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The Popster and i drove about 4,600 miles across the southwest over the last 2 + weeks. It was a great trip, not perfect but relaxing and very nice. We drove out pretty quickly, with The Popster doing almost all of the driving. We went out 56 and drove straight through missouri, kansas, oklahoma, texas, new mexico, arizona, and on into nevada. we went across the hoover dam and got a good look at the bridge they are building across the canyon. we drove along lake mead and tried to stop for a swim but the lake level was so low it would have been wading in mud, which the dog enjoyed doing.

we holed up in mesquite, nv in a casino hotel for a couple of days, mostly just resting from the grueling drive. Myrtle and i did a long morning hike and we found a stuffed hedgehog dog squeeky toy. There was a backpack there too but i put it out in a sunny spot to dry out and never made it back to pick it up before leaving. The Popsters visits with his mesquite pals was brief and anticlimactic after the long drive.

we drove into california and up to the bay after stopping at an anchient peoples museum that had an old anasazi house and a recreation from the CCC days as well as a reconstructed pit house. if i lived in the desert i would have to live in a pithouse and only come out at night in the summer. we also went to the valley of fire, a cool redrock dessert. the three of us hiked out in the heat to mouse’s tank, and i saw more petroglyphs than i’d seen in one place before. very cool ones and i am eager to go back when i have more time. i would like to take a long winter some time and devote it to documenting hyroglyphs. some day. i thought it was cool that so much of the good surfaces were used in this canyon but i didn’t see any in any other canyon.

the tank itself was very cool and probably accounted for the longheld sacredness of the canyon. it was really more of this mossy kind of grotto than what i would think of as a tank. Mouse was a troublesome old Pauite who holed up out there in the middle of nowhere and caused mischief before they put him down.

at three months of no smoking my only regret is not to be able to easily make a tobacco offering when i go to indiginous sacred places. i’lll work around that next time, should’ve bumbed one from the popster. all in all vaca was less challenging on my no smoking than i had anticipated.

after valley of fire and the long drive across california we slept for 1/2 a night in the berkeley marina parking lot. there is something restful about sleeping under the ocean breeze. brother john came out and woke us early and we went to Nations my favorite california chain for 2 eggers and chili-cheese omelletes with lots of bad coffee. we read a chronicle and discussed the demise of the newspaper.

we hiked the dogs around point isabel, my favorite dog park in the known universe. a 2 mile loop trail along the bay with great views of The City and the goldengate bridge. Myrtle was in heaven going around saying “hi” to all the dogs and people in the park.

we went back to the woolsey house and discussed its impending demise, zoning and unfixable problems with the house and its plummeting value and reverse mortgage. i imagine that will be the last time i see it from the inside. but then again maybe not because i learned before it was a beany factory boarding house it was the hog farm, wavy gravy’s commune, and before that it was a Beat house. it was nice to see Pete who i used to live across from. John moved up to my old space so we saw quite a bit of Pete. I met his brother who came up from florida to help take care of him. hung out with greg the most, donna was sick and didn’t see much of her. scotty was surprisingly happy to see me, as i never thought we were that close and even stacy seemed pleased with our little family reunion.

we spent a day driving through yellow stone. the falls were huge, like nothing i’d seen. we could not walk to the bottom of bridal veil falls because of the spray. all the upper parts of the park were closed with snow so we just made a day trip of it. we did go up an overlook none of us had been too and dad and myrtle had never seen the park so it was pretty fun.

at the bay we hung out, john made chili and we had zachary’s stuffed pizza (yum). i missed my friends in concord.

we caravaned down to joshua tree national park area and we camped in BLM land. when we arrived we came to this wide open expanse where there was an occasional pick up or camper with dirt bikes riding around. we drove to this outcropping ahead of a rocky hill but there were some trucks parked out of site behind it. we decided to drive to the foot of the long rocky hill and camp against it. we drove forward and were looking at potential campsites when the pick ups began shooting assault rifles not far from us so we drove around to the other side of the range of hills and camped.

the site was pretty enough but littered with debris, thousands of shot gun shells, and myriads of shot up stuff including a card table and two manequin torsos. it was sunday and when it got towards dark everyone but us left. we cooked a meal and i slept out under the stars with the full moon brilliant like street lamps.

Gardening continues in earnest. have planted a lot of native wild flowers, some row crops (arugula, onions, leaf lettuce, carrots, radishes, a little spinach), i have a cold frame with leaf lettuce (almost ready) and spinache (couple more weeks), i have garlic, chives, oregano, & sage coming back from last year. also added white sage, echincacea, and wild bergamont (all native) this year. Planted paw paws yesterday, i put in 2 should have gotten 3. i might go to the native plant sale (i drove to a little hippy place an hour away for my other natives) and get another one on saturday. the weekend after i am camping on the grounds of a B&B (hot tub access) and pulling invasive garlic mustard out of a river bottom area where i have been planting native trees with missouri river relief. We have been planting nut trees (oaks, hickory, pecan) with the thought once they mature the nuts will float down stream to re-seed the rest of the banks. i love being involved in a 300 year plan. glad your still coming, time frame not really that important.  happy easter. eric says ‘a late easter means an early spring.’

the universe defies my fate, entropy is the norm

i know not the reason why i wait, the calm before the storm

and i don’t want to be the one who wasn’t out there

because he’d always been afraid of the rain

but i may not want to be the one way out front again

awashed all up with the souls of the oppressed

feeling it all, much of the joy, but most of the pain

and i know not the reason why i’ve sealed this fate

but the universe it just keeps moving along

“If you’re a friend of The World, you’re an enemy of God”, my Grandma Trapp used to say. She was a frighteningly intense woman of strong belief and an unforgiving nature. I feared her like little else but was also attracted to her strange intensity for the spiritual that I found lacking in my own nuclear family. We were frequent visitors to her home and when I was 9 my dad had a big ranch house built next to  the family farm and we were neighbors.

As idle hands are the devil’s workshop I largely tried to steer clear of her or I’d easily get pulled into some serious chores or at least a serious scolding for my sins were multitude. I wore shorts and was disrespectful of the Sabbath. My work effort was less than salutary and I was wasteful in many things. I had not lived through the Great Depression where the rag men came looking for scraps of cloth for their mysterious purposes. My life was one of leisure that surely was spoiling my immortal soul.

I didn’t attend church but for some reason was drawn to Camp Meetings and Revivals, probably for the road trip. Grandma would drive and preach on the wondrousness of The Lord, hands frequently leaving the wheel for halleluiahs and hosannas, God be praised. The family joke was that the fact she hadn’t wrapped the old Buick around a tree proved the existence of a watchful and caring Savior.

The sermons always delivered by intense and scary old white men with drawls and the occasional shooting of spittle were awe inspiring and terrifying. They were all on sin and Godlessness and apostasy and other cool sounding words that I stepped cautiously around if not understanding. At almost everyone I walked my sinful little self to the altar to beg for forgiveness and promise to do better. Promises forgotten before I finished the walk from her house to mine.

Grandma lived in an old farm house, dusty from the coal furnace. The entire upstairs was filled floor to ceiling with clutter with only walkways. She was incapable of throwing anything away. She didn’t pay for the rural trash service we did but would bring over her trash once a month or so, a coffee can of bottle lids and such. Everything else was saved, re-used, recycled, or burned in the coal furnace.

Grandma also was a devoted organic gardener, though she never used that term. She just gardened as she’d been taught. Her big money maker was the asparagus patch. She left some to go to seed and it seemed like such an easy piece of work. The Popster says their was metal wreckage, can’s old car frames and the like, buried under the patch. That asparagus does best in poor rocky soils and that was their way of duplicating such in the rich black soils of my childhood.

Grandma also read Organic Gardening magazine, and because I have been a literary addict since the age of 4, I did too. Wasn’t aught else to read at Grandma’s excepting the Bible. I became intrigued by double digging even though I wasn’t able to put it into practice until my teen years  when we moved into town and I got charge of the garden.

After we lost the house in Ida and the 9 acres of the family farm to the twin destroyers of rising diesel and deregulated shipping rates we moved into town. Ultimately we settled on Roeder Street and I put in the little garden bed behind the garage, mostly for tomatoes. The first year their was 4-6 inches of top soil but after close to 20 years of double digging the top soil went down two feet. I wish Grandma had lived longer, she died in my early 20s, when I was too young to look past the fire and brimstone and see the wealth of knowledge of days gone by. Nonetheless I learned a trick or two and for that I am thankful.

so spring has been off to a great start. my friends jillian and mark have been visiting for a long weekend from maryland and st louis respectively and it has been nice hanging out. eric had a great birthday party on the equinox itself. we had a campfire and some pretty funny banter. today i went to brazito to a wild flower nursery and laid down a chunk of change. i got some paw paw trees and a bunch of wild flowers. i am trying to rehabitate the flower bed in the south east corner that is super shady from the neighbors privacy fence. today i shoveled in about 6 gallons of compost and planted some wild ginger, spider wort, and jacob’s ladder. i also planted some bachelor buttons and marigold seeds around them to fill in the space for this year so i could plant the perennials further apart and give them room to expand. the compost seems to have come out pretty good, though there is a bit of a smell. i still have almost 2 full flats to get in plus some research to do. i am also hoping to get in some onions and perhaps some cabbage and brocoli fairly shortly. what about you? how does your garden grow?

Tonight the government will be taking an hour of our time, from our sleep time and not our work time of course. They will give it back in the fall but without interest. i like the idea of an extra hours sleep but its the principle of the thing. Its a great example of unintended consequences though. they pushed it up by 3 weeks as part of the energy bill and lo and behold people take the extra hour of daylight and go driving so it uses more energy. its stimulative though, those folks are driving to the mall so they’re not going to change it back.

I got some nice gardening action in, even though i woke up with a headache (sinus turned migraine that ate up better than half the day). i turned up about a quarter of one of the beds. i have been double digging it and it was so much easier than last year when i was busting it out of sod. I shoveled in 100 pounds of sand as my only amelioration. I added a layer of leaves and covered that with 1/4 inch or so of coffee grounds (thank you starshmucks) in the fall and figured that would be fine, since the compost isn’t ready yet and i used up the last of my lama manure over the winter.

I planted carrots (from the Ferry Morse Company) and sowed in radishes right there with them (Ferry Morse ‘champion’ to the south and Livingston’s ‘Crimson Giant’ to the north). The Ferry Morse’s were left over from last year and they did pretty so-so. The carrots didn’t produce much and the radishes both underproduced and got woody. I doubled the amount of sand and it just can’t rain as much as it did last year which i think was the biggest problem. Plus rabbits i presume ate of the carrots at one point. I use hair and beard trimmings to scare off rabbits and i’ll try to be more aggressive on that this year, now that i know rabbits like carrots.

I switched my rows from west to east to north to south and when i got to the south end where i had my carrots and radishes last year i put in more Perry Morse ‘grand rapids’ leaf lettuce, which is doing real well in the cold frame. i am going to have some more thinnings with supper tonight. i read on the seed package you can do the same thing with radishes. oh, its a family tradition to plant radishes and carrots together. the radishes come up quick so you can see where the rows are and they are done by the time the carrots are needing the space. I like to grow things intensively because double digging everything by hand is a hell of a lot of work so i like to pile in as much stuff as possible. Plus i’d like to push the envelope on what you can produce in a backyard. Theres just so many reasons to do so: the cost of organics, producing it in the most local fashion, getting connected with the earth and with the food, a cushion against economic and social turmoil, its pretty, and its a lot of fun.

how does your garden grow? anyone doing anything yet?

i am so thankful spring is finally here. it was just gorgeous today, sunny in the high 60s. i have been at a convening of the cadre for co-occurring excellence (how’s that for a moniker) for the last 2 days, which was pretty boring but at least got me out of the daily grind and with the nice weather finally broke out of this funk i have been in.

played a game of horse shoes after work and eked out a victory in a back and forth struggle with the popster. he has been a little down himself of late having learned his BP was high again and his new pill spun him. i haven’t been able to be super supportive myself and a bit ago just walked away while he was talking to me. he had followed me outside when i was taking out the compost and was smoking and i am just too fragile to be around it at home where i am vulnerable. on the good side its been 3 1/2 weeks w/o a smoke. i am med and nicotine free and feeling pretty on it. i got my third gift certificate for a pair of shoes for finishing the class. i’m getting quite a collection.

on the gardening front, i thinned out my lettuce and spinach in the cold frame again. they are both doing great and i got enough to top of my store bought lettuce into a pretty nice salad tomorrow night. a few of my crocuses are up so i guess the squirrels didn’t eat them all. a row of the garlic is looking pretty good and there are a handful of spinach coming up from where i winter sown them.

tomorrow and the next day i hope to turn over some soil and get in some more lettuce and spinach and perhaps the carrots and radishes. i have 200 pounds of sand i was weighing the truck down with i am going to split between the root crops and the horse shoe pits and might do that this weekend as well. the compost is not done, looks like at least another month. hopefully it’ll at least be done by may for the main spring planting. a client gave me a box of chemical fertilizer. i think i am going to use it on the shrubs in the front of the house since i don’t have any food crops going out there (except the rhubarb which i think got fried by the sun anyway). no since sending it to the landfill.

Tonight i finally got around to making chicken paprikash. I make the baked version and i do most of my baking in the winter. Its a really great dish, relatively healthy, inexpensive, and really really yummy. I learned from Johnny Watson (see Johnny poems) about 7 years ago and its a funnier story than my dinner party tonight but i don’t think i want to get into that. i will just say that it involved a big argument, the police being called and having to drive the chicken paprikash to Cincinnati to finish cooking and we didn’t get to eat until like 3:00 am, but it was really quite excellent. Today was the first day i made it without calling Johnny and getting the recipe. I started by cutting 2 really large onions into very thin slices and then adding 4 bell peppers (2 green, a red and an orange) also sliced thin and 5 cloves of garlic. Next i rinsed off a package of chicken pieces (thighs, legs, & wings) extremely cognizant that they were made of corn in a fairly wacky and cruel manner (damn you ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’). I put in the chicken pieces and then covered with water (i think chicken stock would be a bit better). I also covered the chicken in what Johnny calls a shit-ton of paprika (about 3 tablespoons believe it or not) all of this covering going on in a casserole dish. I also salted the chicken pieces and added some black pepper (not really necessary). I baked this for 3 hours at 400 degrees until the peppers are almost gelatinous and the chicken is near falling off the bones. I pulled out the chicken and put in a serving dish. I stirred in almost a cup of sour cream into the pepper-onion drippings broth. I could have thickened the sauce with some corn starch but didn’t. All of this was served over egg noodles. 

I made a side dish of fresh carrots and frozen peas with grated fresh ginger (i keep my ginger in the freezer to keep it fresh and have taken to serving it with most of my frozen veggies cuz i see it in there when i get the veggies out) and dried purple basil (from my garden last year, almost out of it. I have been eating basil on near everything so the dried basil will be gone before i have fresh again).

I made a salad with fresh spinach, red pepper, red onion, cucumber (pealed because it was all waxy coming from Wal-Mart), yellow squash(cut thin), shredded carrot, and pine nuts (raisins for the guest with no teeth). Most of us topped it with a store bought balsamic dressing. Oh, and best of all on top i put my leaf lettuce and spinach thinnings from the cold frame.

All in all it was a lovely dinner. I got a six pack of Sam Adams Cherry Wheat because it was on sale and Eric and Suzy made walnut brownies from scratch. Coincidentally Dad had bought walnut ice cream and they were marvelous together.

Dinner conversation ran to 2012 and the end of the world, our rising and lunar signs, and of course i told some hitchhiking stories and rambled my neo-platonic metaphysice i have been obsessed with forat least the last 6 years. don’t get me started on that.

thank you constant reader, i couldn’t have done it without you. I wrote the first draft of Up North a bit more than 7 years ago and it has languished in its little Mead Memo pad unread by anyone until now. I find re-writing/editing way harder than writing and it probably took about twice as long to re-write as write, and i didn’t even change it that much. I wrote it in the present tense writing most of it on the trip as you can tell in the context of the story. I hope you liked it as a serial. My next plans for it is to give it a third and probably final edit and put it out in Publisher as a novellette.

I have been captivated of my life as a novel since high school. I think i have written here that back then it dawned on me that there were two kinds of great writers. Those who have mastered the craft in the extreme and those who can write adequately but have lived a life that gives them something to say. I have been profoundly changed by taking that second path, even though i choose more to live my life than document it.

This was an experiment in trying to live a novel, really a short story. I was surprised how life accomodated to bring it a theme and leaving the protragonist changed as every short story does.

There is a school of counseling called Narrative Therapy. It teaches that we should think of our life as a novel. The trick is not so much looking back at what the protagonist has learned from the first part of the novel. Any thoughtful person can do thatl. The trick is to flip to the end of the book and see what that character has to teach us. The one that has it all figured out.

I have gotten some good verbal feedback on the story but no one has commented. Lets dialogue. Tell me what you think. What do you want to see more of? less of? again my thanks constant reader. Without you, this story would have only been told to myself. and of course the angels.

I grabbed some Taco Bell, got oriented and was on a bus to Lansing in short order. After a short walk I was home. I showered, put on some clean clothes and started to walk down town. I was struck by how I was a man on a walk and no longer a vagabond. When I started walking up Capitol the point was really sent home when a gent with silver hair past the collar of his denim jacket approached me. “Excuse me,” he said. “I just got into Lansing and I’m trying to get some heat for the family, do you have any change?”

An hour ago I would have said, “I was just going to ask you the same thing,” but instead I reach into my pocket. Coming up empty I said “I don’t, but I’ll be coming back this way.” His eyes turn away before I am finished. I continued my walk to the florist and order Amee flowers for her new job. It was one of my pre-trip errands I just didn’t get too. The florist was really nice and promised me a nice arrangement, Gerber Daisies and wildflowers in Fall colors, no carnations.

My errand done I strolled back Capitol. I didn’t spy my sparechanger where I left him, but I looked up the block and saw him copping a squat with a buddy eating a sandwich and drinking a soda. I walked up the block and handed him a dollar, from my right pocket, enjoying the look of frank surprise on his face. “I told you I’d be back.”

“You must be a Christian, aren’t you?” he said as he got up to talk to me, eye to eye.

“I’ve been accused of that,” I said letting my internal grin shine through.

“I knew it. I have a verse for you, Acts 16:31, maybe you know it. It’s when Paul is in prison and is freed by the angels and the jailer asks what must I do to be saved? And Paul says, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved, thee and thy house.’ Now I take my house to mean my parents, my wife, and three children, even though I don’t see them. I know that this is at least something I can do for them.”

I am struck dumb by his sudden openness, his sincerity. I think of my own ‘house’ shaken as it is and I can only nod. Then I thought of another ‘house’ and the power of the prayers of beggars in the Rabbinical tradition I had been reading about up north and I asked. “Will you say a prayer for me? There’s a boy who fell in a river last night. They haven’t found the body and I know it would bring peace to that family if they find their boy. At least then they’d know. Will you pray for them?”

“Right now?” he asked. 

I looked around suddenly aware we are standing on a crowded downtown sidewalk. “Yeah, now would be good.”

We clasp hands as brothers. “Dear Heavenly Father…” I quickly lose track of the words, journeying on in my own thoughts and my own prayers and my own gods but joined to this man, beggar no longer, but a gifted and beautiful man of God who I am honored to know for this short time. He calls on the God of the Bible and His Son Jesus Christ that this boy shall be found and peace come to his house, his family.

We open our eyes after the amen and just look at each other feeling the magic. I was the first to break away and release his hands. I reached into my left pocket and took out the last of my money. “Here’s another ten to give it power”.

Again that astonished smile. “God bless you”, and I know She has, just as I knew before I read it in the paper the next day that the boy is found this afternoon. For there is power in prayer, inexplicable, miraculous and comforting. As I walked away I offered a prayer for my new friend. To see a paper tomorrow and to know his own worth. To believe in his power. To inherit the earth.

The End