There’s always been a backyard garden at 321 Oleander, from the day we moved there in 1968 and our Mom planted Swiss chard along the brick wall where the previous tenants had created a bed for decorative shrubs that never took root. Perhaps they got discouraged by the intense arid heat of the Central California summers, but that never stopped Mom. In no time, that Swiss chard grew as tall as she was and its bitter boiled green leaves found their way onto our dinner plates night after night.
Mom had one full-time job as a social worker and another full-time job trying to keep us kids in one piece on her own, but she always managed to keep a garden growing. Three kinds of tomatoes, sage, snap peas, and cukes. Hollyhocks to the eaves of the house, four o’clocks on the side, hens and chickens, an army of irises. After we’d all grown and gone and she’d retired, Mom’s garden got more and more elaborate, its pickable sweets and gewgaws the delight of visiting grandkids.
That’s what made the tangle of empty pots and weeds in the backyard so disheartening after Mom broke her hip. Taking turns caring for her, we’d look out the back window at the desolate patch of brown and see only loss, decline. It was a relief that first year after her fall when first summer turned the whole town sepia and then winter left the surrounding croplands fallow. Just wouldn’t have seemed right for things to go on growing when our Mom was struck still.
But when spring came around again, our eldest sister couldn’t take it anymore. She paid the guy who cuts our Mom’s grass an extra fifty to come back with his Rototiller and turned the dead garden into a blank soil canvas. Then she headed back to Alaska for a month’s respite with the parting words, “If you feel like thinking about a garden…”
Our little brother, now a grown genius, had the first shift. Knowing that hydration is destiny in the Central Valley, he created an intricate homemade system of underground soaker hoses and multiple faucet heads so the whole 10 x 40 tilled bed could be deep-watered with one turn of the wrist. He also transformed Mom’s various abandoned garden decorations into planter boxes, trellises, and dividers, all ready for the plants to come.
It was my turn next, and I tackled the task with my two favorite tools: a computer and a credit card. I made a more-or-less to scale diagram of the garden with icons for various plants – red circles for tomatoes, mottled green ovals for zucchini, sticks with smiley faces for sunflowers – then posted them on Google Docs and asked my siblings to help plot out the plants. Then I hit both the local nursery and Home Depot for a cornucopia of seeds and seedlings. I was used to gardening in my over-shaded New York yard and believed in having back-ups to back-ups because half the stuff would never even come up anyway.
Actual planting was guided by our middle sister, the only one of us who’d ever grown a serious garden in a climate like this one. She’d even co-gardened with our Mom as a high schooler way back in the day, so she knew about things like planting the various vined things apart from each other, and when to put a paper plate under the head of a cantaloupe.
We all had a part to play – with Mom bemusedly supervising from her bed on the other side of the house. We’d bring her the updated plan printouts and empty seed packets, seek her advice on the relative merits of cherry tomatoes vs. beefsteaks. (Plant both, she advised, so we did.) Once the seeds were in the ground with their careful markers and water system had its test run, there was nothing to do but wait.
Within a week, there was very little brown left to see on our garden canvas – things were sprouting like crazy. Within a month it was clear that every single zucchini seed had taken root and was competing to produce the biggest leaves, the most blossoms, the fattest vines. The seed tomatoes were in a race with the store-bought plants to see who’d put out the most fruit first. Sunflowers shot up 4 feet, then 6, then 10 and 12 by mid-summer. A riot of cantaloupe turned the makeshift trellis into a mountain of green festooned with perfect melon spheres. A forest of dill bumped up against two kinds of basil tall and bushy enough to be mistaken for a fragrant hedgerow. And we all agreed that the standing too close to the pumpkin patch was hazardous – the vines were growing so fast it seemed they could wrap around your legs before you had time to move.
All summer we harvested zucchini the size of small children, tomatoes by the bushel, herbs, melons, even a cucumber or two. Although the carrots only grew a couple inches long, their greens came up past our knees. The pumpkins were huge way before their time, and a few mated with their squash cousins to created pumpkinis (or zuchkins - we were never sure which). We set up a Free Veggies stand out on the front sidewalk near the foot of the ramp we’d built for Mom when she’d first fallen, back when we were sure she’d be tooling around with her walker in no time. We’d bring each new astonishment to her bedside and say, invariably, “Can you believe this came out of YOUR garden?” She was the only one who seemed not the least bit surprised.
Now another autumn is upon us, and the Rototiller guy has come and gone again. The abandoned weed patch that became the mother of all gardens is now a rich brown canvas once again. Like our Mom, it’s ready for whatever comes next.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
321 The Slide Show Late Oct '09
A tour of 'Thursa's place.
If you click on the image, you'll be led to an album. Find full view in the upper left hand corner of the page/ click and you'll be let into the theater; hey, a front row seat!
Monday, October 5, 2009
Intro to Kenya News and WBUR's Here and Now ---
Today, The Blue Room is proud to share Kenya News, a source offered via BBC's West Africa correspondent Will Ross who's recent report from the Turkana region of northwest Kenya was featured Oct.5 with WBUR's Here and Now and can be heard as a podcast there.
Both The Kenya News and WBUR's Here and Now, with host Robin Young will be regular feeds on the Hinterlands page accessible here through the Blue Room.
Here and Now is beamed to the Monastery in Bako via XM Radio channel 133.
Featured today is a piece by Micah Bochart after his travels in Africa just before the recent chaos erupted there.
Reckless, Like Churchill In The Garden
September
2007
Reckless, like Churchill in the garden.
Pen pressed to paper, as the story goes, cutting up the empire into units of glib aesthetic, saying here’s Kenya, here’s Uganda, here’s Nairobi, and the price of that swell-looking map coming down hard in borders and stations and the sundering of tribes.
Coming down hard in the Masaii divided, to the north Kenyans, to south Tanzanians. Here one, here the other.
Like power coy and migrant. A history in throes.
And me tossed between them and packaged as a witness, and seeing them in body. Two tribesman handcuffed together in the back of a pickup truck in the mountains of Tanzania. September 15. 2007.
I’d just come down off the mountain. Meru, that is. Fifteen-thousand feet. The fifth tallest in Africa.
I was exhausted and diseased, four days into a fever, and still I’d climbed the mountain, still crazy enough or stupid enough. Still stumbled about in that lunar extremity, up from the jungle, the misty treetops, up from a grazing giraffe that for once traipsed close enough to feel like a beast, like the corporeal creature it was.
Up to a summit swathed in fog, view zero, then down again with Godwine my guide, never less than ten steps in front of me, a rifle strapped to his back, his English sketchy, my Swahili falling short on the far side of Asante, but finding communion in space, in green, in scattered pockets of endurance, appearing here and there, Godwine pausing every fifteen minutes, saying, There is buffalo, there is gazelle.
And parting at last at the base of the mountain, he and I, and me falling asleep in the sunshine, reclined against my pack, waiting for the rangers to wake me when my free ride came.
The free ride I’d heard whispered about but never described, always in the margins since I’d entered the park two days ago, when I’d paid a man to drive me in, and the uniformed gatekeepers assured me of the existence of vehicles with no shillings attached, that would take me back to the highway again with my pocket none the slimmer.
And so I waited, sick but certified, a piece of paper in my hand with Godwine’s signature that said I’d climbed Meru, and shipping out at the end of the afternoon, a man tapping me on the shoulder and saying take it while you can, and me jumping in, without looking twice, into the flatbed of my Free Ride Manifest.
I didn’t notice my company until we’d started down the road, when it was me and the backpack pressed against the tailgate, and three men standing above me with machine guns in their hands, and two Masaii tribesman, faces impassive, handcuffed together at the wrist, and this my ride. My way back to Arusha.
I’d never learn their crime. I’d just stare at them sitting there on the far side of the flatbed, bodies roughed against the cab, their robes smeared with dust, and the truck speeding down the switchbacks, rattling over chuckholes, me sitting at the tailgate and trying to keep myself from sliding forward. From sliding into the muzzle of a rifle or Kalashnikov. And the men above me laughing, and the tribesman staring, and the head of a giraffe watching us go by, head thrust upward from the canopy of the jungle, watching us as they must always watch, the creatures of Africa.
Watching the passage of handcuffs. Borders and stations. All the little units of arcane justice.
Like power coy and migrant.
All reckless.
Like the maps.
--
I was drunk the night I bought my tickets.
I had to be drunk or I’d never go through with it.
I came with my skin and my readings of scripture, Rough Guide and Lonely Planet, the overpriced bibles of the Footloose and Free, propelled trans-
Atlantic by the click of a mouse and a bottle of cheap red wine.
Three days in Tanzania.
Twelve days in Kenya.
My time divided neatly and cutely, five months in advance, an equator’s length away, my body hungry for a plucking up of Self-hood and dropping of Self in a place where Self was altered, in sands that were redder in life than in vision, and outbound at last on the 31st of August, borne on the wings of gas and commerce, a village fed on the price of my seat, the tickets unbought till I was drunk enough to buy them.
So drunk one night that I looked up prices, clicked purchase, sealed my odyssey in non-refundable contracts, and only then headed east. To Kenya. Coming down on the 1st. To Nairobi, which smelled like my grandfather’s cabin, like sweat and woodsmoke and Rudolph Bartell.
I thought nothing else could smell that way, that odor so deeply entrenched in my memories, and now it encompassed the totality of a capital, all the mosques and churches and broken asphalt, my German farmer father twice removed like a misplaced ghost hanging all over the city.
Nairobi.
Seven million people and the railroads that built it and the smell of a cabin in Washington State hanging over everything with not-so-baited breath.
And then Mombasa, on the ocean, and the bus ride down from Nairobi, south and southeast, every mile my farthest, a nine-hour study in elevation lost, shaken, from six-thousand feet to sea-level, down to the place where “Swahili” was born, where the dhow trade surged, crucible of language, Arabic tongues, indigenous tongues, tongues twisted/ coy/begotten, and the bus stopping in transit at a restaurant infested with flies, the way Greyhound always stops at McDonald’s, only now with a nearby sign saying "Mosque," and an arrow pointing the way, and a girl of twelve or fourteen with a shaved head and sandals and a sleeveless blue-jean dress hanging out in the parking lot and making a point of ignoring my face.
She's much too sassy to reduce to a metaphor. Much too vital to claim as my own, and in the service of my point, yet claim her I must. Reduce her I must. The moment is too potent to resist.
Like the young man in Mombasa who asked me to leave.
We met on a landing overlooking the harbor, me there first, and thus incensed by my expulsion, though never questioning the legitimacy of it, and the young man traipsing down the steps at seven a.m. and seating himself on the opposite side of the bench. Saying good morning to me, then asking me to go.
He said "Leave this place, please," and I did, not threatened, just angry, angry then renewed, "his leave this place" like parasites unwritten.
Unwritten, my week of endless pandering. The manic prostitution of salesman and beggars, the bus-stops and matatu terminals filled with people who were filled with goods, in burden and in motive, looking for money and knowing I was good for it, the proof in my pigment and my total aloneness, and me swindled on the first day by a con-man beggar who seduced me with sympathy and his hot-air story of being a Sudanese refugee, one I knew to be false even while he fed it to me, and me handing him a thousand shillings, or fifteen bucks Americano, and now the bane of it all, this man by the ocean asking me to leave, and the girl in the parking lot on the road to Mombasa, and the look in her face and the way she held her body, like she was unwriting borders. Unwriting maps.
And in Nairobi, the National Gallery, on Moi Avenue and Kenyatta Street. The Mau Mau Rebellion in sepia. 1954. The last great rebellion against the British before the loosing of the reigns.
Ten-thousand Africans deads and ten times as many interned, and ninety colonists dead. Ninety in all.
And the soldiers of the Sultanate of Oman, slavers like the Portuguese they conquered, turbans on their heads and rifles in their hands, their feet planted in the ground with a force that exceeded extraction, and Kenyatta’s election, and Independence in 1963, and the history of Kenya splashed out in photos I could photo because the curators let me, and here a statue of ivory, in an abstract pattern, something womblike, and this a sculptor’s dream of how it would end. Apartheid in South Africa. Dreamed in ’89. The magnitude of resistance and survival.
And me there in September.
2007.
And in three months the election, when Yahoo! News featured its photo of a Kikuyu in a white shirt and a white hat, a machete in his hand, and a wall of fire behind him, his blow coming down on some unseen skull, and this the image for which Kenya would be known.
--
I was numb when I read the news.
All I could remember were the restaurants and the diners, Kibaki or Odinga on the TV set and everyone looking up from their dinners and watching. Just watching.
And my second time in Nairobi, coming back from the north and meeting a local at the hostel where I was staying, a young man with a pony-tail who was part Kenyan and part German and took me and another American out on my birthday for Ethiopian cuisine, and him talking about the election with all the dispassion and the flair of a talk on Clinton or Romney, and now the man with the machete, and churches burning, and me looking back and wondering how much of what I’d known had gone up in flames. Rewritten again.
Like the women in Naivasha, my age, maybe younger. In blue jeans and white T-shirts and wearing their hair straight and long and loose around the place where their shoulder blades joined.
I’d rode north from Nairobi in the back seat of a matatu, the yellow cab of Kenya, a mini-van with cracked glass and a faulty exhaust system. A hundred shillings to go wherever the hell you felt like going, and I felt like Naivasha, because it was someplace beyond, and so it was four hours of winding roads and rattling glass, a sound I knew would ingrain itself in my head until it was almost as inextricably a part of my being as the exhaust we all kept breathing, and I rode with my pack tucked tight between my knees and my body shoved between a Masaii tribesman and a consultant from Nairobi, my shoulders bookended by a tie and a brief case and a walking stick and earlobe rings, and now in Naivasha, at the edge of the village and the bottom of the valley, the two girls climbing in and sitting on either side of me, and me falling bottomlessly in love with their jeans and their fifty-league freedom but most of all their matching T-shirts and the way our
knees kept touching, and then, later, removed by the space of a quarter of a year and a resurgent Atlantic, I’d look back and find my gaze restored.
An Innocent again. Another gawker of maps. Artisan of the reductive transformation of a nation to a JPEG, Kenya returned almost to the place where it started – a chunk on the globe, a story in the news – and I’d look at the photo of the man with the machete and wonder who’s head he hit, and in my thoughts and in everyone’s thoughts and the thoughts of all the world it was like everyone in Kenya was fair game.
Could’ve been those girls. Could’ve been headless.
Could’ve been Marcus Bushman, who I met a half hour later on the shores of Lake Naivasha, sprawled on his stomach in the grass with a walking stick in his hands, a meager triplet of yards from the water’s edge and half again from the hippo-proof fence.
Marcus, the groundskeeper of this tiny little hamlet of a campground, and me in the grass across from him, talking about Alaska, and Marcus, twenty-something, like me and the blue-jean babes of Naivasha, a man of consummate coolness whom it looked like nothing in the world could rile, telling me he’d like to go some day. Marcus lying barefoot on his stomach in the grass with the hippo-proof fence behind him. Saying he’d like to go some day, and with genuine interest, and saying it in such a way that for once I felt my race had been shuttled to the margins. My nationality unwritten. Marcus doing me the tremendous service of stripping away my colonial background, so that for once, all I was was Alaska.
I asked permission for a photo.
I took his e-mail address down, so it wasn’t a one-way street, and I shot Marcus standing in the grass with the campground behind him, leaning against his stick, and it was Marcus’ picture I’d take in my hands and hold against the one with the machete and all the other Yahoo! shots of a nation gone wild, and Marcus’ picture that would remind me most of the failure of my gaze, my effortless adoption of this model of chaos, and I’d look back on it all and realize I could have done this nation no greater insult.
Reckless and imperial. And all that shit.
Both The Kenya News and WBUR's Here and Now, with host Robin Young will be regular feeds on the Hinterlands page accessible here through the Blue Room.
Here and Now is beamed to the Monastery in Bako via XM Radio channel 133.
Featured today is a piece by Micah Bochart after his travels in Africa just before the recent chaos erupted there.
Reckless, Like Churchill In The Garden
September
2007
Reckless, like Churchill in the garden.
Pen pressed to paper, as the story goes, cutting up the empire into units of glib aesthetic, saying here’s Kenya, here’s Uganda, here’s Nairobi, and the price of that swell-looking map coming down hard in borders and stations and the sundering of tribes.
Coming down hard in the Masaii divided, to the north Kenyans, to south Tanzanians. Here one, here the other.
Like power coy and migrant. A history in throes.
And me tossed between them and packaged as a witness, and seeing them in body. Two tribesman handcuffed together in the back of a pickup truck in the mountains of Tanzania. September 15. 2007.
I’d just come down off the mountain. Meru, that is. Fifteen-thousand feet. The fifth tallest in Africa.
I was exhausted and diseased, four days into a fever, and still I’d climbed the mountain, still crazy enough or stupid enough. Still stumbled about in that lunar extremity, up from the jungle, the misty treetops, up from a grazing giraffe that for once traipsed close enough to feel like a beast, like the corporeal creature it was.
Up to a summit swathed in fog, view zero, then down again with Godwine my guide, never less than ten steps in front of me, a rifle strapped to his back, his English sketchy, my Swahili falling short on the far side of Asante, but finding communion in space, in green, in scattered pockets of endurance, appearing here and there, Godwine pausing every fifteen minutes, saying, There is buffalo, there is gazelle.
And parting at last at the base of the mountain, he and I, and me falling asleep in the sunshine, reclined against my pack, waiting for the rangers to wake me when my free ride came.
The free ride I’d heard whispered about but never described, always in the margins since I’d entered the park two days ago, when I’d paid a man to drive me in, and the uniformed gatekeepers assured me of the existence of vehicles with no shillings attached, that would take me back to the highway again with my pocket none the slimmer.
And so I waited, sick but certified, a piece of paper in my hand with Godwine’s signature that said I’d climbed Meru, and shipping out at the end of the afternoon, a man tapping me on the shoulder and saying take it while you can, and me jumping in, without looking twice, into the flatbed of my Free Ride Manifest.
I didn’t notice my company until we’d started down the road, when it was me and the backpack pressed against the tailgate, and three men standing above me with machine guns in their hands, and two Masaii tribesman, faces impassive, handcuffed together at the wrist, and this my ride. My way back to Arusha.
I’d never learn their crime. I’d just stare at them sitting there on the far side of the flatbed, bodies roughed against the cab, their robes smeared with dust, and the truck speeding down the switchbacks, rattling over chuckholes, me sitting at the tailgate and trying to keep myself from sliding forward. From sliding into the muzzle of a rifle or Kalashnikov. And the men above me laughing, and the tribesman staring, and the head of a giraffe watching us go by, head thrust upward from the canopy of the jungle, watching us as they must always watch, the creatures of Africa.
Watching the passage of handcuffs. Borders and stations. All the little units of arcane justice.
Like power coy and migrant.
All reckless.
Like the maps.
--
I was drunk the night I bought my tickets.
I had to be drunk or I’d never go through with it.
I came with my skin and my readings of scripture, Rough Guide and Lonely Planet, the overpriced bibles of the Footloose and Free, propelled trans-
Atlantic by the click of a mouse and a bottle of cheap red wine.
Three days in Tanzania.
Twelve days in Kenya.
My time divided neatly and cutely, five months in advance, an equator’s length away, my body hungry for a plucking up of Self-hood and dropping of Self in a place where Self was altered, in sands that were redder in life than in vision, and outbound at last on the 31st of August, borne on the wings of gas and commerce, a village fed on the price of my seat, the tickets unbought till I was drunk enough to buy them.
So drunk one night that I looked up prices, clicked purchase, sealed my odyssey in non-refundable contracts, and only then headed east. To Kenya. Coming down on the 1st. To Nairobi, which smelled like my grandfather’s cabin, like sweat and woodsmoke and Rudolph Bartell.
I thought nothing else could smell that way, that odor so deeply entrenched in my memories, and now it encompassed the totality of a capital, all the mosques and churches and broken asphalt, my German farmer father twice removed like a misplaced ghost hanging all over the city.
Nairobi.
Seven million people and the railroads that built it and the smell of a cabin in Washington State hanging over everything with not-so-baited breath.
And then Mombasa, on the ocean, and the bus ride down from Nairobi, south and southeast, every mile my farthest, a nine-hour study in elevation lost, shaken, from six-thousand feet to sea-level, down to the place where “Swahili” was born, where the dhow trade surged, crucible of language, Arabic tongues, indigenous tongues, tongues twisted/ coy/begotten, and the bus stopping in transit at a restaurant infested with flies, the way Greyhound always stops at McDonald’s, only now with a nearby sign saying "Mosque," and an arrow pointing the way, and a girl of twelve or fourteen with a shaved head and sandals and a sleeveless blue-jean dress hanging out in the parking lot and making a point of ignoring my face.
She's much too sassy to reduce to a metaphor. Much too vital to claim as my own, and in the service of my point, yet claim her I must. Reduce her I must. The moment is too potent to resist.
Like the young man in Mombasa who asked me to leave.
We met on a landing overlooking the harbor, me there first, and thus incensed by my expulsion, though never questioning the legitimacy of it, and the young man traipsing down the steps at seven a.m. and seating himself on the opposite side of the bench. Saying good morning to me, then asking me to go.
He said "Leave this place, please," and I did, not threatened, just angry, angry then renewed, "his leave this place" like parasites unwritten.
Unwritten, my week of endless pandering. The manic prostitution of salesman and beggars, the bus-stops and matatu terminals filled with people who were filled with goods, in burden and in motive, looking for money and knowing I was good for it, the proof in my pigment and my total aloneness, and me swindled on the first day by a con-man beggar who seduced me with sympathy and his hot-air story of being a Sudanese refugee, one I knew to be false even while he fed it to me, and me handing him a thousand shillings, or fifteen bucks Americano, and now the bane of it all, this man by the ocean asking me to leave, and the girl in the parking lot on the road to Mombasa, and the look in her face and the way she held her body, like she was unwriting borders. Unwriting maps.
And in Nairobi, the National Gallery, on Moi Avenue and Kenyatta Street. The Mau Mau Rebellion in sepia. 1954. The last great rebellion against the British before the loosing of the reigns.
Ten-thousand Africans deads and ten times as many interned, and ninety colonists dead. Ninety in all.
And the soldiers of the Sultanate of Oman, slavers like the Portuguese they conquered, turbans on their heads and rifles in their hands, their feet planted in the ground with a force that exceeded extraction, and Kenyatta’s election, and Independence in 1963, and the history of Kenya splashed out in photos I could photo because the curators let me, and here a statue of ivory, in an abstract pattern, something womblike, and this a sculptor’s dream of how it would end. Apartheid in South Africa. Dreamed in ’89. The magnitude of resistance and survival.
And me there in September.
2007.
And in three months the election, when Yahoo! News featured its photo of a Kikuyu in a white shirt and a white hat, a machete in his hand, and a wall of fire behind him, his blow coming down on some unseen skull, and this the image for which Kenya would be known.
--
I was numb when I read the news.
All I could remember were the restaurants and the diners, Kibaki or Odinga on the TV set and everyone looking up from their dinners and watching. Just watching.
And my second time in Nairobi, coming back from the north and meeting a local at the hostel where I was staying, a young man with a pony-tail who was part Kenyan and part German and took me and another American out on my birthday for Ethiopian cuisine, and him talking about the election with all the dispassion and the flair of a talk on Clinton or Romney, and now the man with the machete, and churches burning, and me looking back and wondering how much of what I’d known had gone up in flames. Rewritten again.
Like the women in Naivasha, my age, maybe younger. In blue jeans and white T-shirts and wearing their hair straight and long and loose around the place where their shoulder blades joined.
I’d rode north from Nairobi in the back seat of a matatu, the yellow cab of Kenya, a mini-van with cracked glass and a faulty exhaust system. A hundred shillings to go wherever the hell you felt like going, and I felt like Naivasha, because it was someplace beyond, and so it was four hours of winding roads and rattling glass, a sound I knew would ingrain itself in my head until it was almost as inextricably a part of my being as the exhaust we all kept breathing, and I rode with my pack tucked tight between my knees and my body shoved between a Masaii tribesman and a consultant from Nairobi, my shoulders bookended by a tie and a brief case and a walking stick and earlobe rings, and now in Naivasha, at the edge of the village and the bottom of the valley, the two girls climbing in and sitting on either side of me, and me falling bottomlessly in love with their jeans and their fifty-league freedom but most of all their matching T-shirts and the way our
knees kept touching, and then, later, removed by the space of a quarter of a year and a resurgent Atlantic, I’d look back and find my gaze restored.
An Innocent again. Another gawker of maps. Artisan of the reductive transformation of a nation to a JPEG, Kenya returned almost to the place where it started – a chunk on the globe, a story in the news – and I’d look at the photo of the man with the machete and wonder who’s head he hit, and in my thoughts and in everyone’s thoughts and the thoughts of all the world it was like everyone in Kenya was fair game.
Could’ve been those girls. Could’ve been headless.
Could’ve been Marcus Bushman, who I met a half hour later on the shores of Lake Naivasha, sprawled on his stomach in the grass with a walking stick in his hands, a meager triplet of yards from the water’s edge and half again from the hippo-proof fence.
Marcus, the groundskeeper of this tiny little hamlet of a campground, and me in the grass across from him, talking about Alaska, and Marcus, twenty-something, like me and the blue-jean babes of Naivasha, a man of consummate coolness whom it looked like nothing in the world could rile, telling me he’d like to go some day. Marcus lying barefoot on his stomach in the grass with the hippo-proof fence behind him. Saying he’d like to go some day, and with genuine interest, and saying it in such a way that for once I felt my race had been shuttled to the margins. My nationality unwritten. Marcus doing me the tremendous service of stripping away my colonial background, so that for once, all I was was Alaska.
I asked permission for a photo.
I took his e-mail address down, so it wasn’t a one-way street, and I shot Marcus standing in the grass with the campground behind him, leaning against his stick, and it was Marcus’ picture I’d take in my hands and hold against the one with the machete and all the other Yahoo! shots of a nation gone wild, and Marcus’ picture that would remind me most of the failure of my gaze, my effortless adoption of this model of chaos, and I’d look back on it all and realize I could have done this nation no greater insult.
Reckless and imperial. And all that shit.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Northern Lovliness
While building sitting power towards writing, I'll resort to images of our beautiful daughters, Hannah (near Smaug Mt.), and Merrick
...a serious duo
...and Merrick with Joe...
...and The Micahman and his beloved Large Ones
...a serious duo
...and Merrick with Joe...
...and The Micahman and his beloved Large Ones
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