A baby is born

A new baby was born, and he looked around.   He was present in the room.  He felt the warmness of the room, and heard the humming of the air from the ceiling registers, and the clatter of carts in the hall.  Bells rang. People in white moved through the room and through the hallways.   The baby awakened out of thinking.  He did not think but felt, heard, touched, tasted.  The baby was without illusion.  The baby was disillusioned.  He had come from a place of abstraction, a place without form and only direction, where there was no thought, only action, as cells divided and multiplied, each within its own capacity.  The baby had become from infinite possibility.  It had opened itself to the places where the cells would go, and it became full, and whole, and finally, aware and empty.  And when there were no others moving, no clatter, no light, there was stillness, and it was the stillness that the baby had come to know, and would always seek again, and so the baby listened for nothing always and again.  He moved away from thought and toward nothing. He moved away from who he thought he was, or who others thought he was.  The baby became its parents and progeny flowing down for thousands of years, and evolving from salt and sea.  It became the forest, and the sun on the leaves of the forest, and the soils and waters beneath, and the life that flowed through and within all things.  He became part of all that had been, was, and was becoming.  He was as insignificant and as significant as a unique entity, and because of his connections to all living things, had limitless power.  He surrendered all understanding.  He became as the wind.

Advice from Ralph (the cowdog) in these hard times.

There are bulls and bears, but there are more loved dogs.

You can’t count on food, so plan ahead and keep your nose to the ground. 

It’s sometimes hard to sniff out a good friend.  Find one human you can always trust. 

It’s important to take the time to find the best place to lie down. 

We can mate, play and fight.  What grand opportunities every day. 

Don’t eat all of the cat just yet. 

Only chase things you can’t catch. 

Lie down in the waves.  It cools the tummy. 

Eat everything in your bowl. 

I am here because other mammals lack direction. 

Groom old mates. 

I can learn new tricks. 

There is nothing better than a hug. 

I have all I need and no Blackberry. 

Neutering is Prozac for dogs. 

Fewer fleas is worth the bath. 

If it gets cold, don’t complain. Find a warm spot. 

If I sleep on the sofa when no one is home, then did I really sleep on the sofa? 

There is nothing better than a run in the marsh. 

I have trained him to throw a ball. 

Invest in free time. 

There is no retirement.  Run ‘till you drop. 

Injuring and playing with a vole, is more fun than killing a vole. 

Terriers can teach you how to dig with your nose. 

Waiting silently in the cold to be let in, makes humans feel magnanimous. 

Lie in the shade in the Summer and the sun in the Winter. 

Don’t be afraid to shed. 

Don’t worry about the fleas, just scratch. 

Try to be useful sometimes. 

When he says sit, I think rest. 

When he says shake, I think foot rub. 

When he says roll over, I think back scratch. 

When he says stay, I think inevitable food treat. 

All dogs are good dogs.

Bark less, wag more.

You are, therefore I am.

Copyright 2008 Bill Pendergraft  Photograph of Lucy Creek, late afternoon.

November 4, 2008

Andrew Bellamy

Photographed by John Rosenthal 

 

In the sandhills of North Carolina

Beneath the long leaf pines

Curving with age, their canopies flattened

Turkey oaks turning from the sun

And the glistening wiregrass below

Falling to pocosins and the thickets

Of myrtle and sundews and flytraps

Slopes of low bush blueberries,

Lately browsed by black bears and murders of crows,

Lies a long lost cemetery.

 

Here can be heard the thump of the pickaxe

And shovel striking down through the sand and clay

And the skid and grate of sand,

Shoveled up and out to the pile.

The glistening muscles of a young black man

Alone here at the dig.

His breath slow and rhythmic

His eyes first down to his work

Then up to the chattering pileateds

And the gnaws and rustles of fox squirrels,

Dropping remnant cones through the understory.

 

To this rectangle, deepening into the dark earth

Beyond the light and sands and soils

To the very heart of the matter

Fly the sons and daughters of the South

The poor rag tag soldiers

And their withering masters.

 

Pouring from the sky like July rain,

Come the Baptists and Jews

The Methodists and Episcopalians

Slave owners and sons of slaves

Masters and sons of masters

From the shores of Madagascar

Cross the Gulf Stream

To Port Royal, Charleston and Savannah

 

All bound and bound to come here

Flying like crows and doves to this deep hole

The segregationists and hateful politicians

The Northern fat that fed them

Sucked into the sky and from the sky

Funneled to the deepening grave.

All come here now

A downpour of sorrow and death

Come all who have enslaved others

Once and for all, descending.

To the final dark and silence.

 

He is solitary in his labor

He is bent and determined

He is in a rhythm between the labor

And the rewards of labor

He does not pause to rest

But struggles on and on here

 

And when he has finished

When the last of them comes home

When all are covered and silent

And the earth is free of them

And their hatred and the memories of their hatred

He slides his shovel and pickaxe onto the grass

And he lies down

He lies down

Lies down at last

Above and covering the rest

The dark angel of their return

And we hear of them no more.

 

Copyright 2008 Bill Pendergraft

Two Chances a Day

We have two chances a day to paddle with the rising tide into the salt marshes that fringe Beaufort County, South Carolina.  Here among the thousands of acres of spartina alterniflora, the great soup of muddy substrate and the soft percussions of ooze, we can open ourselves like an oyster and feed on all the richness of life meandering, as we slide quietly through the sulpherous froth to watch, listen, reflect.  

Periwinkle feed on algae, inching up and down the spartina with the tides.  The seaside sparrow that lives and more often dies only in this wet fringing grassland buzzes at our passing, yet he and the rail remain invisible.  With a heaving hoarse breath, a dolphin and child rise from the black bottom and herd fry into green thickets.  We lie back on the boat, beneath the most blue of skies, as osprey, eagles and wood stork float on heat rising from the pluff mud. 

We debate the economies of big box development, and new jobs. We will need to fill low wet places. We use euphemisms like “beach renourishment” and “wetland mitigation,” a head fake to take our minds off of the reality of bulldozers and backhoes.   

And what will become of our salt marshes, as the sediments dribble across macadam, through the orange illusion of barrier fencing and down storm drains to cover and kill? 

Sometimes we only have one chance a day.

Copyright 2008 Bill Pendergraft

Photo of JP paddling to Goat

Ralph the Cowdog

Fay formed as a tropical storm in the Caribbean, cut across the Keys, headed east into the Atlantic, and turned west at Melbourne, steered by a high-pressure system. For three days the winds and rain bands swept from the east, one moment, sunny and still, and then gusts cross the loose affiliation of hummocks and islands that is Beaufort, SC. Live oak leaves and the branches of water oaks and pine tops thump on the roof, and scatter across the myrtle understory like a green garnish. The wind heaps the spartina and water up in the sloughs to froth.

Ralph, the cowdog, lies sodden and forlorn in a hole he has dug, his jaw flattened against the wet sand. With each successive squall, he runs low under the house, and I see him lying there, looking for comfort in the blow, but refusing to come inside.

Ralph, brought here by my daughter as a pup from Red Canyon Ranch in Landers, Wyoming, was the son of Gypsy, a girl who chased coyotes up from the river corridors in spring, and slept in winter snow caves. Her coat was as thick as that of Icelandic sheep, and her jaw was crooked from a break that happened when she leapt from a flying flatbed Ford 350, as it hurtled up to the high ranges. Ralph inherited her stoic nature, practical attitude, cordiality and ability to herd and separate the chosen. As he now lives in a small patch of coastal woodlands without cows, his best and most infamous work is circling strangers and giving them a friendly nip on the Achilles tendon. In the heat of August, he wades into the marsh and pluff mud just up to his raised nose.

His job now seems to be to watch me, walk beside me, and sit when I stop, and I think he feels that’s my job as well. He sleeps by my bed and I hear him curl and stretch on the rug during the night. When we awake, we greet each other like lost children. We are kin to each living thing, and if we are paying attention, even the very slightest among them is our guide and good friend in the storms.

Photo: Ralph, the cowdog, watches Fay blow through

Copyright 2008 Bill Pendergraft

Reykur

Stykkisholmur, (Stykkis to locals) Iceland on the Snaefellsnes Peninsula is a natural harbor and the jumping off place for the ferry to Flatey and on to the Westfjords, Iceland’s wildest and many say, most beautiful place. Stykkis is a pleasing collection of 19th century clapboard cottages and modern structures. Just a few miles South, the first Iceland assembly met in the 9th century on Helgafell, the sacred mountain of Thor.

After many nights of camping, we check into the Grundarfjordur Hostel in Stykkis to wash off some road mud and sleep in a place with no sheep.

Glaciers cover about 15 percent of Iceland, and we’ve almost completed a counterclockwise tour beginning in Keflavik some 14 days before, and leading around Langjokull and Myrdalsjokull, and across Vatnajokull, calving into the North Atlantic, and by Dranbgajokull before dropping South. Tomorrow, we will return to Reykjavik, people, traffic, noise and shopping malls after a two-week escape.

In Stykkis we meet Sara, an artist who splits her life between the UK and Iceland. She asks, “Have you been to the Library of Water?” After two weeks of wet touring, hot spring soaks, massive glaciers, volcanoes, earthquakes, and breathtaking waterfalls around every bend in the road, that Iceland would have a library of water seemed usual. “Why no,” we reply.

A quick walk up to the high point in Stykkis and we enter what was Stykkis’ former library, now evolved into a museum and containing an exhibition of water, words and weather reports by US artist, Roni Horn. http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/horn_roni.html

Twenty-four glass columns hold water collected as ice from some of Iceland’s glaciers. The sculpture of water and glass is bathed in morning light as we look around and through the columns to the sea beyond and down to adjectives inscribed on the floor and capturing the weather within and without us. http://www.libraryofwater.is/

When we travel we may try to capture and somehow contain the story of the journey. It may be glass columns of glacial water or more likely a diary, photographs, stories that we relate to family and friends, or glacial blue images that pool in our dreams like melting ice. And the more literal our attempt at documentation, the more magic we lose in the telling. Here, there is magic all around, stirred among the steam, fog, smoke and rain.

Copyright Bill Pendergraft 2008

Sara at the Library of Water

Sorry Day, Sydney

My daughter climbs the 1439 steps to the summit of the Sydney Bridge, and watches the boat traffic in the harbor, the tourists snaking to the Sydney Opera House, and the CBD and beaches beyond.

Bridge construction began in 1923 and though the project razed the neighborhoods in its path, it provided jobs during the Great Depression. After completion locals were concerned about the apparent safety of the bridge, and four pylons were built. Largely cosmetic, they added no real strength or safety to the bridge, but gave users a comfortable mythology.

She climbs on the day of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous Australians for their mistreatment.

…today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing culture in human history. We reflect on their past mistreatment. We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations—this blemished chapter in our nation’s history. The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country. For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry. To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry. We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written. We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.

As he speaks, Australians of all color and heritage weep openly in the streets of Sydney and beyond, and I am reminded of King's speech on a summer day in Washington DC forty-five years earlier. My daughter winds her way down and we head into the city. Neither King nor Rudd have cured injustice, yet their words serve as comforting pylons as we inch toward lasting equality, the way apology leads to forgiveness, and forgiveness to peace.

Copyright Bill Pendergraft 2008

Photo of Sydney Bridge with the NSW and Australian flags flying.

Truth and Fiction, Beaufort

In Beaufort South Carolina, there is a river, but the river is not a river at all. Here, you never know exactly what is truth and what is fiction, what are rivers or confusing meanderings of creeks and tidelands. The river is fiction, for though you expect that rivers begin somewhere and end somewhere, the river here really has no beginning and no ending. It flows back and forth with the tides, and with some whimsy inspired by the moon. In fact, when my very own daughter talks about the river, she doesn’t mean the Beaufort River necessarily, but all creeks, rivers and bays in the lowcountry, and in all truth, I think she describes her capacity for a perfect balance here on the edge, a balance on the flood tide of happiness that occurs when she’s here, with her peeps, on the river. For here, among the mysteries of tidal marsh and all life that calls Beaufort home, living between truth and fiction seems normal. Like a good Frogmore Stew,(http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Good-Ole-Southern-Frogmore-Stew/Detail.aspx) though you follow the recipe, you never really know what will turn out, or who will turn up.

So it was one day when the mysterious children of my nephew and his wife came for a visit. It may have been the moment that we gathered strawberries at Dempsey’s (www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM25A), as DP and Elizabeth Ann squished the most juicy soft ones in their hands on the way to the bucket, and when later we made biscuits with extra sugar, and whipped cream for strawberry shortcake…the good kind, and later walked in the woods in search of nature’s mysteries, and dropped down the bank out to Lucy Creek to see if the Devil Pot had emerged from the pluff mud. At this moment I believe DP was crafting a cross of the dead fronds of the sable palm, and Elizabeth Ann, was in search of pine nuts, her latest passion.

It was at this moment, that the truth of this and the fiction of that collided the way winds and tides collide in opposition, stirring up the most disturbed water, with a white frothy surf, like women throwing their wet hair back over their heads. DP collected leaves and sticks for his mother, and Elizabeth Ann lost “Charlotte’s Web” and made sure DP was properly buckled in for the ride back home.

In spite of our little sentiments about life's predictability, water and children are entirely unpredictable. They pool and flow in the most unlikely ways, in strange places, and often against the tide.

Next time, smores and stories in a thicket of myrtles and buckeyes.

Photo of Lucy Creek in a mysterious fog

Copyright Bill Pendergraft 2008

Turlee Station, New South Wales

Turlee Station, one hundred and forty-five thousand acres of mallee, rabbits, roos, emus and sheep is fifty clicks south of Mungo National Park in New South Wales, Australia, and ninety northeast of Mildura Victoria. Even if you don’t know about John Williamson’s music, when you’re at Turlee, I reckon you can hear his songs blowing ‘round the water tanks and up through the holes in the corrugated.

Turlee is a working sheep station that has begun to attract tourists as it’s close to the moonscape of Lake Mungo (http://www2.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au/) and wrapped around by the Willandra Lakes World Heritage Area. I have pitched a tent at Lake Mungo a few times, and even stayed in Mildura at the posh Grand Mildura Hotel, drinking some great local brews and sampling Stefano’s best cuisine, (http://www.stefano.com.au/) however the best two nights I spent in the area were at Turlee.

It certainly had to do with the company, as my partner and I were joined by another yank couple, just flying to Australia for the first time. While I expected that they would take one look at Turlee and begin running across the wheat fields toward home, they took to it immediately. The temperature at one hundred and ten would have sucked the moisture from their lips, but the bush flies were there first. Without so much as an Aussie wave, they helped me make a cuppa after the evening’s pasta and an old Penley's from Coonawarra. We also met Des Wakefield, who has owned Turlee Station since 1973, and the station stay owners, Nathen Wakefield and his wife Sophie, who manage the complexities of station life with aplomb.

We napped, not to be confused with sleep, in the shearer’s quarters with no cross ventilation, a steady stream of mosquitoes, and an occasional bat that swooped in on the insects. We would have baked like a tourist at Byron Bay yet Bob, the local roo hunter, kindly lent us his electric fan... but that’s another story.

You know you’ve found a great spot when in spite of withering heat, biting insects, and scary mammals, you remember every nuance of the experience with the fondness of your first date. OK, inexact comparison, but you get the drift.

We landed at Turlee because some mob from the BBC were filming in the area and hogging the quarters at Mungo NP, but what a stroke of luck for us. We watched them emerge occasionally to lean on their tripod at sunrise, and look anxiously toward Dover.

Before Turlee, I loved to visit this edge of the outback, to watch wildlife and stumble around the lunette in search of Mungo woman, but after a couple of days driving up from the Murray to Turlee Station, I want to be a mallee boy.

Learn more at http://www.turleestationstay.com.au/

Want to hear more about John Williamson's music? Drop into http://www.johnwilliamson.com.au/

Copyright Bill Pendergraft 2008

Marja trying to get some rest at Turlee Station. Photo by Jonathon Colman

Fledglings, Beaufort

The fledgling eagle flew a great circle over the spring marshes of Lucy Creek and crash landed in my neighbor’s yard. Jim Holden called me for a hand in approaching the eagle to determine if it was injured, and to monitor its status until we could call for some expert help.

We found the eagle in a thicket of yaupon and wax myrtle, under the low hanging limb of an angel oak, his dark feathers a perfect match to his surroundings, the shadows of the small wood. He was silent, as were the parents. We often awoke to the adult's calls and also heard them at dusk, hunting over the rising tide, but this afternoon not a sound.

We determined that the best course was to call Tom Murphy at the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources; our friend and resident eagle expert who constantly monitors the status of the expanding eagle population in the state.

During the evening, Jim must fend off the neighbor’s marauding dogs, as an attack could injure or even kill the young eagle.

The next day Tom and veterinarian Al Segars arrive, capture the eagle and determine that it has an injured leg and eye. There is speculation that, as there were two juveniles in the nest, one could have attacked and driven the other away, too early for its first flight; too soon to have learned to summon its parents with a call of distress.

Later we learn from Tom that the young eagle was euthanized, unable to do what eagles must do to survive; to see clearly, to hold on.

As a human parent, it would be anthropomorphizing to attribute my parental sentimentality to eagles; to imagine that they would worry about their lost youngster. Would they carry on if their young had disappeared, unheeded, unheralded, or would they sit awake in the darkness, listening for a call of distress?

Copyright Bill Pendergraft 2008

Al Segars and Tom Murphy at work in the Lowcountry.