OK, so I've been gone from the writing world for a little too long. Not working at the newspaper has finally freed my mind enough to let me think about things that I might WANT to write about instead of HAVE to write about. So let the comeback begin.
As soon as I get back from Glacier Park!
Friday, July 27, 2012
Monday, September 15, 2008
Deer
“This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it n to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.”
“The Deer,” by Mary Oliver
I hear everything at night. The creek across the road, the past, with all its failure and triumph, the hum of an intrusive streetlight, the rush of my own blood, relentlessly saving the only life it knows.
The doe was under the crabapple tree, pawing at the fallen fruit. She was last year’s fawn, maybe, compact and a bit squat for a whitetail.
She was already putting on fur for the coming winter, her tawny coat giving way to a mat gray. Her chilled breath frosted the hairs of her snout.
Hidden by the dark house, I sat unseen by the living room window and consciously tried to turn all my attention to her.
The ubiquity of deer has made that ever more difficult. In our upper Rattlesnake neighborhood, deer outnumber dogs. That should perhaps be a blessing in our anesthesized, screen-filled lives, a chance to brush shoulders with the wild.
Instead, because deer are everywhere, seeing them has lost its sense of mystery and wonder, which surfaces maybe with the year’s first fawn but mostly not at all.
Around our house, Jakki will literally fawn over fawns, but the English language is in for a beating if one of those fawn’s moms ventures onto the deck and chows down on our allegedly deer-resistant flora.
With all that in mind, I sat quietly and gave myself fully to the deer. Beyond her skittering watchfulness, what struck me most fully about her was her face. I’ve watched enough deer over time to know they all look different, but this face was, somehow, more different.
Her muzzle was shortened, her ears a little less erect, more doglike. But mostly it was her eyes. They were, for a deer, too close together, but what I saw in them was the mystery, both the other-ness of the wild and my own sense of connection with the natural world.
I must’ve sat for an hour with the deer. She browsed for a while, then curled up in the frozen grass and slept. Finally, I did the same.
Over the weeks and through the winter, I saw her regularly, recognizing her easily amidst her colleagues by her impish mug.
Her love affair with the crabapple extended into the snow season. In time, I could see what differentiated her curved hoofprints from those of others that gathered under the crabapple.
For a month, the little doe would startle if I stepped out the front door, lighting out for the woods, but as the weeks passed and food got harder to find, she brooked my presence more patiently.
I don’t want to make too much of this. I’m no deer whisperer, and I don’t want to to say I had some ethereal bond with this doe. At least not one that she took part in.
But what she did was re-open my eyes to the astonishing wonder right there in my own neighborhood. What she did was wipe clear the window of amazement that always exists but remains too often shuttered as we cycle through the dulling sequence of workaday living.
“This is the earnest work,” the poet said, and she is right.
When the winter ended, the doe moved on, as green-up moved up the hillsides and creek drainages. I missed her, but I moved on, too, to spring vacations, to my daughter coming home from California, to every little thing that passes the days.
Sometimes, late at night, I’d think I heard her, but it was always just the rush of blood and creek water merging at the intersection of past and future. The most I could find were mud-smudged hoofprints that might belong to hundreds of deer.
And yet she lingered in my mind, making it possible for me to look at other deer not as neighborhood pests but as emissaries from the world that exists beyond my everyday life.
What she did was not make me ponder wilderness and what it means, but allowed me to simply sit for a while with the notion of being wild, of moving only out of need for food, water and cover.
To let the other things that pass for need slip away.
Every week, I see a deer dead by the side of the road. Because of the cross-eyed doe, because she made me see rather than look, I recognize most of them. A sentimentalist might have named them, but I just remember their faces, the curve of their antlers, the one that limps, this fawn that goes with that mother.
Most of them die needlessly, killed by motorists driving too fast for reasons antithetical to the “earnest work.”
But I’m not here to rattle sabers, and my ears aren’t capable of hearing the excuses anyway.
Besides, we all die.
A few weeks ago, on a bike ride on the trail north of our house, I came upon a small deer dead in the woods.
Her nose was blunt, too short for her face, and her ears folded over at the ends. More gray than brown. Her body was smooth, no sign of a wound or injury. The ground around her was undisturbed, dry, not even a hoofprint.
Her eyes were closed, and I left them that way, mostly to avoid the truth of their gaze.
I dragged her a bit deeper into the woods, covered her body with limbs and straw.
I remembered a few more lines from Mary Oliver’s poem.
“You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke, like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t
the owned, tilled earth of today,
but the past.”
Then I got on the bike and rode home.
Late that night, sleep still far away, I heard the unmistakeable sound of hooves in the yard. No blood, no water, no past, no future.
Just deer.
I came downstairs and sat in the deer window. A dozen or so does glided across the grass, into the ransacked flower beds. Unlike that first night, the moon shone silver.
I sat in its reflected light and began the earnest work of remembering all their faces.
“The Deer,” by Mary Oliver
She appeared to me first last fall, in the near-black of a moonless dark.
Sleepless, I may have heard her footsteps, but maybe it was just the wind in the dying birch leaves.I hear everything at night. The creek across the road, the past, with all its failure and triumph, the hum of an intrusive streetlight, the rush of my own blood, relentlessly saving the only life it knows.
The doe was under the crabapple tree, pawing at the fallen fruit. She was last year’s fawn, maybe, compact and a bit squat for a whitetail.
She was already putting on fur for the coming winter, her tawny coat giving way to a mat gray. Her chilled breath frosted the hairs of her snout.
Hidden by the dark house, I sat unseen by the living room window and consciously tried to turn all my attention to her.
The ubiquity of deer has made that ever more difficult. In our upper Rattlesnake neighborhood, deer outnumber dogs. That should perhaps be a blessing in our anesthesized, screen-filled lives, a chance to brush shoulders with the wild.
Instead, because deer are everywhere, seeing them has lost its sense of mystery and wonder, which surfaces maybe with the year’s first fawn but mostly not at all.
Around our house, Jakki will literally fawn over fawns, but the English language is in for a beating if one of those fawn’s moms ventures onto the deck and chows down on our allegedly deer-resistant flora.
With all that in mind, I sat quietly and gave myself fully to the deer. Beyond her skittering watchfulness, what struck me most fully about her was her face. I’ve watched enough deer over time to know they all look different, but this face was, somehow, more different.
Her muzzle was shortened, her ears a little less erect, more doglike. But mostly it was her eyes. They were, for a deer, too close together, but what I saw in them was the mystery, both the other-ness of the wild and my own sense of connection with the natural world.
I must’ve sat for an hour with the deer. She browsed for a while, then curled up in the frozen grass and slept. Finally, I did the same.
Over the weeks and through the winter, I saw her regularly, recognizing her easily amidst her colleagues by her impish mug.
Her love affair with the crabapple extended into the snow season. In time, I could see what differentiated her curved hoofprints from those of others that gathered under the crabapple.
For a month, the little doe would startle if I stepped out the front door, lighting out for the woods, but as the weeks passed and food got harder to find, she brooked my presence more patiently.
I don’t want to make too much of this. I’m no deer whisperer, and I don’t want to to say I had some ethereal bond with this doe. At least not one that she took part in.
But what she did was re-open my eyes to the astonishing wonder right there in my own neighborhood. What she did was wipe clear the window of amazement that always exists but remains too often shuttered as we cycle through the dulling sequence of workaday living.
“This is the earnest work,” the poet said, and she is right.
When the winter ended, the doe moved on, as green-up moved up the hillsides and creek drainages. I missed her, but I moved on, too, to spring vacations, to my daughter coming home from California, to every little thing that passes the days.
Sometimes, late at night, I’d think I heard her, but it was always just the rush of blood and creek water merging at the intersection of past and future. The most I could find were mud-smudged hoofprints that might belong to hundreds of deer.
And yet she lingered in my mind, making it possible for me to look at other deer not as neighborhood pests but as emissaries from the world that exists beyond my everyday life.
What she did was not make me ponder wilderness and what it means, but allowed me to simply sit for a while with the notion of being wild, of moving only out of need for food, water and cover.
To let the other things that pass for need slip away.
Every week, I see a deer dead by the side of the road. Because of the cross-eyed doe, because she made me see rather than look, I recognize most of them. A sentimentalist might have named them, but I just remember their faces, the curve of their antlers, the one that limps, this fawn that goes with that mother.
Most of them die needlessly, killed by motorists driving too fast for reasons antithetical to the “earnest work.”
But I’m not here to rattle sabers, and my ears aren’t capable of hearing the excuses anyway.
Besides, we all die.
A few weeks ago, on a bike ride on the trail north of our house, I came upon a small deer dead in the woods.
Her nose was blunt, too short for her face, and her ears folded over at the ends. More gray than brown. Her body was smooth, no sign of a wound or injury. The ground around her was undisturbed, dry, not even a hoofprint.
Her eyes were closed, and I left them that way, mostly to avoid the truth of their gaze.
I dragged her a bit deeper into the woods, covered her body with limbs and straw.
I remembered a few more lines from Mary Oliver’s poem.
“You never know.
The body of night opens
like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke, like so many wrappings of mist.
And on the hillside two deer are walking along
just as though this wasn’t
the owned, tilled earth of today,
but the past.”
Then I got on the bike and rode home.
Late that night, sleep still far away, I heard the unmistakeable sound of hooves in the yard. No blood, no water, no past, no future.
Just deer.
I came downstairs and sat in the deer window. A dozen or so does glided across the grass, into the ransacked flower beds. Unlike that first night, the moon shone silver.
I sat in its reflected light and began the earnest work of remembering all their faces.
Friday, January 25, 2008
So Sorry
Hey folks. I've been under the weather this week with the same hacking cough and cold that everybody else I know has. I made it in to work because I had to a few days, but have been pretty unproductive. However, yesterday on an assignment I ran into a fellow blogger who noted my lack of posts recently.
So it seems only polite to apologize. I'll be back it at soon, I hope. Maybe even later today. I do have some thoughts about Rehberg's English-only bill, and a couple of other matters are tumbling around the brain block, too. I think they were there earlier this week, as well, but the fog was so thick, I couldn't find a way to express them.
I appreciate that people are reading and have taken the time to wonder what happened. It's very thoughtful of you all.
So it seems only polite to apologize. I'll be back it at soon, I hope. Maybe even later today. I do have some thoughts about Rehberg's English-only bill, and a couple of other matters are tumbling around the brain block, too. I think they were there earlier this week, as well, but the fog was so thick, I couldn't find a way to express them.
I appreciate that people are reading and have taken the time to wonder what happened. It's very thoughtful of you all.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
The Sun -- It's Hot!
This just in -- the sun is responsible for the Earth being hot. Global warming explains nothing. It's all that activity on the sun. This was the sort of folderol I had on the phone this morning after my story about Dr. Steve Running's speech being canceled in Choteau. You can find the story here: http://missoulian.com/articles/2008/01/17/news/local/news02.txt. The New York Times has a pretty similar story today, which you can read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/us/17climate.html
Callers told me that no, global warming isn't real, and if it is, well, it's just all that activity on the sun. Imagine my surprise. This happens every time I write about global warming, which some folks just can't come to terms with. And they're entitled to their doubts, I suppose. What troubles me in this whole discussion is not that people disagree with Steven Running or Al Gore, but that they want to shut them up. That's just the antithesis of the freedom that made this country great, and is unfortunately too much the rage in these late G.W. Bush days.
On the plus side, I also had a lot of calls and emails saying thanks for writing about Running's run-in in Choteau. I guess it all equals out.
Callers told me that no, global warming isn't real, and if it is, well, it's just all that activity on the sun. Imagine my surprise. This happens every time I write about global warming, which some folks just can't come to terms with. And they're entitled to their doubts, I suppose. What troubles me in this whole discussion is not that people disagree with Steven Running or Al Gore, but that they want to shut them up. That's just the antithesis of the freedom that made this country great, and is unfortunately too much the rage in these late G.W. Bush days.
On the plus side, I also had a lot of calls and emails saying thanks for writing about Running's run-in in Choteau. I guess it all equals out.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
An Open Letter that Contains Some Untruths
Dear Mary,
Hi, I'm Michael, your next-door neighbor to the south. You know, in the barn-like blue house. I'm still a bit new to the neighborhood, so I'm trying to reach out to all the good folks I haven't met yet. Actually, you're about the only one I haven't met, but not because I haven't tried. I know you know my girlfriend quite well, but I sort of feel like you don't know my name and have no interest in ever learning it. It might be helpful if, say, your car wouldn't start and you wanted to say, "Hey Michael, could you give me a hand with my car?" I have seen you in the yard a few times, but you refuse to speak to me. I wonder why that is?
In any case, the girlfriend tells me that you're a bit odd, but I'm still open to having a different opinion. I've seen all the cars with Jesus bumperstickers line up on the street when you have some sort of church meeting at the house, but that's not so weird. I do think it's uncharitable that these good Christians think it's ok to blockade our cars in our driveway, but whatever, that's maybe not your fault. And even I think it's a little weird that you're married but your husband lives in another state and just comes home for visits. I'd love to hear more about that, like what you do when he's home and such.
You may not know this, but the neighbors talk about you. They tell stories about how you're scared to death of coyotes and bears and maybe even all the whitetails running up and down the street. I myself am a little tamped at the deer after they ate the flowers off the porch, but hey, we're living on their street, really, don't you think? I mean, back when it wasn't a street, which was only the 70s or so. Maybe they're still getting used to the idea of development.
Anyway, a lot of people think that because you're the weirdest person on the street we might somehow be better off without you. I don't know.about that, but I did fall in with a bad group of pranksters one day and pull a few little tricks that the group thought might make you consider putting your house up for sale. And while I do know some people who'd love to buy your house, I don't really feel that strongly about your leaving unless you continue to not shovel the snow off your sidewalk, which is really starting to chap my butt.
But I feel bad about the tricks, so in the interest of being neighborly, I wanted to say I'm sorry for howling like a coyote underneath your bedroom window. There are not coyotes, as far as I know. Though there may be. And although I'm sure you already know this, that wasn't a pool of blood on your back deck. I hope it came up. Finally, I did put all those Blair Witch piles of sticks and stones around your house and over your doors and on the front hood of your car. But it's just stuff from the neighborhood, so just toss it out in the back yard and everything will be fine.
If you want to keep living here, it's cool by me. I do think you ought to tell your husband to come home or get out for good. And if he does come home, tell him he can borrow our snow shovel.
Warmest regards, your neighbor
Michael Moore
Missoula, Montana
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