Thursday night I was a complete zombie.
Dinner at Kioki’s with the Zennys, He was delighted at the quality of their sukiyaki.
“In your school, Zenny, did you have to sweep the halls? Or did you have janitors?”
“Not the halls, but the classroom. Huh, I never really thought about it. It was just something we did. The newcomers complained, though, the parents complaining that wasn’t sending their kids to school for,” the clash in cultures between Japanese and American values.
And rice, big bowls, in the cafeteria — including cafeteria duty, twice a month.
~*~
My parents phoned: won’t be coming out: but my sister passed her nursing boards, first time around.
Assembled a cheap picnic table kit.
Cherries lack size this year — the cold snap just as they were ripening knocks the crown off their price.
Kitty: “I can’t do anything when you’re here” followed by “When you gonna mow the grass?”
Plus: “I can’t even draw when you’re home.”
Oh, yeah? Writing is damn frustrating work, even without interruptions.
~*~
She had some friends down from E’burg for a feast: crab, spring potatoes, snow-pod peas, beaucoup wine, all delightful. With my head tizzy nearly dizzy, I stepped out to look at the twilight mountains and catch some air. Saw Rena, then Zenny taking a piss in the orchard. And then, “Come on in,” he said, waving me to a small trailer parked there. And then in we went for me to make an incredible introduction to Richard “Smitty” Small Bear, a forest tree planter who works six months a year — an ex-astrologer, Zen student, and now a Friend — with his fourth wife, Pattibuff, a schoolteacher. He’s from Georgia with a nearly New England accent [how did I know then?]. We were there two hours by coal-oil lamp. “Hey! I gotta get back! We gotta party!”
I returned the next night, even better.
Told me about the two weeks he spent on the Appalachian Trail, trying to work out a broken loving. “I met an animal every day — a deer, a bear, face to face — every day except one, when I bedded down in the shelter, fell asleep, bolted upright in the middle of the night, felt an evil, a cold glowing moving my way, as if wishing to scare me out into the laurel. People step of the trail there, in that laurel, are never found again. I stared at it, thought I’d lose my mind, realized it was a contest of wills. I finally shouted, ‘Go away!’ and it retreated. I fell back into an instant deep sleep. Later, in Foxfire, I read that place was believed to be full of evil spirits.”
“Maybe you were finally facing yourself.”
“Maybe. Or maybe something else.”
“That, too.”
“To an anthropologist, it’s all real.”
He had spend five years with the Hodads, a tree-planting cooperative named for the short spades they used.
He left in the morning, back to Deadwood, Oregon.
~*~
Next night at Tinowit, the irony of ancient tribal dances on a modern basketball court. Indoors.
In one mating song and dance, the male circles an oblivious female (pecking grain) as he sings a bright, optimistic song while hopping counterclockwise except for a few steps back. Regular steps. Hops and half-turns within place before moving around the circle, singing, and then stopping to peck his own grain, very slowly, circling.
Later, when we ran into our landlords, the advice, “Leave by 11. The real stuff starts after midnight, when the men arrive with war dances. This is just a warmup.”
In other words, “Whites not welcome. Go away!” Or else.
~*~
27:VI:79
What caused yesterday’s power outage was a beaver.
Summer going smoother than I had expected …
[As a lesson in the similarities and differences between American football and opera] … both deal in the clash of power, but only one includes love and betrayal …
The Fourth of July frustrating when my fireworks didn’t burn, it was too windy after dark. Box of wooden matches, even the entire thing all at once wouldn’t burn. SHIT, SHIT, SHIT. Red Chinese fireworks, $5.95 plus tax.
Next night, potluck at the Dolphs … Zennys and the Jim Doornicks showed up. Kitty: “We don’t fit in anywhere.”
Zenny got fired a week ago. Paul Belzer, finding himself in a real jam, wants a hired man who can save his orchard. Barid got a week’s pay and two weeks’ notice on moving out. Learned from a lawyer that when housing’s part of your pay, they can just kick you out.
Thursday night Kitty accidentally planted idea in Zenny’s head of buying a place, a joint venture, and he replied he knows of low-interest loans if you already have the land, an interesting catch. So things begin cooking. Whether they bear fruit, we’ll see.
Kitty’s still spray painting her car (using cans of spray paint). Sand off, spray again, shamrock green. Looks velvety, though, rather than shiny.
That was our VW Bug, with its bare spots from our move out from Indiana.
9:VII:79
After two or three arguments, I threw a box of canning jars across the yard. What’s happening to me? And I spent the next Saturday working on SOP [standards of performance] sheet for second half of the year and a Yearly Meeting response to a query. No poems. Five more day to vacation.
Fortune cookie: Among the lucky, you are the chosen one.
Rattlesnake Ridge, where this shot was likely taken, rose behind our shack. It was as tall as many of the mountains in the Northeastern U.S. but arid. On the other side from us was the Moxee Valley, which reached eastward from Yakima. Remember, everything green was irrigated. Photo by Z3lvs via Wikipedia Commons.
~*~
20 sept, Thursday
Cut off, irrigation ditch today.
Yesterday, looked at our first orchard purchase possibility. No way: 16 acres, $160,000, 29% down. Bad production, tiny 3-year-old apple trees, water stress. Landlord/seller is keeping the choicest spot, smack in the center, the site’s the key to pollination and wind-machine control.
Great Hawaiian chicken dinner at Zenny and Bloom’s …
Don’t know why I vote. Always on the losing side.
On the highway, precast concrete beams for Interstate 82 extension. Each beam, trucked in from Seattle, on 18 wheels with the tractor, plus the tail assembly another 18 wheels with a cockpit slung between for a second driver (crazy fool) held to the tractor by only that beam. Five to seven beams for each span of highway overpass/underpass for each double lane of highway. Six of those spans at Sunnyside Dam add up to 72 trips from Seattle, more or less. Each beam weighs 250,000 pounds — 125 tons.
One beam beside the road was broken/cracked/twisted. It had gotten loose while being moved into place. Reason only one of two cranes was on the site now.
~*~
Finally, some Hatha — last night, candlelight only — me, my skinny tent of bones stripped to brahmacharies — bone and hair, big feet, breath — stretching, bending, breaking back, getting free.
Nagging feeling something’s going wrong — at the office, especially — with Meeting and home, too. Lord, give me strength!
A dream of a party at Dave Smart’s old house. Robin Rankin and her husband were hosting — the Aldrich twins and others seducing me — or seduced. We go to an upstairs room in the back, make love in an evening rain. Outside the window is an incredible forest that had always been hidden by the houses on the street (Oakdale and Ashland retain forest names). A good-sized stream in a valley plus a waterfall. The nearest house, out beyond that. (Moler’s Dairy, in reality, where those waters would have been, had been sold or at least out of business and was being torn down. The woods of my dream were as dense as Jay Lower’s down the street, whose land probably triggered this.)
Anyway, the idea of a forest in the Sabins’ tight yard is amazing, especially considering there was only a sprawling cottonwood two yards over, plus telephone wire and somewhere beyond that WING’s two blinking radio towers at night.
23:XI:79 / Friday [after Thanksgiving]
Snow yesterday — awaken to an inch or so already on the ground, more piling up onto leaves still on the orchard trees into the afternoon.
“It’s Christmas!”
Saturday — More snow, atop the earlier three inches … yellow and green leaves scattered atop six inches of snow. A chainsaw buzzing somewhere off in a peach grove.
Black bra, black panties — kisses, full of teeth and tongue — my hot, wild honey.
Are the novel and poems, really worth the effort, time, blood? Sometimes it feels so futile.
9:XII.79
Upcoming Christmas, with its underlying depression and obligations.
BE HAPPY OR ELSE!
Extending to “We merchants are happy if you keep spending, pal.”
One time of the year everyone’s downtown. New faces. Where do they come from?
23:XII:79
After driving the Dolphs to the airport in their Mercedes on the slickest roads, their flight delayed, we made a dash to the valley mall for last shopping — camera film, books, Trojans, groceries — a good day to sit tight, do nothing, except read Brautigan’s Dreaming of Babylon, a real disappointment in which nothing happens.
The night before, on KKHI [an AM radio station in San Francisco; its signal reached Yakima at night], a Salzburg festival broadcast of Mozart’s Magic Flute with magnificent conducting, vigorous, spirited, free, yet precise — turned out to be James Levine on the stand, doing Max Rudolf proud
~*~
New Year’s Eve party at Whiz and Wisteria’s … Purdy showing up with the wife of the Toppenish Review editor. Carla? Nice body, horsey face. (I’ll see her later, Unitarian.) And he screaming, “I’m the only religious character around here!” (Or in this room?) “And my religion isn’t! Hee-hee!” (UU)
Kitty’s SHUT UP YOU GUYS! (She beat the unbeatable Ivar at chess yesterday in three moves. He was dumbfounded, she the Big Big-Shot. Cigarettes and makeup, me sexy wife.
A whole world of fools, as Karin from Denmark toasted and then accidentally knocked the world globe off onto Whiz’s turntable and floor. Tee-hee!
Actions and accidents both speak.
~*~
From Spiralbound Cascadia with commentary.
