off the sofa, and swat the dog on the nose. Duly abashed, the dog would go sit in the corner and Tom, the true alpha, would recline again on his throne, or your lap, whichever suited.
And then there were the others, so different from one another. Isis, the sweet round one. Ramses, white long-haired with eyes which were constantly dilated so that they reflected everything and looked endless. Maggie, short, black, no tail, and spunky. Squirt, grey and with over-sized ears who always had to be at the highest point in the room. And of course, Corky, who was a male tabby and was so ugly he was cute. Corky had the most endearing personality. He always remembered people. If you came over, he'd stand up and put his front paws on your thighs, and meow at you as if to say, "Make a lap for me already."
Part of the charm of an evening at Julie's house was just sitting on the couch and watching this menagerie of cats interact with one another all night. They were highly entertaining all by themselves. I still miss them.
Julie's father-in-law died a millionaire and despite his wife's attempt to withhold her two sons' inheritance, or spend it all in international travel, Julie finally came into money late in her life. She was profligate. She must have bought 20 guitars and no end of jewelry, the more shiny and glitterier the better. But she was also very generous. Many a time she helped me out and I never asked -- she would just hand me a check out of the blue.
My mother had foot surgery in 2006 and we kids all four took a week off to take care of her. Mom had been a nurse and what they say is true -- doctors and nurses are terrible patients. Something happened in Julie's week with Mom that changed their relationship forever. Julie stopped coming to visit her. All our holidays were at Mom's; Julie adopted a cousin's family and spent her holidays elsewhere from then on. She could really hold a grudge. She felt intensely and no amount of reason could dislodge her from that emotional stance.
Julie had refused to go see my father when he was dying. I think she just couldn't handle it emotionally. When Mom went into Assisted Living in Seattle, Julie became the point person and did that job for three years. Mom had to move facilities twice and Julie took the point on that too. It didn't help that another sister accused Julie of stealing from Mom. When Mom was finally transferred to Long Term Care over on the Olympic Peninsula (at a facility where my younger sister worked as a geriatric physical therapist), Julie was done -- with Mom and the family. She didn't attend Mom's memorial services when she passed and neither sister ever saw her again.
So, she was a complex character. But truth be told, she was one of my most favorite people on the planet and I miss her dearly. I often think about her. Because of our age difference and the fact that my mother always worked when I was a small child, Julie was my perpetual baby sitter and kind of a second mother. Later, she served the role of a confidant and advisor to all three of we younger siblings. I think it weighed on her.
Once at Mom's house, Julie and I were alone in the den. She said to me quietly, "I feel like I'm eternal." I said, "Yeah, I feel that way too." Then she said, "But I don't know whether that means I stay myself forever or I get reborn as someone else." I just said, "Yeah, I don't know either." My guess is that this is the kind of thought that Julie wouldn't share with anyone else. It was just a special moment between we two.
I am sure she is happier where she is now and that she's exploring life with renewed vigor. I feel that she is watching over me. Strange, I can sense Julie but not my mother. I think of her often, I miss her dearly, and will love her forever. I look forward to seeing her again.
I'm including a silly rendition of "White Rabbit," the old Jefferson Airplane song, which Julie loved -- it was the siren song of 1967 -- in a new, send-up version by the wonderful Molly Tuttle -- in costume no less. Something tells me Julie would love this version. I can hear her laughing and exclaiming all the way through, eyes gleaming, crooked smile of delight as we enjoyed it together.
Here's to you, big sis' --
