Chaos in the Garden

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Mary Peterson under Time & Place

…therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden, to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.” (Gen 3: 23)

We have been eating zucchini for weeks. It’s that time of year. At first, each squash picked from the garden is cherished and celebrated. Now, we are feeding them to the chickens.

Joy fills my mom’s voice when she speaks of the garden, and when she harvests, she coos all sorts of endearing things. “Well, little one, aren’t you a beauty!?!” and “Oh my goodness! I can’t wait to taste you!”

My dad walks past the green beans, climbing in full splendor up the rack he built just for that purpose. The seeds were a bit old when we planted them weeks ago, and thinking they wouldn’t all make it, we sprinkled them close together. Now in full harvest, the plant has filled in thick and lush, bearing long twisty green beans on both sides of the planter. The soil is moist from the shade and regular waterings.

But then, hidden among the beauty of the plants, Dad hears the telltale rattle of a snake announcing its presence. The presence of danger is unavoidable.

The first order of business is to get the dogs inside. The younger of the two, Annie, hasn’t shown any restraint in recent encounters; she has attacked three javelinas as well as a porcupine. It’s better not to tempt her.

Dad yells at the dogs, using a very loud voice, commanding them to obey. “Annie! Buddy! Now!”

Hearing my dad’s stern voice is my first clue. It is out of character, not the normal end-of-the-day sound.

Soon, my phone rings and it’s Mom, who has now gotten involved.“Where are you? There is a snake in the green beans…”

I am confused and a little sarcastic, “You want me to come look at it?!?!” Snakes are fairly common to our desert property and I am working on something that seems more important.

“We need you. Come now.”

I join the snake hunt, complete with nervous energy and raised voices. The snake is moving around and is hard to keep track of.

“Mary, go get something long…we need to figure out where he is.”

I return a few minutes later with a twenty-foot stretch of plastic pipe, long enough to keep a safe distance while trying to rouse a snake out of hiding. Mom has a hoe. Dad has a gun. We are ready.

At the far side of the planter, I poke the bottom of the plant, trying to push the snake toward my parents. “Please don’t shoot me,“ I yell, only half joking. I am out of their sight, and the wall of green beans will not stop a bullet.

With a half-hearted laugh and a touch of exasperation, Dad snorts. “Got it.”

Suddenly, the snake is on the move, unhappy with being poked and seeking safety. He crawls high into the bush, his movements shifting the leaves.

I use the pipe to lift a branch, and the snake’s crafty eyes and active forked tongue are now in plain view. Two feet off the ground, its body is wrapped around the planting rack.

Dad takes the shot, and the snake falls to the ground and continues to slither away.

Somehow, Dad now has the pipe and I have the hoe. Instinctively, I move in for the final blow, separating the snake’s head from the long body now wide open in the dirt. It takes a few whacks to ensure the job is done.

This is the first snake that I have personally killed. For most of my life, I watched this kind of activity from a distance, fearfully.

The body continues to writhe and slither, the mouth bites the air, still on the attack. It is terrible to watch, this snake, seemingly alive but not. I feel the crashing sensation of adrenaline and the clammy feeling of sweat, but mostly relief that it is over.

We stand together, reliving the experience and dreading being the next one to have to pick green beans. I text my boyfriend to share the experience, and true to his roots, he texts back: “I can get $10 for the rattle. $45 if you skin the snake.”

We laugh and, with another whack of the hoe, the rattle is separated. We briefly discuss the possibility of skinning it. It is a big, worthy skin. But none of us is interested in getting that involved.

The mood begins to lift and normalcy settles back in. My dad, anticipating the release of the adventure-seeking young dog, gathers up the snake carcass to bury where it won’t be discovered.

I pick up the rattle, the silvery scales electrifying my fingertips, and head toward the house. As he drives by on the golf cart, my dad jokes, “Wait, how much for the skin?!?” He is always interested in a deal.

I shake my head. “No thanks, Dad. I’m going inside.”

* * * * *

Roosting

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Mary Peterson under Sound & Place

My home is a green spot amidst the brown barrenness of the desert. The wildlife is drawn into the coolness of the non-native trees, to the drip of the water faucet left barely on.

The birds add their notes, twittering and chirping, above the white noise of the wind moving throughout the property. Together, they are an omnipresent sound. At times, whispering. At others, roaring.

Drawn to the sprouts of new plants, the birds bounce around the garden plot, a fact my mother bemoans every year when her vegetables start budding. But she doesn’t leave them defenseless. A system of wooden boxes and rusty metal screens protect the vulnerable plants in their first weeks.

Tap, tap-tap! Insistently knocking on the window as if to rouse me from sleep, a roadrunner greeted me the other day. They aren’t know for flight. His appearance on the roof of the second story struck me as curious. And, the pair of swallows have returned to their mud nest on the front porch. They are a sight that comforts my heart, the promise that “the swallow herself finds a home.”

Every morning, my father pours bird seed into the feeder outside the kitchen window and we have the pleasure of watching the large and the small, the colorful and the plain eat together at the base of apricot tree.

Loudest among the music of our property is the bass call of the owl, “Whoooooo, whooooo.” Watching over it all, he lives in the tallest of pine trees on the fence line.

Last week, I pulled up the sandy drive and was greeted by the deep call of the owl as I made my way to the front door. “Whooooooo, whoooooo…”

In my desire to respond to his welcome, I imitated the sound and sang back to him: “Whoooo, whooooooo.”

To my delight, there was a response. “Whoooo, whooooooo…” It made my heart flutter and my mind race with thoughts– Was I able to commune with nature? Was I having a St. Francis moment? I walked in the door filled with a deep awe at the moment that had passed between the owl and I.

A few minutes later, I heard the back door scrap against the tile. As his steps progressed into the house, my father called out, “Whoooooo, whoooooo...” It reverberated down the hallway and meet my ears.

A moment of realization flushed over my face. My St Francis nature moment had been nothing more than a long-distance communication with my dad, cleaning up for the day down at his shop.

“Dad!!! Was that you?!?!,” I yelled with a pretend accusation in my voice.

He laughed. I debated whether or not to tell him that I had been fancying myself a person with special animal communication abilities.

My parents have taken on the role of subduing the earth around our home. After his morning walk, my father reports on the tracks of animals and with a warning in his voice, evidence of snakes. From the high vantage point of the tractor, he moves dirt across the property, leveling and building up. My mother, when she has secured the garden’s defense, searches out the perfect combination of flowering plants to bloom on the patio and sweeps the blowing sand from the corners where it gathers.

To celebrate their 40 years of marriage, my sister and I bought them a variety of plants. All have a red-colored leaf, blooming at different times throughout the year — a pomegranate bush, an elm tree, some others with fancy names that escape me. Perpetual red; a sign of abiding love. But, really there is no need for the witness. Because doves, a staple of wedding and anniversary cards, eat breakfast outside the kitchen window and roost in the pine trees behind the house.

My People

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Mary Peterson under Mess & Place

With a demanding sing song in my voice, I yell after Dad as he walks to his shop, “Like items together!”

“As always!”, he responds while chuckling to himself, “Wouldn’t dream of something different!”

It’s our little joke. I try to invite the semblance of order; he insinuates that I’m a bit neurotic.

In Dad’s smudged and hardened hand are ten powerful magnets. He dug them from a rotting plastic crate.

As he bent over the cracked tub, Mom barked at him, “I already went through that stuff!”

But, that just egged him to dig a little deeper. “Ohhhhh…I wouldn’t want you to get rid of any treasures!” When he discovered the magnets, he was vindicated in his search.

An hour earlier, we wrestled Dad’s new welding table off the back of the truck using chains and the tractor. After the steel monstrosity was put into place, Mom wandered over and begun poking through a hidden corner of the property.

That corner had been the home of a battered RV for several years. Frank was in a tough place and my good-hearted parents allowed him to park his RV behind Dad’s shop, a long extension cord providing him with power. He stayed long enough to compile quite the assortment of stuff, mostly leftovers from job sites, or so the story goes.

When Frank fired up the RV and drove away, there were promises of coming back to pick up his stuff and clean up the mess. But, months have passed. We know it isn’t going to happen but keep joking about it anyway. “You’ll never guess who I heard from” and “Frank will be back any day now.”

Surrounding the weed-free rectangle where the RV sat, there is a leaning stack of warped barn wood and a small pile of white tile. Tools, left outside, are rusted or hardened. A tower of old-school electronic equipment is balanced on an ancient riding lawn mower. At the edge of the area is a red truck with uncertain ownership. The desert has begun reclaiming some items, burying them into the sand or breaking them down with the unrelenting rays.

No one in my family is very good at throwing things away, the remnants of historical want. Digging through the abandoned stuff is painful at times. Thing after thing, wasting away. It’s hardest to know what to do with the items that still have a small flame of possibility.

I walk some dirt-covered hangers toward the “keep” pile and mom quickly gestures toward the “dump” pile. I launch a defense in the silence of my head about their merit but place them into the trash bin. My desire for order defeated by the reality of the time and effort it would require to restore them back to usefulness. Not worth the $.75 of value the old hangers have.

By self-designation, I’m in charge of the “burn” pile. We’ve only just begun the clean-up but the pile is already past the size of a “small fire.” I will need to figure out a secondary pile before the project is complete.

Mom is going to call a local guy to see if he wants to pick up the “metal” pile. Waiting for scrap prices increase again, he has been collecting.

Occasionally, after a day of puttering through his projects, Dad will direct the remote to the Kiltchners and say, “Let’s see what my friends are up to.” As the Alaskan homesteaders root through their boneyard of stuff and repurpose the broken down items into something astounding, Dad will smile and say, “Those are my people.”

As we lose light in the setting sun, the work quickly comes to an end. In our own little way, we are righting a wrong, restoring the order and dignity of the desert. Working alongside my parents, in a small portion of our family land, I think to myself, “Like items together!”

There is no doubt: these are my people.

A Thorn In My Side

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Mary Peterson under Scent & Place

“AAAAAAhhhh-chooo!” (That’s me, sneezing!)

My eyes water.

My nose runs.

Desperate thoughts drive me to find the quickest access to a Kleenex.

Yep, I’m the girl with wadded up tissues in her purse, the girl with skin that is raw and sore from from wiping her nose with toilet paper or a napkin in a pinch.

I have allergies.

My eyes begin to itch.

My throat begins to scratch.

Clumsy fingers scramble to unlock medication from it’s protective bubble and I wait eagerly for it to take effect as I gulp it down. pollen-allergies-clip-art-1909082

A whole chain of events is triggered with a simple inhale. Unseen particles of fragrance or pollen float around in the wind until they find their way into my nose. Then, I’m a goner.

Recently, I moved away. Remarkably, my allergies were gone. But now, they are back with a vengeance. Thus, I must sadly conclude that I’m allergic to home.

The landscape that I call home is loaded with plants who have adapted to survive. Unrelenting desert sun forces native plants to develop a toughness.

The most annoying are sand burrs, a long grass that looks innocent enough but secretly lodges nasty little spikes into soft spots in your skin. In an effort to avoid a carpet full of prickers, brought in on shoelaces and rubber soles, we choose to fight against the persistent plant and its painful thorn. Eradication from the surrounding area is our goal.

Dad starts with a flamethrower as his instrument of destruction, attempting to conquer the seed pod by a fiery death. After hours of work, contained to a small patch of land, he declares defeat. “The plants are too green,” he grumbles, “the seeds just fall on the ground and I’m wasting time and fuel.”

Mom advocates for weedkiller, the heavy duty kind that comes in a five-gallon jug from the feed store. As the sickly orange fluid pours into the plastic sprayer, the odor wafts up. It’s a cross between vinegar and cough syrup. Not pleasant. Strapping the plastic jug of poison to his back, Dad walks around the front of the house, carefully directing the nozzle to the dreaded plant. As the poison does its work, we discover that killing the plant just knocks the burrs to the ground. Next year, we will pay the price.

Shovels are our last hope. Hauling large garbage barrels to the edges of the back yard, we point the steel tip at our target, the shallow roots of the grass. My dad and I, with gloved-hands, walk slowly through the field, analyzing each weed and attacking our common adversary. With a light shake to remove the dirt from the roots, we toss the de-earthed plants into the black plastic of the bin. Pressing my arm down to compact the growing stack, the smell of cut plants and dirt and plastic merge and begin to tickle my nose. Two sacks later, we darkly joke that we could play an awful trick on a neighbor by leaving a bagful of seed heads in their grass.

By that time, I am a wreck. Those hours, spent in close relationship with the native weeds, did a number on my allergies. Between the hot sun, the allergies in full force and the stickers working their way into my socks, I am grumbling between sneezes, brought low by an unseen enemy.

“AAAAAAhhhh-chooo!”

I take off a glove, remove a thorn from my fingertip, and dig a Kleenex out of the pocket of my stained work jeans. At least the tissues smell of baby powder and momentary relief.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Traveling

Posted on June 13, 2015 by Jonathan Bower under Uncategorized

Sunrise through a tent door in Joshua Tree

“Pop,” Matt called out from the back seat, the wind from his open window whipping through his hair, “where’s the most beautiful place you’ve ever been?”

It was late. We were driving home from a house concert at a friend’s property in a secluded wooded area on the fringes of Anchorage. Between the trance of the evening’s music and the long sunlit Alaskan summer evening, I’d lost all track of time, and so I now raced along the highway, distracted by the hour and that tomorrow was Monday and that the kids were still awake.

“Well…” I said, jogging my memory, “I remember really loving Italy…”

“…and Spain…” I added, as an afterthought.

“Wait, Pop,” he gasped, “you went to Italy?”

In 1999, in my late twenties, my then girlfriend and I left Montana and backpacked around Europe for a few months. While I know the trip made an impression, and that there’s a box of photos in a storage closet somewhere documenting the time, I now struggled to put into words any lasting effect or poignant tales from the journey.

As the boys and I hurtled towards home, my mind only proved a soupy stew of vague, passing images and snapshot scenes: vines wrapping around a trellis of on the back porch of an apartment we rented on the Amalfi coast; standing on the balcony of our room in Barcelona and looking down on the courtyard with its little round tables and wooden folding chairs in the square; our host in the Cinque Terre, Giacomo, lifting a bunch of fresh grapes from a barrel and smiling as he handed them to us; a thumping nightclub in Prague where we winced our way through glasses of Windex-colored absinthe.

Yet I struggled to grasp these wispy images from a long ago former life, to contain them in the framework of story or to find threads that wove all these together into a single fabric.

Who in the world was that guy in Europe baring my name and face then? What were his dreams? What did he want out of life in those years?

And was this midlife? Do memories just erode like shore lines in a hurricane during your forties? I clamored back to the surface.

“Japan was beautiful, too, though, right Sammy?”

“Yeah…” my eleven year-old dreamily sighed from the passenger’s seat.

We emerged beyond the high trees running along the highway and were coasting past exits and turnoffs leading to Anchorage’s version of the gaudy, predictable chain stores and strip malls featured off of every exit in the United States.

On this night, however, well north of consumer culture’s eyesores in the foreground, the sun blazed and pulsed with a dazzling prism of colors and light. Rounding the curve that revealed as much, it’s a wonder we didn’t drive straight off the highway. Slack jawed, I directed Sam and Matt’s attention to the sun’s show on my left.

“Look at that!”

The kids looked and said nothing.

As a born and bred East coast kid from the working class suburbs of Philadelphia, Alaska’s skies always leave me feeling like I’m getting away with something. From the midnight sunsets of summer, to the aurora of winter, there’s something nearly scandalous about letting a random suburban Philly boy travel so far from home to witness so many jaw-dropping skylines.

I tried keeping my eyes on the road while still absorbing the sky’s show on my left. The last time a sky so brilliantly throttled me and consumed my attention was on my trip to Joshua Tree this past March, where I met up and traveled with one of my oldest and best friends, Mark. Every morning and evening in the park seemed, like and unlike in Alaska, an unpredictable but welcome pass for being daily sucker punched by a sky full of Amazing. The in between times, our days, were framed by stupefying encounters with dramatic stone structures, hikes on paths and ground that recalled Roadrunner cartoons, and wandering amidst ruins and desert flora that seemed props for a Cormac McCarthy novel.

Mark & boulders, Joshua Tree

I remember passing hazily through the airport, in slow motion on the morning we both flew out of LAX, heading our separate ways back to Alaska and Pennsylvania. I boarded my plane in a trance and sat in my window seat, gaping and eyes wide.

What had we just lived through?

While on one hand I felt like it’d take years to process the silent wonder of the desert and all we’d encountered there in its raw, unforgiving simplicity – in its stark landscapes, its sunsets and sunrises and stillness - my memories of Europe suggested I might not even remember or be able to note the trip’s impact on my life a decade from now.

As I sat staring out the window of the airplane, looking at nothing, my phone buzzed. Mark was texting from his gate, where he still waited to board his flight. He included a photograph featuring an underlined, marked up page of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire:

Matt watching Sunday evening’s sunset, 6/7/15

“If [the desert] has any significance it lies, I will venture, in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful - that which is full of wonder…The shock of the real. For a little while, we are again able to see, as the child sees, a world of marvels.”

The desert, certainly. Alaska, too. Perhaps the passage even served as a way to more memorably travel and carry myself as I pass through the world in the coming years.

Because hadn’t I perhaps traveled blind and numb to wonder in my other, younger, previous lives? Didn’t I, like the strip malls we now passed and all they advertised, once treat Experience and the places I traveled like something to ravenously descend upon, consume, and devour? Could that be partially why the threads, the stories, and memories of other places prove so hard to come by?

I blew past our turn and steered the car north.

“Pop!” Matt shouted, “Where are you going?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the sunset in the distance, now straight ahead of us.

“We’re going there.”

To wonder.

Wherever it rests. Wherever we find it.

Sunset, Point Woronzof, Anchorage, AK 6/7/15

Alone Together (New Wilderness)

Posted on April 10, 2015 by Jonathan Bower under Uncategorized

Baby…we’ve been alone too long.
Let’s be alone together –
let’s see if we’re that strong.

– Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle”

I forgot about Lent this year. I forgot about it even being a thing on the calendar that happens. And while I might be excused for my forgetfulness – I’m not Catholic and didn’t grow up Catholic or in a liturgical tradition – I have to admit that being oblivious to it caught me off guard.

I only remembered it when, one particular Wednesday in February, while at the supermarket – a bottle of wine in one hand and my iPhone in the other – a woman passed me with an ash cross smeared across her forehead. Hazily noting her gray smudge, I was seized by, well, not guilt (“Protestant Guilt” is a topic for another time), but a sudden burst of surprise.

I paused in the aisle, looked at the bottle of wine and a curious ambivalence surged through me. On one hand, given the pace of my life the past few months, I knew I could benefit from a contemplative period of intentional, spiritual reflection, if not also a detox and fast from you name it.

And then I decided to forego Lent. I decided not to indulge myself this year.

Right, indulge myself. I know. That seems implausible. It contradicts the spirit of the season, on one hand. But let me explain.

Ever since I first learned about Lent in my mid-to-late-twenties, I wanted on board the Lent train. Not even wanted on board. Knew I was already on board – one of its passengers.

After all, for as long as I can remember, I’ve adored all the wilderness imagery evocative of the season. Whether the spare, stark pictures of U2 on its Joshua Tree album, T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” or every Tatooine scene in the Star Wars films, desert wanderings and wilderness imagery and references have always spoken to something deep at the heart of me.

For as long as I’ve known about and observed Lent, I’ve delighted, too, in its meditations on death and mortality. My lonesome inner-adolescent – still carrying a torch for the bummed out musings of The Smiths, The Cure, and Tears for Fears – can’t resist feeling an albeit maudlin affection for the overtly melancholy tone of the season.

So, for many years, I’ve anticipated – with a kind-of adult version of the excitement kids possess for Christmas – that one Wednesday towards winter’s end, when the church lights go dim and the organ inclines towards slow songs in a minor key. More than that, however, I think I’ve reveled, too, in how Lent affords me – a shy, introverted individual by nature – righteous permission to avoid the hustle of the marketplace and everyone passionately competing for attention from one or another soapbox there. While it’s certainly not written into its script, or part of The Book of Common Prayer, Lent enables a guy like me to justify stealing away into literal or metaphorical prayer closets, solely in the interests of escaping any undesirable or annoying chaos or hullabaloo that rubs me the wrong way. And always under the guise of a spiritual endeavor.

I know it must sound strange, on one hand. Many good-hearted, pure-intentioned loved ones and mentors admirably and enviably enter into this contemplative season. It’s only recently that I began sheepishly second-guessing my impulses, my fine-tuned behavioral patterns and the creature comforts these serve.

I blame happiness. Joy. Will go out on a limb and accuse Love of revealing a shortsightedness on my part. I’ll also blame an altogether bewildering and, for me, mostly uncharted territory I only know to name as Relationship.

Taken together, these, for me, add up to prove an altogether different kind of wilderness. Actual wilderness, perhaps. The kind that Tolkien’s hobbits dread, that explorers for centuries have strived to tame, erase, or domesticate. Relationship, for me, has long remained a region too frightening to bravely explore – even, regrettably, while “in a relationship” with someone. Relationship too frequently proves thoroughly terrifying ground, a terrain more distressing than any postcard-esque desert landscape or overabundance of welcome monastery silence. More than any solo adventure I’ve undertaken, relationship leaves me thoroughly exposed, and so also at perpetual risk, often underdressed for its dangerous and unpredictable weather patterns, unprepared for its unexpected turns, its steep climbs, and deep, shadowy valleys.

That bottle of wine I was holding on Ash Wednesday? I was buying that for dinner later, to drink with a woman I’ve spent nearly every Wednesday with since mid-August of last year. In fact, somehow, sometime last autumn, my Wednesdays earned the status of Friday, solely given the degree of excitement with which I look forward to seeing this person.

So, you might pardon me if ashes and meditations on my mortality were the last thing on my mind this year.

When we first started talking late last summer, we certainly didn’t see landing here nearly eight months later, together, in a strange, wild place called Relationship. One evening, we simply and unsuspectingly engaged in a memorable conversation. We decided to pick up where we left off a couple weeks later. The conversation continues today.

Meanwhile, I can’t help trusting that my otherwise predictable flights into the desert – the oasis of those welcome, lush silences, and the “do-able,” time-limited fasts from whatever – can wait for now. These aren’t going anywhere. They’ll rest ready for me if I need to return to all things overly familiar down the line.

That night, as I walked towards the checkout counter, the mystifying opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” poem came to mind:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves…

I wondered then – bottle of red wine in my hand on Ash Wednesday, longing to lean into the good evening ahead – do I have what it takes? Can I find it in me to bravely, wildly, and only love what I love?

Something unfamiliar whispers that it’s worth the risk. That the journey could prove epic.

You Are Here

True stories about roots, identity, and place.

Tag Archives: desert