White Deer

My grandmother and I used to traipse along Inverness Ridge each fall to pick huckleberries, and for a glimpse of Old Man Ottenger’s exotic white deer and the spotted fallow deer; but the National Park Service took the land from them, parcel by parcel—destroying most of the dairy ranches in the process.

The NPS gave the land to the public, tore down historic farm buildings, killed off the exotic deer: non-native species. If the alternative was a future of tract-housing, then they did a good thing, taking the land, but what they destroyed in the process was a thriving community of farmers and ranchers—for the greater good of tourists and their easy dollars.

But most of this land commuting northward at 2 inches a year along the Fault, is so far from civilization that its isolation is its salvation and its reward.

Trigger-points of memory: a certain angle of light reposes on the blood-red roses splayed against the limed wall of an abandoned farm. A bleached redwood wine vat holds the music of spring water plashing into the mossy trough where cattle and deer come to slake their thirst at sunset. Generations of barn swallows sip and weave the air into arabesques. No one wants to look at the moral dilemma: ranchers—treated like the Coast Miwoks their forefathers displaced—offered land treaties in the form of 25-year leases. Polyester tourists, also a non-native species. Rarer now to see the white deer.

Once while rough camping, I saw a big white buck in the night mist—an otherworld apparition of white on white—his antlers tining the haloed moon. But another kind of darkness hid in the pale Albion moonlight.

A sudden chill, a premonition drove me deep into the arms of pine boughs as truck lights severed the darkness. The silhouettes of two men illumined by red tail lights filled me with unseasonable fear. . I heard shots. Saw them leave. I was so afraid, I curled into the arms of the old pine and shook with fear.

At Limantour Spit death’s admiral was waiting in the staccato report of poachers’ guns—like Chinese firecrackers—the night they shot Ranger Kenneth Patrick for the rare white deer hides. Like the dried penises of white tigers, the deerskins were destined to be sold as aphrodisiacs and for healing magic to the highest bidder in the black markets of China.

© 1997 revised 2000 Maureen Hurley

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE 5/5/89

Wildcat Beach, Beltaine Silk & dye.

WILDCAT BEACH, BELTAINE

                                — for my students Nat & Erik

At Wildcat Beach I fill pockets with wax opals,

agates and moonstones—pieces of the fallen moon.

Five vultures wheel in a bright sky vibrating

against ruddy cliffs. The ocean eats the strand,

the night eats the sun. We lose track of time.

I point out equus, horsetail fern, ancestor of trees

when the dinosaurs were young. I despair:

so little time to teach the children about life cycles.

I yell at those who want to quit right in the middle of the road—

Five miles is forever. I feel like an ogre yelling at them.

Coddling won't do. No, that’s not it. I was never coddled.

So I tousle their heads, repack packs, clean skinned knees,

offer advice, feed them chocolate—these children I never had—

I am mother without being mother, father without having had one.

It's always a longer walk back, no matter what they say.

I am teacher. I am poet incanting words into true air.

We make a medicine wheel, divide into the four elements,

and writie poetry to the cardinal directions.

One crow commuting up the beach nods to me in flight.

On this side of the San Andreas Fault,

I come to understand the rest is illusion:

Those old generals who set the Gulf ablaze with oil

their dreams are cursed by flames of blue eels

writhing in shallow pools. Fire over water.

I dreamed Easter Island was a mathematical equation of the mind.

Two boys and I sit on the bluffs talking of neutron stars

and the desire for a simple life filled with ritual.

We watch a bonfire blaze on the opposite shore.

Nat says everything has a spirit—even that lupine bush.

They restore my faith, like the white deer who browse

beneath the stars. Recognizing an absence of ritual

in our lives, we seek something unbidden in the moonlight,

in the water and in the ancient eyes of fish.

5/5/89