No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

The Circling Stars, the Sea Surrounding: Philip Glass and John Luther Adams

April 2014

EVERY YEAR ONE of the Portland Opera Company’s productions is sung by the singers in the company’s outstanding training program. In 2012 it was Philip Glass’s short opera Galileo Galilei. There is a splendor to young voices different from the patina of the experienced singer; and these performances always have an extra charge of tension and excitement.

The bold, beautiful, intricately simple set, all circles and arcs and moving lights on different planes, was, I believe, from the Chicago premiere in 2002; the conductor was Anne Manson.

The first scene shows us Galileo old, blind, and alone. From there the story follows a reverse spiral through time, revolving back lightly and ceaselessly through his trial, his triumphs, his discoveries, to the last scene, where a little boy named Galileo sits hearing an opera about Orion and the Dawn and the circling planets written by his father, Vincenzo Galilei. It is all borne along and buoyed up by the endlessly repetitive and ever-changing music, always spiraling, never resting, and yet moving with the slow majesty of the great orbits, without reference to any beginning or ending, in a vast, joyous continuity. It moves, it moves, it moves… E pur si muove!

I was rapt from the first moments, and by the last scene I could scarcely see the stage for tears of delight.

We went back the next night and had the same radiant experience. There’s now a recording of the Portland Opera performance (Orange Mountain Music, OMM 10091). I have listened to this with deep pleasure and will listen to it again. But I am still certain that the true power of opera, and certainly this opera, is in the actual production, the immediate, live presence of the singers and the interaction of their voices and the music with the sets, lighting, action, movements, costumes, and audience to create a global, irreproducible experience. This is how all the great opera composers have understood their undertaking. Recording, film, all our wonderful instruments of virtuality, catch only the shadow, recall only a memory of that lived experience, that moment of real time.

An opera is a preposterous proposition. It’s almost incredible that any production of any opera ever comes off. To a lot of people, of course, it doesn’t—Tolstoy was one. Philip Glass’s music is also somewhat preposterous. To a lot of people it isn’t music at all. Some of his pieces sound mechanical, even perfunctory to me; but having been deeply moved years ago by the film Koyaanisqatsi, and by his Gandhi opera Satyagraha on stage in Seattle, I’m always ready to hear what Glass is up to now. For Galileo he had a brilliant librettist, Mary Zimmerman, and rose to the challenge. The words and action of the piece are luminously intelligent: they go to the heart of what Galileo’s life and thought mean to us in terms of knowledge, courage, and integrity both scientific and religious, yet they linger also on the humanity of the man who rejoiced in his daughter, rejoiced in thought and argument, rejoiced in his work and his great discoveries, and for his public reward got shame, silence, and exile. It is a grand story, and a dark one: quite right for opera.

I found Galileo completely beautiful. I think it as beautiful in its way as Gluck’s Orfeo is in its. Neither is so dramatically and emotionally huge as much nineteenth-century opera, but both are complete, whole, every element in them entering into a ravishing totality. Galileo has an intellectual grandeur rare in opera, but even that is in the service of making pleasure, true pleasure—the pleasure given by something noble, thoughtful, deeply moving, and delightful.

And this was my first twenty-first-century opera. What a marvelous start!

Just two years later, this March, the Seattle Symphony brought a concert to Portland that included a piece, Become Ocean, they commissioned (and bravo for doing so!) from the composer John Luther Adams.

There are too many composers named John Adams. The one from San Francisco is better known at present, but I’ve found his music increasingly disappointing ever since the curiously brainless and vapid opera Nixon in China. Living in Alaska, John Luther Adams is still marginal not only to mainland America but to mainstream fame. But I believe that will change as his music is heard.

For Become Ocean, the orchestra is divided on stage into three groups with differing instrumentations. All three play continuously, each following its own pattern of tempo, volume, and tonality. Now one group and now another dominates, the ebb and flow of each interpenetrating with the others like currents in the sea. Sometimes they all are on the ebb; again their crescendos overlap until a vast, deep tsunami of music swells over the hearers, overwhelming… and then subsides again. The harmonies are complex, there are no tunes as such, but there is no moment in the work that is anything less than beautiful. The hearer can surrender to the surrounding sound as a ship surrenders itself to the waves, as the great kelp forests surrender to the movement of the currents and the tides, as the sea itself surrenders to the gravity of the moon. When the deep music ebbed away at last, I felt that I’d come as near as ever I will to indeed becoming ocean.

We stood up to applaud, but not many people did. Portland audiences tend to leap to their feet automatically for a soloist, but rise more selectively for mere orchestra. I think the response was to some extent puzzled, maybe bored. Become Ocean is forty-five minutes long. A man near us was growling about it never ending, while I was wishing it never had.

Edgard Varèse’s Déserts came next in the program, a piece that skillfully and faithfully obeys the modernist mandates of discord. Maybe we have at last worked through the period when serious music had to seek antiharmony and strive to shock the ear. Neither Glass nor Adams appears to be following a program dictated by theory; like Gluck or Beethoven, they’re innovative because they have something new to say and know how to say it. They are obedient only to their own certainties.

I came away from both these concerts marveling that while our republic tears itself apart and our species frantically hurries to destroy its own household, yet we go on building with vibrations in the air, in the spirit—making this music, this intangible, beautiful, generous thing.

Rehearsal

April 2013

SITTING IN ON a rehearsal is a strange experience for the author of the book the play is based on. Words you heard in your mind’s ear forty years ago in a small attic room in the silence of the night are suddenly said aloud by living voices in a bright-lit, chaotic studio. People you thought you’d made up, invented, imagined, are there, not imaginary at all—solid, living, breathing. And they speak to each other. Not to you. Not anymore.

What exists now is the reality those people build up between them, the stage-reality that is as ungraspable and fleeting as all experience, but more charged than most experience with intense presence, with passion… until suddenly it’s over. The scene changes. The play ends.

Or in a rehearsal, the director says, “That was great. Let’s just take it again from where Genly comes in.”

And they do: the reality that vanished appears again, they build it up between them, the doubts, the trust, the misunderstanding, the passion, the pain…

Actors are magicians.

All stage people are magicians, the whole crew, on stage and behind it, working the lights and painting the set and all the rest. They collaborate methodically (ritual must be methodical, because it must be complete) in working magic. And they can do it with remarkably unlikely stuff. No cloaks, no magic wands or eyes of newt or bubbling alembics.

Essentially they do it by limiting space, and moving and speaking within that space to establish and maintain a Secondary Creation.

Watching a rehearsal makes that especially clear. At this point, some weeks before first night, the actors wear jeans and T-shirts. Their ritual space is marked out with strips and bits of tape on the floor. No set; their only props are a couple of ratty benches and plastic bowls. Harsh lights glare steadily down on them. Five feet away from them, people are moving around quietly, eating salad out of a plastic tub, checking a computer screen, scribbling notes. But there, in that limited space, the magic is being worked. It takes place. There another world comes into being. Its name is Winter, or Gethen.

And look! The king is pregnant.

Someone Named Delores

October 2010

A SENTENCE IN a story has been troubling me. The story, by Zadie Smith, was in The New Yorker of October 11. It’s in the first person, but I don’t know whether it’s fiction or memoir. Many people don’t even make the distinction, now that memoir takes the liberties of fiction without taking the imaginative risks, and fiction claims the authority of history without assuming the factual responsibilities. To my mind the I of a memoir or “personal essay” is a very different matter from the I of a story or novel, but I don’t know if Zadie Smith sees it that way. And so I don’t know whether she’s speaking as a character in fiction or as herself when toward the end of her tale of a seemingly unrepaid loan to a friend she says, “The first check came quickly but sat in a pile of unopened mail because these days I hire someone to do that.”

The implacable editor in my hindbrain promptly inquired You hire someone not to open the mail? I silenced the meddling reptile, but the sentence continued to bother me. “These days I hire someone to do that.” What’s wrong with that? Well, I guess it’s the “someone.” Someone is no one. The nameless nobody hired to answer the mail of a somebody with a name.

So at this point I’m beginning to hope that the story is fiction and thus that the narrator is not Zadie Smith, because this doesn’t sound like the voice of a writer highly sensitive to class and color prejudices. It reminded me, in fact, of the dean’s wife, when I was a lowly assistant professor’s wife, who couldn’t leave “my housekeeper” out of her conversation for five minutes, she was in such a state of admiration of herself for having the grand house that required keeping and the housekeeper to keep it. But that was silly, naive, like Mr. Collins continually mentioning “my patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh.” The statement “these days I hire someone to do that” has a harsher ring to it.

And so what? Why shouldn’t a highly successful writer hire help and say so? And what skin is it off my nose?

Envy, of course, in the first place. I am envious of people who hire a servant with perfect assurance of righteousness. I envy self-confidence even as I dislike it. Envy coexists only too easily with righteous disapproval. Indeed perhaps the two nasty creatures live off each other.

And then, annoyance. There’s an “of course” implied in “I hire someone to do that,” and there’s no “of course” about it. But people think there is, and this kind of talk encourages them to think so—which annoys me.

It’s a widespread illusion: a writer (a successful writer, a real writer) doesn’t do her own mail. She has a secretary to do it, as well as helpers, amanuenses, researchers, handlers—lord knows what—maybe an editor’s hole in the east wing, like the priest’s hole in old British houses.

I imagine writers commonly had secretaries a century ago. Henry James did, sure enough. But Henry James was not exactly your average writer, right?

Virginia Woolf didn’t.

Among writers I know personally, only one has a secretary to do mail. To me it seems a perquisite of the extremely successful, and of a magnitude of success that daunts me. Privacy to be with my family and do my work was of the first importance to me. So when I began to need help answering my letters, I found it extremely difficult to convince myself that I needed it badly enough to justify my hiring “someone,” bringing a stranger into my study, setting myself up as a boss.

I always had trouble calling Delores my secretary, it sounded so pompous (echoes of “my housekeeper…”). If I had to speak of her to strangers I said her name, or “my friend who does mail for me.” But I knew that this latter phrase was one of the mildly devious devices by which we handle guilt, the ways we try to reintroduce humanity into the relationship of hirer and hired, which inevitably, to whatever slight a degree, involves inequality, the raising up of one and degradation of the other. Democracy, by strenuously denying the fact of inequality, does enable us, to a surprising extent, to act as if it didn’t exist; but it does exist, and we know it. So our job is to keep the inequity of power as small as possible, and refuse to let our common humanity be reduced, however slightly, even by a careless word, by an assertion of unequal worth. My envy of writers who hire a person to handle their mail and annoyance at people who assume that I have such help are really quite mild, but they are painful now, because I did have “someone,” but I have lost her.

Delores Rooney, later Delores Pander, was my helper and dear friend.

Thirty years ago or so, I finally got up my courage and asked around for a professionally competent and discreet person to give me a hand with my letters, which were getting beyond me. Our mutual friend Martha West, who had worked with Delores as a secretary in an office, recommended her. She was then working as manager-agent for a dance company. We rather nervously gave it a try.

I had never dictated anything to anybody (outside Beginning French courses, where you very slowly and clearly read a dictée in French to the students, who very slowly and inaccurately write it down). Delores had taught herself shorthand and was a whiz at it—a skill now, I suppose, almost entirely lost—and she’d taken lots of dictation from lots of dictators. She coached me in composing a letter orally, and encouraged me with praise; she was an excellent teacher. And also she’d worked and lived with artists, painters, dancers, and was used to artistic temperamental peculiarities, having a few of her own.

We got to doing letters quickly and easily, and I soon began to draw on her as a collaborator in composing the letters—what to say and how to say it. Does that sound all right?—What if you said this instead of that?—What on earth am I going to write to the man who sent me the 600-page manuscript about fairies on Venus?—This one’s a whiner, you don’t have to answer him… Delores was always better than me at kind answers to kooks, but she was tough-minded too, and encouraged me not to answer a letter that was troublingly weird or made unreasonable demands. She got to be so good at replying to the eternally repeated questions that I could hand her a letter and just say “idea for Catwings” and the true tale of how I happened to think of cats with wings was all ready in her computer—though she varied it slightly according to her mood and the age of the inquirer. She had a gracious, graceful tone in discouraging problematic requests by explaining why I couldn’t personally reply just now. She covered for me beautifully. She loved to answer children’s letters, even when they were the mechanical kind some teachers make kids write. The open kindness and generosity of her spirit lent all my correspondence a quality it would never have had without her collaboration.

She never came more than once a week, usually only once every three or four weeks. I’d do the most urgent business correspondence and let the rest and the fan mail pile up. She got a computer before I did, and it eased her work a great deal. When I got one, it didn’t make much difference at first. But when email really got going I began to be able to deal with all the real business myself. Still Delores and I together handled nonurgent business, the fan letters from readers, and what we called the Gimmies: the letters everybody who becomes visible to the public gets, asking you to do this, give to that, endorse this book, speak at that good cause, etc. Even if you can’t possibly say yes to them, most such letters are well intentioned and deserve a civil no. Delores said no thank you in every possible way, always politely. It was a great burden off me. She said that the Gimmies were boring but just various enough to be entertaining too.

As for fan mail, letters from readers have always come to me on paper only, my crude but effective way of keeping the volume down. The letters people write me—often with pen and ink, or in pencil, crayon, glitter, and other media if they’re children—are ever amazing, giving me immense pleasure and reward, but they are also never-ending. I knew there was no way I could handle the load if I tried to read and answer them on my website or on email. But I have always felt that such letters deserve a reply, however brief, and for years Delores was my invaluable aide in answering them.

We loved each other as friends, but didn’t have extensive contact outside our work sessions. She was a busy woman: she soon became the writer Jean Auel’s secretary four days a week, and was agent and manager for her husband, the painter Henk Pander; when her parents grew old and sick she looked after them, and late in life she adopted and brought up her granddaughter. Our friendship was expressed mostly during and in our working relationship. I always looked forward to Delores coming, and we always spent half the time talking, catching up. Once, when I was scared by a stalker, she and Henk gave me wonderful immediate support.

As the years went on she seemed to grow shyer and more withdrawn from her friends than she had been, I do not know why. She told me once that she liked coming to work with me because we laughed together.

Her computer began to get out of date, and her life was complicated by various issues; her energy was being overtried. She couldn’t or didn’t want to figure out how to help me with e-correspondence the way she did with paper mail, which she took home along with dictated answers or suggested notes from me. So I came to do all the email and most of the letters, leaving her only some Gimmies and no-thank-yous and those fan letters that needed only acknowledgment.

Delores’s joy in life had been visibly flagging for a long time when she was diagnosed, last year, with cancer. At first it seemed local and curable, but proved to be metastasizing. It killed her in a few months. There was a brief and lovely respite or remission for a few weeks late in her illness, when we were able to visit with her quite often, and laughed together as we had used to laugh. Then the cruel disease closed in again. She died a few months ago, attended with great tenderness by her husband.

I find it extremely hard to talk about people I loved who have died. I can’t now make a proper tribute to that complex and beautiful woman, or say more than that I miss her friendship in every way.

Without her, I’ve had to give up the effort to answer fan mail, at least temporarily. As for the Gimmies, some of them get answered, some of them don’t. I suppose I could hire someone to do that.

But I doubt that I will. I can’t put my heart into it.

Without Egg

July 2011

VISITING VIENNA IN the early 1950s, Charles and I stayed in style for very little expense at the old König von Ungarn Hotel, which had been there since at least the 1820s. We ate breakfast at a café around the corner. Always the same café and the same breakfast: good coffee, fresh fruit, crisp rolls with butter and jam, and a soft-boiled egg. Perfect. Invariable. Every morning.

I don’t know why I got it in my head one morning to vary it, but I did, and when the tall, middle-aged waiter arrived in his impeccable dark coat, I indicated that I wanted the usual breakfast, without the egg.

He appeared not to understand, which, given the quality of my German, was understandable. I repeated something like “Kein Ei,” or “Ohne Ei.”

He responded slowly, in a shaken voice, “Ohne Ei?”

He was disturbed. I was ruthless. Yes, I said, without egg.

He stood for quite a while silent, trying to handle the shock. He visibly forced himself not to appeal, or plead, or show his disapproval. He was a waiter, a disciplined, skillful Viennese waiter, and must obey the most perverse customer. “Without egg, madame,” he said softly, almost unreproachfully, and went away to fetch my eggless breakfast, which he brought and set before me with silent, funereal dignity.

We still laugh recalling that tiny incident of nearly sixty years ago, but it is also kept alive in my memory by a sense of guilt. For one thing, in 1954, in Vienna, an egg meant something. The city was just coming out of very bad times. It was still occupied, divided among the U.S., the British, and the Russian armies; the cathedral had rearisen and the opera house was rearising from the rubble of bombing, but damage and destruction was everywhere, and the effect of privation plain to see in the faces and bodies of people on the street. An offer of food in a city that has gone hungry is not a small matter.

Also, I willfully and needlessly disturbed the order of that waiter’s universe. A very small universe, the Viennese café breakfast, but a stable, orderly, perfected one. Better not change something that has achieved excellence. And it was unkind to demand of a person who spent his working life maintaining that excellence to impair it, to do something he so clearly felt was wrong. After all, I could have let him bring the egg and simply not eaten it. He was far too good at his job to have taken notice, except possibly for a mild, commiserative “Madame doesn’t feel hungry this morning?” To have an egg and not to eat it was my privilege. To refuse to let him bring the egg was to interfere with his privilege, which was to bring me a complete and proper Viennese café breakfast. I still want to laugh when I think about it, and I still feel a twinge of guilt.

The guilt has increased since I began, a couple of years ago, to have a soft-boiled egg for breakfast—to have, in fact, a Viennese café breakfast—every morning. Invariably.

I can’t get those lovely, light, crisp European rolls. (Why do the artisanal bread people in this country think crust should be thick and tough? The more leathery, the more artisanal?) But Thomas’s English muffins are very good, so I have them, with tea, fruit, and a three-and-a-half-minute egg eaten, as in Vienna, from the shell.

To soft-boil an egg I put it in a small pot with cold water to cover, set it on high heat till it boils furiously, take it off at once, turn over the egg timer (a three-and-a-half-minute glass), and start the muffins toasting. When the sand is through the glass, the egg comes out of the water and into the egg cup.

As you see, a certain care and ceremony is involved, which is what I wanted to talk about, and also why the egg cup is important.

If you crack a soft-boiled egg and dump it out into a bowl, it tastes the same but isn’t the same. It’s too easy. It’s dull. It might as well have been poached. The point of a soft-boiled egg is the difficulty of eating it, the attention it requires, the ceremony.

So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup. But not everybody is familiar with egg cups.

In this country they are usually an hourglass shape, with one lobe or bowl bigger than the other. The small end is just big enough to hold the egg. You could eat it there from its shell, but most Americans take it out, turn the egg cup over, crack the egg, and dump it into the larger bowl, where they smoosh it around and eat it.

British and European egg cups don’t offer that option; they have no big bowl; they are just a small china cup on a short pedestal, like a goblet, in which the egg sits upright. You have no choice but to eat your egg out of its own shell. This is where things get ceremonial and interesting.

So you put your freshly boiled egg into the egg cup—but which end up? Eggs are not perfect ovoids, they have a smaller end and a bigger end. People have opinions about which end should be up, i.e., which end you’re going to actually eat the egg out of. This difference of opinion can become so passionate that a war may be fought about it, as we know from Jonathan Swift. It makes just as much sense as most wars and most differences of opinion.

I am a Big-Ender. My opinion, which I will defend to the death, is that if the big end is up it’s easier to get the spoon into the opening created when you knock off the top of the egg with a single, decisive whack of your knife blade. Or possibly—another weighty decision, another matter of opinion, with advocates and enemies, the Righteous and the Unrighteous—you lift the top of the egg off carefully from the egg-encircling crack you have made by tapping the shell with the knife blade all the way round about a half-inch down from the summit.

Some mornings I whack. Some mornings I tap. I have no opinion on the matter. It depends on my mood.

Some elements of the ceremony offer no choice. The knife has be steel, since the sulfur in eggs blackens silver, and the egg spoon must also be untarnishable—stainless steel, or horn. I’ve never seen a gold egg spoon, but I’m sure it would do. Whatever the material, the spoon has to have a small bowl with a fine edge on it: a thick edge can’t coax all the egg white off the inside of the shell. The handle is short, for good balance and easy handling. An egg spoon is a tiny implement that, like the Viennese breakfast, cannot be improved. Like all good tools, it gives pleasure by its pure aptness. It does one thing only, but does it perfectly, and nothing else can do it. Trying to eat an egg from the shell with a normal spoon is like mending a wristwatch with a hammer.

The sole imperfection of the egg spoon is that it’s so small it gets lost. Horn spoons are larger, but the beautiful horn spoon my daughter gave me finally wore out, its edge becoming coarse and fibrous. Replacement can be a problem; most Americans don’t eat their eggs from the shell, and the implement has become rare and hard to find. When I see one, I acquire it. My current egg spoon is stainless steel; on the handle are the letters K L M. I will not go into how we came to own this spoon.

You see what I mean about difficulty. Eating an egg from the shell takes not only practice but resolution, even courage, possibly willingness to commit crime.

If you are in the whacking mood, the first whack of the knife on the shell is decisive. A firm whack on a good shell in the right place decapitates the egg cleanly with one blow—ideal. But some eggshells are feeble and crumbly, and sometimes your aim is tentative or faulty (after all, this is something you have to do before breakfast). If you hit too high, the opening isn’t big enough; too low, you get into yolk, which you don’t want to do yet. So maybe you choose to tap instead of whacking—nowhere near as exciting, but you have more control of the outcome.

So now you have opened your egg. You stick the spoon right down into it, but not too suddenly, or the yolk will well up and dribble wastefully down the outside of the shell. The three-and-a-half-minute egg white is barely firm, while the yolk has thickened just enough to make a beautiful golden sauce for the white. Your job is to mix the two nicely so you get a balance of yolk and white in each small spoonful, while not destroying the delicate little bowl you’re eating from, the eggshell. This takes attention.

The more complete the attention, the more you actually taste the egg.

It may be apparent by now that this whole blog is a subtle blow against double-tasking, and a paean to doing one single thing with, as the Bible puts it, “all thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

Nor is there any breakfast there. The grave is without egg.

The flavor of a fresh soft-boiled egg is extremely subtle. I like salt and pepper on a fried egg but nothing at all on a boiled egg. It is completely satisfactory in and by itself. If a little butter from the muffin gets into it, that’s fine too.

The soft-boiled-egg experience is the same every morning and never the same. It remains endlessly interesting. It is invariably delicious. It delivers a small, solid dose of high-quality protein. Who could ask for more?

Of course, I’m very lucky: I can get toxin-free eggs at our co-op from local farmers who don’t cage their birds in pestholes and don’t feed them on carrion. The eggs are brown, with strong shells and orange yolks, not the weak, pallid things laid by hens kept in filth and torment all their lives. The Oregon Legislature has at last decided to ban poultry batteries, hurray—the ban to take effect in 2024, unhurray. The lobbies who run our lives demand that torture, ordure, and disease continue for thirteen more years. I will not live to see the birds go free.

Nôtre-Dame de la Faim

October 2011

I VISITED A great cathedral this week. It’s situated in a mixed industrial/small business/residential area not far from the Portland Airport, an odd place for a cathedral. But it has a huge congregation and is full of people, not just on Sundays but every day of the week.

And it’s big. Nôtre-Dame de Paris covers about 67,000 square feet. This one is nearly twice as big, 108,000 square feet, two full city blocks (and its overflow, adjunct building across the river covers 94,000 square feet).

Nôtre-Dame, with its towers, is much taller, and is built of stone all carved with saints and gargoyles, and is endearingly ancient and beautiful. This one looks rather unimpressive as you approach it, partly because there are buildings near it and you can’t really get a view of it, and partly because it wasn’t built long ago to celebrate and embody spiritual worship, but recently, in dire need, for a specific material purpose. Still, I wouldn’t discount a very large element of the spirit in the building of it.

From the outside it looks like a particularly huge warehouse, but it hasn’t the strangely menacing, fortresslike look of the great windowless citadels of consumerism, Walmart and the rest. When you get inside, you see the cathedral. The high, airy entrance hall leads you first, on an elegantly stone-tiled floor with little bronze decorations set in here and there, to an area of offices and cubicles. Most churches hide their administrative department, but this one puts it right out front. The walls are blond wood, everything is spacious and handsome. Like the high nave of Nôtre-Dame, the startlingly high steel-braced wooden ceiling soars above all the small human activity down on the floor beneath. In the old cathedral that height creates a great, mysterious, upper space of shadows. But the space beneath this vault is luminous.

It wasn’t till I entered the interior, the cathedral proper, that I understood why they’d built the ceiling so high. As there should be, there are great doors to open into the sacred space. And as a sacred space will do, the first sight took my breath away. I stood silent. I remembered what the word awe means.

Much of the interior of the huge building is visible from that doorway, or would be except that the whole floor is covered with immense, towering blocks and piles and stacks of crates, cartons, boxes, and containers, arranged in gigantically severe order, with wide aisles between each tower or bay. Only down the aisles can you see the far walls in the far distance. There are no permanent walls or divisions. The immense, splendidly cantilevered ceiling stretches serenely above it all. The air is cool, fresh, and clean, with the faintest smell of garden stuff, fresh vegetables. Vehicles run quietly up and down the aisles, miniforklifts and the like, looking quite tiny among the high blocks and stacks, constantly busy at moving crates and boxes, bringing in and taking out.

Well, it isn’t a cathedral. That was a metaphor. It’s just a warehouse, after all.

But what kind of warehouse stores nothing to sell? Nothing, not one item in all these (literally) acres of goods, is or ever will be for sale.

Actually, it’s a bank. But not the kind of bank where money is the only thing that happens.

Here is where money doesn’t happen.

This is the Oregon Food Bank. Every box in the great cubical stacks between the aisles, every carton, every can, every bottle, every crate, holds food. Every carton, every can, every pound, every ounce of that food will be given to the people of Oregon who haven’t the money to buy what they need to live on.

It is a cathedral, after all. The cathedral of hunger.

Or should I say the cathedral of generosity? Of compassion, or community, or caritas? It comes to the same thing.

There are people who need help.

There are people who deny it, saying that God helps those who help themselves and the poor and the unemployed are merely shiftless slackers sponging on a nanny government.

There are people who don’t deny poverty, but they don’t want to know about it because it’s all so terrible and what can you do?

And then there are people who help.

This place is the most impressive proof of their existence I ever saw. Their existence, their efficiency, their influence. This place embodies human kindness.

In, of course, the most unspiritual, lowly, humdrum, even gross way. In a thousand cans of green beans, in towers of macaroni boxes, in crates of fresh-picked vegetables, in cold side-chapel refrigerators of meat and cheese… In hundreds of cartons with improbable names of obscure beers on them, donated by the brewers because beer cartons are particularly sturdy and useful for packing food… In the men and women, employees and trained volunteers, operating the machinery, manning the desks, sorting and packaging the fresh produce, teaching survival skills in the Food Bank classrooms, kitchens, and gardens, driving the trucks that bring food in and the trucks that take food out to where it’s needed.

For these towering walls and blocks and reefs of goods—twelve to eighteen thousand pounds of food in each bay of the warehouse—will vanish, melt away like sandcastles, tonight or in a few days, to be replaced instantly by the supply of boxed, canned, glassed, fresh, and frozen food, which in turn will melt away in a day or a week, going where it’s needed.

And that’s everywhere. The Food Bank distributes in every county of the state of Oregon plus one county of Washington State. They don’t have to look far to find people who need help getting enough to eat.

Anywhere kids are, to start with. Many school-age children in our country, towns, and cities don’t get three meals a day, or even two. Many aren’t always sure if they’ll get anything to eat today at all.

How many? About a third of them. One child in three.

Put it this way: If you or I were a statistic-parent with three statistic-kids in school, one of our three children would be hungry. Malnourished. Hungry in the morning, hungry at night. The kind of hungry that makes a child feel cold all the time. Makes a child stupid. Makes a child sick.

Which one of our children… which child…?

The Tree

January 2011

WE TOOK DOWN the Christmas tree this morning. It was a very pretty little fir, three and a half or four feet tall, a tabletop tree, said the woman at the florist’s next to Trader Joe’s, where we bought it. We put it on a wooden box in the corner window of the living room, as I believe a Christmas tree should be seen from outside and also should be able to see outside. To be exact, I don’t think a tree can see, but it may be aware of light and darkness, of insideness and outsideness. In any case it looks right with the sky over it or through its branches. Before we decorated it, it stood there, sturdy, plain dark green, a complicated higher organism, a very definite presence in the room. When we had an artificial tree, its nonentity made me realize what I feel about a living tree, not only the splendid, big, tall Christmas trees we used to have when I was a child and when my children were children, but a little one too—that it is as much a presence in a room as a person or an animal. An unmoving presence that says nothing, but is there. A very taciturn visitor from Norway, perhaps. Speaking no English, entirely undemanding, wanting nothing but a drink of water every few days. Restful. A pleasure to look at. Holding darkness in it, a forest darkness, in the green arms held out so calmly, steadily, without effort.

Our Norwegian visitor leaned out into the room a little—we couldn’t get it quite vertical with the screw pins in the base—but nobody could see it from the side anyhow, as it stood between the writing desk and the bookcase, so we didn’t worry. It was beautifully symmetrical without having had half its branch-tips sheared off with a hedge trimmer, as lot trees so often have. It certainly was a lot tree. It had never been in the forest I saw in it. It had grown on some slope not far from Mount Hood, probably, along with hundreds or thousands of other young firs in straight rows, one of the dreariest sights in our farmlands, almost as soul-blighting as a clear-cut. It is often a sign of the small farmer giving up crop-growing, crowded out by agribusiness, or the nonfarmer putting in a tree lot as a tax write-off. Our tree had not known forest. It was a forest tree all the same. And it had known rain, sun, ice, storm, all the weathers, all the winds, and no doubt a few birds, in its day. And the stars, in its night.

We put the lights on the tree. We put the old golden bird with the ratty tail on top. The small gold glass snail-shell ornaments we bought for our two-foot tree in Paris in ’54, a dozen of them and a dozen gold glass walnuts—one walnut left, and nine snails, one with a hole in its tissue-fragile shell—go on the top branches, because they are small and weigh nothing and you can see them there. The bigger glass balls, some of which are so old they are crazed and translucent, go lower down; the bigger they are the lower they go, it is a rule of life. The little beasts, tigers and lions and cats and elephants, dangle on loops from the branches; the little birds sit up on them, clutching with unsteady wire claws. Now and then a bird loses its grip and is found upside down under its branch and has to be reseated.

The tree looks very nice, a proper Christmas tree, except the LED lights are really much, much too bright for it. They are small but violent. Old-fashioned frosted lights, too big for this tree, would suit it better, with their soft, diffuse glow which you could hide among the branches. And some of the colors of the LEDs are terrible; a screaming magenta is the worst. What has magenta to do with Christmas, or anything else? I’d take off all the magentas and airport-landing-strip blues and have it green red and gold, if I could, but the strings come with five colors, and they don’t seem to sell replacement lights, you have to buy a whole new string, which will, of course, have the same five colors. I made little tubes of tissue paper and slipped them over the small, fiercely glaring bulbs, but it didn’t make much difference, and it looked kind of crummy. All the same I left them on.

So Christmas came, and the tree shone each day and each night until I unplugged it before going to bed. I know you don’t really have to turn the lights off, LEDs burn so cool, but safety is safety, and habit is habit, and anyhow it seems wrong not to let a tree have darkness. Sometimes after I unplugged it I stood with it and looked at it, silent and dark in the dark room, lit only by the glow of the small electric candle behind it that illuminates the sign in the window that says PEACE. The candle cast faint, complicated shadows up on the ceiling through the branches and needles. The tree smelled lovely in the dark.

So Christmas went, and the New Year came, and on the day after New Year’s Day I said we ought to take the tree down, so we did. I wanted to keep it one more day after we took the lights and ornaments off. I liked the tree so much without any decorations. I didn’t want to lose that quiet presence in the room. It hadn’t even started to drop needles. But Atticus is not one for half measures. He took the tree out into the garden and did what had to be done.

He has told me that when it came time for his father to kill the pig he’d raised by hand all year, he’d hire a man to do it, and would leave the house and not come back till the sausage was being made. But Atticus did this deed himself.

After all, the tree had already been cut from its root; its life with us was only a slow dying. A real Christmas tree, a cut tree, is a ritual sacrifice. Better not to deny the fact, but to accept and ponder it.

He saved me some of the dark branches to put in water in a bowl in the front hall. When the trunk dries out it will be good firewood. Next Christmas, maybe.

The Horsies Upstairs

January 2011

ON THE EVE of Christmas Eve the family was all out in the forest where my daughter and son-in-law and three dogs and three horses and a cat live. Three of them live in the horse barn and the pasture at the top of the hill, five of them in the log-cabin-style house at the bottom of the hill, and one of them in great style in a studio cottage with a heating pad all her own, which in winter she deserts only to hunt mice in the woods. That afternoon it was raining, as it had been all December, so everybody was inside, and the kitchen-living-dining room was pretty full of people, the eldest eighty-three and the youngest two.

The two-year-old, Leila, was visiting with her mother and her step-aunt from Toronto. Seven of us had come over for the afternoon, and six were staying there—the hosts upstairs, the Torontans in the study, and one hardy soul out in the trailer. (There is no bed in the studio cottage and Mimi does not share her heating pad.) The dogs were circulating freely among us and there were many good things to eat, arousing much interest in the dogs. For anybody as young as Leila, it must have seemed pretty crowded and noisy and full of strangers and strangeness, but she took it all in with bright eyes and sweet equanimity.

That morning, when it stopped raining for a while, she had gone up the long, steep driveway with the women to the horse barn and riding ring. They played with pretty Icelandic Perla, and Hank, who stands a stalwart ten hands high and is convinced of his authority as the only horse (as opposed to mare) on the premises. Leila sat in the saddle in front of Aunty Cawoline on Melody, the kind, wise, old cutting horse, and very much enjoyed her riding lesson. When Mel picked up her pace, Leila bounced up and down, up and down, and softly sang “Twot! Twot! Twot! Twot!” round and round the ring.

So then, that afternoon, indoors, at some point among the various conversations, somebody said it would be dark before you knew it. And somebody else said, “Pretty soon we’d better go up and feed the horses.”

Leila took this in. Her eyes grew a little brighter. She turned to her mother and asked in a small hopeful voice, “Are the horsies upstairs?”

Her mother gently explained that the horsies were not up in the loft but up in the pasture at the top of the hill. Leila nodded, a little disappointed perhaps, but acceptant.

And I carried her question away with me to smile over and to ponder.

It was both charming and logical. In Toronto, in the limited world of a two-year-old, when somebody talked of going “up,” it would almost always mean “upstairs.”

And to Leila the log-walled house, which is very tall though not really very large, must have seemed immense, labyrinthine, unpredictable, with its doors and staircases and basement and loft and porch, everything unexpected, so that you enter the back door at ground level, walk through the house, and go down a long flight of steps to get to ground level… Leila had probably been up the loft stairs to the bedroom only once, if at all.

Anything could be up those stairs. Melody, Perla, and Hank could be there. Santa Claus could be there. God could be there.

How does a child arrange a vast world that is always turning out new stuff? She does it the best she can, and doesn’t bother with what she can’t until she has to. That is my Theory of Child Development.

I wrote a short story once, all of which was true, about going to a conference on the Northern California coast among the redwoods and having not the faintest idea I’d ever seen the place, the cabins, the creek, before—until I was told, and realized it was true, that I’d lived there for two intense weeks of two summers—that this very place was Timbertall, the summer camp my friends and I went to when we were thirteen and fourteen.

At that age, absolutely all I had noticed enough to remember about the location of Timbertall was that we all got on a bus and rode north for hours and hours talking the whole way, and got off, and were there. Wherever there was. There was where we were. With the creek, and the cabins, the huge stumps, the high dark trees, and us, still talking, and the horses.

Oh, yes, there were horsies up there too. That’s why we were there. That was what mattered, at that age.

I was a kid who, thanks to a wooden jigsaw puzzle of the U.S.A., had the states fairly well located, and had been taught enough geography to acquire some notion of continents and nations. And I knew the redwood country was north of Berkeley, because my parents had driven with me and my brother up that coast when I was nine, and my father was always clear about compass directions.

And that was all I knew at fourteen about where Timbertall was, and all I cared to know.

I am appalled by my ignorance. Yet it had its own logic. I didn’t have to drive the bus, after all. I was a kid, carted around by adults the ways kids are. I had an adequate arrangement of the world, a sufficient understanding of my position, for my needs at the time.

No wonder kids always ask, “Are we there yet?” Because they are there. It’s just the harried parents who aren’t, who have to have all this huge distance between things and have to drive and drive and drive to get to there. That makes no sense to a kid. Maybe that’s why they can’t see scenery. Scenery is between where they are.

It takes years to learn to live between, and thus to get the relationships between things arranged, to make sense of them.

It probably takes the weird adult human mind too. I think animals are where they are in the same way a baby is. Oh, they know the way between places, many of them, as no baby does, and far better than we do—horses for sure, if they’ve been over the ground once. Bees, if another bee dances it for them. Terns above the trackless ocean… Knowing the way, in that sense, is knowing where you are all the way.

At fourteen, unless I was in a very familiar place, I had very little idea where I was. More than Leila, but not that much more.

But at fourteen I knew the horses were not in the loft bedroom. I knew Santa Claus was not at the North Pole. And I was giving a good deal of thought to where God might be.

Children have to believe what they are told. Willingness to believe is as necessary to a child as the suckling instinct is to a baby: a child has so much to learn in order to stay alive and in order to be human.

Specifically human knowledge is imparted largely through language, so first we have to learn language, then listen to what we’re told and believe it. Testing the validity of information should always be permitted and is sometimes necessary but may also be dangerous: the little one had better believe without running any tests that the stove burner could burn even when it isn’t red, that if you eat Gramma’s medicine you will be sick, that running out into the street is not a good idea… Anyhow, there’s so much to be learned, it can’t all be tested. We really do have to believe what our elders tell us. We can perceive for ourselves, but have very little instinctive knowledge in how to act on our perceptions, and must be shown the basic patterns of how to arrange the world and how to find our way through it.

Therefore the incalculable value of true information, and the unforgivable wrongness of lying to a child. An adult has the option of not believing. A child, particularly your own child, doesn’t.

A scenario: Leila, instead of contentedly accepting the information, begins to wail in disappointment, insisting, “No, the horsies are upstairs! They are upstairs!” A softhearted grownup smiles and coos, “Yes, dear, the horsies are upstairs, all cuddled up in bed.”

This is a lie, though a tiny, silly one. The child has learned nothing, but has been confirmed in an existential misunderstanding which she’ll have to sort out somehow, sometime.

That up means up the stairs, up the hill, and a whole lot of other places too, and that its meaning may depend on where you are at the moment, is important information. A child needs all the help she can get in learning to take that vast variety of meanings into account.

Lying, of course, isn’t the same as pretending. Leila and a grownup might have a fine time imagining the horsies in the bedroom, with Hank hogging all the blankets and Perla kicking him and Mel saying, Where’s the hay? But for this to work as imagination, the child has to know that the horsies are in fact in the horse barn. In this sense, truth to fact, insofar as we know what fact is, must come first. The child has to be able to trust what she’s told. Her belief must be honored by our honesty.

I brought in Santa Claus for a reason. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the way we handle him. We had Santa Claus in my family (in fact my mother wrote a lovely children’s book about Santa Claus in California letting his reindeer graze on the new winter clover). When I was a kid we read “The Night Before Christmas,” and we set out milk and cookies by the fireplace, and they were gone in the morning, and we all enjoyed it. People love pretense, and love ritual, and need both. Neither of them is counterfactual. Santa Claus is an odd, quirky, generally benign myth—a real myth, deeply involved in the ritual behaviors of the one great holiday we still have left. As such I honor him.

Very early in my life, like most kids, I could distinguish “Pretend” from “Real,” which means I knew myth and fact were different things and had some sense of the no-man’s land that lies between the two. At any age I can recall, if somebody had asked me, “Is Santa Claus real?” I would, I think, have been confused and embarrassed, blushed red in case it was the wrong answer, and said no.

I don’t think I missed anything not thinking Santa Claus was real the way my parents were real. I could listen out for reindeer hooves with the best of them.

Our kids had Santa Claus; we read the poem, and left milk and cookies out for him; and so do their kids. To me, that’s what’s important. That the bonding ritual be honored, the myth reenacted and carried forward in time.

When I was a kid and other kids started telling about “when they found out about Santa Claus,” I kept my mouth shut. Incredulity is unlovable. I am opening my mouth now because I am too old to be lovable, but still incredulous when I hear people—adults!—mourning over the awful day they found out that Santa Claus wasn’t real.

To me what’s awful is not—as it is usually presented—the “loss of belief.” What’s awful is the demand that children believe or pretend to believe a falsehood, and the guilty-emotion-laden short-circuiting of the mind that happens when fact is deliberately confused with myth, actuality with ritual symbol.

Is what people grieve over the pain not of losing a belief but of realizing that somebody you trusted expected you to believe something they didn’t believe? Or is it that in losing literal belief in our fat little Father Christmas, they also lose love and respect for him and what he stands for? But why?

I could go on from here in several directions, one of them political. As some parents manipulate their children’s beliefs, however well-meaningly, some politicians play more or less knowingly on people’s trust, persuading them to accept a deliberately fostered confusion of actuality with wishful thinking and fact with symbol. Like, say, the Third Reich. Or Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom. Or Mission Accomplished.

But I don’t want to go there. I just want to meditate on the horsies upstairs.

Belief has no value in itself that I can see. Its value increases as it is useful, diminishes as it is replaced by knowledge, and goes negative when it’s noxious. In ordinary life, the need for it diminishes as the quantity and quality of knowledge increase.

There are areas in which we have no knowledge, where we need belief, because it’s all we can act on. In the whole area we call religion or the realm of the spirit, we can act only on belief. There, belief may be called knowledge by the believer: “I know that my Redeemer liveth.” That’s fair, so long as it’s fair also to maintain and insist upon the difference, outside religion, between the two things. In the realm of science, the value of belief is nil or negative; only knowledge is valuable. Therefore, I don’t say I believe two plus two is four, or that the earth goes around the sun, but that I know it. Because evolution is an ever-developing theory, I prefer to say I accept it, rather than that I know it to be true. Acceptance in this sense is, I suppose, the secular equivalent of belief. It can certainly provide endless nourishment and delight for mind and soul.

I’m willing to believe people who say they couldn’t live if they lost their religious belief. I hope they’ll believe me when I say that if my intellect goes, if I’m left groping in confusion unable to tell the real from the imagined, if I lose what I know and the capacity to learn, I hope I die.

To see a person who’s lived only two years in this world seeking and finding her way in it, perfectly trusting, having her trust rewarded with truth, and accepting it—that was a lovely thing to see. What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn between our birthday and last day—from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.

First Contact

May 2011

I HAVE SEEN many rattlesnakes, I have eaten fried rattlesnake; but only once have I ever been in contact with a living rattler. Though contact is not the word I really want—it is metaphorical and inexact. We did not touch. Maybe it was communication, though of a very limited kind. As communication between alien species is perhaps doomed to be.

I have told the story often as a comedy, a story in which people behave ridiculously, with a happy ending. Here it is:

We were at the old ranch in the Napa Valley and I was just about to sit down on one of the 1932 iron chaise lounges (carefully, because if you sit too far toward the end, the whole unwieldy thing stands up and throws you off like a bronco) when I heard a noise I recognized. That was the first communication. It was the hissing buzz of the rattlesnake’s rattles. Startled by my movements, it was heading off into the high grass, rattling away. About fifteen feet away it looked back, saw me looking at it, and stopped there, its head up and facing me and its gaze fixed on me. As mine was fixed on it.

I hollered for Charles. The rattler paid no attention. I believe they are deaf. I suppose they “hear” their own rattle as vibration in their body, not in the air.

Charles came out and we discussed the situation—not calmly. I said, “If he goes off into the high grass there, we’ll never dare walk out in the pasture the whole time we’re here.”

We thought we had to kill the rattlesnake. That’s what you do, generally, in the country, at a place where little kids come and run around.

Charles went and got the big heavy long-handled hoe my father called the Portugee hoe, with which rattlers had been killed before, by others. Not by us. Charles got close enough to strike.

The rattler and I had never taken our eyes off each other, or moved.

Charles said, “I can’t.”

I said, “I couldn’t either.”

“So what do we do?” we said.

The rattler was probably thinking the same thing.

“Go see if Denys is there?” Charles said.

I said, “I don’t think it’ll move so long as we keep staring at each other, so you go.”

And Charles went up the driveway and down the road a couple hundred yards to our only near neighbors, the Cazets. It took a while. All that while, the snake and I did not move and looked steadily into each other’s eyes. They say a snake’s gaze is hypnotic, but who was hypnotizing whom?

We were like people newly in love who “can’t take their eyes off each other.” This was not love, but it was something equally intense, and even more immediately a matter of life and death.

It is this brief time, five or six minutes I suppose, ten minutes at most, that over the years I have thought of again and again, always with the vividness of the moment and always with a sense of its importance, or import: of there being a great deal to learn from it.

During this time, the rattlesnake and I were alone together. Alone in all the world. We were held together by common fear—bonded. We were held in a spell—entranced.

This time was outside ordinary time, and outside ordinary feelings; it involved danger for both of us; and it involved a bond between creatures who do not and cannot ordinarily relate to each other in any way. Each would naturally try not to relate—to just get away—or to kill in self-defense.

In all these respects, I think it isn’t amiss to think of this time as sacred.

The sacred and the comic are not that far apart, something the Pueblo Indians seem to know better than most of us do.

Charles and Denys came panting down the driveway with the big galvanized garbage can and a piece of semirigid white plastic tubing about fifteen feet long. Denys had the tube; he knew what to do because he’d done it before. A distinguished artist/author of children’s books, he was a year-rounder in the valley. And his house was on a pretty little property which, before the house was built, we used to call Rattlesnake Clearing.

The snake continued to look at me only and I at it only, while Denys set the garbage can down on its side with the opening facing the snake, maybe twenty feet from it and very visible to it. Then, coming quietly round behind it at full tube-length, he flicked the end of the tube near its head. That broke the spell. I looked away from the snake at the tube, the snake looked away from me at the tube, and then flowed hurriedly away from the thing flicking about in the air behind it and made straight for the welcoming dark cave of the garbage can. It flowed right into it—at which Charles ran to upend the can, and clapped the lid on.

A mighty and wrathful commotion took place inside the can. It shivered and trembled and all but danced. We stood in awe and listened to the rage of a truly angry rattlesnake in an echo chamber. It finally quieted down.

“Now what?”

“Anywhere a good ways away from the house.”

“There’s the millionaire up at the end of the road,” said Denys. “I’ve turned several snakes loose up there.”

A pleasing thought. The millionaire was never there, nobody lived on his lovely hilltop. Excellent rattlesnake territory. The three humans and the garbage can all got in the car and drove up the road, the snake in the can making some vicious criticisms in a low, hissing buzz along the way. At the end of the road we got out and laid the can down, knocked the lid off with the invaluable plastic tube, and watched the split-second disappearance of the snake into a thousand acres of wild oats.

It was our garbage can, the one that still stands up at the top of the driveway where the garbage company can collect on Mondays. I have never looked at that can since, in all these years, without thinking of what it held, once.

A teaching, a blessing, may come in strange ways, ways we do not expect, or control, or welcome, or understand. We are left to think it over.

The Lynx

November 2010

LAST WEEK MY friend Roger and I went out to Bend, the eastern Oregon city where a lot of retired people in search of sunlight and a dry climate have been settling since the 1990s. From Portland the shortest road is over Mount Hood and through the vast Warm Springs Reservation. It was a bright late October day, with the big broadleaf maples making masses of pure gold in the evergreen forests. The blue of the sky got more intense as we went down from the summit into the clear air and open landscapes of Oregon’s dry side.

Bend is named, I guess, for the bend of its lively river in which it sits. The Three Sisters and other snow cones of the Cascades tower up over it in the west, and the vast expanses of the high desert sweep on out eastward. In recent years the city grew and thrived with the influx of settlers, but it hit hard times with the recession. Too much of its prosperity depended on the construction trades. Downtown is still pleasant, but there are gaps, with several fine restaurants gone, and it looks as if some new resorts out toward Mount Bachelor are paralyzed at the platting stage.

We stayed at a motel there on the west side of the river, which is built up at intervals, with bits of juniper forest and sagebrush plain in between. The long, wide boulevards go winding around in curves, crisscrossing each other at three- and four-exit roundabouts. It appears that the people who laid out the roads wanted to imitate what happens when you drop noodles on the floor. Though Tina at Camalli Books had given us careful instructions with all the road names and all the roundabout exits on the way to and from our motel—and though a western skyline of six- to ten-thousand-foot mountain peaks would seem to provide adequate orientation—we never once left the motel without getting lost.

I learned to dread the Old Mill District. As soon as I saw the sign saying OLD MILL DISTRICT I knew we were lost again. If Bend were a big city instead of just a far-flung one we might still be there trying to escape from the Old Mill District.

Roger and I were there to do a reading and signing of our book Out Here at the bookstore Friday evening and at the High Desert Museum Saturday afternoon. The museum is on Highway 97 a few miles south of town. A bit farther on is Sunriver, one of the earliest and biggest resort developments. Roger suggested we have lunch there. Given the money that flows through those residential resorts, I was expecting something on the gourmet side; but the bar and grill served the same huge piles of heavy food that you get at a bar and grill anywhere in America, where the idea of a light lunch is a pound or two of nachos.

I haven’t stayed at Sunriver but have spent a few nights at other high-end resorts in the area. They are laid out artfully to blend into the austere and beautiful landscape. Built of wood and painted or stained in a repetitive range of muted colors, the houses are unobtrusive, with plenty of space around them and trees left standing between them. All the streets curve. Straight streets are anathema to the resort mind. Right angles say City, and resorts are busy saying Country, and that’s why all the boulevards west of the river loop and swoop about so gracefully like noodles. The trouble is, since the juniper trees and the sage bushes and the buildings and the streets and the boulevards all look pretty much alike, if you don’t remember just where Colorado Drive connects with Century Drive before the roundabout exit to Cascade Drive, if you don’t have a good inner or external GPS system, you get lost.

Staying a couple of years ago at one of these resorts in a granny flat in somebody’s condo, I could get lost within a hundred yards of the house. All the curvy streets and roads were lined with groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones that exactly resembled the other groups of houses in tasteful muted earth tones, and there were no landmarks, and it all went on, over and over, sprawling out, without sidewalks—because of course the existence of such a place is predicated entirely on driving, on getting to it, from it, and around it by car. I don’t drive.

Bend is, I believe, the largest city in America with no public transportation system. They were fixing to do something about that when the bottom fell out of the building trade.

So after getting lost a couple of times walking, because I couldn’t tell which tastefully muted house on which curving road was my house, I was uneasy about going out again. But if granny didn’t go for a walk she was trapped in the granny flat. And that was pretty bad. When you first walked in, you thought, Oh! very nice!—because the whole inner wall was a mirror, which reflected the room and the big window, making it look large and light. In fact the room was so small it was almost entirely filled with bed.

The bed was piled with ornamental pillows. I counted them, but have forgotten how many there were—say twenty or twenty-five ornamental pillows, and four or five enormous teddy bears. When you took the bears and pillows off the bed so you could use the bed, there was no place to put them but on the floor around the bed, which meant there was no floor space, only pillows and bears. There was a tiny kitchen on the other side of a divider. No desk, no chair, though there was a blessed window seat to sit in, with a big view of trees and sky. I lived in the window seat, making my way through the bears and pillows when it was time for bed.

A door, which could not be locked, led down a corridor to the owners’ apartment, which was occupied. I put my suitcase and eight or ten of the pillows and the hugest, most obese teddy bear against the door as a barrier against absent-minded intrusion by my unknown hosts. But I didn’t have any real faith in that bear.

Roger and I kept passing that very resort on our noodly way to refinding our motel, and I winced every time I saw it, afraid we might somehow get into it and get lost in it again.

I feel vaguely guilty about preferring a mere motel to a carefully planned, upscale residential resort. But the guilt is vague while the preference is clear and categorical. I like motels. Exclusivity isn’t my bag. “Gated communities” are not communities in any sense of the word I understand. I know that a great many of the people who own or time-share or rent places in these dry-side resorts go there not for the exclusive company of other middle-class white people but for the marvelous air and light of the high desert, the forests, the ski slopes, the spaciousness and silence. I know. That’s fine. Just don’t make me stay in one. Especially not one equipped with giant teddy bears.

But all this is merely preparation for getting to the lynx.

The lynx lives at the High Desert Museum. Briefly, when he was a kitten somebody pulled out his claws (“declawing” a cat is the same as pulling out a human being’s fingernails and toenails or cutting off the last joint of each toe and finger). Then they pulled out his four great cat fangs. Then they pretended he was their itty-bitty kitty. Then they got tired of him, or got scared of him, and dumped him. He was found starving.

Like all the birds and animals at the High Desert Museum, he is a wild creature who can’t survive in the wild.

His cage is inside the main building. It is a long enclosure with three solid walls and one glass wall. It has trees and some hiding places, and is roofless, open to the weather and the sky.

I don’t think I’d ever seen a lynx when I first met him. He is a beautiful animal, chunkier and more compact than a mountain lion. His very thick dense fur of a honeybuff color has a flowing scatter of dark spots on legs and flanks and goes pure white on belly, throat, and beard. Big paws, ever so soft-looking, but you wouldn’t want to be at the receiving end of one of those paws, even if its fierce, hooked weaponry has been torn out. Short tail, almost a stub—when it comes to tail, the mountain lion has it all over the lynx and bobcat. Lynx ears are rather queer and charming, with a long tip; his right ear is a bit squashed or bent. A big squarish head, with the calm, enigmatic cat smile, and great gold eyes.

The glass wall doesn’t look like one-way glass. I’ve never asked about it. If he is aware of the people on the other side of the glass, he doesn’t let them know it. He gazes out sometimes, but I have not seen his eyes catch on anything or follow anyone on the other side of the glass. His gaze goes right through you. You are not there. He is there.

I found and fell in love with the lynx during the last evening of a literary conference a couple of years ago. The writers at the meeting had been invited to a banquet at the museum to meet and mix with people who supported the conference with donations. This kind of thing is a perfectly reasonable attempt to reward generosity, though, knowing what writers are like, it must often be terribly disappointing to the donors. It is also an ordeal for many of the writers. People like me who work alone tend to be introverts and, indeed, uncouth. If piano is the opposite of forte, graceful chitchat with strangers is definitely my piano.

During the hour of wine and cheese before dinner, all the donors and writers milled about the main hall of the museum, talking. Being no good at milling and talking, and noticing a corridor off the main hall with no people in it, I sneaked off to explore it. First I found the bobcat (who must wake up now and then, though so far I have only seen him asleep). Then, getting farther away from the chatter of my species, going farther into dimness and silence, I came on the lynx.

He was sitting gazing out into the dimness and silence with his golden eyes. The pure gaze of the animal, Rilke called it. The gaze that is purely gaze: that sees through. For me, at that moment of feeling inadequate and out of place, the unexpected, splendid animal presence, his beauty, his perfect self-containment, was refreshment, consolation, peace.

I hung out with the lynx until I had to go back to the Bandar-log. At the end of the party I sneaked back for a moment to see him again. He was sleeping majestically in his little treehouse, great soft paws crossed in front of his chest. I had lost my heart for good.

I saw him again last year when my daughter Elisabeth drove me around eastern Oregon for four days (a grand trip, of which I hope to put a record in words and pictures on my site, if Elisabeth and I can goad each other into getting it together). She and I saw the displays and the otters and the owls and the porcupine and everything else at the museum, and ended in a long contemplation of the lynx.

And last week, before the reading, while Roger was doing all the hard work getting the books to sign into the museum, I could spend another half hour with him. When I came, he was pacing about, very handsome and restless. If he had a tail that was worth lashing he would certainly have been lashing it. After a few minutes he vanished through a big metal cat flap into some kind of back room not on view to the public. Fair enough, I thought, he wants some privacy. I went on to look at the live butterfly exhibit, which of course was lovely. The Oregon High Desert Museum is one of the most perfectly satisfying places I know.

When I came back down the corridor the lynx was sitting quite close to the glass, eating a largish bird. A grouse, was my guess. At any rate a wild bird, not a chicken. He had a tail feather hanging down from his chin for a while, which might have reduced his dignity in the eyes of beholders, but he does not acknowledge beholders.

He worked at his bird with diligence and care. He discussed his bird, as they used to say of people eating lamb chops. He was quite absorbed in discussing it. Lacking all four fangs, he was pretty much in the position of a human lacking incisors: he had to go at it sideways, with his molars. He did this neatly. It slowed him down, I am sure, but he never grew impatient, even when all he got was a mouthful of feathers. He just put a big soft honey-colored paw on his lunch and went at it again. When he got seriously inside the bird, some children who came by squealed, “Eeeyew! He’s eating the insides!” and some other children who came by murmured with satisfaction, “Oh look, he’s eating the guts.”

I had to go away then and do the reading and signing, so I could not see him finish lunch.

When I came back after an hour or so for a goodbye glimpse, the lynx was curled up comfortably asleep in his treehouse bedroom. One wing and a beak lay on the dirt near the glass wall. On three tree stumps, the servants of the lynx had laid out three dead mice—an elegant dessert presentation, as the fancy restaurants say. I imagined that later, when the museum closed, when all the primates had finally gone away, the big cat might wake up and yawn, and stretch himself lithely down from his treehouse, and eat his desserts one by one, slowly, in silence, all by himself in the darkness.

There is a connection that I am groping for, a connection between the resorts and the lynx. Not the noodly streets that took us from one to the other, but a mental connection that has something to do with community and solitude.

The resorts are neither city nor country; they are semi-communities. Most of their population is occasional or transient. The only day workers are gardeners, janitors, people doing upkeep. They don’t live in the nice houses. Most of the people that do are there not because their work takes them there but to get away from their work. They’re not there because they have common interests with others there but to get away from other people. Or to pursue sports such as golf and skiing, which pit the individual against himself. Or because they long for the solitude of the wilderness.

But we aren’t a solitary species. Like it or not, we are the Bandar-log. We are social by nature, and thrive only in community. It is entirely unnatural for a human being to live long completely alone. So when we get sick of crowds and yearn for space and silence, we build these semi-communities, pseudo-communities, in remote places. And then, sadly, by going to them, swarming into the desert, all too often we find no true community, but only destroy the solitude we sought.

As for cats, most of their species are not social at all. The nearest thing to a cat society is probably a troop of active lionesses providing for the cubs and the indolent male. Farm cats sharing a barn work out a kind of ad hoc social order, though the males tend to be less members of it than a danger to it. Adult male lynxes are loners. They walk by themselves.

The strange fortune of my lynx brought him to live in an artificial environment, a human community utterly foreign to him. His isolation from his natural, complex wilderness habitat is grievous and unnatural. But his aloofness, his aloneness, is the truth of his own nature. He retains that nature, brings it among us unchanged. He brings us the gift of his indestructible solitude.

Notes from a Week at a Ranch in the Oregon High Desert

August 2013

THE HOUSE WHERE we stay is on a small cattle ranch, in the valley of a creek that comes energetically down off a mountain, cutting a winding oasis of willows and grass between very steep ridges topped with basalt walls like battlements—rimrock. Across the creek is the ranchhouse under a huge old weeping willow. The eastern ridge rises immediately behind it; immediately behind our house, the western ridge. Level, grassy pastures fill the narrow land between; the steep slopes are sagebrush, rabbitbrush, bare dirt, rock. Far up the long valley, most of the ranch stock are still in summer pasture. It’s very quiet around the house. The nearest town is three miles to the north. Its population this year is five.

On the First Day

Five swallows sit the near wire.

A fiercely agitated flicker lights on the other wire, then follows its own crackling cry.

Rain hangs in the overcast, heavy above the ridge.

A hen has laid an egg: outbursts of proud contentment. Two roosters crow, competing.

The peacocks make their gallant, melancholy, meowing trumpet call.

Soon the sun will break above the rimrock of the ridge, an hour after rising.

Flights of blackbirds pass in the cool, shadowed air between the eastern and the western rimrock, dozens at a flight, each flight a sound of many wings, an airy throbbing rush and thrill. The creaking whicker of wind in feather, now and then. Now and then a chirp.

In silence far above them swallows follow the hunt, the least and sweetest predators.

A contrail feathers out white over the eastern ridge.

As my eyes begin to have to look away from the slow intolerable brightening I close them and inside the lids see the long curve of the ridge dark red, the darkest red: above it a band of green, the purest green. Each time I look and close my eyes again, the band of green grows wider, burning clear, unmitigated fire of emerald. Then at its center appears a circle of pale, unearthly blue.

I open my eyes and see the source, the sun, one glance, and look down blinded, humble, to the earth, the dull black lava pavement of the path.

The warmth of the sun is on my face as soon as its light is.

After the tremendous thunderstorm of afternoon, tall shivering towers of rain that swept across the pastures, wind that writhed the great old willow like seaweed in the waves, after all that was over and the quiet dusk was filling up the air between the ridges, the horses got to frisking. The little roan and the three bays nipped and kicked, ran and reared, chest to chest; even Daryll, old paint swayback boss, got into it with the colts a bit. They teased, they galloped across the pastures, hooves drummed that wild music on the ground. They quieted down, drifting off north along the creek. Old paint’s white flank glimmered like fireflies in the willowy dark.

In the night, awake, I thought of them standing in the wet grass, among the willows, in the night.

I stood on the doorstep in the deep night. Cloud-veils crossed the blazing pavement of the firmament and passed. Above the eastern ridge a shining blur, the Pleiades.

On the Second Night

On the second night all creatures woke, and the sleepless cricket was silent suddenly. The thunder spoke from ridge to ridge, from canyon to canyon, far, then nearer. Darkness split wide open to reveal what it hides. Only for a moment can the eyes of the creatures see the world in that awful light.

On the Third Day

In the afternoon the ravens of the western ridge flew with their children across the air between the ridges, calling in their language full of r’s. The youngest talked a lot, the elders answered briefly. Then all at once there seemed to be five ravens? six?—no: these were vultures, materializing from the sky, eleven, twelve, nine, seven… soaring, vanishing, appearing, circling, playing with heights and distances and one another in their marvelous, calm, and never broken silence.

After a while they all drifted off back south toward the mountain, quiet lords of the warm towers of the air.

Walking up the road from Diamond after dinner, we heard way off across the fields the shrill, uncanny chorus, a coyote family. A nighthawk’s twang. Metal rattled loud where a hoof touched it in the effortless leap: the doe flitted off into twilight like a rolling-falling wave. Then, from the old, tall poplars hoarding darkness, voices spoke softly with complete authority. Under cloud, the red sun shone out, sank, was gone. The owls said nothing more. The old trees released their darkess finally.

On the Morning of the Fourth Day

Sunlight fills the open valley half a mile away, but here between the rimrocked ridges I sit in windy shadow; half an hour yet to wait on the lava doorstep, while the rain from yesterday’s thundershower drips from gutterless eaves onto my head and book, for the brightness over the dark bulk of the ridge to gather and center into the sun itself.

The big black cattle munch industrious on rain-gift grass just outside the wooden fence around the house. A peacock pulls his poor, slattern tail along through molting August, pride reduced to sapphire head and rajah’s crest and the brassy, meowing, melancholy jungle cry.

The banty rooster shrills: It-is-a-clarion-call! It-is-a-clarion-call! The big rooster exerts the unjustified superiority of a deeper voice. The hens pay no attention, scattering out, scudding along like sailboats over the grass. Now they begin to chatter, to gather back to the henyard: Gretchen has come out to scatter feed.

The contrail shines where it has each morning, drifting now steadily north and east to where the sun will rise. It slowly passes, iridescent, behind the ridge that darkens as the brightness grows.

It is risen. It is risen in beauty.

The reliable miracle, a couple of minutes later and a little farther south each day.

The lesser miracle, the brief transubstantiation of black lava into glimmering red-violet and blue-green light in my observing and delighted eyes, has occurred, is over. The rough black rock keeps its secret.

The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability. He is drawn to my orange tea mug.

The big black heavy cattle munch and breathe and gaze, each with its following of small black birds. All living things work hard to make their living.

I sit on the rough black steps and try to tell the secret that they keep. But I cannot.

They keep it.

On the Fifth Afternoon

Hundreds of blackbirds gathered in the pastures south of the house, vanishing completely in the tall grass, then rising out of it in ripples and billows, or streaming and streaming up into a single tree up under the ridge till its lower branches were blacker with birds than green with leaves, then flowing down away from it into the reeds and out across the air in a single, flickering, particulate wave. What is entity?