list three daring things you’ve done…

A friend asked us to post three things that we did when we were young—those adventures where you look back on and say "I can't believe I did that.” Well, apparently I’m a bit of an adrenaline junkie. I couldn’t choose just three insane moments in my life. True, I was usually with a boyfriend, but not always. And it’s probably not fair to ask me about during exploits, there were too many to list. Probably one reason why I became a writer.

My boyfriend and I hitchhiked up from Marin County to Victoria, BC in the early 70s, slept under a spruce tree in Stanley Park. Then we hitched up-island to catch the ferry from Cape Scott/Port Hardy to Prince Rupert, but we missed the boat, then had to camp on damp moss covered ledges for a few days until the next ferry came in as there was nothing there, not even a gas station, let alone, a hotel. 

The ferry ride to Prince Rupert took  more than 15 hours, we hit huge swells in the open water of the Queen Charlotte Straits. The massive swells rocked the ship around like a toy and everybody was barfing. When we got to Prince Rupert there was no place to stay so we camped in a graveyard on top of a hill and the sun absolutely refused to set, it was June.

Then we hitched over to Prince George where the mosquitos were the size of hummingbirds, the resident moose was not happy to share his boggy meadow with us. Then we hitched down to Banff, and Jasper, and slept in hotel doorways as all the campgrounds and hostels were full. It seemed that all of Canada was on the move. We camped out in day-use picnic shelters. They had wood burning stoves! 

The worst part of the journey was when we got stuck in front of the Columbia Glacier, I resorted to wearing my down sleeping bag as a coat, the ice field was so cold. I looked like a mustard colored abominable snowman in my down bag so no one would stop for us. The toe of the glacier hissed and sung. I wasn’t prepared for that. Then we went over to Calvary (why?), and headed back down through Kamloops, and down the coast to SF. An epic summer journey.

I went to the USSR several times in 1989-91, created a poetry and art exchange (it was Glasnost) and traveled from Kyiv to Leningrad on a train illegally, incognito, sans internal visa, because I was told no, I couldn’t go by the local authorities, then we couldn’t get a train ticket back to Cherkassy. In those days, Americans weren’t allowed to travel freely, without a pass, and certainly not on common trains for the ludí, the people. 

In Leningrad, on another trip, a Soviet friend thought I would like to help restore a fresco in the dome of the Church of Atheism & Religion (St. Isaac’s). To get to the outer dome, we had to climb up an iron catwalk to the top of the outside dome, the iron railing was coming off, it was midwinter, and a long way down to the ground, OSHA would not have approved, but Russia was like Mexico, everything was jerryrigged. When we circled the dome where there was a little door that let us inside the brass dome between the fresco, a tunnel to the inner dome. Wild. We had to leap down to a trapeze net stretched across the opening of the dome (I was scared shitless), then we were suited up in climbing harnesses and ropes, suspended like spiders to clean and scrape the old fresco. Getting back down to the ground was worse. I had never rappelled down a rope before, the marble floor was a long way down, my hair got caught in the cleat and I thought it was curtains. Oh, and neither my friend or his friend spoke any English—just to up the game. 

Another time we walked out on a frozen Ozirkii lake, but when we got to the middle, we heard it crack, the loudspeaker from shore was telling us to get off the lake, but I couldn’t understand Russian. We got off the lake quickly.

We hiked in to Machu Picchu in 1989 the long way, 42 km, through milpia forest fires, and so couldn’t see the Andes, we went through a cloud forest, saw many fantastic Inca ruins over Dead Woman Pass. I rode a pack horse that had never been ridden before, I was stuck with him because we dawdled and missed out on all the good horses. He had no bridle, so I made a hackamore from an old stiff leather lariat. 

We were cantering along a stream when he veered left up a narrow trail and ran full speed to a chicha hut. I had his head in my lap and still he wouldn’t stop. We slammed into that adobe chicha hut sideways, so hard, that dust rose from the roof like smoke. I lifted my leg over the pack frame and let the horse take the brunt. He slammed sideways onto the wall. All the Incan men sitting outside at the bar, scattered like the wind, drinks in hand. The horse got the message, he wasn’t going to lose me. He was much better behaved for the rest of the trip. So when we went up an incline so steep, I fell off his back trying to avoid a tree limb, because my backpack had made me top heavy. I fell under the horse. Luckily he froze and I crawled out from under him. 

Then the train to Arequipa and Lake Titicaca was stopped by the army in the altiplano, and they searched everyone, they bayonetted the natives luggage (looking for smuggled people) because of the Sendero Luminoso uprising. We had just seen the corpse of the defense lawyer of Manuel Febres Flores, outside the Chorillos Tunnel near Lima. It was a hairy time to be in Peru. Tanks in Lima. Car bombs.

Then there was the time the US invaded Tegucigalpa right as we were headed there, oops! We were stuck in the Guatemala Airport for days with no flights out. We had just come from the highlands, had met the Guatemalan army there and in Tikal too. They were not the good guys. Neither were the guerllla. We learned to tell who was who by their guns: AK 47s guerrillero, Uzi, GA. People were being disappeared, including tourists. I had nightmares for years.

I never did get married, though my Soviet friend proposed to me in the lobby of the Hotel Cosmos in Moscow…

Then there was the time a young bear slept on me in Little Yosemite….before I went up Half Dome, I did it twice, why, I don’t know…. And that time in the Galapagos between islands in the open sea with too many people, in a tiny open panga, when a drifting fishnet got stuck in the propeller. Oh, but the albatrosses and flying fish and the dolphins alongside the boat made it worthwhile. 

I won’t mention the time I snorkeled alone in a volcanic crater, called the Corona del Diablo, and a sea lion mistaking me for one of his harem because I was in a black wetsuit, attacked me. Maybe he thought I was a silkie. I had to keep spinning like a top to keep him from biting me. I thought I was going to drown for sure but no one would even know because I was far from the boat. I was a super snorkeler. And I often broke the rules, never snorkel alone. I could never get enough of it. 

Then there was that time I was snorkeling alone, far from shore with a shark in the Bahamas…

I could go on….

URBAN RENEWAL

URBAN RENEWAL

I used to dream the Bay Area was surrounded by snowcapped peaks, 

and I wondered which mountain range I was channeling. 

San Francisco was home, my natal ground,

but wanderlust took me to the Sierra Nevada range,

then north to Seattle, Vancouver, and Horseshoe Bay, 

and then up-island to isolated fishing hamlets, Naniamo, 

Uclulet on the mailboat, we drove to Tofino on dirt roads 

before there was a gringo trail. 

I remember walking along the bluffs below Pike Street Market 

where the native people slept it off from the night before, 

they were littered along the railroad tracks like strange pinnipeds.

The forgotten ones filled the jails, and a nation turned its back 

on the indigent and those of fragile mind and body, 

pushed for urban renewal to clean up the riffraff for once and for all.

The detritus of the past, swept away like a tidal wave before our eyes.

In Vancouver BC, first Gastown, and then Chinatown disappeared.

The streets of Ferndale and Eureka, steam-cleaned. 

There was nowhere else left for the indigent to go. 

Folks rejoiced waiting for fresh-eyed tourists to arrive.

The Marin architect that cleaned up Ghirardelli Square, 

blueprinted the way with cookie-cutter plans for urban renewal.

The underbellies of cities, gutted like fish, stripped of psyche.

It was like an echo, the cavernous gods of tourism, each town

lost more than an inconvenient eyesore. Now, across America,

malls, dressed in brick façades and quaint lamp posts, lie fallow, 

a wasteland of tourist dollars with shops selling teeshirts 

as if to prove residency, and bright trinkets made in China. 

Meanwhile, the indigent moved uptown to sleep on street corners.

Those mountains in my dreams, they were in mourning, 

protecting those who grew up in their shadow.

2/16/22 CPITS Write On! Terri Glass class First final draft.

Weave and Mend, folksong from Daughters of Copper Woman

The Poets & Writers Townhall meeting led me on a very merry goose chase tracking down an earworm of a song I had once heard long ago that haunted me—as we were discussing how to teach during the time of Covid. As with all earworms, the song interrupted my thoughts and became a message. I finally succumbed and looked it up, and was glad I did too. I learned a lot. I love being a folksong armchair historian.

My first go-to was Mudcat, of course, I found a Mudcat thread on the song. At first I couldn’t find anything on the song because I didn’t have the right title. The Browne Sisters—the version I’m familiar with—called it Old Woman, which yielded a wild goose chase, and no lyrics. 

Now I  love the Browne Sisters, and know them well from various Highland Games, but sometimes it’s hard to glean the lyrics from their amazing harmonies. Many thanks to Shay Black who saw my query on Facebook and sent me the full lyrics. He also gave me another lead, songwriter Mary Trup. But I also discovered that Anne Cameron wrote the poem.

No one on the Mudcat thread connected the song up with the writer, Anne Cameron, or where she grew up, Nanaimo, or that she was tapping into Nootka creation stories in Daughters of Copper Woman, so this is theoretically where this song came from. 

More research is ahead for me. Note that the name is spelled Mary Troupe here. I kind of like it. Created ca. 1981. Still searching, still sleuthing. Meanwhile, I found simple acapella version here. No ads. Great graphics in this vsrsion and Janet Russell’s harp accompaniment suits this song. No ads.

Below is songwriter Mary Trup’s version as sung by Shay’s sister, Irish Senator Frances Black. Now I am officially obsessed by this song. Words by Anne Cameron, slightly rearranged but that is the way of folksongs—even newly minted ones. I can’t seem to find anything on the songwriter Mary Trup, where she’s from, or if the tune is borrowed, or based on Celtic music, but it does have a Celtic echo and lilt. It’s certainly a song and melody that grabbed me by the heart strings.

Weave and Mend

Old woman is watching, watching over you
In the darkness of the storm, she is watching
She is weaving, mending, gathering the colors
She is watching over you. 

Chorus:
So, weave and mend
Weave and mend
Gather the fragments safe
And win the sacred circle,
Sisters, weave and mend,
Weave and mend,
Oh women, weave and mend

Old woman is weaving, gathering the threads
Her bones become the loom she is weaving,
She is watching, weaving, gathering the colors
She is watching over you.

Chorus:

For years I’ve been watching, waiting for old woman
Feeling lost and so alone, I’ve been watching.
Now I find her weaving, gathe ring the colors
Now I find her in myself.

And another version on the Black Brothers Band webpage. 

(It took me a while (a year and a half) but I finally got around to recording the song for Carol Hoorn, replete with a cat who was concerned about me. Link.)

My persistence paid off, with the clues I had uncovered, eventually I found a great book review. The Wordpress blog is called Historian’s Notebook, by Faith L. Justice. Ironically I was in Naniamo during that summer of 1981. I could have met her, if only I had known. But I had to wait a half lifetime to put this story together.

Emily Carr, Canadian painter & writer, Group of Seven

Autumn, 1922-23, oil, Arts & Crafts style (1913-27) Glenbow Museum, Calgary.

One of my favorite artists of the Pacific Northwest, Emily Carr,  (Dec. 13, 1871 – Mar. 2, 1945) was also a writer who chronicled the stories of the First Peoples of British Columbia. Carr’s memoir, Klee Wyck, inspired me to travel making a pilgrimage of sorts to the then remote Nootka villages of Tofino and Ucluelet on western Vancouver Island, and later, to the village of K’san on the Skeena River, in the late 1970s, where I promptly got sick and spent a few days camping in the bushes outside of town—to the consternation of my boyfriend, the villagers, and jeweler-woodcarver Vernon Stephens, who had once driven us from the middle of nowhere to another middle of nowhere. Another story...

Though relatively unknown and unrecognized in her lifetime, Carr was one of the first North American Modernist painters to use the Post-Impressionist painting style. She bucked the prim Victorian society and studied art for three years at the California School of Design/San Francisco Art Institute, and later, Carr spent a year in France, 1910-11, where she met the Cubists and Fauvists. Their use of bold color and broad shapes greatly influenced her work.

But upon Carr’s return to Vancouver, no one was interested in her work. She toiled in domestic obscurity for 15 years, managing an apartment complex in Victoria, until 1927, when a piece was accepted to a National Gallery of Canada exhibition where she first met the Group of Seven. She was the only woman painter to be included in the Group of Seven, modernist painters who changed the face of Canadian art

After being told that Canadian totem poles and trees were unsuitable, and simply unpaintable, Carr defiantly went out and painted them anyway—for the rest of her life. She finally gained some recognition for her work when she was nearly 60. After a series of heart attacks in 1937, Carr gave up the rigors of plain air painting, and wrote seven books, winning the Governor General’s Award for Literature in 1942.

I have seen many of her paintings in museum collections, but not this one. A reverse image search referred me to the dubious ArtPoster and Pinterest sites, several titles suggests it’s called,  Lone Cedar, or (Cypress) Tree in Autumn, or simply Autumn, ca 1920, painted variously in Brittany, or in British Columbia.

I have a lino block that I carved in high school that is similar in style. I wonder if I saw her work back then? Where? At the De Young? SF Art institute? I got to see her work later, in Victoria and Vancouver. There was an article on Emily Carr in the Sunday section of the Chronicle, California Living, circa 1972, which contained a retrospective of her work. I saved that article and read it again and again and again. She was uniquely a one of a kind artist.

It took some doing, but I found the painting, it’s called Tree of Autumn, 1922 - 1923, oil on canvas, 49.5 x 44.5 cm, done in the Arts and Crafts style (1913-1927). Collection of Glenbow Museum, of Calgary—which explains why I never saw it, though I’ve been to Calgary, I didn’t visit the museum. Purchased in 1956. Note bene: As of 1990, it’s housed at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Another extraordinary painting I’ve never seen before is First Nations War Canoes in Alert Bay, oil on canvas, Fauvist style, 101.5cm x 84cm. 1912. Audain Art Museum, Whistler, British Columbia. “In 1912, following a journey up the northern coast of B.C., Carr produced a number of works with First Nations motifs in her new style. However, these works were not well received with audiences in Vancouver and Victoria.”

First Nations War Canoes in Alert Bay, Fauvist style, 1912. Audain Museum.  Wiki

The West Coast is burning

Oh great, I was sitting outside during a red alert. The West Coast is burning. Ashes from as far north as British Columbia, where there are 560 wildfires, as well as wildfires from WA, Or, and N. CA, were falling on my Mac screen. And now my eyes sting. My throat is raw. All that unshed grief and death of trees playing out in real time.

CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

I once stood toe-to-toe with the Columbia Icefield,

we were stuck beside it for days, hitching south.

It was like standing in an open sky refrigerator, 

we feared we might freeze to death at its foot.

I wore every bit of clothing I had in my backpack, 

and my upside-down sleeping bag as a shawl,

looking like the Michelin Man with strange headgear,
the toe of the bag, a lofty orange helmet.

In that odd get-up, I scared off all the prospective rides.

We were so grateful when the redneck PG&E worker

that picked us up in Oregon, came to our rescue. 

Lord knows why they ever stopped. Maybe
they felt sorry for me, but Bob, with long hair & beard,
was from the camp across the river from status quo.

Over the campfire, we sipped coffee, and were humbled, 

not realizing we too were redneck in our own way.

For a while, the divide between us was diminished.

The vast Columbia Icefield, older than Mankind
taking its first steps, moaned and groaned and seethed
like an old dog on its last legs, rising from the hearth.

We parted company again in Banff, they were like family,

we meant to keep in touch, never did send that postcard.

The idea of global warming hadn't yet been parsed,

nor had it begun its irrevocable spiral. The ice is melting.

Now, you need to take a bus to the glacier's edge.

Soon it will be gone, like all the rest. 

Another snapshot lost in time.

7/8 & 8/15/18

VANCOUVER VARIATIONS

VANCOUVER VARIATIONS

It was eerily amazing to see
a huge Iranian rally in Vancouver
students lining both sides of W Georgia St
all the way from Stanley Park to the top of the hill,
to Burrard, the heart of Vancouver's financial district.
Everyone in black, holding green balloons,
clapping and flashing peace signs.
Drivers honking in unison and in solidarity.

6/28/2009

ACROSS THE BORDER

ACROSS THE BORDER

Within hearing distance of Victoria Harbour,
we sit and savor the long white nights;
but we're really south of Friday Harbor, San Juan Island,
So why does twilight seem so much longer
across the border?

6/25/2009

Saltspring Island (placenames) (Journal entry)

I awoke thinking of Salt Spring Island. Phrases we once said: We're going to Ganges for some Labatt's Blue. We're going up Mount Vesuvius and Mount Maxwell. Salt Point, Long Harbor, Indian Wells. So many orphan names attached to memory. Now mere fragments.

This place is the haven of wildlife artist Robert Bateman, and of movie stars: Al Pacino Patrick Stewart, Robin Williams. We never saw any.

But I do remember all the nesting eagles at Beaver Point. Like Christmas tree ornaments. The pictogram that I carved into living rock. A Kwakiutl sun face design for the solstice.

I remember naming the deer. We camped at Henry Ruckle's farmstead at Beaver Point, Now Ruckle Provincial Park.

And the odd bits: the first to arrive were nine slaves in 1857. They landed in Vesuvius Bay, the northwest corner of the island. Refugees from California. Last time I was on  Salt Spring Island, it was a refuge for draft dodgers, from the Vietnam war. Bob was thinking of defecting. We were looking for a place to call home.

A cultural crossroads on the Gulf islands. The Hawaiians, the Kanakas (Polynesian for human beings) whose descendants still live here. We visited the Hawaiian graves at Fulford Harbour, at St. Paul's Church, some dating back to 1885. No markers for the First Peoples, the Salishan and Saanich.

7/28/1998
rev. 6/17

ON THE ROAD TO TOFINO

As I drive down the road to Tofino
the only thing I can see is darkness.
How could he?

She's the girlfriend
of an old boyfriend of mine.
Men seeking air, kissing women
Women like glass jars
half full of wild grains.
Tongues of men
entering the mouths of women
Small tongues like cocks
too small for vaginas
Enter loosely into the center of women
Enter and the bitter grain
covers their tongues
Grain they cannot eat or digest
Women lie buried in the earth
and are covered with greenhouses
Greenhouses to grow babies
One, sometimes two greenhouses
When men enter their women
You can see the rich earth moving
covered with fine rich crumbs
When a man comes, the earth is
shoved up through the navel
into the greenhouses of women.

(not sure what this is about...as I'm typing it up in 2015,  I've forgotten the gist of it, other than the title has haunted me for nearly thirty years. But I do know I got a Dear John letter from Lee while I was up north on Vancouver Island. He was seeing Mimi Wheatwind. I felt so betrayed.

Of course I dated none of these poems, but it was a surprise to find them.

Port Alberni

Port Alberni, Vancouver Island – I overdrove my mark, a hitchhiker said she knew where I wanted to go, and we missed our turnoff, so I'm staying with her in a strange house. I know not where.

The moon is a rusted silver crescent hanging below Venus. Mountains fringe this place like shards of glass. Montgomery School Principal, Ken Lytle used to live here years ago, when he was a boy. The hills around Cazadero's Montgomery School are much like this place.

It is 50 miles away to Uclulet by water, it means safe harbor. Or, just water. A Nootka word. You ride the mail boat to get there – it's an eight hour trip. The road to Tofino is even longer. Uclulet looks like Point Reyes. I watch the same ocean here, as I would at home.

Ken Lytle spent some time in Port Alberni as a kid and hated it. I can see why. Port Alberni, Dante's Inferno of the Northwest is surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It has a gorgeous fjord that meanders 50 miles to the Pacific, it's a mile wide and a mile deep, but the brown oily water from the pulp mill, like flotsam. Paper pulp loosing from ships floats out to sea. The fish leaping to the surface gasping for air, ground from the pulpmill when it rains, it is an acid rain. Hell on earth.

I'm staying with friends in a rustic log cabin in Parksville. Pete Lang's wife Sarah is teaching me to belly dance. Downstep, thrust, downstep, thrust. Work down into the floor, not up into the sky. The outhouse has a blue plastic sky. I stepped on a slug, barefoot. I’m stuck to the earth now.

A friend of mine, Ken Lytle once threw a slug at his wife when they lived in Cazadero. And when I washed my jeans, there a slug was in the washing machine. There isn't any way to get slug glue off. Damned, those jeans are Calvin Kleins. I traded a pair of cowboy boots for them. The slug crawled through Ken’s wife’s hair. He said she washed her hair seven times. It never came out. But she washed that man right out of her hair. They are now divorced.

Sharon Doubiago said to write a story about your clothes. I think of Frida Kahlo. Sharon says that she still has the same clothes. From year-to-year, the stories about clothes stack up and accumulate like clothes in the closet. 

Once when we went out dancing in the town of Elk on the coast of Mendocino, the leotard I had scrounged from a trashcan, ripped down the back. I borrowed her special heart pin and then I lost it. It was found later on the dance floor, broken. We glued it back together – our friendship mended. Sort of.

Sharon will run away to Port Townsend to escape a broken heart. Did I trigger it when I lost her heart pin? 

Why I am Writing

Why I am writing

It must be rolling off the boat from side to side and the people, determined, arms clamped at their sides, walking deliberately forward, five steps to the left, five steps to the right, sometimes colliding with ship's furniture, always managing to pursue their destination as the swells rock the ship.

Maybe it's the thought of heading into a country where the mail is on strike and there isn't any means of communication that appeals.

I watch a beautiful woman, physically stunning, told at a young age that the turn of men's heads was meant for her, but her eyes are fishlike, cancer eyes. There is death in her eyes, those half-lidded mouths never smile – their blue chill has spread to her viscera, and the marrow of her bones freezes.

Someone said that Port Townsend is the clitoris of the Olympic Peninsula. The M. V. Coho cuts a large swath – a seam in the watered silk itself that spreads from Port Angeles to Victoria, B. C. After a rain, the only clear patch of sky is located directly overhead, and the moon glows like a cat's high. Five steps forward, and five steps to the left, the body obeys the surges and swirls of the sea.

A friend of mine is kayaking from Seattle to Juneau. He called from a payphone in Ketchikan. Last time we heard from him, was a postcard saying his kayak needed mending. He hopes for patches will hold. After being so close to the sea for so long, he becomes depressed when he's away from it for more than a few hours, and he doesn't want to come home. I know that feeling.

In the seat behind me, a man is teaching his young sons how to navigate by the flashing beacon lights. To the west, the light flashes at 10 second intervals, and the one to the north, at two second intervals. Swells rock the ship. The inland passage is unprotected here. Breakers roll in from Japan carrying glass fishing floats across the Pacific.

A group of men sitting across from me, scruffy, the boys in the process of imprinting – a rough society of males looking insolently about. As they were engaged in conversation I detected an accent slightly German and my opinion of them changed. It's funny, what will forgive in foreigners that we won't forgive in natives.

As we pulled into port, reflections of the Houses of Parliament parliament are lit up like Disneyland, and  their reflection is distorted by our way by our wake.

7/8/1981?

This was a previously typed version I had found. Not from my raw notes like Parkville
added 10/16

Parksville, BC

July 8, 1981 on the MV Coco headed to Victoria again, a six-hour wait to get on the ferry.

The MV Coho cuts a swath, watered silk spread from Port Angeles to Victoria BC. After rain, the only clear patches are directly overhead. The half moon glows like a cat's eye in the dark.

The ferry pitches, I dance down five steps forward, then five steps to the left. The body obeys the surges of the ocean and the swells keep us stepping in time.

I contemplate moving here. In winter it gets dark at 3:30 PM, dawn's at 7:45 AM. Winter must be dreary. 

In Parksville, a woman in her late 30s, who has lived here most of her adult life, is wearing red suede cowboy boots, tight jeans, and off-white sweater, neckscarf. She pulls out a unicorn puppet as the ferry pulls into port. The Houses of Parliament are lit up like Disneyland.

She tells me there's a home for retarded people in Parksville. They let them loose here. It's wonderful. Phil was named Mr. Parksville. Phil came over the other day like a tornado, screaming hello! He runs around town like Santa saying hello, you take care now. Hello!

He strides through town, he helps little kids with bikes, nodding his head so hard that his glasses fall off. He walks 10 miles a day. He went to Disneyland and forgot to stride. And lost his mind.

He changes the light bulbs at the Island hotel, he is employed. He always comes around and asks: do you need any lightbulbs changed? And the manager usually find some that need changing. Once a week he comes, and every week lightbulbs change. Sounds like a lightbulb joke, but it's not. 

Vancouver, BC

I've been three days in Vancouver, but I didn't want to write a thing. Today hiking on trails around Grouse Mountain, my depression lifted. A grouse boomed. I called back, he answered and so on.

Depression is caused by barometrical variances someone said. I take to the mountain trails with a vengeance.

At the Literary Storefront, in Vancouver, my poetry teacher David Bromage reads Wang Chao stories, and my homesickness left for California on the Gray Rabbit. The loft is hot as blazes, the sunset lingers forever, fiery throat of night.

Afterwards, we slipped oysters down at Leo's Seafood. There were three of us who were brave enough. Cecelia, David, and I. Margaret Atwood just shuddered. Terry, the coordinator shuddered too. David's son Christopher passes. 

Cecelia and David are newly married. Oysters are an aphrodisiac. They're hairy. It's all that bearded clam stuff, or was it hammy business. They have each other while I was invited to Terry's place to spend the night. I do need a place to crash.

So Terry runs the Vancouver readings and I run readings in Sonoma, and so we have a lot in common. However, I only met him three hours ago. God knows, maybe he's waiting for me to come onto the oysters or, or ersters as David said.

How do I know they don't have red tide here? What is that stuff sprinkled on top? Celia says it's paprika. God, she just slips them down whole, doesn't even chew them. Must have had years of practice. Maybe that's how she got more than one husband.

I remembered how Lee said she had the kind of mouth a man wants to slip a cock into. I was shocked by his candor. I couldn't keep my eyes off her mouth all night. It's always open. She has such a petite, sweet face and big boobs. She looks like she could be Christopher's kids sister and he's only seventeen and 6 foot five. David, Celia, and Chris – they all look related in a stylish fashion.

It was good to hear Lee's voice on the telephone and that Sonoma County hasn't burned down in my absence. It's wildfire season. For $2.30 a minute Lee told me in a lengthy fashion about how he quit  working on his book, and I billed this call to my home phone. Astronomical.

On the trails of Grouse Mountain I saw crooked trees growing in graceful J curves on the hillside. Ken says that when the trees move down the steep slopes, they always right themselves, growing up in a straightforward fashion—imagine trees moving like that.

Alan is now in Ketchikan, that's Pam's brother. I guess the patches on his kayak are holding. He calls Pam from a payphone. Won't be in Juneau until July 12 or so he says, and he still doesn't know I have his car. Pam tells me much later he was sweet on me. Of course I was the last to know.

Pam got a job as a waitress in Juneau. The pay's lousy. They won't let her keep the tips either. At home she'd be making much more on tips than six dollars an hour. She is completely broke. 

She supposed to be back in Sonoma by July 15 to discuss her future school plans with her husband Rick. I don't see how she does it, traveling with her lover of three years, Michael, and Rick back home making movies God knows where. Atlanta? Before he goes to Europe. 

Maybe she's talking like she actually wants to cut Rick out of her life completely. Her emotions contract and expand like a red rubber band. After three years, this is the most serious she sounded in a long time.

7/81

Alaska Bound

Alan who is kayaking from Seattle to Juneau, sent a postcard to Pam from Prince Rupert Island, saying I'm putting a patch on my boat. I hope it will hold. Love Alan.

Pam and Michael will play before they start searching for jobs. Trips, kayaking etc. I want to go. I have no money for the boat ticket.

Michael will try for a job on a fishing boat. Maybe replace someone who doesn't want to go out again for the season. Pam won't work in a cannery because she doesn't believe in killing anything.

In Alaska there are no vegetables.

How is Pam, a vegetarian, going to survive?

Dolphins, Inland Passage, journal

We walked down four flights of stairs of bleached wooden cedar planks that connected the cliff with the shore, and the railroad tracks below the town. The stairs, like the ones at Pike Street Market in Seattle collect all the town winos, and the Indians.

We are on foreign soil, their stares tell us. The streets are for white folks that ride the ferry up from the mainland in there well padded Winnebagos. They are like metal wombs that completely isolate them from the people that live here. They're all bound for Prince George to go fishing and hunting. No one stays long in Prince Rupert.

With our grubby backpacks and jeans, a symbol, just as the Winnebago is, we wandered down the tracks where the vegetation grows the thickest. We watched the natives of the forest with their cheap wine watching us.

The mid day summer sun warms the railroad ties that smell of creosote and tar and the light shimmers wet on the inland passage that faces to the west to the Queen Charlotte Islands, and beyond them the open Pacific.

Why aren't the Indians somewhere out there and dugout canoes like the Haida in Curtis's film? What's here for them? Work in the floating ship factories? They drink down their two weeks pay before the weekend is over.

I've been to the coast of Vancouver Island. Uclulit, another fishing town 40 miles away by sea, some 90 miles by road, wouldn't want to spend the winter in either place.The intense loneliness of the isolated towns along the coast. Even the sun seems indifferent as it filters down to the hemlocks.

The quality of light in the north, a difference of angle of sun to the earth. The sun didn't set until midnight and then it arose again too early. Orange sky for three hours as the sun dipped to the horizon. Haida Bear stands sentinel to  the deserted longhouses, rotting away  in the wilderness on the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Winos lying along the railroad tracks, when's the last time they saw their totemic ancestors? Last night, dolphins escorted our ship into port.

No date, but a copy was attached to my Hoh River piece, 7/25/1979, though the experience was from 1977 or 78.
This may be a piece I wrote in 1978. By fall of 1978, I had turned it into a poem and added it to my poetry MS (calligraphed), so it dates from 1978 or earlier. But it's interesting to see them side by side. If I wrote the prose in 1978, I was clearly a much better prose writer than a poet. If only I had known.

Inland Passsage

Added 10/16.

Driving to K’san, Skeena River

Driving to Terrace

I admired the rough beauty of the Skeena River and the glacial sweep of the mountains. We were nearing Terrace. There was Old Terrace where the Indians mostly lived, New Terrace, a government project most likely, and there was a lot of empty road between it and 'Ksan, a reconstructed Indian village near Old Hazelton, that Vernon helped to design. Something to do with national pride. The Gitxsan Indian Nation.

Vernon was nothing like the Cherokee man we met in Vancouver who wanted to annihilate all white folks. But he liked us right enough. He wore a breastplate made of bones in the Cherokee style. Bones that reminded me of the delicate bone of my forearm. Paranoid, I told myself.

Vernon Stephens was driving down the Yellowhead at 110 mph in an old 60s pickup truck. Our packs were in danger of flying out the back of the truck. But I trusted Vernon implicitly. He picked us up in Prince Rupert. Liked our foolhardiness. "Anyone nuts enough to try to hitch out of that place deserves a ride," he said.

I had briefly met Vernon years before in front of the de Young museum (or was it the UBC?) I once spent an afternoon watching him carve a totem pole in the old way. I never expected to run into him again in Prince Rupert, of all places.

Vernon's hair was the most beautiful wavy black cloud I had ever seen. Bob's hair was long, and curly, California style, but he always wore his hair tied back in a knot, like he was secretly embarrassed by it all, and only grew long to be defiant after he got out of the army.

Vernon wore his hair like a bride's veil and he walked with the comfort of the man in touch with his body, his energy directed from his hips led him forward with grace and ease. Bob was head oriented. Like there was this string attached to the top of his head, lifting him up every time he stepped forward. Not of the earth. But then, that was Bob's way.

I'd been with Bob for so long, I'd gotten used to his ways. I'd forgotten about them, actually. Vernon made me aware of it. Made me turn over in my subconscious. Took me two years to realize it. Bob made me unhappy and I didn't even know it.

We stopped off to have a beer in Smithers. Vernon knew everybody there—there wasn't enough room for another chair at our table. "Can I buy you another round?" another face asked. I couldn't even place the name with the face, there were so many buyers.

I noticed that I was the only woman drinking in the bar. This was truly a man’s world. I was gatecrashing.Again. I asked, "So, don't women drink beer around here?" No one answered. The waitress was the only other woman I had seen since leaving Prince Rupert. Rosie was her name. Vernon said she was a great gal. He knew her well. I think. It made me a little envious.

Amazing to watch this man who had the profound respect of all these white folks. Not like the ones who hurled slurs at Indians in other towns. Not like the drunks sleeping it off below Pike Street in Seattle.

Vernon is a goldsmith. A well-known goldsmith. Most everyone around here is wearing one of the chased wristbands he makes for the Provincial Museum in Victoria, and other tourist shops. One of those bands costs more than what Bob and I have to live on for the entire summer.

Vernon takes off his cuff to show us how he makes it convex. I dabble in silver and show him my turquoise rings. I can tell that he is not impressed which makes me sit up a bit, as I'm pretty good at it, but I have no intention of becoming a jeweler, and he knows it.

The beer keeps coming. Soon, I'm slithering under the table, and they all have a good laugh. "She can can't even hold her beer," Vernon says smugly. I feel the implied dig and I slur, "I'm Irish. 100% Irish. We feel it sooner. It's this Canadian beer, it's stronger than our American beer." He laughs.

"Yeah, that’s real piss beer," someone offers. I retort, "Hey, listen, you got to account from my relative size. I am a lot smaller than you guys." And then I pretty much fall into a heap on the floor. Vernon takes my unfinished beer and drains it down. Lifts me up. Says, "Well, we gonna hit the ground. I got to get to Terrace. Thanks. Be seeing you."

Vernon pulled the battered truck into the only gas station in town. It took us two tanks of gas to drive from Prince Rupert to Terrace. We paid for gas. Least we could do. Nothing is close these parts. To go to the nearest bar, you have to drive 40 miles or so. No alcohol on Indian reservations.

Soon we have to take a break, return all that rented beer. There's so little traffic in these parts, the two men just stand there jawing on the side of the road at dusk. Male bonding in action. Twin rivulets track across the road and head down to the Skeena River. My beer frothed into a little well of sacred earth by the side of the road, making me realize, that despite the company, I was very much alone. In retrospect, I should’ve folded my bad hand, and run off with Vernon. But it was not in the cards.

typed 3/1979

SKEENA RIVER

Skeena River and vast glacial mountains
We drink from a pure stream along the way.

Why did Vernon say he hated the river?
Whey did it ever do to him?

Halfway to Terrace we stopped off for a beer

Soon the table was crowded with Indians
and two gringo hitchhikers.

After several rounds, I slid under the table
and all the men laughed because
a woman couldn't hold her beer.
We returned the rented beer to the river.

I’ve backpacked through British Columbia
and slept wherever it suited me.
But in Vancouver there was nowhere to stay.

So we slept in the shrubbery
at the University of British Columbia

and under a tree in Beacon Hill Park in Victoria
only to be awakened by an aphid rainstorm
and to a young man waking the swans with his flute.

And after a hangover from the Beaver Pub
we slept in the shadow of the lofty Empress Hotel.
In Stanley Park where we watched the ships in the Straits.

At Jasper, deep in the Rockies, We slept in a hotel lobby
with other travelers of the thumb

And we snuck into the showers upstairs.
Ah, such heaven.

On the reservation

she was young and big and brown
and seemed so much younger than I.

She looked forward to the day
when she could join the RCMP Academy.
She said her grades were good.

I looked at her in disbelief
and thought to myself, ah well,
one can be miserable in the midst of splendor
but it still is a kind of hell for her.

I have traveled so far to see her hell.
I camped by the Skeena River
in the bushes that night
and I got sick from the water.
Another hind of hell.

3/79

INLAND PASSAGE

INLAND PASSAGE

The mid-day midsummer sun warmed
the railroad ties that smelled of tar and creosote,
and the light gathered on the Inland Passage
shimmering to the west,
to the Queen Charlotte Islands, & beyond, to Japan.
Haida bear who stands sentinel
to the deserted longhouses, last night
your ocean swells rolled and rocked our ship
until everyone was seasick.
So peaceful now, with secret coves
forested islands and factory ships.
The dolphins appeared at sunset
and escorted us to port.

June, 1977 or 78?
Headed to Prince Rupert

Postcard from Mount Rainier

July 5, 1975, Washington.

Dear Grandma, 

After we went to Victoria, we got bad weather and rain so it spoiled our stay. We took the Gulf Island cruise but didn’t stay long. We went to Salt Spring Island and Galliano Island. A tiny three-car ferry. It sure was miserable being there in the rain, so we went over to Vancouver and to Horseshoe Bay. 

Couldn’t see a thing because of the weather, so we decided to come back to the US. Then the good weather struck on the day we were about to leave. So we decided to stay a while longer and revisited the Horseshoe Bay area. Well worth the bother. It was stunningly beautiful. But the logging industry has ruined much of British Columbia. The air is absolutely foul from the paper pulp mills. Worse than LA smog.

We went up to Garibaldi Provincial Park North of Vancouver, but the only way in is by backpacking. Snow level was too low, so that was out. It had snowed a few days earlier down to 3000 feet, so the mountains were quite beautiful.

We took a ferry across Horseshoe Bay, thinking that the Sunshine Coast would also be as beautiful as Horseshoe Bay, but it was a disappointment. And there was no sunshine We were able to see so many of the sites we missed the last time. Capilano Gorge in North Vancouver was outrageous, an actual granite gorge in North Vancouver with a very bouncy rope suspension bridge. 

In Victoria, we ran into a bunch of people that we had met last year on Salt Spring Island it was a nice surprise. We ran out of things to do in Victoria so yesterday we headed back to the states and got through customs with four 12-pack cases of Labatt’s beer. The customs lady merely said “oh, go on through,” like we were a couple of kids. They usually make you pay duty on any alcohol in excess of 1 quart. We were fully expecting trouble through customs because the bus is a camper van, and they are usually thoroughly searched.

We drove straight through to Mount Rainier. There is so much snow here that one can’t really hike here either. Oh well. I found a warm spring on the slopes of Mount Rainier and soaked my feet from a small wooden bridge. June is not a good month to vacation in the Pacific Northwest. It’s nice now but another storm front is moving in from the coast. We will probably check out the Columbia River Gorge, and  the Trinity Alps, and then head back home in a couple of weeks or so.

Have you heard from Jane yet? I wrote to her in Ireland. I guess I’ll phone when I get back in California to find out when she is returning. Please, tell Borg of my travels as I haven’t sent a postcard. I haven’t yet sent Jane a postcard either. When the weather is so bad I didn’t feel like sending any cards to anyone. As it was, we had to stay in the van or camp out in a museum because of the dreadful rain.

Didn’t get any Dickson tea, but got another kind. I haven’t tried it yet. Barf-o-bits Bob has recovered from his sea voyage quite nicely. I think he just ate too much salmon as he won’t touch the stuff now. If you’re wondering why my writing is so messy I’m writing on top of Bob’s head. It’s the only level spot. 

Love, Baba