CHAINBOUND STORIES

I grew up amid chainbound stories 

adorned with dark family secrets 

like the phantom itch of severed limbs, 

the stories my family carried to this country 

in carpetbags and unhinged suitcases 

with broken clasps bundled with leather belts 

made of discarded bridles, the horses long dead.
The stories that held us captive 

were whispered around kitchen tables
littered with an ancient tongue that was not shared
but hinted at—we learned secret words but not syntax,
the whiskey glasses jumped like startled hares
as fists punctuated each rebel sentence,
and under darkfall, munitions were gathered 

in basement cellars and jail evidence lockers,
sent home in shipments of potatoes

by way of Liverpool and Enniskillen

to fund the long war against the Crown.
I grew up with unspoken stories of freedom 

a tongue loosely translated in a homeland, 

a war not my own, a puzzle of the past 

leading us inexorably forward.

Write On! with Susie Terence 

More on those historic mercury mines of Marin (the short version)

A rather long note bene: Since I went through so much grief the other night trying to save my old 2020 mercury mine blogpost from Google Blogger AI censorship bots, in desperation I took screenshots of the original post and reposted it on my artist page on Facebook. I also made a very truncated version (below) for the Facebook group, California History as I was afraid the information I had worked so hard for was going to be forever lost. 

The original mercury mine blogpost had its inception Labor Day weekend when I was hiking San Pedro Ridge in San Rafael. We were still in Covid sequestration, and to keep my sanity, I wrote many articles I might not have other otherwise written. 

In this case, I wrote a stub that didn’t go anywhere, no real leads, and then I delved into it again in December 2020. I discovered that I was in over my head with the material, and no matter how I tried, I couldn’t finish the blogpost—partially because I couldn’t find the discrete information I needed. 

And also, I thought I didn’t have the chops to figure out how to present the material. Why a writer, suffering from dyslexia, is a writer is a mystery, but there are many of us out there. It’s not like I’m earning any money off my writing. I’m not getting paid for any of this. I write because I have to.

I suspect my writers’s block, or rather, my revisionist block, was due to the fact that it was too big a subject. The more information I uncovered, the more of the post grew. I was in over my head. I despaired. It was an albatross. But the only way out was through. 

Sometimes I think I can’t write my way out of the paper bag. or, that I don’t have the intellectual  chops. This time I was in one colossal kevlar-lined paper bag, but I persevered. It was probably one of the most challenging blogposts I have ever written. 

My Night Train to Moscow post (which began as an email), my redhead, pacer, bees, and daffodil blogposts also gave me some serious writer’s grief, but at least the posts weren’t banned by Google. 

I face enough unwarranted censorship from Facebook for writing bad similes, or thinking outside the box. I sure don’t need this kind of grief from Google either. I expected better from Google. (Google fail.) I feel betrayed.

The other day, when I made another stab at revising the original blogpost because of a Facebook post on the old mines in Lost Marin, I finally made some serious headway—only to have Google Blogger take it down and literally trash my blogpost, then reinstate it—some 30 times. When Google takes down a blogpost, you can’t even see it. It just disappears into the ether. No warning. Poof! Gone.

A while back, Google suffered a serious systemwide matrix glitch and took down multitudes of my innocuous posts—only to reinstate them later but I had to physically find my blogposts in the trash and then reinstate them. Before that, I didn’t know that Google had previously removed some of my other posts. Sadly, some of those posts are lost forever.

Thinking it was an email spam, I ignored the red warning label Google had slapped on my posts, and I lost my Juanita Musson memorial post, plus others. I reasoned, how could a memorial post be considered spam? It was not logical, as Spock might have said. But it was for real, only I found this out in arrears. 

I was able to salvage some of the removed old posts from first drafts that I had stashed elsewhere, but not all. Not Juanita in the bathtub. I despaired thinking I had lost all my revision work on the mercury mine post. I was 12 hours deep into it. So, of course I fought furiously to save my post, and to get it reinstated. Again and again.

Now I’m afraid to make any further changes on my original mercury mine post for fear of triggering the AI bots. Google no longer adequately warns you that it is removing posts. It no longer uses the red banner. And it took a long time for a Google warning to show up, explaining what the reasons were for banishment: violating community standards.

Google warned I was violating community standards, but it didn’t specifically say what. I had no idea. Googling it did not elucidate or shed any light on the subject. So, I kept removing images, revising, checking on all my links, and nothing worked. I wasn’t over quoting anyone, and it was my own intellectual property, not to mention, photos. And all the graphs I used were from publicly funded agencies, therefore within fair use parameters. I couldn’t remove the ban. I despaired.

A Google email eventually appeared, claiming this time that I was violating community standards by promoting or selling controlled substances. Huh? How is a blogpost on historic mercury mines even remotely considered to be promoting a controlled substance? Maybe it was the word “mine” itself that triggered the bots. So, this post below is a test of sorts.

(I am not trying to bite the hand that feeds me. If it wasn’t for Guy Kawasaki’s evangelical support of Google Blogger, I would not have delved so thoroughly into the new medium of cyber-writing. It all began innocently enough, I had lost some of my earlier poems to ASCII gibberish, and decided to put them online. Then I discovered I could back-post my work. One thing led to another. MySpace was no longer cutting it. It was a grand liberation to be free of the physical page. As it is, I now have 5000 blog posts. I must admit, I feel betrayed by Google at this point.)

See, during one of those rare moments, when I could actually re-access my ephemeral albeit temporarily reinstated mercury mine blogpost, I took screenshots of it and posted it on Facebook so I wouldn't lose my work completely. I also made a truncated version for a Facebook group I belong to, California History. I have previously taken several of my blogposts and revised (shortened) them for the group. 

Then I realized that the revised post I wrote for California History  is also a separate entity. New work. Probably closer to what I had hoped to originally write. It’s posted below. Now watch, Google Blogger will ban this blogpost too. Don’t worry. This time I have a link to someone who works at Google and I will complain mightily. How’s that for throat-clearing? Are you still there, Dear Reader?

Historic mercury mines in the North Bay (below is a truncated version of my original post. Click on the link/title for full post and research notes).

When I was a child, I was fascinated by my uncle’s old mining survey maps of Bolinas Ridge and Mt. Burdell dotted with old cinnabar (and copper) mining claims. Curiosity got the best of me.

Our red California earth is oftentimes a sign of the presence of iron /hemitite, or cinnabar (Remember Napa’s Silverado Mine on Mt. St. Helena, made famous by Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1884 novel, The Silverado Squatters?)

There are several historic cinnabar mines in Northwest Marin, including four at the Gambonini Ranch, near Solajoule Reservoir, some sites on Mt. San Antonio, and also on the ridges above Novato. The old mine shafts on San Pedro ridge in San Rafael seem to be gold claims. But where there’s gold, there’s cinnabar.

During the Gold Rush, cinnabar ore mined in California, for mercury, was originally used for silver and gold extraction. The crushed ore was processed in high-temperature smelting ovens. 

Those unstable leftover cinnabar tailings are what has caused the mercury runoffs into our watersheds, including in the San Francisco Bay—destroying one of the most fertile marine ecosystems in the world.

There are numerous historic cinnabar mine tailings throughout Marin and Sonoma counties, some that have also added to the high mercury levels in several of our reservoirs, including Bon Tempe, Solajoule, and Nicasio reservoirs and their drainage watershed, Tomales Bay. 

The fish warning signs that rim several of our reservoirs serve as a grim reminder that mercury poisoning is cumulative. Tomales Bay in Northern Marin County has higher mercury levels than San Francisco Bay—and it’s not from naturally occurring cinnabar deposits, as the mineral mercury oxide is inert unless it’s been heated and extracted.

According to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA), there is an fish advisory or warning that Nicasio and Solajoule Reservoirs contain methyl-mercury, as does Bon Tempe Reservoir on the slopes of Mt. Tamalpais, which once hosted several historic mines, including mercury, copper, gold, and even a nickel mine.

I assume that the rest of the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) reservoirs (our drinking water supply) also contain trace amounts of some form of (inert) mercury too as they’re all downstream of Bon Tempe dam and empty into each other, exiting via Kent Lake into Lagunitas Creek that drains into Tomales Bay. 

Naturally occurring mercury oxide does not enter the food chain the same way manmade methyl-mercury does. But at the Nicasio Reservoir methyl-mercury pollution is significant enough to trigger OEHHA advisory warnings about cumulative mercury poisoning from carp, sunfish, black, and large-mouth bass species (apex predators such as bass contain the most cumulative methyl-mercury in their systems). 

Why Nicasio? It doesn’t butt up against any known mercury mines, it doesn’t share the Solejoule Reservoir watershed to the north where there’s also an OEHHA advisory warning for black bass and crappie.) Why am I mentioning Solejoule? because in 2000, it became a Superfund cleanup site.

In a nutshell, in 1964, a PG&E subcontractor, Oakland-based Buttes Gas & Oil (BG&O), ran a lucrative open pit mercury mining job at Gambonini Ranch near Walker Creek in northwestern Marin. 

But in 1970, when the price of mercury fell, BG&O pulled up stakes and left the open pit mercury mine tailings exposed to the elements behind an earthen dam that epically failed during a series of fierce storms in 1982—which dumped ungodly amounts of leached methyl-mercury into Tomales Bay. More than in San Francisco Bay! 

BG&O had leased the land from Alvin Gambonini’s father from 1964 to 1970, never disclosing to the Gambonini family the potential dangers involved with the toxic heat-processed mine tailings to extract the mercury, or that the leftover toxic mercury particulates leach out of the rock tailings whenever it rains. (I wanted to ask, what about all the cows?) 

BG&O never sealed the four mines, nor capped the tailings. It took nearly two decades for the EPA to discover the mishap. It triggered a $3 million Superfund cleanup in 2000. 

Back to Nicasio Reservoir. The methylmercury is coming from somewhere. Not from abandoned mercury mines upstream that I know of, or from the isolated Solejoule Dam which empties into Walker Creek. Question is, from where?

However, some of those old red earth mine sites really were manganese, or hematite, a type of iron, not cinnabar—like the Sausalito mine, and the prehistoric hematite site on Mt. Burdell. Inert red dirt. Sometimes a red rock quarry is just a red rock quarry. Just don’t eat the fish.

storm front

After five days of back to back storms, no power, I’m getting desperate. I am housesitting at Sam’s place while he is in hospital. I am desperate for tea, or anything warm, really. An all electric kitchen sucks when the power goes out. I am freezing as well. No heat, no hot water. No showers. I ache. My hip hurts. After five days of no tea, and no coffee, I have massive headaches and am cranky as shit. 

The power has been out everywhere including at the community center. Even their generator died. Sam’s landlord, Jay has solar panels but who knew they needed Wi-Fi in order to work? No way to talk to them. Go figure. So any chance of power is nixed for the long run. 

The nights are long when I am sitting in the dark. Luckily I have books on tape, but my iPad is having trouble keeping a charge so I spend afternoons in my car charging my iPad. I can’t sign into my Zoom writing class because there’s no Wi-Fi to be had anywhere in West County.  

So I drive into Fairfax, looking for godlight and for Wi-Fi. The library was closed, but it had an outdoor outlet, so I boiled water, and paid homage to the electric kettle gods. Hot tea never tasted so good. I charge up my iPad with the car and surf like a madwoman until it’s time to go. Click. Shit. Dead battery. 

So I roll the gray guppy backwards in the parking lot pushing off with my bum hip. I’ve been laid up for a couple of weeks now, somehow I managed to strain my hip flexor muscle again so walking is agony, but apparently pushing a car one-legged is OK. Go figure. 

I push the car out of the parking spot, get it rolling down the hill backwards, and, damned if it didn’t start up. Backwards. First two times I popped the clutch, I pre-empted myself, I forgot to turn on the ignition, then popped the clutch too soon. The car juddered. Third time’s a charm. 

A momentary break in the storm before the next front arrives. Sometimes it’s good to have faith in the ordinary, trusting that things will work out in the end. Now, that’s love.

But wait! Not content with just warm tea, I took a mug of soup down to the community center Hoping to find power. PG&E was their supplying power, but no Wi-Fi, no kitchen. Dorothy and Alexa were in the office. Dorothy Cox had power in Woodacre so we drove to her house where I heated up my soup, beautiful soup, chicken Thai coconut soup. 

And now that’s heavenly, or maybe it was divine intervention. Dorothy is a lay minister. God is not a metaphor to her. And now the thunderclouds are painted in pastel hues. Now that’s God painting the sky after the storm.

Measuring the sun

When I was a child, my grandmother measured the seasons by where the sun rose on our hill, the long ridge served as a fulcrum. In summer, it rose over the big rock to the north, and in winter over the tall pines along the fence line. In this way, we measured the seasons using the natural world, not man-made monuments. I was fascinated by the way sunlight raced along the tiles by the front door. Ours was an old house that kept to the old way, with the house aligned to the cardinal directions. So the morning sun shone through the front door, like a portal, or one of the gates of Stonehenge. We even had a big rock, a knob of limestone, or a chert reefer, perhaps blueschist sticking out like a menhir. She carried the old ways with her, the stones circles of her childhood landscape conflated with portals of time in the new world. I was an odd child, always measuring the world by criteria I didn’t quite understand. One morning, I got the idea to measure how the fast the rising sun over the ridge rose, so with my plastic ruler, I measured the speed between sunlight on tiles versus the advancing shadow. Each line on the ruler was a two-minute marker. I had half the equation but not the other half. In that moment, I realized how the shadows of a sundial worked, and suddenly I was connected to time in a timeless manner. Past and future fell away until there was only time present.

1/17/24 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Thanksgiving

Give me those red viscous cranberries, cooked in sugar and nothing else, dripping off a silver spoon. Give me that explosion of flavor where sweet-and-sour compete, neither predominant, a palate cleanser, someone said. It was declared a winner in my book, as we slogged our way through a bargain basement of calories. Don’t add orange juice to it. Please. Mashed potatoes made with butter and sour cream, became snowcapped volcanic peaks with craters filled with pan gravy, the raft of turkey, like a tabula rasa. We suffered through the diabetes-inducing sweet potatoes, way over the top with burnt snowfields of marshmallows—that’s where my taste buds rebelled. All that over the top gilding of the lily left them in diabetic coma. The top I could at least scrape off, but I couldn’t avoid the damned canned concentrated orange juice my aunt Jane was so fond of. I grew to hate orange juice. Once the aunts got it into their heads to dress up what needed no dressing, like yams, it was all over. We were never going to go back to the simplicity of butter again. My formally favorite dish was forever ruined. At least they couldn’t do that to the stuffing. Until someone got the idea to add oysters. Just, no. And then there was the strange three layer Jell-O, salads, quivering on the table—grapefruit slices in lime Jell-O, cream cheese, with the lemon layer with filled with walnuts and celery. And then something darker at the bottom, perhaps cherry Jell-O, where the cranberries hid in their dark depths. Another aunt added raviolis to the mix, and green bean casseroles, which became a tradition I abhor. I could not stand the taste of mushroom soup and green beans. The aunts modernize the menu to fit the era, then got stuck in the 1960s, and my grandmother who was still directing, was not willing to let go of the basic plot—at least the plot itself was fixed, but the walls of her small kingdom were closing in. What I remember most are the black olives we wore on our fingers and how we shoveled celery stuffed with peanut butter and cream into our mouth as if we were starving and there was no food in sight. And that transition phase when you got to leave the kids’ table for the grownup table.

NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

I imagine tomorrow’s house as a place 

of four walls invoking the four directions, 

instead of the sagging skirt of this tent. 

A roof, where stargazing is mandatory, 

where we once again travel the Milky Way, 

Orion’s sword cleaving the winter sky, 

though my eyes are always in need of reading glasses, 

to navigate the labyrinth of words that deluge us daily.

For a moment, it comes into focus, and I rejoice.

I may not be able to align a triple junction of tail-lights 

while driving down the road, astigmatism’s gift,

but for a moment, a constellation springs into focus, 

the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the Gazelle Leaps. 

Once I could see more stars with the naked eye, 

like the time we hiked up Mount Whitney, 

and the Milky Way was truly a sea made of stars. 

Or as we gazed up from the loft of the Andes, 

the sky was occluded with wildfire smoke, 

so I wasn't aware the constellations had shifted. 

A consolation was a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

The Big Dipper hovered on the horizon 

like an afterthought pointing to the direction of home.  

But I’m thrilled that I can find any constellation 

at all in a vast wilderness of sky lonely as ice. 

When the Big Dipper emerges overhead from the blur, 

it steals my breath away, and once again, 

I can find true north within the void, 

not easy to do in a sky filled with industrial light, 

not like the dark nights of childhood, where stars 

shone with a brilliance rarely witnessed. 

All the cells that I have ever been in the past, 

are annealing the starlight like folded iron 

at the smithies forge into a sword of light 

as I fathom these four walls called home, 

then I realize that the idea of home is held 

deep within the memory of self.

12/6/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo

Saturdays

I couldn’t wait for the weekend. As soon as I got off the school bus, I was free to wear jeans for two whole days. Saturdays began at dawn, unfettered by obligations. We rode those long coastal ridges on donkeys, and later, on horseback, until dusk. Sunday mornings were reserved for church. That meant no breakfast as mass began at 9 AM. It took up half a day as we had to walk to Saint Cecilia’s Church, nearly 2 miles away. My stomach rumbling. After mass, and a trip to the WC, my grandmother hunted for french bread at the Lagunitas Store, squeezing each one for freshness. We left with a loaf of Bordenave’s Viennese milk bread, and a copy of the Sunday paper, Mr. Lacy waving goodbye. I don’t remember the long walk home, or anyone giving us a lift. Few folks had cars. Sometimes we also hoofed into Forest Knolls to get the mail, adding another mile to the journey. Shank’s mare, my grandmother said. She had bunions, it couldn’t have been easy for her to clip-clop down the road like a pony in those old black lace-up saddle shoes with fancy eyelets and a design punched out on the kid leather—like a man’s dress oxford with a tall square heel. When we got home, we tucked into a big fry up of bacon and eggs with buttered Vienna bread, hot from the oven. I pored over the Sunday funnies, the likeness of my aunt smiling back from a Paisano ad on the last page. But, by then, the day was half gone. My grandmother fell asleep on the couch with the newspaper draped over her. It was a sleepy time, a day of rest—not like Saturdays where the day was all ours from dawn until dusk.

Tomales Bay gleamed—

severing the coastal hills 

with a sword of light.

10/11/2023 Write On! with Terri Glass

A long night with restless critters

What an effing long night it was last night, I was sleeping in the tent when the coyotes all went off, singing arias a little too close to me for comfort, followed by a fox coughing in the valley, and as the rutting deer blundered past my tent, one of them knocking down the tent ropes, so it sounded like I was inside a large harp, booooiiiing! Zing! the roof was shaking like crazy. Then the wind came whipping down from the mountain (thanks to Karl the Fog—that heat spell was something—and extreme heat in October is cause for alarm—as in wildfire) and the gust of wind shook the tent like terrier with a rat. I could hear the tall fir trees cracking and groaning which set off the hoot owls. They sounded pretty feeble as they still don’t have their mature hoot down yet. The deer insult was followed by some largish animal attacking the side of the tent, three times with lots and lots of claws getting stuck in the tent wall. Of course, my first thought was Oh my God, a mountain lion or a bobcat is trying to get in—surely it’s not the coyotes. Not what I wanted to think about before drifting off to sleep—especially after coming onto my sleepytime gummy bear. Speaking of bears, by this time, I was really quite cross, and I begin yelling for all I was worth, which scared it—whatever it was—off, and it also brought out the neighbors bearing torches. Meanwhile, my cousin’s crazy cat was zooming around the inside of the tent like a well-oiled lunatic. Whatever was attacking the tent must’ve been trying to attack her. I no sooner got back to sleep when that episode was followed by two raccoons having it out and literally rolling like little fat fur barrels down the slope into the creekbed where they caterwauled and quarreled some more. This performance was repeated throughout the night with copious snarling and fearsome growling and snorting as they made direct contact several times. And at dawn, I had to rescue my cousin’s crazy cat (the one that was racing around the tent) singing her three-note Siamese cat opera, trying to get away from a large puffy stray tabby Tom who was trying to beat the crap out of her. They are all nuts. I chased him off, she was stuck on automatic hiss mode so I couldn’t pick her up and put her in the house. She usually doesn’t sleep outside, so she was pretty freaked out. I am so tired, I am cross-eyed. And now it’s raining. No need to do a rain dance. I’ve been dancing around the garden all night long in my PJs like a dementor screaming at all the wild animals.

The doe’s breakfast
Morning aubade

Missy the Deer (photos)

Missy the deer I caretook last year munching on chicken feed & rolled oats in the garden.

Last year I clandestinely took care of a young deer who was hit by a car. She was one of our deer, born and bred in my grandmother’s garden. Well, the other evening I had an interesting interlude with her. I haven’t seen her in nearly a year, and she came right up to me, almost expectantly, as I was getting out of my car—like she knew me. I was so shocked I just stood there. I rolled some lemon cukes her way, and slowly walked away. We tend to talk to all animals, she was no exception.

So later, she came to the back door and peered in expectantly. Her enormous ears swiveling like semaphores. It was as if she were saying, I know you. C’mon! She had also brought her twins. I thought, oh, great, she was somebody’s pet. She’s so tame someone’s been hand-feeding her. A practice I condemn. They’re gone and interfered with the boundary between keeping wild animals wild and leery of us. I also thought, there was no way it was last year’s deer I had taken care of. I looked for a limp. She seemed to favor her hind leg, but I couldn’t be sure. It was clean.  Deer movements are sporadic, at best.

Then, the day before yesterday, she came up right to me again when I was in the garden. There was no mistaking it. She was wanted a connection with me. I stood stock-still. There was only an old Adirondak chair between us. She kept watching me and edging closer, so of course I talked to her. She pricked those marvelous ears at me, never taking her eyes off me. 

This time I saw the big scar on her hind leg where the bone had broken through, and realized it was the same deer that I had secretly fed last year. I suppose I could anthropomorphize a bit here and say she was thanking me, but I think it was hunger talking. But most animals tend to like me and will often approach me. Do I stink, or smell like the forest? We had just returned from huckleberrying so we were manky. Maybe I should bathe more often.

She hardly limps at all now. And there is no doubt that she definitely remembers me. It’s uncanny. Apparently my cover has been blown. She has no fear of me, but her fawns are afraid of us—and that is good. Despite my best intentions not to interfere with her wildness, I’ve gone and named her Missy. But her guardian, Bucky the mascot is missing, so I fear the worst.

It was Alex Call who told me to get her some high energy corn to help her survive. I couldn’t find any cracked corn, so I got a sack of chicken scratch with corn in it. I think she found it an odd choice, so I added some rolled oats too, which she gobbled right up. She loved rose petals and leaves. I tried to stay within her food range but spinach, bok choy and squash were a no-go.

Since I still had some chicken feed left over from last year, I sprinkled in the dry grass for the birds, I gave some to her. She ate it, plus the apples we left in the grass. I put out some other greens too as she’s pretty thin. She still won’t eat spinach. So I sprinkled more oats and chicken feed in the grass. We shall soon see if she will lay eggs, or begin to crow like a rooster at dawn.

You can see the wounds on her hind leg, she figured out how to walk, but it must’ve hurt.

For the most part, last year, I kept out of her line of sight, only putting food out when she wasn’t around. I was hoping she wouldn’t make the general fatal connection between humans and food—but still she figured out who and what I was—the feeder. So, my scent was probably the main clue. It was either that, or let her die. I think Bucky’s trust in us put her at ease. But she was still very leery of us. I never approached her. I didn’t want her to become accustomed to us. 

Some a-hole hit her with a car or truck, probably one of the day workers up the hill, and he left her to die. Didn’t even call the humane society. Coyotes smelling blood and opportunity, were trailing her, mama and cubs were waiting in the wings for an easy meal. Over my dead body. We drove them off yelling like banshees. Sean permanently scared them off with an air gun. Talk about a chain reaction set in motion. We sure didn’t want them hanging about or snatching one of the cats either. 

Bucky was a gentleman, he stood guard when she ate & chased off predators, but not us.

But this was also during the tail end of the drought, and the young deer was having trouble finding food, Bucky, who quickly figured out that I was a friend, not a foe who was feeding the doe, was reduced to eating lichen, toxic cotoneaster and ivy—which she couldn’t reach. She couldn’t even walk down to the creek, not with that blown hock, so I put out a bucket of water as well as assorted lettuce greens and grain. 

After all, generations of her deer people have drunk out of my old horse trough, and eaten my horses’ hay. These deer were born in the upper garden where Missy was currently sleeping, so it is as much their natal stomping grounds as it is mine. Besides, during the summer, I often sleep outside in the tent when I come visiting. So they know me. I am merely part of the garden furniture.

I am so not into feeding opportunistic wild animals, thus altering their behavior, but I don’t mind cohabiting with them. So this is a bit of a hybrid event, keeping her alive. Luckily, her fawns are afraid of us. May it continue to be so.

• The doe’s breakfast
• Morning aubade

I AM OF CALIFORNIA

I am of Ireland, the holy land of Ireland, 

the green land of myth and mystery. 

I have seen my grandfather bent over his books, 

as if they could restore the myriad atrocities 

dealt by the hands of the enemy. 

I did not know why he left his homeland 

to continue insurrection from this land of the free. 

So I sat on his lap and blew out wooden matches 

as he sucked on another stogie, 

that would eventually kill him 

as surely as those British bullets. 

Rubber ones hadn't yet been invented. 

That particular atrocity would come later.

I am of Ireland, that fabled land 

of verdant song & story. 

I watched my grandmother as she pinched pennies,

and hunkered down over potato beds in the garden,

raking & weeding, cajoling them into the stewpot 

where cabbage sang arias to bacon & ham hocks 

or tongue when we were lucky enough to get them. 

I never knew the poverty belt was cinched tight 

around our necks until I left home, 

the idea of perspective was always trapped 

in the green depths of the rearview mirror.

I am of California, the golden rolling hills 

where hawks argue over turf in a blue vaulted sky.

I need to quit using the word vaulted. 

It's just that the sky is a cathedral, 

a star of the sea shining in the distance 

where I was once baptized in pickled brine. 

But I gave it up, not for God, nor the vigilant nuns,

but when the women were ordered to give up 

their bodies, to spread their legs wide & cowp, 

then bend a supplicant's knee at the altar of prosperity. 

There was no melting pot, we were condemned 

by the fabric of our customs & names & religion.

The hidden wealth of the immigrant pushed aside 

made superfluous by insidious inquality 

of this WASPish nation wanting to break us all.

9/20/23 Write On! with Susie Terence

THE SONG OF BARBED WIRE

The song of barbed wire, strung taut on old posts, 

the way my grandfather labored on the steep hillside, 

the horizon distracting him as he wiped sweat from his brow.

Already the siren call of the deep valley below the mountain

will lead his children astray, the long arm of the known world 

promising so much and yet offering little in return.

A torrent of syllables and fragments slipping over rocks 

among the old bones, in the creekbed in deep summer. 

The body’s doubt, and the knowledge of regret holding us back. 

7/19/23

Moonstones

I still have some moon-snails, still looking for my moonstones.

When I was young and foolish, I once hiked out to Arch Rock, or was it Double Point, I don’t remember which, I was hiking south along the deserted shore below Alamere Falls, when I came to a rocky outcrop and I couldn’t get to the other side. So I climbed up it and there was a big sinkhole down to the beach, and the arch looking out to sea—Double Point, I assumed. There are several arches along that part of the seashore. 

So I jumped down into the sinkhole to the beach below and went out the second arch and continued on exploring the isolated southern strand. Moonstones and moon shells galore. A treasure trove. By the time I returned at sunset, the tide was coming in and time was running out. What I hadn’t planned on, was the problem of climbing back up out of the concave walls of hole. For a while there I thought I was a goner.

Luckily when I jumped up I could just reach the lip overhang of the sinkhole with my hands, I held on for dear life, but I was sweating it trying to gain purchase on the eroded, not to mention slippery, concave walls of that sinkhole. A vertical wall would’ve been a piece of cake. I hadn’t counted on the curved walls. 

I utilized all my gymnastic moves and rock climbing skills, with a lot of adrenaline—which helped. I pulled myself up via a chin-up and hoisted an elbow over the edge. Victory. But getting my much heavier legs up to rim level without anything to use as leverage was much harder. As I flailed my legs, I thought for sure I was a goner. 

And yes, I was a little more than a teenager, so I guess we could blame my prefrontal lobes. Luckily, I had massive upper body strength, and I didn’t weigh very much. I pretended the cave lip was a horse, and eventually got a leg up and wriggled myself to the top. I was more than a bit shaken. I lay facedown on the rock counting my lucky stars. 

I remember the utter thrill of jumping down from the cliff into the sand. I felt like an intrepid explorer on an adventure. I never once thought about my personal safety. I’m sure there were moonstones in the sand egging me on as I was collecting them at the time. I felt invincible, it was a real Robinson Crusoe moment. Until I had to return the same way I came. Oops! Then, the long hike back along the Palomarin Trail to Highway One in the dusk.

Leave-takings

I was born with wanderlust. When I was a child, I would traipse off into the woods and hike up the ridges of Mt. Barnabe to see Elephant Mountain and Tomales Bay cleaving the land like a saber shining in the distance. Since then, I've traversed many landscapes the world over and for that I am grateful. 

One summer, when I was working in a small village deep in the Swiss Alps, I involuntarily threw my arms open wide as if to encompass the sublime majesty that left me breathless. Whenever I am overwhelmed by raw beauty, I open up my arms as if to embrace the landscape.

To anchor the self in place and time—if only just for a moment—that is my one true religion. I’ve done something similar with my own childhood landscapes, my ritual involves greeting the landscape as well as saying goodbye. Perhaps it is also a form of gratitude.

I once taught an old lover how to embrace the land. It was so exhilarating and liberating to acknowledge the intangible like that. As we hiked the long ridges that traversed the coastline, we opened our arms wide with impromptu hugs, kissing the vast landscape, saying I love you. I love you. A ritual that he continued to cherish long after we had broken up. 

When a Soviet friend had to return to the USSR when his visa expired, I was surprised to find there was also a Ukrainian custom of leave-takings—or saying goodbye to places you’ve been—which included bidding adeiu to my little cabin. 

It was somehow a fitting reminder to acknowledge the importance of departures. When you say goodbye to a house as if it were an old friend, you acknowledge its hospitality and shelter. It doesn’t need to be your house, it could be a place you've stayed, a place where the walls have protected you from the vagaries of the world.

And the house offered us refuge from our ourselves. Yes, I know, a house is an inanimate object, but it both shelters and cradles us in its arms like a mother. In that moment, it becomes not a house, but the idea of home. Something I learned while living in the USSR—and it seemed a fitting ritual. 

I can’t say there were many places in the Ukraine I wanted to embrace. The vast breadbasket was flat as a pancake all the way to the horizon and beyond—except for the desecrated kurgans, tumulus mounds punctuating an ancient landscape carpeted with sunflowers and wheat. 

At the steep ravine of the Bibi Yar, Stalin’s secret burial chasm, I wanted to weep even before I knew the backstory of the atrocities that had happened there, what was inhumanly possible. I said a goodbye racked with sobs for the eroding debris—bones of the unnamed dead hidden from the world in a mass grave.

Ditto that in Iona in the Hebrides as well—for entirely different reasons—the holiness of St. Columba's abby was graced with filtered light. I was letting go of something so profound, it was nearly nameless. It was as if I were shedding a lifetime of grief. The death of my grandmother, my mother. The absent father. 

Maybe it's a form of hiraeth or saudade. An overwhelming homesickness, more than nostalgia, it’s a longing for a place you cannot return to—the soul harboring equal parts of grief and love. As sobs racked my body, I was grateful that the holy community of Iona tactfully looked away, they understood the personal conversion of psyche.

The idea of leave-taking dates back to the 12th c., to receive permission from a liege lord to formally depart, as in fare thee well—I’m off to the holylands. As I made ready to leave, I was reminded of a saying I coined as a form of closure while on the steep slopes of Huayna Picchu, where I had left talismans: a lock of hair, and milky quartz from our hill in Northern California. For my grandmother, I said, as if bearing witness.

I instructed my friend, Always remember to say goodbye to the places you've been. Cherish them, say goodbye, for you will never pass this way again. 

And with that, I kissed the landscape goodbye.

5/18/23 Mill Valley Library non-fiction workshop with Sarah Broderick

THE BLUE VAULTED SKY

1. My grandmother hauls an oak sapling to the sawhorse, 

tumps it in to place, wields the bow saw like a violin, 

orchestrating the sonorous wood, as it plays the air 

like bees droning in the acacia trees. A sawdust pile rises up, 

and the cats, ever curious, watch it for signs of life. 

Our breath hangs in the air like half-formed ghosts. 

The winter reminds us there is only the wood stove for heat.

She never says anything much. Only later will I understand 

she is missing her husband, my grandfather, 

who died at the turn of the new year. She is alone now.

2. When he said he was going away, with suitcase in hand, 

I looked at the sky and asked to go with him. 

I couldn’t understand why he would say no, 

or why he’d leave without us. There was our shared birthday, 

I blew out his matches as I sat on his lap. Was he mad at us?

The aunts and uncles laughed uncomfortably 

when he said he was going up to heaven to be with the angels. 

I asked the practical questions of a four-year-old:

How would he get there, who was driving? Was there a bridge?

Would he stay in the clouds? And where was the road?

3. The following summer, I was obsessed with angels, 

as I struck wooden matches, thinking they were toothpicks, 

against the rusted seat of the teeter-totter lying on the dry grass,

when out of the blue, a disembodied voice said, don’t do that!

Startled, I dropped the matches, looked around.

But there was no one there, only the curious cats, 

and the merciless blue vault of the sky overhead.

4/12/23 Terri Glass prompt, Write On!

Early morning trail ride

Some Saturdays I rose before dawn for early morning trail rides with my friend Stephanie. Everyone else was asleep. Her father never knew of our morning escapades, and my grandmother didn’t seem to mind. But I also didn’t tell her where we were going, as it was too far from home for a child on her own. I was on my horse, somewhere deep in the hills, and therefore, safe. At least she never said anything to me. My own parents were in absentia, my father deep in a bottle, my mother in one asylum or other. Steph‘s dad was a little more controlling. See, her mother, who was a Russian translator for the UN, blacklisted by McCarthy, knew all about silence. She drank in silence, and because of that silence, she died in the fire. A short in the dryer. Because Les couldn’t protect his wife, he was over-protective of Steph. The boys, her two younger brothers, not so much. Bucky was close to our age but Gooby was still in diapers. We’d simultaneously sneak out of the house just as the sky was beginning to lighten, and meet up at the county road. The morning fog was like a tight glove protecting us from the mid-20th century. We could’ve been anywhere in time. Sometimes we’d sneak through her upper pasture, past Old Grandad, the Hereford bull, to get to the fire road that led up to Mt. Barnabe. But the stiff barbed wire gate gave our small hands pause. The top of the mountain facing due west was our goal. It was always a spectacular view from the crest of the ridge, the morning mist parting to reveal the sheathed silver sword of Tomales Bay, tracing the trench of the San Andreas Fault, and the clenched bare fist of Elephant Mountain. It restored my equilibrium to see the word from a raptor’s viewpoint. These refuges, these steep hills and valleys were the coping weapons of my youth.

4/12/23 

TheNarrativeMethod.com prompt

SPRING, AND ALL short poems, not quite haiku

Spring arrives with convicts
dressed in orange jumpsuits,
picking up the detritus of our lives
abandoned by the side of the road.

The hawk hunkers down on the powerline,
waiting for the foolish optimism of mice.

Two days of sunlight after weeks of rain,
the spine of the drought is broken,
and the pale hills flash their family jewels.

The wind laughs at the years
as if he were listening for something
from the great beyond.

Mornings, the words take their own time coming in. 

You have to be ready to rearrange the parts. 

     —With thanks to David Melzer. 

4/3/23

Retro clothing

I read an article, Adventures in my Wardrobe, about how we all have gobs of clothes hiding out in our closet as if they were in a witness protection program (or is it a witless protection program)—clothes that we never wear, and yet we hold onto for dear life. Because, memory. 

The author, Anne-Marie Hoeve, decided go on an archaeological dig in the back of her closet, and daylight all those old clothes she never wears. Her experience with her old clothes was like opening up a time capsule. The paradigm shift of memory and nostalgia head-butting with time present, made for a lively tale. 

The memories Hoeve experienced while wearing old clothing made for an intriguing anthropological study, as the association of clothes and memory is profound, if not downright irrational at times.

Like the odor of violets, old clothes can invoke the memories of the dead. It’s like hearing old music again. Loving Spoonful’s Happy Together telescopes me back to my 2nd corridor locker at Drake High School. Every time. I like my men young and and my clothing old—I used to joke that I only wore clothing of the dead, so as to keep their memories alive. There’s more than a little truth to that.

Every few years I go through my really old clothes and wear them again, after an extended sabbatical, they seem like new again, so I’m hesitant to toss the old stuff out. I hate to part with my retro clothes. OK, so call them antique clothing. But they give me joy. That crazy OCD minimalist organizer and delclutterist guru who arranges books by color, Marie Kondo, would not approve.

Something I haven’t worn in five or ten years, is dragged out of the giveaway bag, and becomes a new favorite again. Especially with summer clothes. That old mirrored rayon top with the over-dyed embroidery from the $5 box at Tienda Ho on Telegraph Avenue in 1999 that hasn’t seen daylight in decades, suddenly became a new favorite during the heat wave, despite my cousin‘s dismissive sniffing.

Or a recent score of string pants from Savers totally matches that sparkly plaid Victoria’s Secret nightshirt dress and completes it—as if it’s been waiting all these years for the stars to align to this particular moment in time. Ok, so they’re too big. Maybe the black leggings are a better match. I look less like a plaid oversized Easter bunny terrorizing the neighborhood.

And the sea foam green cashmere poncho, a street find (some dead lady’s stuff), perfectly matches the new GV jeans I bought during an impulsive pre-COVID-19 moment after I had finally left my abusive partner of 20 years. I had stuffed them into the giveaway bag because the memory association was too painful. But the sweet cashmere poncho reclaimed them for me. You bet I will wear them now, come sweet May again.

Black Sabbath, or why I don’t drink much

I was born with red hair, bright as a new, copper penny, but it darkened to a shade of auburn when I was 12, and then it faded to a mousy brown when I was 16. I felt betrayed by my changing hair color, but I emulated all the clichés of being a redhead.

I carried all the markers including packing a fierce temper, pale freckled skin that easily burned, and I have an unusually high tolerance to pain. The pain threshold is an interesting quirk, I remember coming to during all my operations— when I had my tonsils removed, I remember my doctor’s face with the convex mirror on his forehead. He said it wasn’t possible.

My oral surgery, my first knee operation, I remember them all. During one operation, I was struck with inconsolable grief and began sobbing, my anesthesiologist had to tell me to stop crying for what, I don’t remember. But I bore witness to all my operations, much to the dismay of my anesthesiologists.

I took to warning my doctors that I carried the redhead gene, but they didn’t listen, or didn’t believe me—until after my last knee operation, when I began to recant the playlist, as if it was a profane litany. It surprised me that my knee surgeon, who owned a race horse, was into the Scorpions and Black Sabbath.

RUSH HOUR and other short poems

RUSH HOUR

Friday night at the dispensary. 

Boomers wait patiently in line. 

Not one of us is under 50.

3/13

GAME CHANGER

After the storm, potholes bloom 

on the back roads 

like a giant game of Chinese checkers 

where the scoreboard tracks our tires.

3/13

ONE STORM TOO MANY

The ancient patriarchs of the field 

gave up the ghost and sloughed off 

into the earth for that final nap. 

No saplings to replace them.

3/13

BACKROADS

A drunken uncle once said, 

alcoholics know all the back roads. 

Decades later, out of habit, 

we still drive all the back roads, 

our relatives, long since dead. 

3/13

All backroads flooded, 3.5” of rain, hail