Long Ago and Faraway

Sometime during our recent trip east I realized long ago I’d passed on a joyful place I’d been briefly happy, a brief fleeting glimpse of well-being in otherwise, an odyssey of uneasy doubt shadowing me through my early years.

My year on Long Island Sound had happened before I’d lost my child; before our family farm ended up like the rusting hulk of a freighter marooned and forgotten on a barrier reef. I’d moved on from Stony Creek without the wisdom of my years.

I would flap my wings collecting skills, chasing dreams of nectar like a naive butterfly. New York had been a great push into something I’d never been exactly comfortable with, but I’d not have sacrificed its dues for anything.

Feelings of desolation never left me on those endless commutes from one end of Manhattan Island to the other, and beyond, lugging a small consortium of instruments after cleaning the gypsum and bandaging my hands, having made my living for the day. A teacher, the great valve trombonist, Marshall Brown, had been right, playing music was much more fun than pounding nails. But somehow it was a cross for me to bare having been inundated with dought as a child regarding the ethics of work.

Eventually the gob-stained streets, wet shoes and lost umbrellas—bags of garbage on the streets, changing clothing styles, angry waitresses, rising prices and convalescing unrequited love affairs, all took their toll. Unsureness yielded to a great yearning for something green that smelled good and featured hearty portions of first and last light, flowing over stable mountain tops with plenty of birdsong.

The unknown place I grew to yearn for was something completely different. It called to me like an early morning reveille—the imagination of wilderness—a pressing desire for the comfort of solitude. Slowly, but surely, I made my way towards my heart’s desire for change, and the day finally came when I rode up an ancient seabed into the high valley of my dreams.

The joy of having invested in the very thing every artist needs more than anything else payed off—the time without interruption to develop a personal vision. Still, with every choice I’d ever made came the agony of sacrifice, to which I was no stranger.

After the move West, I proselytized to other friends and artists I cared about: buy yourself time. Existence is a spiraling whirlpool of yearning and risk, and like a two hour movie, it’s over before we know it—a movie we never wanted to end; a movie featuring ourselves before we move out into the universe and a complete unknown.

Returning to the pink granite shores of Long Island Sound and to the gentle energy of my old mate Jonathon—impressive artist and fisherman, lost to me over decades of precious time—I felt something like, almost family, or even better.

I knew I’d been stricken with a case of happy madness.

****

Time’s Passage

I’d reconnected with Jonathon after what honestly seemed a quick forty years, having passed like still oceans between raging storms.

The years had cycled between rough water and calm days at sea, when only the sound of an occasional gull was heard, or a fish breaking the glassy expanse of still waters in the morning light.

Typical of European descent, Jonny and I had become swarthier and redder with the years, in his case from the sea and me the desert and a taste or two. Shorter and rounder with bulges and folds and the aches and pains of older men, we faltered with the burden of shakier gaits. Time was keeping its promise.

We’d begun heading into the wind, trimming our sails, battening down and preparing our sea anchors for heavy weather ahead. We were slowing imperceptibly—but hungry still—Jonny and me.

Time’s passing brings its irksome ways, driving home the reality of unwanted change we’ve no control over. As elders, hopefully we see ourselves as grateful survivors smoothing over life’s hard edges with can do attitudes. Like finely-stained wood floors, if not all together the smoothest or straightest, we maturely approach the challenge of survival with compromise.

In this perilous final quarter, a fearsome hunger for more is my constant partner. I wouldn’t trade the wisdom of my aged brain or the aching of my weakening frame for any Fountain of Youth. With maturity has come wisdom. Life may not have dealt me a straight, but surely three-of-a-kind.

How many times had I thought about my fellow journeyman, Painter David, a soldier lost in combat. What had his tragic suicide denied him and perhaps even the world? How many times had I visited him in my dreams? The memory of his floundering still pushed me on.

Painter David’s been flying around out there all these lost years, someplace in the universe I suspect. My hope is it was just a realignment we’re all headed for—but please providence—not all too soon. There’s more to learn and projects to finish and be archived in the mighty vault of history—to protect the memory of living and fact, as best we can from the causticity and eventual disintegration of everything in the hands of entropy, our destroyer.

Quickly enough we cycle into the center of Father Time’s spiral, a speck of hardly anything, in the short term almost, but not quite completely gone, our energy streaming into the cosmos above the mountains or from deep in the sea. Nothing can stop it.

****

The Artist

The artist, Robert Smithson, pondered the sweeping effect of time and separation in his earthwork, the Spiral Jetty, a work sitting starkly alone, disintegrating into the Great Salt Lake. He too was gone all too soon into the great blue unknown above, his husk fodder for the earth beneath our feet.

Artists are at the mercy of luck and determination in an endless search for personality and the murmurations of true expression; freedom to create without burden, to search for love and companionship, security, and all our favorite things in a world of endless things, a solemn priority brought to us by life.

I’ve always believed a “separation factor” existed in human life we have no control over, an enigmatic force that moves us apart—consuming our memories and joys without leaving a physical scar—taking old friends away, lovers and teachers, adored relatives and beloved pets.

Artistic drive is not unlike what motivates us all. But I’m convinced artists feel something more intensely, a virtue and a failing at once, something others with different and more practical strengths and weaknesses should not envy. Artists strive for something undefinable. Many suffer with frustration at being deliberately ignored or passed over.

Artists spend their lives giving the gift of their gifts. Never cut and dry, it involves opposing armies of strife, misunderstanding, and to an absurd degree constant resentment by non-artists , while in a sense being robbed at the same time.

A churning ocean is difficult to navigate in search of a tiny island hidden somewhere on a vast curved horizon.

Like busy furred animals not guaranteed a thing, artists sort and prioritize time like few others. Like others, we too work our fingers to the bone building wealth and constructing palaces to house our families, while with our heart’s desire we make art few notice, a sacrifice of epic proportions.

Kicking and screaming, deeply insecure, we forge a life of meaning from a single glowing rock. Against all odds, satisfaction must be willed, defined by loving notes, images, knowledge and philosophy, all with a touch of godliness.

Like fifty thousand years of human history before us, the world crumbles around us into the present moment. It forces the conscientious (if bold enough to ask): what have I done lately to protect my vulnerable world and honor the miracle of our planet’s supple lifeforms?

Creation is nothing short of a miracle. Not a single one of us can or ever will decode it. The thoughtful, the reverent, the responsible, without question honor it with all their being.

Life is by nature tentative, a brief flash in the big picture of something we can’t ever be sure of. Robert Smithson’s spiral expressed time’s great arc as entropy, an unstoppable process not one of us, not even a stone can elude, a process turning us first to small particles of carbon and minerals and eventually to stardust—whatever that might be—other than the eternal rationalization of endlessly searching minds destined for quantum brilliance.

****

In Memory of Painter David & Professor David

For Jon & Michele, Patty, Simon and Kate

You are not forgotten.

Last of Four Parts – 1579 words

BACK TO PART THREE

BACK TO PART ONE (BEGINNING)

Share

Leave a comment

Return to Stony Creek

My old roommate Remi was not to be found after the storm-battered decades. After visiting Professor David, Kate and I returned to Jon and Simon’s pink granite Long Island Sound bay with its slew of perfect islands arranged just offshore like a plate of fresh shucked oysters.

Remi would not be with us. A conspicuously missing moving part, his absence was like the memory of a spirited engine once full of impressive torque, rusted silent by time’s relentless passage.

Fifty years had streamed by since Remi and I had packed our U-Haul and left that one-street, Vermont river town for the final time.

For Kate and I, out of the Madrean desert of southeastern Arizona, returning to the bliss of Stony Creek and the Thimble Islands was an alternative reality of the highest order—the place Remi and I had sojourned those many years ago on our way to New York City—a life I’d once passed on with regret.

I was overjoyed to return. Compared to much of the country it was still picturesque and unspoiled. Yet still, in that typical American way, it had infilled dramatically with second and third homes and glossy island getaways.

Folks like us had ascended a massive pyramid of wealth accumulation, many demanding more than their share. Money trumped everything in America. We’d birthed the era of the endless tax cuts without concern for growing homelessness, but demanding as much or more from our government at the expense of massive deficits. Americans began to refuse to pay taxes as a credo regardless of how blessed they were with more than their neighbor.

The process would mete out a very different world for our children and those unborn, as the luxuries of an undeveloped world would no longer produce great opportunity to accumulate easy wealth, or offer escape from an expanding urban milieu in which modern-day surfs serve the rich without question or just compensation.

In America, the business of medicine makes healthcare, to a large degree, a privilege, not a right, care that should be the equal responsibility of taxpayers for every fellow citizen—a bulletproof safety net designed with great skill and resolution, immune from fraud.

Our taxpayers are those citizens the government has spoon fed a methodology— the benefits of a system tailor-made to their motivations to enrich themselves. But that is not necessarily all the people in a world of contrasting types with different aspirations, abilities and senses of purpose, not to mention the potential to be a victim of risk or fraud.

On top of this, an intact environment is no longer something that can be taken for granted.

****

Dinner on the Sluice

The day Kate and I arrived in Stony Creek we all agreed to meet at a crusty seafood place in a red clapboard building not far from the local sluice. It bordered a marshy inlet within sight of the once ruined MIF iron foundry where Remi and I had built studios a half a century earlier. MIF had long since been converted to condos.

Today an enormous micro-brewery sits in the spot we’d parked my white van with a sticker of a bluefish proudly pasted outside the driver’s window. Through a modest entry up a short flight of steps, we’d walk into the well-used antique brick structure and up to our second floor studios.

As desert rats, Kate and I were desperately wanting the taste of the sea that evening. As dear as the little darlings had become with the world-wide fleecing of the oceans, and the respective rising prices of anything from or near the sea, we payed a king’s ransom that night.

After all, the coral was dying and plastics had entered every living thing and place on Mother Earth. It might not be long before all the seafood was gone.

Arriving late we ambled in to meet Jon for the first time in the lost decades. He was already sitting at a small booth in a corner with a glass of ice water and a lemon. After hugs, and me fighting back an embarrassing tear or two, a moment of awkward silence unraveled. What do first mates say in the moments of a reunion, after the awkward lapse of fourteen thousand, six-hundred days?

Tentatively I finally spoke, asking honestly and really wanting to know, “So Skipper, is it true? Do oysters in fact make you love longer?” I suspected it was true, but hadn’t eaten enough of the little jewels to know.

The memory of his quiet grin returned as he glanced at me cross-eyed, embarrassed at the thought of physical love, like the mention of an old mistress from the past. Flashing an awkward side glance at Kate, whom he’d only just met, I sensed he didn’t really want to go there. I understood, being an aging male myself, and feeling and wishing at that moment I was at least twenty-five years younger than I was in fact.

I was happy to learn he’d stopped walking a mile for a Camel. Smoking was a thing of the past and he was also a committed teetotaler, and the loving father of a beautiful grown daughter, Emily. Where had the time gone for that? A goblin lived on my shoulder pestering me with a stream of guilt about what I had or hadn’t done in those quickly passing years.

Jonny had changed. I was pleased to see he seemed happier and in a better place.

In his oyster-years, seaman Jon had segued through the ownership of a dozen or more vessels, facilitating a growing mastery of seeding and harvesting the tightly closed little living gems some of us still call “ersters.” At nineteen, between years in art school, I myself had shucked my share working at the International House of Oysters in Miami on Old Dixie Highway.

****

Shellfish

His occupation as an oysterman had been encouraged by a miraculous cleansing. Off the peaceful bay on Long Island Sound I’d lived all those years ago, what were once polluted waters had undergone a miraculous transformation over the decades.

For the world it was a start—the Sound’s rehabilitation in the wake of the mighty Hudson River’s—rare examples of positive change in a gloomy era of procrastination, the natural world often a second or third thought, for change the Earth aches for everywhere.

The clumsy evil of man-made climate change is warming oceans, killing coral and yielding fewer fish. Rain forests and open savannas with vast populations of wildlife are being compromised by man’s lust for wealth, putting our blue world and her requisite air and water in dire jeopardy.

The ocean is gifted to have a principled fisherman of Skipper Jon’s character, el capitan, one of the good guys, a pippin to thank for making a thoughtful difference. He fosters a proactive desire in others by working to conserve what he loves and what inspires him as a working artist and oysterman in a society focused on material escape.

These days he’s working a Maine-built, sardine packer named, Double Eagle, a last of her kind—a real beaut, as you’d say. He first learned of her after reading an article in National Fisherman Magazine in the nineties. He’d had his seaman’s eye on the honorable old lady for years before he made the deal giving life to her.

She could hold as large a bounty of oysters as he’d ever dream, and could even access the Grand Banks if needed. A subtle olive green, she features a small wheel house, a twelve foot beam standing four feet above the water line and a powerful diesel. Carefully organized on a spacious deck, she’s complete with the necessary winches and cranes. She daydreams, comfortably undulating in the current at her mooring in the Thimbles, waiting patiently for the coming season.

****

A Gentle Cruise

I hadn’t seen Simon in forty-nine years when he showed up to join us for the cruise. Bright, with a wry waggish sense, he hadn’t changed much. To me he looked something like an elf might appear in his seventies, a little leaner and shorter than I remembered, but still the handsome Simon we’d known.

Time had certainly passed since he’d introduced us to those ventures at sea aboard the party boats, mining the nearby waters for a variety of game fish waiting just below the surface, eager for our shiny lurers. Unequivocally, in those days Simon would mandate each one of us have our own full case of beer and drink the entire thing in a single morning’s fishing. Those were the days readers, when the seas were bountiful and friends near and kind.

Like the proud new father of a second daughter (adopted), as we cruised through the Thimbles aboard the Double Eagle, Skipper Jon spoke eloquently of his aging mistress of the North Atlantic, his eyes brightly lit with the thought of filling her with ersters the following spring.

I’d hoped that day for a fishing trip into the blue water of the deep Sound, close to the opening to the Atlantic, but that wouldn’t happen. Like the old days, I’d imagined there were still marauding schools of blues churning the surface—birds in close pursuit hitting the water for scraps—the telltale sign of a school.

Aboard the Double Eagle my friend’s looks of resignation quickly signaled me those days were a thing of the past, not unlike the waning monsoonal rains of the southwest deserts, much of it due to climate change and the actions of selfish men and our elected governments.

We would have to settle for a gentle cruise through the rounded pink granite islands, entertained by our captain’s tales of oystering in the gentle coves and nearby bays.

The memory of fresh bluefish fillets drenched in garlic butter on an open fire haunted me with lust, the pleasure of the salty flesh of an apex predator like myself, both of us members of an all-defining keystone known as the food chain.

****

End of Part Three – 1853 words

To be continued…

GO TO PART FOUR

GO BACK TO PART TWO

GO BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Share

Leave a comment

Stony Creek

Phase one of our trip to New York was to first join Jonathon close to where he’d grown up in a seaside village in Branford, Connecticut (our plan, not his). We would paint there in the ruins of an old iron foundry. I’d applied for an MFA in New Haven, so living and fishing by the water on the shores of a granite bay until I better understood my path forward, would test my resolve to take Manhattan. Incidentally, the pink granite for the Brooklyn Bridge had come from this very place.

The foundry was close to the bayside harbor of Stony Creek, a breezy hole-in-the-wall and the entry to a small group of lovely islands just off shore known as the Thimbles. Otherwise the area was a frenetic suburban world crisscrossed with freeways and subdivisions, quickly becoming built out but fortunately Democratic.

The old forge was ideal. Remi and I would build temporary studios to paint in until we got better organized for the big city. Except for my months in D.C., I would do my first work as a serious artist in this perfect and inspired setting on the shore of Long Island Sound. Without pressure I would finally be independent in the outside world.

I would wait to hear if I’d been accepted before diving into a pressured and demanding place for masters, young and old, determined on success. At our age we couldn’t imagine the pressure we’d face seeking recognition in an unforgiving place like New York where uninhibited ambition was a prerequisite. If I was not wanted in New Haven, I was entirely prepared to go for it like a turkey into a hot oven. Each night I prayed to make it all happen, fraught with the uncertainty of waning juvenescence.

Stony Creek was an enchanting place I’d never forget, but it was Jonathon’s place and I felt like a guest there. He’d grown up there with Simon, a new friend we’d bond with that fall of nineteen seventy-five.

Together we all developed a feverish lust for killing and eating bluefish. Fierce predators hunting in vicious schools during migration, they invaded the sluices and bays off the nearby ocean in a dramatic pursuit of smaller fish.

****

We’d not see anything like it again in our lives. The numbers of bluefish declined dramatically over the extractive decades that followed. Governments failed repeatedly to manage any control over a planet descending into what would become an environmental apocalypse—climate change, overpopulation, and the advent of global capitalism in which industry knew no limit.

All efforts to rein it in and find balance would spiral out of control, coming to an infected head when a feckless and incompetent president was elected by razor thin majorities in the Electoral College.

No president would compare as poorly on the issue of character. No president would succeed so stunningly to bring my country to its knees in frustration.

In ten years he would completely corrupt what was once a functional party representing half the country, rendering it too confused and morally bankrupt to rise against the criminality in their midst.

No president would prove the utter failure of the Reagan Revolution. Trillions deliberately pilfered from working people. A tiny gilded class, untaxed and unprincipled, piloted by a new brand of oligarch, would rip the guts from lessons learned decades earlier. A class of people engaged in a scale of waste and wretched excess the world had never seen.

No president would bring the world closer to the brink, the result of mental illness, incompetence, unchecked malice, bigotry and the loss of America’s shining example of peace and prosperity for the world.

A new dark age would descend over a country that had once been a model for peace, equality, truth, and free speech required to flesh it all out.

****

By the fall of nineteen seventy-four, our adult lives were an accelerating whirlpool of raw ambition. Our paths were diverging into webs of responsibility and opportunity, and the burden of romance. The past steamed far out into the ocean entirely out of sight of dry land, disappearing into the blue distances of our minds. What might have been, had we stayed in Connecticut, became one more mystery in the linear bluster of time.

Each step of the way entropy nipped at our heels as we navigated what I came to hypothesize was a separation factor, dividing us in a spiral jetty with no escape.

We ended up leaving Stony Creek for New York barely a year after we’d settled in, passing on what could have been a blissful life on the water. I would often regret not having given it more of a chance, and oddly, I wouldn’t return to Stony Creek for a half century.

****

Soho

The journey south from the relative tranquility of college life was the last scene of a first act. After Stony Creek, our lives would settle into the noisy shadows of a forgotten crosshatch of cobblestoned streets and crumbling warehouses. All of it quickly and dramatically changing as fine artists like us were being drawn in to grab up cheap live-work space for a song and a dance.

We were urban pioneers at the center of what seemed the universe. We were butterflies in a meadow of nectar, surrounded by the fading memory of a half dead industrial heyday.

On weekdays the filthy streets were clogged with trucks belching smoke so thick you could slash it with a box cutter at high noon. Workingmen’s taverns and grimy restaurants with steaming hot plates fed and watered the workers by day.

Early drinkers could enjoy fifty cent drafts at Fanelli’s, or lunch on the best spaghetti and meat balls south of Houston, when Mike Fanelli and his sons still catered in white aprons discussing the latest boxing news.

Like vampires, our kind ventured out by night to places like Magoo’s or the Duane Street Bar, or Puffy’s Tavern.

Morning coffee was fifteen cents, served in ubiquitous eight ounce cardboard cups with blue printing.

At all hours fire trucks and ambulances screamed over buckled cobblestone streets saving lives, a racket I’d never imagined in the tranquility of a rural college town, or basking in the gentle breezes off Long Island Sound. We’d grown up and nothing would hold us back.

****

In those years Soho was a convenient partnership, artists mixing with the last rights of mid-century commerce in turn-of-the-century buildings. Having sprouted from the watered seeds of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism barely twenty years earlier, Minimalism and Color Field painting became the latest thing in the halls of Soho and Tribeca.

Large painterly canvasses took space to build and cover in pigment. Massive floor-throughs hosted the biggest names, throwing color purchased on Canal Street from the legendary multistoried art supply store, Pearl Paint. Or house paint was often a convenient alternative in a spontaneous new modernism devoid of finesse.

Sculptors were welding massive plates of russet-colored corten steel into unpredictable geometric shapes challenging the eye. Thunderous groups of modern dancers pounded on well-worn factory floors. Experimental film found its way into the lexicon of contemporary art. Unconventional theater on improvised dark-lit stages catered to the last of the beatniks.

A new music was born. They called it Punk and Loft Jazz. To the uninitiated it was mostly noise, the next big thing after acid and hard-bop.

As time passed, artists risked sinking into oblivion if they hadn’t an association with the increasingly fashionable streets of Soho, particularly thick on weekends with gushing crowds from nearby boroughs and wealthy bedroom communities, with money to spend and hungry for what artists did and stood for. If nothing else, artists defined hip in a world selling out to exponentially growing mass markets of ravenous consumers. Markets were growing bigger and more lucrative with each passing decade, each a single act in America’s endless enrichment.

The art world began and ended between Houston and Chambers Streets. Galleries, and soon elegant restaurants, filled vacant storefronts underneath havens of studios and chic investors’ homes on streets with names like Prince, Spring, Broome, Mercer, Greene, Wooster and Broadway. Landlords made millions.

Soho became the ultimate cool and we Eight Ways had become a tiny part of it with everything to lose in its swirling dervish of lust for recognition.

To us there was little doubt fame and fortune would be ours for the taking in such a fertile breeding ground for creatives—like the waters of Long Island Sound with their endless schools of bluefish. We’d chased them trying and usually failing to reel them in on slick custom rods, just children’s games compared to where we were convinced we were headed now, forty-five degrees to the wind baby.

****

Das Boot

Jonathon and another painter, Michele, were a new couple. They also left Stony Creek soon after I learned I was not wanted in New Haven. As planned, Remi and I moved up the block to Manhattan separating to cohabitate with our respective inamoratas.

That was fine, because the career I was to build as a jazz performer in New York City would have been curtailed by graduate school. I wasn’t giving up visual art, but I’d decided to develop my saxophone, flute and clarinet playing and become a performer. It would take a massive effort.

It wasn’t long before I was playing in major jazz clubs and leading my own band out of my loft on the second floor of 508 Broadway.

Jonny and Michele had found the obligatory loft on Greenwich Street and were fully immersed in a scene of young creatives eagerly seeking gallery representation. Jon, a sculptor, worked with Mark di Suvero as the art star’s assistant while pursuing his personal vision in a rusty shipyard on the West Bank of the Hudson.

Jonny was a thalassophile and loved the water.1 He would go on to make the sea what we jazz musicians called his “day gig.” He would purchase many vessels over the years having been born and raised on the water. It was in his blood.

Not least of all, what defined his return to the water was what we called facetiously, Das Boot, a small freighter on its last legs docked at Plum Point he laid down a dream for and a lode of hard cash.

He and Michele had given up their loft and all the pomp and flair of Tribeca to courageously make a new home aboard Das Boot, dreaming of an unfettered life sailing the world’s seas. The setting at Plum Point was nothing short of fifties noir.

Soon fate divided Skipper Jon and me, as the “separation factor” bore down. I’d become a jazz musician. Jon and Michele were off to the bounding main.

****

Years later, in hindsight, having known something about my old friend, I envied and respected his decision to leave the Hudson waterfront to return to the great place he’d been raised. He would survive the hollow promises of New York City—its myth of fame—to become a committed lover and protector of the sea without any sacrifice of his art.

Das Boot would never again ply the open oceans Jon and Michele had dreamed of. She’d go down for scrap having served fully and productively, and not without devotion in her final days.

Back in Stony Creek, Skipper Jon would found a shellfish company commandeering thirteen boats at its height. He would build boats by hand, including one to the exact specs of a Maine lobster boat. He possessed them with a fearsome love for ocean life, its saltwater, its wide open expanses and its ever blue deep sea.

His latest vessel, the Double Eagle, was not his biggest catch, but it would again hold a sea’s bounty or he wasn’t Skipper Jon.

In those someday miracle years, he and Michele bore a loving daughter.

Me, in fun they called, Skeets Hereford, the jazzbos of my boop boop de bop years. I would chomp away at my snaffle bit for another couple of decades a good deal of it on subways chasing dreams in a black tuxedo.

I couldn’t match a perfect daughter. Today they live side by side in matching homes on a butterfly-hill overlooking a pink granite bay.

****

End of Part Two – 2235 words

To be continued in Part Three…

GO TO PART THREE

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

Share

Leave a comment

The road to wisdom is paved with gratitude. The road to ignorance is paved
with concrete.1

The Green Mountains – Art School

Off to see the world for the first time a long, long time ago, Jonathon and I and a handful of other intense ex high school students went to art school together. We were a dream class in the dream­ department of a dream college in a dream New England village.

That was how my painting teacher described us years later. Recently I’d crossed the country to see him and visit Jonathon after forty years. My teacher, Professor David (I shall call him that to avoid confusion with other Davids of the same period), was the Real McCoy if there’d ever been one. Just this past Fall he was still bright and spirited at ninety. He hadn’t stopped working his paint-spattered atelier in the green mountains—hills dappled with the changing pigments of a lush variety of deciduous beings—having finished cleansing the air for the summer and entering winter’s dormancy .

An aging beatnik, he’d been a painter, a puppeteer, a glider pilot and a sailor. All these years later, lucid and without an apparent care, he was more focused and solitary than ever in his country-road bungalow, bravely approaching life’s conclusion.

Every penny had gone into his art and family and an exciting portfolio of world travels, with no particular attention to the comforts of home. It showed that day, that crisp, teetering early autumn day when with Patty, a dear half-century-friend of ours, and Kate and I visited David’s well-worn atelier. It would likely be our last time together.2

Two forlorn sailboats sat on trailers in a clogged yard of the previous summer’s leaves, a patterned mass of saturated yellow, green and red also covering the driveway, a stippled mass like a Seurat. The colors appeared to have danced off the surface of a piece of his painted Fabriano, heavy cotton paper covered in the translucent brush strokes of water color he was famous for.

He’d been a master of his craft and a passionate bon viveur, loving the company of beautiful women and savoring the finest wines, all subordinate to a brilliant career as an artist. That was my teacher, the first of three Davids I would remember fondly from those rich years in art school.

Professor David was the most influential adult I’d known in my adolescence. Today at seventy-three, my life mirrored his to a degree—both committed artists passionately assaulting life—averse to wasting a single moment on a thing without the eloquence of beauty or its expression.

Dispatching his students with healthy encouragement all those years ago, and for the first time with grades we deserved, deep inside us were implicit instructions to one day return. Back at his dappled mountain retreat, I almost felt I had fulfilled an edict and was complete, having finally returned to the company of his startling, all-knowing single eyed intensity. And humbled that he was so full of flattering memories of us.

My wife would finally know the man with the patch at thirty-six who’d all those decades ago guided me into my new world, gifting me a conceptual roadmap to sublimity.

****

We his students were free souls to the last wavering one of us, still just nippers really, fiercely independent and without compromise, soaking in late-sixties rebellion. Chance had brought us together in a genesis of shared ambition. Like a folio of dreams with a beating heart, the whole gestalt of it would stay with me for life. I would take it down my yellow brick road influencing every venture life bestowed on me as artist and activist.

We were a group of like-minded partisans of the arts. We called ourselves, “Eight Ways,” although undeniably there were way more than eight ways amongst us. Like young raptors, we fledged out of a dank metal building, a satellite supplementary and apart from the main campus. A warm nest smelling of oil, acrylic and acetylene, we proudly called our orbiting star the Art Shack.

At the end of our time together we organized a show by the same name, riding the momentum of those early years as draftsmen, painters, printmakers and sculptors, like a loaded skiff on a high wave above a pounding surf.

Against fearsome odds we would become creatives, invariably and without mercy the very thing our parents had done their best to inculcate our young and impressionable minds with doubt.

They would speculate coldly, why would anybody needing to make a living ever want to be an artist? But so determined were we, our parents were eventually forced to give in, moving on without us in often disappointing post-war lives— obediently toeing the line—chasing dreams, negating any chance of the fulfillment we would seek as post-war babies.

I was expected to fall into lockstep with my Ivy League elders, but their alma maters’ hadn’t exactly agreed. My parental units had allied themselves with what seemed like legions of dull, insentient councilors doing little for a living, and whose job ironically it was to guide.

They rationalized their disappointment with me in absurd notions, all untrue, only contributing to my worst inclination towards insecurity and a tendency towards fearfulness in life (foist on me first by my parents).

These wooden, public school overseers only irrigated my parent’s horror at what they were convinced would be a shaky future chasing a dream as an artist. How sweet it would have been had they known anything about guidance or encouragement. Professor David was a shining light at the end of a long tunnel.

Decades passed like tropical storms. Our lives, not always perfect, were always spiritually rich and certainly productive. All but one of us successfully pursued the ambitions our dream college had instilled on us—to be as successful and motivated as our professors, the art stars we modeled ourselves after in the BFA Program.3

Later we would flock to New York City. They had taught us if you went there, (what we called “the city,”), wherever you proceeded from there you’d always be a “New York artist,” which was good enough for me.

Still, one of us was tragically star-crossed, too bewildered by angst to negate a hasty exit by his own hand. We and the others would gather one last time in the nation’s capital for a final goodbye to Painter David, our fallen “eighth way.”

****

Saxon’s River to Washington D.C.

Our last semester, Remi (one of the Eight Ways), and I roomed together in a small river town with a single street lined with clapboard houses, including ours, a general store, and an old-fashioned inn across from a church missing its steeple. There’d been a small diner where we’d enjoyed home-cooked dinners for two and half dollars plus tip. Down the road was a covered bridge as perfect as a Maxwell Parish.

I left Saxon’s River after my graduation to spend six months in Washington D.C. trying and failing to bond with my father and connecting with Painter David. David was an astonishing abstract expressionist painter with only months to live.

My father had left our family for a second wife and a new career in what was then the nation’s gloomy capital. Still pretty much segregated, blacks were ghettoed to the east of North Capital Street and whites lived comfortably to the west, essentially a wall between the races.

In those days, the nineteenth-century downtown was the prowl of muggers, pushers and pimps. Delinquent roving gangs and packs of marauding rats held sway like something out of a dystopian thriller.

For studio space I rented a windowless loft in a crime-ridden downtown neighborhood filled with faded traffic circles and immense, frightening Victorian houses down on their luck, fronted with macabre stoops scattered with shiny soiled needles.

I convinced David to go in with me on the loft. Working by day as a roofer in the hot summer sun, he was rarely there.

Our studio’s entrance was on a dark, narrow alley opposite an all black strip club, a place I was graciously welcomed into by its patronage.

Upstairs two black musicians were living and working by day on the new D.C. Metro. With a small trust, I painted by day and jammed with my friends upstairs into the wee small hours of the morning.

Another new friend, Ian, a mysterious white acquaintance and spirited young squatter, guided my girlfriend Lucy and I through broken windows connecting what seemed endless rows of abandoned, nineteenth century office buildings where young artists squatted and made art. They looked empty and boarded up from the front, but inside was a hive of activity, at least until the next expansion eventually came and the guts of vintage downtown Washington were ripped out and thrown into landfills.

Urban renewal would wreak havoc across the country pulverizing much of America’s rich architectural history in the name of convenience and consolidation. In the hands of big money, it was what they called progress.

****

That fall of nineteen seventy-four, in our windowless loft lit only by florescent, I painted a series of black and white canvasses hinting at something about entropy. My monochromatic canvasses were like abandoned walls after the bomb, suggesting a paradoxical state of perdition, good and evil and a strange beauty of their own. Eventually, in storage the paintings were destroyed with impunity by philistines, the backbone of America

The loft and the paintings and the fading city was too much of a coincidence. The works’ sentiment blew up in my face that spring with the coming of the cherry blossoms. Young Painter David committed suicide at twenty-three.

The dreadful event abruptly cut my Washington stay short, funneling me temporarily back to Saxon’s River where I’d stored my belongings in the house I’d shared with Remi. Remi was still living there and working on an assembly line nearby. Each weekday he’d commute back and forth to the factory in an olive, sixty-eight Ford LTD with a broken frame.

****

Departure From Rural Life

Rich or poor, Remi and I stayed close friends after art school ended in seventy-four. Unlike the rest of us, he’d grown up in humbler means near by. He didn’t seem to have the momentum he needed to build a shining career as a creative out in the big world (spoiler: he would do it). I didn’t want to leave him behind.

I felt strongly he was too gifted to be stuck for life on an assembly line paying down a mountain of school debt, so I decided to take action. With my encouragement and transportation, I volunteered to be his one way ticket to the outside most of us had come from. My first good deed in life would be dragging my penurious co-aspirant out of the state.

We packed our art supplies, paintings and few possessions into the front of the immense box of an enormous U-Haul. It was big enough for the belongings of two octogenarians, much less two twenty-three year olds starting out in life.

At thirty-two cents a gallon, truck size wasn’t an issue. The world was drowning in fossil fuel, a hailstorm of denial rising up like a lion in a blizzard of avoidance. A majority of the world naively assumed burning dinosaur bones would be a harmless, effective and sustainable paradigm for everything energy related, heat, cooking, transportation, warfare, profit, garbage, plastics and more. Our energy needs were threatening to drown us in a poisonous dependency.

Much of the citizenry occupied a less degraded Earth than today, but it was quickly becoming worse than our parents’ and grandparents’ planet. People had little or no idea of the fire-breathing dragon on the horizon.

Soon we were loaded up and off to the sea-breeze coast of Connecticut. Sailing free at last down the interstate, we fantasized we were commandeering a truck full of Marshall amps. We imagined we were roadies with the Grateful Dead, those jangly dead-heads burning electricity with abandon, “riding that train high on cocaine.” What could have been better?

****

End of Part One – 2240 words

To be continued in Part Two…

GO TO PART TWO

Share

Leave a comment

In my solitude you haunt me
With reveries of days gone by
In my solitude you taunt me
With memories that never die1

I rise at the moment of the morning sun’s reliable clockwork. Its blushing tide of flesh clear light spreads upward from behind the tall peaks and down the rocky hillside studded with juniper and oak. From the highest ridge the fiery bloom of the star’s fireworks explodes, spreading amber dye over the ravished branches below, their living shoots dormant and hidden, waiting for the rain.

Offended and without breath, a mute stream passes stolidly below our small porch. Grateful for a few drops in the night, the Love Grasses have morphed from crispy beige to faint viridescence in the shadow of the tardy monsoon. They are friendly touches of life in the otherwise, long low tide of the parched summer.

Behind our bedroom, a mighty Black Oak—a full twenty-four inches around—has yielded to the slow ebb of its long life. Its powerful wings once stored the lion’s slaughtered prey. Its husk will stand long after we are dust, its arms still reaching for the heavens, upwards like a devout saint.

My oak—Standing Person—you were my teacher, my protector, my muse, my friend—and by more than a century, my elder. You were a cool patch of shade in the June sun for Cochise and Mangas. I sat below your embrace with my panting animals, gazing up at the miracle of flight in a symphony of birdsong.

I nursed you on… severing your abandoned limbs to encourage the new and channeling the water off the mountain into your roots. But your recession was irreversible and final.

Now, my departed oaken muse, you will be home to a garden of new being—worms and mites, moths and birds—fashioned into a complex of new cavities hosting the living, and mined endlessly for food. At nature’s tender mercy, your biomass will nurture into the uncertain future.

You are a joyful memory. Your long struggle through life and death in the harsh desert is complete. Together we approached the finish line, you and I. You lost, but who would have known I would have seen you off? I followed you into my own old age and now I must wait for my God with only the gratitude of your memory.

****

The first fifty yards heading north into the embittered forest, more than a dozen crimson and cardinal skeletons sit frozen in last life, leaves clinging listlessly to dead branches still crimson and perfect in death.

My treasured Manzanita, we shared the rocky fields when you were headstrong and springing boldly bigger with each season, as the little ones grew near like brittle corals in the current, in woods and pastures like perfect sea bottoms teeming with life.

Elsewhere in the ragged forest surrounding us, Acorn Woodpecker’s lust on for absolute control, unfazed by the summer’s trial, defending their territory like a cadre of uniformed fighters wielding ill-tempered aggression to great effect.

Unmatched and petulant in the crisp morning air and all through the long hot days they scold interlopers—those keen to sneak a seed or hold a cavity hostage.

Silky black flycatchers with pointy crests and bleeding calls mourn the dead Elderberry—another dismal casualty—unable to survive its summer dormancy without benefit of winter’s snow. For now they have other places to hunt for nourishing berries, but for how long I question.

Rock squirrels peek from their burrows below the grassy knolls. Tails bobbing and light-hearted, they emerge from their holes to begin the day’s endless mischief, unconcerned with any apocalypse.

Grouchy Gila’s call querulously, complaining about nothing at all I’m sure.

Up and down the living oaks, along trunks thick as a chimneys, robed nuthatches peck for hiding worms, scurrying and chattering and calling endless warnings at what knows breach.

A family of Bridled Titmice holds a bathing lesson in the bird bath.

Nearby, Bewick’s Wrens and their nestlings spy a curled, sleeping Diamondback hidden in the Salvia. Bravely they risk a lunge, vociferously lecturing their peeping fledges in the beast’s midst. Fresh incarnations as happy as little clams cheep away unconcerned with the risk. Miraculously they learn from their doting parents through the mystery of bird-y-talk, lest one day they be gobbled up unfairly.

A pair of comely male hummingbirds pointlessly joust away for nectar. There is absolutely no chance either will not drink its fill, but they can’t be sure. Wanting every drop for themselves they take no chance on altruism. Prisoners of voracious determination with flurried wings, they quarrel bitterly to the sound of swooshing air and fencing beaks, risking a terrible collision.

Their trip south for the winter is imminent. Their tiny minds sense the cooling nights and the shortening days of winter’s final approach.

****

Maiden Spring—my mountain mistress—has subsided beneath the once quiet pool of dace and mud turtles, leaving nothing for anyone or thing.

Closer to home, sauntering off the mountain and down the grassy hillside before my eyes is a young buck with four small points leading a small herd of does. They arrive for a drink. My spirit animals, the Coues White-tails, approach the wet inviting trough, the only water for miles. Cautiously they tip-toe closer, intuitive and poised, the risk of death from a trespasser’s shot all too real.

Here in our place together in the high valley—their world—not ours, I only wish to protect them I am so in love with their forest and its wildness. As long as there is water to drink, our home is here in the solitude and silence. My life is complete.

Just then a song enters my heart like the scent of an enchanted rose, up into my auditory cortex. It’s Pops. He’s warbling in my mind… “And I said to myself, what a wonderful world.”2 My thoughts precisely, I muse, but for how long at the hand of man?

Sitting with my coffee in the sour sweetness of my solitude, I’m charmed to have the animals’ company—and of course Satchmo—the angel of civility and an equally indelible part of my world.

****

Share

Leave a comment

When you get caught between the moon and New York City
I know it's crazy, but it's true
If you get caught between the moon and New York City
The best that you can do (The best that you can do)
The best that you can do
Is fall in love1

­Return to the Streets

We arrived home in the January of my forty-third year, jetting in over Manhattan on a flight from Tucson.

The bloated Airbus made a dramatic pass over my emerald city. Lower Broadway twinkled with the lights of taxis, tiny yellow bodies moving through the glittering light and ochre smog. A saturation of photons sprayed us—up through the ether at the speed of light—as we banked right into La Guardia.

We had missed a grand snowstorm, but it was gone now and the streets had turned back to gray.

In the intimacy of my holiday walkman, I gazed into the mystery of the glowing island below my window. Ben Webster’s gentle whir comforted me as my anticipation grew to anxiety. The view both excited and repulsed me, spellbound by Ben’s jazz and the sight of those gilded canyons gliding by at three hundred miles an hour. Fixed on a point, my eye measured our progress along the northbound avenues.

Packed with lives, the galactic immensity of which no human brain could fathom, New York suddenly seemed a place every human on Earth wanted to be—the mothership of competition—beings stacked on top of one another in buildings scraping the skies for miles in all directions. The mathematics of it was daunting beyond imagination. Would the Earth stand still and the sirens sound?

I thought to myself, Cat, you don’t need this, to be here at this epicenter-of-ambition, one stoic face in an immense and endless crowd.

Domestic Life

I’d had an allergy to it for too long—the cacophony of it all—everything in one place all at the same time. I’d imprisoned myself in this oversized postage stamp for too long. I knew it was blasphemy, but the world was promising me gifts elsewhere. The two paths, like devils, sat on my shoulder whispering in my ear and arguing amongst themselves.

I’d not been immune to it, struggling for something undefinable behind locked doors. Strife prowled the streets unchecked in search of victims. High art
was gradually being taken over by big business in search of the buck with the biggest rack.

The brouhaha was unbearable. “Is there any money in it?” “Can we make a deal?” “Do we have a deal?” “I thought we had a deal.” “Where’s the money?” “How much money?” “Has he got the money?” Can they raise the cash?” What’s the commission? Money... cash... money... downpayment... money!

In my white van with commercial plates and a sticker of a bluefish, I shuttled Robert De Niro Sr. and his paintings around for twelve dollars an hour under the auspices of “man with truck.”

Robert Earle Jones, father of James, hired me to move things too. I don’t know what it was about fathers. They just trusted me.

I advertised in the Village Voice. One morning a woman called and asked me
if I’d make love to her (forgo the moving...) OK...? And now for something completely different, I thought to myself. But that was not me, “wink, wink,
nod, nod. Say no more!”2

One time I went to jazz musician Howard Johnson’s loft where his bari lay peacefully on the couch like a seductress waiting for her queue: “Live from New York... it’s Saturday Night!” Next I delivered to Pharaoh Sander’s loft under the Manhattan Bridge. I was a truck-messenger in mid-town Manhattan for Choice Messenger Systems. Up the service entrance I went, loaded down with packages on streets with no parking and hungry meter maids. I delivered handmade harpsichords for “Buecker and Harpsichord” on West Broadway.

It was the beginning of a living.

The Hood

My teachers in art school had professed that if one started in New York City
one would always be a “New York artist,” wherever you ended up on the road of life. New York was the Holy Grail of every art school geek and free spirit longing to be a young master and get famous. But like everything in America, you had to have the money, but then you risked your peers hating you for it. New York was impossible, but it was that song that led us over the cliff. We believed in it, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.”3

In nineteen seventy-six, the proverbial Soho loft came my way on lower Broadway and Spring. For thirty-five hundred I’d purchased the fixtures and lease for the second floor at 508 Broadway from sculptor Ken Greenleaf, years ahead of me on his way out to a sensible life in a forest.

Renovating a floor in a cast iron building was standard operating procedure for young Soho pioneers with shiny new BFAs. I blocked traffic on Broadway filling twenty-four yard dumpsters with the debris of eight ceilings built on top of each other over decades. Next came the insulated sheet-rocked ceiling to muffle the sound of my music, and oak strip flooring to replace the original floors, cracked and split from years of heavy industry. Yards of BX cable ran through a birdcage of metal studs to create my own design, a Bauhaus-styled interior built my me, complete with tiled bathroom and copper plumbing. For the first time I’d finally created value the real world could understand.

My building partners were dancers and filmmakers and painters, all of whom were absolutely sure they were on their way straight to the top. As the youngest, I was smitten. Joel Freedman and I did most of the work to buy the building. The others followed with their share of the down payment and a signature. If what my parent’s said was true—there was no money in the arts, only a life of pain and regret—at least the real estate would make me rich when I clawed my way up the pyramid. I was in the right place at the right time.

Merry-Go-Round

At a giant party in Tribeca during my first months in Soho, I met Ruth Kligman, the third person in the wreck that killed Pollack. A man shook hands with me and said, “Hi, I’m Mel Bouchner.” I was naively starstruck and ready for the art world’s embrace. Everyone was a legend in their own mind.

I knew Mike Fanelli. I was stalked by a witch. I was a regular at Puffy’s and Magoo’s. I watched Phil Glass play pool at Magoo’s while I ate my pita burgers in shy solitude. Eight dollars brought me home at 4:30am stumbling up my stairs.

I was in and out of hundreds of “openings,” more than enough to make me
realize I was just one stranger in a strange land,4 where even my friends from art school refused to catch my eye. I was a vegan in a school of barracudas looking me up and down, floating in a sea of pretension, speaking and acting completely differently from me. Waitresses seemed uniformly obnoxious, but still expected a tip. It wasn’t Kansas anymore.5 I was sure of that.

Against all odds, regiments of artists navigated the cunning deceit of those who would define what sold, and mandate to a mindless society exactly what was “good art” (the rest bad), and its rightful—guaranteed—high price.

As the years passed, in no time it seemed my neighborhood changed from conceit to pomp as shops lined up for “space.” They wanted a piece of what they thought was hip because we were there. We invented the term, “bridge and tunnel crowd,” to describe aggregations of souls from Jersey and Long Island and other “normal places,” making the pilgrimage to Soho by the tens of thousands every Saturday and Sunday to shop and gawk.

New York City Love

One morning when all seemed lost, I walked into my office on the top floor of
225 Lafayette, where I was forced for a short time to flee, my tail between my legs, for that elusive of all but essential commodities, money. I looked up and there she was. Serendipity had walked in with a positive attitude and a smile, wings hidden, but very much there.

“I’ve been sent to save Mr. Heath.” Nobody reacted, or seemed to notice her or what she said. In fact, Mr. Heath had become a shriveled grape on a vine, immured at the top of an office building, forced to take an exigent break from the equally exigent process of making unpopular music, almost for free.

The angel said, “I’m forming a band and I’ll be playing in major clubs in sixty days, and signed by the end of year.” My eyebrows stood on end. She’d jagged me and I would never escape.

Our first date at Mondo Cane Blues Bar ended with a tender peck and footsies under the bar. She moved in on me. Doh!!!! I was in love for the third time in my life and I was, “caught between the moon and New York City,”6 and I’d have to make the best of it. No more late night trysts out of La Gammel.

I became a “certified artist” by the City of New York, finally legally able to live in my own building, the one I’d owned for years.

I’d paid real dues in that first decade in the Capital of the World. I’d hung out with Sonny Stitt at Beefsteak Charlie’s who lectured me on the power of Jesus (I was ready). My angel and I did cocktails with Anita O’Day. We lunched with Clark Terry holding court at South Street. Our band had played Birdland, Metronome and Five Spot. I’d seen Jocko Pastorious, disheveled and drunk, break a thirty-two ounce glass bottle of Miller High Life in the middle of Thompson Street. I took that to be a portentous omen.

Epilogue

The high life could not convince me. I’d had the craziest dream that legend in my mind would rise to the challenge, but change descended on me in mid-life, like an acid rain I couldn’t outrun. I wanted to fly with the Cliff Swallows of Capistrano.

We’d scaled the labyrinthine ravines of aspiration immured in a cauldron of self-absorption. We’d learned and grown strong. We prospered.

Ours was hard time in an ambitious city, but something would come away with us willingly—something gleaned from those urbane canyons—where the sweet smell of success and the stench of failure waft through the conflict together, in through the windows, settling on the streets and the sides of buildings, only to repeat endlessly.

Our own and others’ hubris threatened to drown us. The conceit undermined us. The indifference emasculated us. The fickle finger of perceived-excellence frustrated us, and the razor thin line between relevance and irrelevance flummoxed us. It was a war we would not fight. The dead were following us around for sympathy.

It would have to be enough. After decades, my angel and I were headed West to a better life, imagined—down Tom Jobim’s, Road to the Sun.7

We landed on a Sky Island in a vast desert, an idyllic place far from roar of the Double R under Broadway, and the ever present racket of the latest car alarms, running farcically through their perverse litany of digital clatter.

The long light of the American West suited us. We were satiated, and ready to escape city life. I’d hopped that freight before without success, but this time it stuck.

Leave a comment

Share

A Falcon, a Warbler and a Passing

Fall’s first breath arrived as suddenly as a shooting star. The moon was full and her silver laminate coated the grassy pastures and mountains for miles on all sides. The pewter landscape sprang to life with the setting of the sun, as the moon rose behind the Huachucas and the night fell, close to perfection and without qualm.

A Merlin had been preying on our birds and there were bits of feather around marking its dismal meals with God’s blessing, for all life must eat.

In the chaos of the changing seasons, a faint, high pitched call came from a gusty bush. We knew it was a special bird. Careful study determined it was a very rare warbler, an eastern resident rarely, if ever, found in our Madrean woodlands. The “Hooded Warbler”—with its black ear cap, yellow face and olive back. He was foraging for moths in our rose bed.

The early fall days seemed to herald a realignment of some kind—glorious, yet with a hint of tragedy lurking in the dappled shadows of our golden oasis. In the Southwest, death never seems far away. It has to be watched for. Suddenly it might spread its wings and a shadow falls over paradise.

****

The Announcement

She came to me at seven am with the news, holding her arms for warmth around her nakedness, her face distorted by the sudden grip of stinging pain. A grimace of discomfort and shock hung over her lovely countenance, prefacing the terrible words.

“She’s dead, Billie’s dead.” I woke with a start. How could it be that the reaper had returned so soon. Why us—again—I wondered what we’d do.

It hadn’t been long since I’d looked over my desk on the morning of the Summer Solstice and that same look had appeared on her smooth face, the face of a much younger woman—my wife—and her words, “my father died this morning,” seared into my memory immune to exorcism. A sad synchronicity had fallen—the sudden passing of two of our own.

At that instant I’d have given my own life to avoid those crushing statements. I’d have followed them into where the dead go after a good life. The future had revealed its inevitability in small spurts of time.

They were gone for good. Dad was gone. Billie was gone. We, the living, were left behind in that flash, the moment’s notice from which we’re never the same, as life drags us into the future alone, a future ruled unopposed by change.

We dug a hole for her on the lawn beneath the mesquite we’d transplanted from the forest, where we could be close to her under a series of boulders, a garden memorial. We planned to grow salvias and poppies, and return Tommy and Frida’s ashes to the soil around Billie, her closest siblings two years gone.

****

Last Goodbye

One could easily have thought she was only asleep, she appeared so perfect in death. But she had moved away from us—the living—onto her Happy Hunting Ground.

After a brief mysterious illness, our beloved heeler had died in her sleep at fourteen. She lay in the hall in fresh stillness where her breathing sleep had began and ended for the final time. There appeared no sign of pain or trauma. We were grateful she’d passed in peace.

We sat on the wood floor stroking her gray, black and white fur. Her raccoon face and blazing yellow eyes silent, eyes we’d refused to believe wouldn’t see forever and ever, as the song promised on clear days. For a last time, we expressed our unbroken love to her quiet face, ears still erect, and eyes only hours before had blazed with life and intelligence.

Tearfully it sank in. Never again, the sound of lapping water, or the gentle swish of happy footsteps through the house; biscuits after fragrant evening walks—her quotidian treats—hard-wired into her circadian cravings. Our boundless love, the spirited games of fetch, sitting like another person watching the desert pass on the gray seat of the truck, all now the stuff of memory.

She seemed to be telling us, “I’m good for now, but tomorrow will be another day, and I’ll be up for anything dear keepers!”

“I live a fraction of you, but I’m a happy dog. I’ll wave my gray, marbled tail with all the gladness my god has gifted, until I’m no more. I will live fully and without grievance until the day I die.”

“And while I live on in your brains here on Earth, know that my doggy-soul will be somewhere else far out in space, my energy intact in a different form, for energy never dies. We will meet again.”

****

Epilogue

In five-thousand, one hundred and ten days we’d just about never been apart. No kennels, no dog-sitters—that was not our style. We were a family and never allowed selfish human cravings to separate us. Billie was as sentient as we ourselves. She was our most loyal friend, as all dogs are, treated with love by loving masters.

Billie-girl was the smartest, kindest, most well-behaved animal one could ever hope for. By intuition she never killed another living thing. She knew by instinct, her human parents loved all living things without exception. Wildlife posed little risk to her and wasn’t worth fussing over like just any typical canine.

Ours was a comradeship. For better or worse, we were compatriots on life’s bitter journey through the chancy years we’d shared. She would be our last, for the pain of her loss was so unbearable we never wanted to repeat it. We would choose to finish what remained of our lives with the indelible memories of the six, or so we believed after October’s realignment.

We are alone now.

****

Into The Village

Nineteen sixty-seven. With views of Harlem, the New Haven Railroad rattled into Grand Central on a blustery winter’s day. Four teenage boys got off the IRT Number 6 at Astor Place, fresh and innocent off the polished sidewalks of Fairfield County, excited to be free of their parents for the first time. In their hearts and minds they were rockers.

Freshman year they’d formed their first band and called it, The Collector’s Item.

Down St. Marks Place they trod, past shops of dashikis and tie-dyes, past the Five Spot, past the Electric Circus on the left and down to Second Avenue. They turned right past little eateries with old men in antique gray overcoats eating shredded beef pirogies through scratched windows with condensation. Manholes belched steam into the smoggy cold air of November, 1967’s Lower East Side.

Down another blighted block came Sixth Street. A marquee in need of care jutted off a humble, once grand vaudevillian venue—the Village Theater—soon to become preeminent as the Fillmore East, a worldwide point of pilgrimage for young rockers everywhere. Tickets were under five dollars.

Coltrane Jazz

Unrevealed to the bell-bottomed teens in line for the Who under the crumbling marquee, that same year the great saxophonist John Coltrane had played one of his last concerts at the Village Theater. On July 17, 1967, Trane would die at 40 of multiple organ failure complicated by sepsis, a lower respiratory tract infection, and heart block.1

The young rockers had not yet discovered Trane’s music, but soon enough they would be lifting their Beatle-haircut-heads in bewilderment at the beguiling tone with no parallel, a uniquely plaintive sound of astonishing resonance. What they heard for the first time was something completely different, as Artie Shaw had described first hearing Stravinsky’s, Rite of Spring.

What Coltrane described as a Christian spiritual awaking rescued him from drug addition. Later he moved on to Eastern religions feeding his devotion to a higher power right into his sound, a language with no boundary to the expression of his love for God and music.

By that day in November, Coltrane had already crossed over. Jazz would be on life support, all but deceased as simplistic pop infected the world.

His art was complete in 40 short years, his voice silenced. He had lived through the racism every African American had, handling it with grace and dignity through personal expression. In ballads he could interpret white men’s melodies with a sublime sentiment, or rain down “sheets of sound” the world had never experienced, making white folks smart. The sound of his horn transported the listener into an unknown “dimension of sight and sound.”2 He could channel anger or frustration, or pure love, into what some considered pandemonium, but others knew was the inspiration of a visionary.

The Who at the Village Theater

Twenty-two year old Pete Townsend was in fine form that night swinging his right arm like a broken cuckoo clock, knees spread catching air, leaning back, his Stratocaster listing at a thirty degree angle. Townsend arguably invented the guitar sashay of every future rocker on stage and in garages around the world—the ubiquitous vernacular of prancing metal-heads, screaming rockers, and country star sidemen sure of themselves in their confident razzmatazz.

The Who spoon fed the boys in the band a new paradigm, “take-your-music-and-shove-it-America. We’re taking your kids.” Popular music based on second world war sentimentality, consonance, melody and harmony, became passé for a new generation, leading to the Doors, the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, Punk, Metal, Thrash and more. Middle fingers were pointed right at the comfortable suburbs the kids had crawled out from under that day.

Civil Rights, Music, and the Politics of Rock

The young rockers would see all the new acts, but at least one of them couldn’t help but wonder what the real meaning of it all was?

American politicians had gotten something terribly wrong. Born of an unjust war in Southeast Asia, the new music was an expression of youthful malcontent, and it drove a wedge right through the post-war complacency of their “social X-ray” parents.

The invincibility of change reared its toxic fangs. The young rockers would soon matriculate into full blown hippies. Their hair got good in the back. Beatniks, hipsters, beboppers and abstract expressionists were out. Jim Morrison was in, pulling his trousers down on stage. It was the boys’ world now and their generation would define and be responsible for what followed, for better or worse.

A tall, dark-eyed introvert with long, straight black hair was the leader of their pack. As the leader matured in the years that followed he would develop an enmity against the wasteful dissonance of electricity that eventually extirpated his friend’s hearing, the angry turbulence fodder for corporate boardrooms eager to homogenize it into a reliable commodity.

Fully grown into a man by 1973, the leader had jumped clear of that bandwagon in the conviction that great music was by definition good, or it was bad, but absolutely never passé or powerless at the mercy of markets. In a “Barnum Bailey world, just as phony as it could be…”3 philistines had their own book of definitions and what sold big was good enough. The leader resented it more with each passing decade.

Fact was: good music always prevailed in the progression of history even after marketeers emasculated worthy competition and profits were booked.

In hindsight, the music of electrified defiance seemed a metaphor for a coming explosion of nihilism, a new century hostage to mediocrity as the world burned. American society burst into freeform dysfunction, a flavor for each taste in an ocean of industrial rubbish and questionable ethics.

The country was making only infinitesimal progress against an unjust war overseas and one at home for civil rights. The young suburban rockers would soon become card carrying members of the NAACP and organize civil rights marches in the comfortable little concrete hamlet near Long Island Sound, where everything always seemed deceptively perfect.

For the rockers, those years were a nexus, a crossing over into a growing partisan dichotomy—left versus right, conservative versus progressive, a system languishing in the hostility of disagreement, first over a ludicrous war of no purpose killing 59,000 of the young rocker’s less fortunate brothers and sisters; later over a ruthless contest over wealth, privilege and healthcare.

The Parent’s Legacy

The “Greatest Generation,”4 complacent in post-war growth had become convinced comfort and materialism represented meaning in their lives. It led to warming climates and rising seas ignored and a growing age of extinction—an unrelenting threat wreaking havoc on oceans, forests, water and air. An apocalyptic jeopardy caused by precarious governments and self-interest.

We see this today reflected in evangelicals and the “maga” movement, their denial of climate science, convinced that wealth and possessions are evidence of God’s benevolence towards a few of us. The rest of us don’t matter and it’s their world to do what they want with, they preach. The country of Capitalism’s apex celebrates more than it needs in an anti-trickledown archetype of its own making.

Lust for wealth has reached plague proportions in America. The wealthiest pay the smallest share of taxes. The gap between rich and poor grows by day. What the oligarchs and corporate special interests sell us is often a waste or toxic to us. If the health of Planet Earth is the price of growth, privatized industry has won. We will lose objective perspective in a marketing malaise, allowing ourselves to be controlled by oligarchs.

Change is inevitable (we must accept that), but we don’t have to accept the substance of it.5 The human race ingests change and hopefully grows more civilized as it solves important, intractable problems, but the health of the planet cannot be compromised for human advancement. We can’t fall back on fantasies of being rescued through a back door, emigrating to fresh unpolluted planets. The rate of current destruction of ecosystems will not give humanity the time, and besides, we have the means to heal this planet and not be forced to abandon Mother Earth.

Future Angry Artists

At the end of the Who’s show, like wide-eyed emojis, the young rockers watched in living color as Pete Townsend grabbed his Stratocaster by its maple neck smashing it to pieces and repeatedly assaulting the towering piggy-backs the boys pained for, wanting nothing more than to own them. Growing brains couldn’t have been exposed to anything more antithetical to how they were raised, to at least respect property.

Later a moral idealism seemed to dawn on the leader, that life indeed was capable of benevolent positivity and a reasonable ebb and flow of excellence, but his generation had to make it happen.

Angry Arts Against the War in the Vietnam (4pm): Art Farmer, Jimmy Heath, Jackie McLean, Burton Green and Vincent Gaeta, Clifford Thornton, Pharaoh Sanders, Jeremy Steig, Joel Freedman

New generations define themselves in new sounds, images, symbols and words, but that day at the Village Theater was the day the young leader’s Earth stood still. Was it a metaphor for the lawlessness and cynicism that would inflame his world in his lifetime—that which would surely destroy us if we didn’t wake up soon from our dream of an inexhaustible material world?

John Coltrane never destroyed a saxophone for effect, or to sell tickets, or to make a point. His music was one of constructive and complete love.

Back home in his light filled, mid-century modern, his mother argued to the leader’s shock and disbelief, “the Beatles can’t sing!” Maybe they couldn’t by the rusting standards of the Greatest Generation, but he would reason, the Fab Four were at least the beginning of the end of the era of great original songwriters. He had been weaned on the Beatles.

By the new century everything had simply been done. Little originality in the arts existed. Production values soared; light shows and smoke would become the default expectation of every fan; mega-stars thought nothing of being on stage in bathing suits; vast, prismatic, liquid-crystal displays towered overhead; huge ticket prices prevailed. There would be no end to it, and it would all confuse and tax the young rockers as they aged—distracting them from the a priori essence of high art. It became a never ending elegy to young rockers present at the genesis of a new era, and what might have been.

As a thinking adult, guided by a strong parent and an open mind, the leader would live on to embrace the entire history of twentieth century music. He would make his mind up for himself. He would never swallow that full line and sinker baited by private interests, eager to shape his taste and that of future fans and aficionados. In America there is no law against mediocrity. It’s even encouraged for the money. In Capitalism some say greed is good, but that doesn’t make it right.

Ears ringing like a parade of fire engines, the compatriots in sabotage returned to Grand Central for the midnight-blue trip home. On the train back they inhaled full lungs of freon gas from a can handed to them. In fear, the leader almost jumped off the moving train at Portchester.

Months later the young rockers would inhale their first pulls of cannabis on the leader’s sixteenth birthday, the initial flirt with a dangerous gamut of introductions. Some would haunt society for eternity. It was, after all, an anxious and perilous responsibility being alive.

Correction: Coltrane’s performance at the Village Theater was December 26, 1966 on a double-bill with the Ornette Coleman Trio, not in 1967.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

His iMac glowed in the middle of the antique roll-top desk, the brightest thing in the ebony shadows of his cramped room in their small cabin on the side of the dark and rising mountain.

“Goes West Conus,” the link queued in a convenient, pull-down menu for easy access, opened a shimmering facsimile animating the trajectory of a closed low spinning northward and around to the west as it traveled south. The counter-clockwise pull would lock into a tropical moisture plume waiting, ready to channel moisture into the parched and drought-challenged forests and deserts of his real home on the range.

It was Christmas again. “So soon,” he thought.

The years had quickly glided by. His hands shook more and his skin was turning an unmistakable pallor, eyebrows growing in insane directions. So far it was a warm and dry holiday. The road, dust on top of clay, and oaks dying in undeniably greater numbers.

After he and his wife had identified one hundred and fifty species of birds, suddenly new ones were showing up, gila woodpeckers and pyrrhuloxia, escaping increasing temperatures and the “death subdivisions” nestled in the tinder-dry rangelands.

It crossed his mind at the tavern on the corner of Bever’s Street; at close to seventy-two he was familiar with age’s onset, its baby steps, followed by what none of us could predict but ruminated over with greater frequency. He was never much younger than when he’d taken his first baby steps, his mother’s arms outstretched in encouragement, but the direction was always the same, towards an endgame nobody understood, years in the future. He missed not worrying about death.

As the holidays approached he wrote and rewrote his annual Christmas card trying to perfect its ring with the joy that was in his heart, here in the woods apart from most things. He was of the generation that believed it was blasphemy to even dream of Christmas until turkey dinner was down. Only then would he move on to his homemade eggnog, candy and ham.

Being an electronically transmitted card he could pick the exact people he wanted to send it to without posting it for the entire world to see. Post-post-post. He was sick of it. Life is not lived on stage in the public eye, as if communication be pointless if not there for everybody to “share.”

Friendship was something sacred to him, something to be savored with no expiration date. It should make aging easier, facing the “rubbish heap of old age” in the company and relative comfort of being in touch with old friends.

People move on and love is fleeting, people argue in defense of failing relationships altered by modern life. With eight billion people on the planet it was hard for him to comprehend that seventy-two years added up to just twenty people.

One day, awash in nostalgia, he was adding every friend to the list he could remember — next, impulsively removing them for perceived slights past or present, dredged up in the desperation of his insomnia. But the people that had made any effort at all to return last year’s stayed on the list.

He wanted to imagine their faces as they’d been, before he left the city in mid-life for a new one surrounded by the uncompromising peace and quiet of the high desert. It was beginning to feel like a long time ago, but he wanted to hold on to it as long as he could. The world changed behind him in annoying leaps nobody had any control over.

What he couldn’t deny was his vague indecision at exactly who those twenty people were out of the hundreds in his address book. He had a nagging guilt of an ulterior motive, that it was not just pure goodness he desired to project. In his mind he was always negotiating the virtues and failings of friendship and what he expected from them. After all these years, were these just phantom friends?

Every old friend was not a candidate and some were bound to see a group e-mail as a way to attract attention or promote, rather than preserving whatever little flame remained. And there were those that had long ago given up letters and cards, hated e-mails, and only “texted” in a style faintly resembling real communication. They might let old-fashioned messaging pass like a summer shower it be so unfamiliar. Every Christmas it was a little bit of a stretch, but he wanted to be the disrupter of conventional wisdom and show people that love didn’t have to be fleeting even though human nature told a different story.

He knew in his heart it was the loneliness of the woods that made him do it.

What bothered him most were the people he really cared about who were incapable of even returning something like a “thank you, you too.” It took so little effort to punch the keys and be kind, for a 21st century instant. An e-mail in the midst of his solitude was a blessing, a very special occasion. He rushed to return the few he received lest he hurt the feelings of the senders.

­All the anxiety over the holidays and the wars in Europe and the Middle East made his sleeplessness worse. He would thrash left, then right, looking for the best position for his bad disk, the one he’d been hauled by ambulance to Northwest Hospital for, the same hospital his mother had died with her head in his arms.

Before his thoughts had even begun to settle first light was there, the color yellow squinting over the mountain, punctuated by the wink-wink-winks of the jays. If he wanted to avoid it he would put his eye shade on to make up the sleep he’d failed to root out in the darkness, easier to attain after the light had returned, for an ex-musician at least.

“Be cursed, early risers,” he thought.

He’d read recently, Neanderthal DNA caused people to wake earlier. He thought, “but we have grocery stores now and don’t need to get up early to hunt or start the fire.”

His mother had always railed against his desire to sleep late arguing that it was the most beautiful time of the day in Virginia. But when he was younger he thought the end of the day was most sublime.

By the next morning he’d decided not to send any cards under any circumstances. The original stated objective had been to send out positivity and love at Christmas, so he was inclined to change his mind frequently in the entanglement of emotions. He wondered what kind of a person took friendships so seriously — it was getting bad — his pandering to memories of lost friends.

When it came down to it, he couldn’t understand people avoiding the sweet fragrance of their own past, when all was not lost in thoughts of final preparations “waiting for god,” or dreaming of unrequited bucket lists and grandchildren.

“People navigate around the past to ease the pain of its very passing,” he thought.

Old friends would suddenly appear in his mind. Instantly he wanted to send them a Christmas card, so he jumped on his machine to add another address to the draft. All were listed alphabetically and carefully edited for the right spellings of his friend’s spouses’ names.

He was a kind and uncompetitive man. He really cared, except when he was persecuted or forced to defend himself against prejudice for his self-confidence, or his long hair, or the home he’d built with his own hands, or the talent he could never quite break through with, that seemed to threaten others anyway. He’d always helped others and showed interest in the under-dog, but gotten little in return. Only his hard work and determination had overcome the handicap of it.

Solstice arrived. He would bring the juniper in his wife cut from the forest, into their tiny living room with the fireplace, grand piano, smart television, ragged furniture, and undeniably great art collection, universally ignored. It still amazed him what twenty-five years could do to furniture in a home with dogs. She trimmed the tree gradually and patiently, because at seventy-two he couldn’t cut it anymore, an arrogance he tried hard to avoid.

He thought about his e-card, its sentences packed with meaning, almost impossible to replicate in any other way besides the written word. He imagined it might bring joy to them at Christmas and that was his comfort.

He was beginning to think he would definitely send the card each and every Christmas, even though it was likely to be ignored. He would do it anyway, but couldn’t help wonder when his own self-absorption might lead to a loss of motivation in the endless distractions of present-day life.

On the morning of the shortest and darkest day he thought to himself, “yes, I’m going to follow my heart and send out a bolt of glad tidings, before I change my mind again.” And so he did.

Goes West Conus was rarely wrong in the capable hands of Tucson’s crack meteorologists at the NOAA. After months of drought, a drencher arrived for welcome relief as the seasons changed. Nothing made him happier down close to the souther border than a good drencher.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That’s the time you must keep on trying
Smile!
What’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile
If you’ll just smile. 

The Letter

Dear Father Christmas,

I write you on a cold January afternoon from the high desert mountains of southeastern Arizona, a long way from the North Pole I know, but thankfully not nearly as cold. I know you are already busy building toys for all the deserving children, so I don’t want to take much of your time. I am just an old man now with dreams still, but also many questions.

Incidentally, do you remember meeting me at the North Pole many years ago? I was in a blue snowsuit, red gloves and a red scarf. I was your house guest for several days. I met Mrs. Santa and every one of your elves; I visited your workshop and your stable of reindeer. A kind polar bear and her cub helped me find your place when I parachuted from my uncle’s perfectly good helicopter.

Later, my mother wrote a book about my visit “as told to her by her son.” Although the only memory I have of the visit is the book, I have believed in your kindness and grace ever since. I write you with a lot on my mind.

I read an article recently that said that family estrangements happen gradually over years. I don’t want that to happen to my family — in the few I have left. You see, I have almost nobody else. So I am writing you extra early Father Christmas, so that you have plenty of time before the next holiday to consider my wish list.

The only Christmas present I ever really wanted as an adult was to get along with and be proud of my family. America is in the throws of a moral crisis and rapid change. Christmas often brings out melancholy in adults nostalgic for less complicated times; for the lost euphoria of childhood. We adults search for the strength to grow old and wise.

“The Greek word for 'return' is nostos. Algos means 'suffering.' So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return." (Milan Kundera)

Do you by chance dabble in metaphysics? It might just take that, because the years have taken a toll on my nerves, and I’m long past the natural high of childhood. I have spend a lot of time cherishing my past together and holding off its inevitable contradictions, a conundrum of being alive and a human being. I confess, against my better judgement, I ruminate at times over simple math — our days are numbered.

That is why I ask you Father Christmas for the best present anyone could ever receive — the pleasure and solidarity of their family. So here is next year’s Christmas list. I know you cannot fit every wish into your sleigh, but see what you can do, for these same gifts are relevant and be given to families everywhere.

Your passionate admirer,

Tony

The List

Make us realize that each person has their own way of showing love. It need not be shown with a gift, an obligation often imposed on us by our voracious “market economy” with no end to our lust for consumption. All of us may not have the resources or the time to prove their love materially — or they may see unnecessary consumption as waste or not the right representation of their values.

Still, do not think that a gift (if it be your way), given in the spirit of love, without expectation, will not be appreciated. Give us the humility to not expect more than a simple thank you, written or spoken earnestly, although we may expect more in return, it may be all people are capable of.

Give us the resolve to be thoughtful and polite at all times. Sadness, all too prevalent during the holidays, can be mitigated by kindness to others. Kindness can be the simple act of showing interest and being sensitive to another person or animal, or lending a hand or offering a kind word.

Discourage us from giving in to aggressions or expressing them “passively.” Force us to be transparent and above all to communicate. Let there be nothing to prove under one’s breath or in silent facial code. Another may hold a quiet resentment of what they cannot read in your mind locked inside bone and blood. Let us see that our paths are all separate and unique to each one of us. Give us the strength to avoid the temptation to compare ourselves. There is often a good reason for why we are so different and others sport the illusion of success.

Stop us from walling ourselves up in our minds where it is impossible for anybody else to get to. Make us transparent. Be tolerant of others’ idiosyncrasies and tactful in our interactions.

Embolden us to be cheerful and engaged; to participate enthusiastically
in what we share at Christmas time so we may treasure its memory, lest it fade away too quickly into the relentless passage of time. Talk, listen, and be joyful together in the short time we have left. “Smile," though your heart may be breaking.”

Teach us to see that selfish attitudes and verbal insensitivities are antithetical to any joyful celebration and to life itself.

Permit us to set aside rivalries and disagreements, especially about people who have betrayed or hurt us. We may have valid disagreements for discussion on another day. Life is too short to waste on endless debate unlikely to end in agreement. Check your baggage at the door, for the sake of unity, at least at Christmas.

Give us the strength of character to show interest in each other’s personal goals and aspirations, even if one is not particularly interested because of distraction or preoccupation with one’s own travails. We lead full, demanding lives on our own, but let us not be universally self-absorbed. One may even become more interested after sharing others’ goals in generosity of spirit and selfless attentiveness. We all need to believe, within reason, our paths are acknowledged by others in our competitive culture of chasing clover leafs, down one-way streets, detours and dead ends. Above all, be supportive, even if it requires great effort to rise above the hectic fray of our own lives and the frenzied pressures of the festivities.

Encourage us to ask questions, lest the answers be lost to time and to
those who follow us, and may be curious. They will want to learn from the lives we lead in the present moment and the past. Compare notes. Be fully advised. Our thoughts and aspirations are all unique and not one of us thinks exactly alike.

Let us share our belief in the things we agree to stand for, like protecting endangered species and the environment, the “right” to universal healthcare, peace between nations on different paths, however challenging. Help us to understand and practice justice for all people and animals.

Not least of all, teach us to honor our parent’s this very day, lest their memory be lost to us. Forgive their transgressions. Understand that they too fought the same demons. Find that “silver lining” where one may be tempted to only see a “sow’s ear.”

Give us the faith to rejoice in the solidarity of our DNA and our ancestor’s past lives. We are the current incarnation of them. Educate yourself. Honor them. Learn from the examples they set. Value the experiences we can share together on Christmas, as modern versions of them. We call it a “family,” the most precious institution on Earth; to be revered as nothing else in life, along with the wild, perfect garden that surrounds and nurtures us.

This is the holiday I desire — one whose chosen place for gathering is a welcoming place free of envy, competition or trivial animosities—a verdant island surrounded by white sand and a churning ocean — a crystal lagoon protected by a healthy reef of brain and stag horn, home to jubilant schools of rainbow colored fish in perfect synchronicity. This is my wish for next year Father Christmas.

“Smile” –Music by Charles Chaplin, Lyrics John Turner & Geoffrey Parsons
Illustrations by Margaret N. Heath (1923-1996) © Copyright Tony Heath, 2018

Article originally published in 2018.

You were a model of canine tenacity, given from conception life with a dire prognosis. First you were simply used to make a fast profit by unscrupulous host. A difficult lot, you forged through life like a little steam engine, living proof animals are a source of great inspiration to a weak human race idiotically considered superior. You tolerated the burden of your handicap with natural lust for life and a zest for just being alive.

Dutifully, for each and every feeding and drinking, your little dapple frame sat in the padded, five gallon pickel bucket, ideally suited to your nine pound frame. Vertically—six, eight times per day — whatever it required, you sat like a statue on a pedestal to get your the food down. For 14 long years of life, your spirit, without exception, inspired us to push on through the most difficult of times. By default you were our model “service animal.”

You soldiered on bravely tolerating that endless wretching cough required to extricate anything you’d sneak into that searching mouth in the momentary absence of our constantly watchful eyes. Each and every tender morsel you craved, grabbed from the good earth, became a toxic pill lodged in your throat, incapable of natural passage.

The “regurge” of food caught in the throat seemed oblivious to massage, patting, fluids, gentle shaking — but you always came through it happy and animated.

There were no treats. You couldn’t have them. Forced to eat bland “moistened dry,” granted, the best money could buy — the best we could do for you. You forged on without complaint, oblivious to it all. Your spirit refused to ever yield to the struggle for a single second.

There was the giardia, sent home with you by the breeder, the back surgery at aged four, the dentals, as your teeth rotted from constant reflux, the oxygen tent at age eleven, the needles, the pills which never seemed to work, and finally, your little heart filling with fluid. It was all a blur of pain and frustration to us. But mysteriously, not to you. You were a happy dachshund. You always moved on in your doggy-way with impressive bravery and determination, an inspiration to all of us.

And so, through years of work and experimentation, the daily cycle of reflux continued, a constant fight, battles won and lost, an ugly war of attrition not winnable. A narrowing of the distance between the present moment and your return to God was always ongoing.

Through all of it we held you. We loved you. You loved us. You lived with impressive vigor the troubled life you were given with unceasing stout-heartedness. You were our miracle, our little friend — our precious sauschicha — for whom God: something, somewhere — gave us the job of being your keeper. Despite our pain, the missed vacations, the expenses, never being able to leave you alone for more than a short spell, we never regretted we had you, for the support we needed in our solitary little lives.

In 14 years we never spent a day apart. You made a huge difference. Your suffering was not without cause or in vain. Tom, you were the Good Dachshund. Rest in peace.

Live free, run like the wind, hunt with impunity and take in the smells that excited you to no end — to your little heart’s content — in your eternal, happy
hunting ground.

Related Video:

Subscribe now

Share

Share Art, Activism and Love On The Southern Border

Mangy and the Tree of Life

True Friends

“Man's best friend” may be a cliche, but I can’t think of a better phrase to describe the relationships I’ve had with my three living and three past dogs.
Others might be: man’s constant and unwavering source of delight and entertainment,
or, man’s most loyal second self, or, that which ties one down more than a spouse ever could? All describe the kinship I’ve felt with my pets.

They say dogs assume or reflect their master’s looks and personalities. My sister’s dogs are pensive and unsociable, reflecting her introverted nature. My son’s first dog, Kino, was a black Shiba Inu, reflecting his preference for black clothes with an accent of white, Asian women or his choice of a man-bun.  What that says about my preference for Dachshunds I’m not sure, but probably reflects my problems with authority figures, wanderlust or a dangerous preference for sausage.

My living dogs are a “mini,” black & tan Dachshund named, Tom Jobim; a blonde “antelope” Chihuahua, Frida Kahlo, and a female Australian Blue Heeler named Billie Holiday. Keep in mind, my dogs are as big an inspiration to me as the great artists and personalities I’ve admired, in honor of whom I choose to name my closest friends.

Dogs passed but not forgotten: “Zefir” (after the character created by Jean de Brunhoff in “Babar The Elephant”), a red mini—the only dog that ever bit me in the face. My first dog as an adult. Next, “Mangas Coloradas,” a companion for Zefir. Mom always believed dogs need the company of their own kind. Mangas was a black & tan “standard." Sadly short-lived.

In my sixty-six years no more painful circumstance has been forced on me than losing a pet. Beloved companions with lifespans a fraction of our own demand a long string of parting farewells. Evolution is so unfair! As I grow older and time appears to pass more quickly my dogs’ lives seem to pass in shorter intervals—unambiguous markers on my own trail.

On the death of one, I am forced again to scratch out another hole in the clay on a gentle hill near the house. We call it (without facetiousness) Paw Hill. In final parting we wrap them in a favorite blanket or improvised shroud. With gentle hand we place them into the unforgiving ground—the bodies of our precious pets — back to the earth from whence they came. Their loyalty never wavered. They live on in our minds, as long as we have the gift to remember the best of times.

The sacrament is the same. An initial layering of soil is delicately packed around the enshrouded form. Next a covering of small stones is delicately arranged on top, followed last a deeper final layer. Irreconcilably detached in body from us we cover them with Mother Earth. They are on to the
happy hunt.

Lastly, with diesel strength, a perfect stone is found and placed over the fresh grave to commemorate and protect it from ravenous animals, as the ants begin their work.

Tale of the Coyote

Once, before any of the first three had passed, a pregnant gunshot coyote died at the base of “Paw Hill.” We buried her there and put a red stone on top. An innocent mother coyote became the first to grace the spot, welcoming her domesticated relatives to follow her there in the years ahead. Several days later, to our complete amazement, her mate came and stood on top of the stone, to sniff out the grave and say goodbye.

Gunshot Coyote (2007)

Dogs give us something uniquely canine. Close to human love but more about loyalty. Unlike people, dogs don’t think in too many different ways. They want food and love. They don’t plot and scheme against you, or lie and rationalize in unyielding defense of themselves. Dogs do not hold a grudge. Like us, they are sentient, but perfectly innocent and incapable of evil.

Predictable and devoted to us to a fault, they have unwavering instinct for positive attachment when allowed to act naturally (does not apply to their fellow kind). Canines defend territory making noise. We share our space with them in almost complete agreement on security, but we do not condone the barking and ruckus and the false alarms.

It is rare to have a comparable relationship with a fellow person — one completely without conditions, except for food. Our love for these "lucky dogs" (the ones who found us) is never unrequited by them. Mysterious as it is, sometimes it’s harder to lose a dog than a person. Dogs have no subliminal issues with us. When they are gone there is nothing to compromise the treasure of their memory. Their deaths are a total loss.

Kate holding Zefir at age 6 weeks.

Zefir (1996 – 2010)

Zefir was female. She was more socialized than our future animals raised in the relative isolation of the ranch. On the streets of New York City with people everywhere as far as the eye could see, at all times of day and night, our daily walks and interactions allowed her to become kind-spirited, affectionate to most any soul along the way, and friendly to other dogs. This was a civilized and very positive element of urban life with Zefir.

Zefir, our most trusted sentry, New York City, 1995


Except for a striking intolerance to pain (you could get bit), unlike the others, “Zeffy” was our most trusted sentry. She was our “line dog,” always in the lead or strategically taking up one flank.

She was, however, like her master quite accident prone. As a puppy in Tucson, right off the streets of Manhattan, she promptly stuck her nose in a jumping cholla. With pliers and a couch pillow for a brace, and gloves for protection from snapping jaws, each cholla sticker had to be brutally pulled. That night the swelling created what looked like a completely new breed of dog. She survived.

Zefir's first trip to Arizona. God help the poor sod (usually me) who has to remove a goat-head from her paw. I still sport a small scar on my upper lip from her instant rage, at any hint of pain or discomfort. Nothing makes her angrier or less like herself. She was such a “good girl.” Gloves and a muzzle became standard procedure for removing goat-heads or thorns. One could lose their nose!

After Zefir was bitten by a much larger dog over food (the bigger dog’s food), we learned that small dogs must be handled very, very carefully. Even after that first attack, she was mauled again years later by a Collared peccary. Our fault. Miraculously she survived both attacks, living on until age fourteen, although perhaps not as long as she might have if her lungs had not been compromised by the first attack, a small part of her right lung having been removed. Delicate surgeries saved her life after both accidents. I will spare the reader the photos, except on request. Nobody would believe a small animal could survive such trauma. Beware small dog owners. She was a survivor and thanks to her we began unprecedented safeguards that have protected the others since. It never happened again!

"Mangy" (Mangas Coloradas)

Mangas Coloradas (1997 – 2008)

We called him “Mangy,” our “handsome boy.” His story was the most heart-breaking. He was the first to go. He was gentle, undemanding, by nature complex, and distrusting of strangers. An outstanding watch dog.

When we went to Willcox, Arizona to adopt him, we walked in and met his biological parents, a stately black & tan male and a red mother, a Chihuahua-mix, but with no hint of it in Mangas who was the image of his father. Mangas was hiding behind the couch afraid to meet us. This typified his nature —guarded and suspicious, but otherwise with all the finest qualities a dog
could have.

"Mangy," the serious one

When he was happy and wanted to express it he would dash around the grounds in long circles, pursuing imagined prey or without any particular notion other than to express his elation. It was uncharacteristic of his quiet nature. In his own sweet way he would bend and tuck his tail as he ran, his hind quarters pivoting to one side like a hook-and-latter rounding a steep curve in pursuit of a fire. It gave us great pleasure to see him expressing his happiness with such a reckless sense of joie de vivre. Zefir would look on in disbelief, or so it looked that way.

In later years, he would amble up to me on the bed, politely and delicately climb on top of my stomach and wrap his little front legs around my neck. A genuine bear hug would ensue. Other times he had an unusual way on lying on his back, belly up, feet dangling in the air. Blissfully he would make a “har-har-har” sound, the reason for which, other than an expression of peace and solidarity, we never really completely understood.

Handsome Boy died in my wife’s arms in the front seat of our truck. An undiagnosed heart ailment was likely the cause. He was eleven. Like his namesake, the great Apache chief, Mangas Coloradas, he died in the Mogollon Mountains of New Mexico, the land of the real Mangas Colorados. We brought his body home that very day and buried him. He became the first to join “coyote-woman” on the side of “Paw Hill.”

Tom ill at 12 weeks

Tom Jobim (2008)

"Tommy,” aka, “Tom” or "Thomas!" (when he was naughty), despite championship breeding, was dumped on us (for half price) by an unscrupulous breeder in California. He thought we were dumb cowboys. I saw a good deal on a great dog. An American Express card prevented him from getting a penny of the money. And we would not give Tom up. The puppy was a “megaesophagus” dog, having been born with a congenital dilation of his esophagus. He lacked the muscles in his neck to move food and water down his throat to his stomach. But with effort and the advantage of gravity we could do it. The kennel also sent Tom home with hookworm, giardia (a nasty waterborne virus), and a fungus growing on the tufts of his ears and eyelids. The resulting chaos brought on a case of aspiration pneumonia from the lack of a diagnosis in the first weeks we had him. Pneumonia brought on by inhaling food or particles can be a killer in dogs with megaesophagus. He recovered from all that, but his prognosis remains guarded from complications of “megaesophagus.”

By the grace of God, years later he lives on, his needs specially handled. An almost normal life, but he must be fed strictly water-softened dry food, or canned, at times by hand. He sits or stands in a vertical position for his food, three times a day from a five gallon bucket on pillows, or standing upright on a chair eating at the table like a person, to maintain the downward trajectory of his food. Gravity is his friend. After every meal and whenever he drinks water, he needs to be held vertically, his throat gently massaged in an upward motion, or his rib cage tapped, to help the food move down and not become stuck in the folds of his throat and neck. He cannot have treats. He cannot eat anything off the ground (as dogs love), lest he choke and gag for hours. He has “regurged” food and fluid thousands of times in his nine years. He has lost teeth to regurge which poisons the teeth, despite elaborate protocols day in and day out to avoid it. Tom is nothing short of a miracle and he's been blessed to have good parents. He's a “lucky dog.”

Tom eating vertically in his donated high chair

Tommy and Frida

Frida Kahlo (2007)

Her Mexican origin inspired her name after Mexico’s greatest painter. A caring veterinarian pulled Frida off the streets of Tucson, Arizona in a grossly emaciated condition. Theory was she had been living at a frat house where she smoked cannabis. She hated the sight of men because of it, but the very day she arrived at the ranch her and I bonded for life. She's been Daddy’s little girl ever since, as healthy and happy today as one could imagine any Mexican Chihuahua.

Frida relaxing on the front porch.

Beaber arrives at Birdland Ranch (2009), finally... off the leash.

Beaber, the wise senior

Beaber (1998 – 2014)

Last, but hardly least, "The Beab." Last of the “first generation” was our Beaber, a senior rescued from a herd of other needy dachshunds in a shelter run by a kind woman. Beaber’s relative wisdom was impressive. He was distinctly more experienced in life than the others despite his checkered past. His personality was a constant source of recreation for us until he died at sixteen (an impressive run). He'd had an unusual and action packed life. Loved by his first master, an elderly man, his death resulted in Beaber being forced into doing hard time in a rescue kennel. One day my wife saw him and knew immediately he had to come home with her.

He would spend his last five years enjoying an idyllic retirement, a perfect rural life on Birdland Ranch in Canelo, Arizona.

His love of mealtime was the stuff of legend. He would wake up well before first light and sit at the end of the bed staring at us with hairy eyeballs, hoping he can arouse us from our sleep. If that didn’t work, he had absolutely no need for any other strategy than option two — this one worked every time. He would let forth a resonate and unrelenting bay from his dragging chest cavity. Although attached to short legs, the prodigious cavity had no deficiency whatsoever in relation to the small size of his appendages, which at times did have their disadvantages.

His method for commanding food was foolproof — bark non-stop until there was no sane human alternative but for you to rise from slumber, finally, from his perspective, to prepare his breakfast — two-quarters cup “dry” (twice a day, not including treats), and occasionally licking plates for extra sustenance. Of course, his food was of the highest quality money could buy.

He lived for his food and his strolls around the grounds, sniffing to his
heart’s content, hoping, praying he might find a stray scrap of anything remotely palatable.

Beaber had what we called “the walk.” Orphaned at middle age, he had without doubt been walked on a leash every day. He was used to typically pulling forward with all his might on the leash. On Birdland Ranch a leash was unnecessary. That opened up new possibilities. He had a natural tendency to roam typical of hounds, but which of course was strictly limited to the grounds. He was freer than ever, but always under our watchful eye. Birdland is potentially a dangerous place for any small dog. He responded to the rules by inventing a tireless "Beaber-walk" resolutely ambling around the house through its decorative grasses, beating down a well-traveled interstate system around the house, in endless an search for provocative scents or small scraps. This was a dog’s idea of a blissful and productive retirement.

Beaber walks "Beaber's Trail" in search of scents

Whoever might be tempted to believe adopting a puppy is the only way to fly, think again. Adopt a senior! Orphaned seniors need your support too. Beaber’s longevity and his ability to adapt was canny, and his life was gratifying to us as doggy-parents. 

Beaber's Grave on Paw Hill (2014)

Billie, our Australian Blue Heeler

Billie Holiday (2009)

Billie was the runt of her litter. She suffered at the hands of abusive siblings before she was gifted to us.

Her claim to fame is an absolute commitment to doggy-manners. After eight years her sense of etiquette precludes her from taking liberties many dogs take for granted, like climbing onto the couch for a snuggle. She won't do it despite earnest attempts by us to encourage her.

She will, however, with tail-wagging gregariousness, typically “roveresquely” walk to the side of the bed or up to one's chair for a neck massage (hers), or a gentle snout-hold (dogs love to have their snouts gently held). With gratification she leaps up at you in an expression of unmitigated joy, gently grabbing your entire hand in her mouth as a thank you. She could easily take it off at the wrist, but this tender grasp of the hand is her way of saying, “you are my beloved keeper to whom I will always be loyal and adore without exception. Never leave me. Never go away. I would be lost without you.”

"Billie-girl"

One must be a responsible person to own a dog. They need good care, and depend on us to stay alive and be happy. And they suffer as much as we do. They are lost without us. Many of us are lost without them.

Frida, Beaber & Tom

There's a Dog in My Bed

What owner of a small dog hasn’t, in hindsight, without some regret, invited a dog into their bed? The dogless reader be advised. Taking a dog to bed creates a chemical change in one’s brain. From that moment on your bed is never completely yours again. Your bed will sometimes even feel and smell more like a dog bed, although the warmth and connection­ of it is well worth it. But best change the sheets regularly.

Frida spends the better portion of her days and all her nights on our bed, often under the covers for hours. Strictly against our rule of law, we find her comfortably nested in the accommodation of a soft head pillow (human), as if she were “Princess and the Pea.” No Frida!

Usually imagined, the slightest sound or provocation brings full attention, a yapping like an angry Kalashikov. Her hair stands straight up, an inch or more above the tiny back of the spine, all mounted on what look like drumsticks. In the fearless manner of her wolfish ancestry, separated only by millenia, her split-second reaction stokes the fire of the other dogs' passions; the sound of a dozen bugles in ever more earsplitting crescendos. A car by chance? The smell of a skunk? A pesky bovine? An “international hiker?” — how dare they cross our land! Or is it just “Jonas the cowboy” — the growl of his diesel engine probably the cause for such angry concern.

Tom is not any different from Frida, in his way of sounding the alarm with nail-biting enthusiasm. His personality hardly mirrors the gentle sway of the bossa-nova, the music of his namesake, a great Brazilian composer. His modus is defending the high ground to the last dog, usually the bed or the couch. Frida scrambles away in an anxious dash to escape “Jaws” (Tommy), spiral-tail defensively tucked between stick back legs.

Billie is not allowed on the bed, because aside from her hair, which permeates every nook and cranny of the house, she is just too big. During these Frida displays she participates from the floor with her own AK-47-voice cutting through the blackness. God help any intruder.

Kate in bed with Frida, Tom & Zefir.

Mangy's last day in the Mogollon Mountains

Final Bar

Words cannot describe the love we have for our dogs and their love for our lowly butts. The pain of losing them is almost without equal. Like losing a parent, we have no choice but to go on courageously without them. Their sudden absence marks another passage in time — a reminder that our time is sooner than later. The joy our pets give us in their short time on Earth is unparalleled.

An old man once said to me, after greeting and admiring the two young dachshunds in my lap (after they'd stopped barking), he could not have dogs anymore — it just got too hard to say goodbye. I hardly knew the emotion having only lost a parental unit years earlier. I was still years away from losing my first fully fledged adult pet.

With the passing of each of their lives I have grown wiser and become a better person. Like soldiers they teach us to die with characteristic dignity. They help us understand that any life lived in love is a complete life — a parallel life — of great significance in the passage of time and to our endless search for meaning.

More Pictures:

Gunshot Coyote (always be kind to wildlife)

All photographs by Tony Heath, © Copyright 1996-2018

Share

Subscribe now

Share Art, Activism and Love On The Southern Border

A Serpent Calls

Sitting on our small back porch one morning last August, our neighbor "Blacky" came calling, a curious, yellow ophidian of graphic beauty (Crotalus molossus). A pair of them is integrated into the community of animals that live around us and complete our circle of life.

In 1997, to be a part of a richer, more diverse circle of life, we moved to Birdland Ranch from New York City immersing ourselves permanently in what was left of the wilderness we had known and loved as children. I personally needed to fully grok it — to get as close to it as I could before I aged another day.

When we moved to Tucson, a snaky place, from New York City, guaranteed snake-less, I was reintroduced to them with instinctual misgivings having had until then, in a deep primal sense, mixed feelings about them. I knew that despite my fear of them I would never be capable of pointing the pistola and in a flash of gunfire executing so wondrous a being. Naively, my new neighbors' standard operating procedure was a "kill or be killed" mindset pervasive in the desert southwest and other places where humans and snakes interact. Without the outlaws of yore, snakes had become the top villain of choice.

To this day, with at least fifty rattlesnake encounters under my belt, almost every one resulting in gentle relocation, I cannot tell a lie (it being practically a sin to not kill snakes in the West), I have never killed or hurt a snake, or have I come close to being bitten. We even go so far as to routinely stop by the side of the road to rescue them from invariably being run over by snake-loathing motorists, cruelly intent on reducing the number of snakes for the benefit of humankind.

As Blacky slowly approached, not yet visually aware of us, perhaps sensing us through the aura of our infrared signal, we froze and stayed calm. All five of us were there; Frida, a street-savy chihuahua, our blue healer Billie Holiday, and Tom, our forth dachshund to brave the Madrean woodlands of Birdland Ranch. Blacky was still eight feet away. We knew that a stretched out, slow-moving rattlesnake was a marginal threat. We sat still and quiet, watching him approach with undulating motion. As soon as he made visual contact with us, he slowly but resolutely came about and headed back from where he had first appeared, a large shrub on the other side of a small wash. All without so much as a rattle of warning or alarm.

It seemed to us Blacky felt comfortable and part of our place, although for millennia it had been his place.

A rattle is rarely necessary if they don’t sense any threat. The moral of the story is, we are in least danger when we move slowly and interfere as little as possible in their business, eating the pack rats and mice that carry disease and cause damage to automobiles.

Like us, a rattlesnake has its own equal right to life. Being slow and easy targets, they are easily predated on by humans, certain hawks, Roadrunners, and even other snakes. The distinctive, deliberately unnerving rattle evolved as an unmistakeable warning of the distant possibility of a defensive strike, if fear of the rattle itself did not deter the threat. A defensive strike is a waste of the snake’s most valuable resource used to subdue prey.

Many rattlesnakes are endangered because humans are killing them at alarming rates.

Snake Charmers, Madras, India, 1957 (Photo/Horton H. Heath Jr.)

No Stranger to Snakes

In 1956 through 1959, my sister and I and our parents lived in India. As children we had seen snake charmers pulling cobras from the foundation of the obese mansion provided us by The United States Information Agency. In fact, 18 deadly poisonous snakes had met their gruesome end that day, and a selection of non-poisonous individuals caught-up in the dragnet and killed for no reason. Piously, the charmers burned them in a fire in the driveway at dusk—all for a few rupees and my parents’ desire to protect us by ridding the compound by what they imagined were marauding serpents posing in reality little threat, but still sentenced to death.

A ancient Hindu temple originally stood on the site, condemned to build the obese government mansion for privileged Americans we called home. After nightfall, it was said, in the darkness the ghost of a blind monk could be heard walking the grounds tapping his cane. It was well-documented that he had solemnly vowed never to leave the spot where his beloved temple had sat, not even in death. My mother knew she had heard the tap, tap, tap of his cane, reverberating into the equatorial darkness. She convincingly argued that she had heard the tapping multiple times during long spells of insomnia.

India, 1956

A dead monk haunted the site. (Photo/H. H. Heath Jr. 1957)At dinner one evening, with characteristically observant eyes, I glanced out the window to see an enormous cobra, erect, angling through the grass, proudly surveying his territory at the risk of Japaul and his machete, if he dared use it on a King Cobra standing upright.

At Rocklands, our family farm in Virginia, I had seen my cousin Tim grab a black snake out of a tree with impressive confidence, bravely holding it up for the camera. He understood how the snakes behaved transcending his fear.

As we slept, copperheads slithered through the box woods without sound.

When my sister and I were a little older growing up in the Northeast, we would trek through the woods and fields partitioned by archaic stone walls, endlessly exploring the patches of deciduous forest around our Bauhaus-styled home in the Connecticut woods. It was called a “mid-century modern.” It featured the earliest sliding picture windows, inviting the outdoors into our living room.

On more than one occasion we would stumble into a nest of yellow-jackets. As we ran for our lives, the slowest of us (my sister) was invariably the recipient of the most stings. She would cry for hours from the pain, covered with red welts dabbed with calamine.

Or we might innocently happen on a black snake sleeping in the shade of a wall. Our worst fear—a snake—was right there in our path, in the flesh. Nothing was more frightening to us. It would suddenly tear off into the rocks or even right up over the grey stone wall in a blur of sudden acceleration. As instinctual fear kicked in, instantly our brains commanded us to run like a gust shouting in distress, hysterical at the sight of it. But a rattlesnake it was not. Unlike a rattlesnake, Black Snakes rarely stand their ground. They are non-poisonous snakes that rely, like racers, on speed to deter threats. I had seen cobras. I had seen people in their bare feet walking over hot coals without harm. I had seen holy men posed in front of snow-capped peaks. I had seen oceans and coral reefs. But in my eight short years I had never come across a black snake, genera Crotalus or Sistrurus.

A First Encounter

Walking in the lower Sonoran desert in the Spring one is almost assured of an encounter with a rattlesnake, given the reptile’s emergence from the den in late Winter, hungry and sometimes ornery, but with little malice other than what it takes to deter a threat without a bite.

It was our first morning in Tucson. There in the path with little warning was our first coiled Diamondback. In a flash it reared up with a rattle we had only heard in the movies, encouraging us quite convincingly to freeze, identify the location, and retreat backwards without delay. Kate was practically in tears bleating something about going back to the East already (it was only our first day). It was definitely not the reaction of the woman she would become, in short order, as comfortable in the desert as the snake itself.

It was Arizona’s way of saying, “Look pilgrim, this ain’t Soho anymore.” We would grow to appreciate that convenient warning in lieu of a bite, a sound we might hear any time when we walked in the desert or watered the roses.

We were now in a culture of tanned faces with white goatees in black felt hats. Mountain oyster sized buckles of broncs or chested cowgirls garnished boot-cut jeans, fitted precisely over pointy boots designed to exit the stirrup if you got "throwed." Roping required different styled boots called, you-guessed-it, "ropers," designed for stability on flat ground as you "wrastled" a distraught calf to the ground to brand or send off to be made into veal.

A man of the Western interior might slap you on the back one second with a hefty chainsaw laugh, or be swinging at you in the parking lot the next—all because you merely implied a snake had a legitimate right to exist or a damned good case for being left alone to do its work eating pack rats. As my father warned of his days in Arizona, "They shoot everything that moves out there son.”

Recently confirmed by science, for years I had suspected that people had an evolutionary fear of snakes hardwired into their genome (and spiders too). With scientific proof I could attribute my neighbors’ genocidal campaign against ophidians to just “genes,” things we are supposed to be incapable of being different from, but from which I had transcended. I am proof the human brain is capable of cognitive tweaking. We can and should control our primordial fears and a whole lot more that needs changing in the way we think.

I had noticed my neighbor’s lip quiver when we discovered a curled rattler in his pump house. I had seen snakes proudly killed and hung over a backhoe parked by the road. And there were the legendary rattler "round-ups" in the southwest, also known as "killing contests." Just micro-holocausts where sexy, grain-fed gals tend to and pose next to windowed vats full of innocent, captured snakes, packed on top of each other, waiting to be beheaded for the simple sport of it. May the best gal win!

So by nature I guess "folks" just hate snakes. They can’t help it—it’s genetic!

In Time I Learned

Snakes and ghosts became no big thing to me as I grew older and wiser. There are plenty of risks we have little control over, but we can always exercise common-sense and caution when encountering our most primal fears.

How many killers, rapists, muggers, flashers and gropers had crossed my path in New York City. I had adapted and developed defense mechanisms to protect myself there. It was just a fact of life in the city, as a poisonous snake is a part of life in the desert or the jungles of Madras, where they fulfill a necessary evolutionary role.

The Snake Oath (by Tony Heath)

I will honor our snakes as I honor myself.

I will become loath to kill a snake for any reason through my understanding that all life is precious, interconnected, and plays a valuable part (except a few idiots out West).

I will not kill them for any reason whatsoever, even in retribution.

I must learn that a rattlesnake is not a direct threat to me or my pet, as long as I am prudent and careful. (If I don’t believe this I promise to move back to where I came from and admit that I am potentially one who might shoot anything that moves and be the problem, not the solution).

I must see snakes as my “co-inhabitants” in an ecosystem we both share for the short period we inhabit the Earth. We agree: it will continue long after both of us (me and the snake) are long gone and it’s my responsibility to protect it.

I will be be shamed and be made to take responsibility before God for any wanton cruelty to snakes.

I will not make fun of cowboys as long as they promise not to kill snakes.

All photos/videos by Tony Heath © copyright 2023

Share

Subscribe now

Share Art, Activism and Love On The Southern Border

"Yo 'Ko," Photo courtesy Center For Biological Diversity

Be proud that Americans on the border are encouraging the repatriation of the Jaguar. In a campaign widely commented on and supported by residents of our area, the U. S. jaguar's new territory along the U.S.-Mexico border has been designated "critical habitat," a first step to encouraging a northern corridor and successful reintroduction. 

A mythical animal of unmatched significance is making its way north into our lands for a safe place to live and hopefully breed—and to help us keep our wildlife population in check as the top predator.

So imagine our surprise when we learned that Yo 'Ko, another jaguar, was photographed within seven miles of Birdland! A dream of mine for years had actually come true—to have a real jaguar in our mountains! 

I had always thought there was too much human activity around Birdland Ranch, but I was wrong. This just shows how critical southern Arizona might actually be to their survival.

At age seven I traveled with my parents and sister through the Dordogne Valley of France. By chance we stumbled on a castle abandoned on a ridge above a tiny village. Being "for sale" and stimulating our Heath imaginations, from that day forward we called it "our castle." The castle still sits, statuesque on that hillside today. We can only pray the same for Yo 'Ko, a living breathing mystery in our midst and desperate for our help.

Yo 'Ko, you are "our jaguar," and we will welcome you, and do our best to protect and encourage you. To any soul who may even ponder a hunt, we are watching. It is illegal to not only hunt but to track a jaguar.

After Yo 'Ko, Sombra showed up in Cochise County recently, and thanks to the Center For Biological Diversity, a video was released to the public to underscore the majesty of this event and help build support.

Please be advised voters: any further attempt to build a wall along our border with Mexico will permanently seal this area off from migratory animals like the majestic yaguara (Panthera once, family Felidae).

Mr. Trump, tear down the Border Wall.

Here is the full video of Sombra in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona: 

Video of Sombra 

"Sombra" (courtesy the Center For Biological Diversity)

Share

Subscribe now

Share Art, Activism and Love On The Southern Border

In 1997, after having been an artist in New York City for 20 years, my wife Kate Scott and I emerged from the urban fracas intact but ready “for something completely different.” With most of our savings we purchased a rare "inholding" in southeastern Arizona surrounded on all sides by National Forest, a hotspot of biodiversity in what is known as the Madrean Archipelago, one of only a handful worldwide.

Making our way West, first through Santa Fe and Tucson, we arrived in the Canelo Hills of el norté, (Spanish for cinnamon-colored), 12 miles north of our southern border. An historic, but tumbledown ranch house with neglected shoots and corrals, welcomed us to our new home in the high desert wilderness, the culmination of my lifelong dream to spend my life outdoors in service to the natural world. The ranch even came with its own cowboys, as we hardly wanted to fence it off from the surrounding wilderness, so we were forced to lease our grasslands to the local “permittee” allowing it for tax purposes to remain agricultural.

Newlyweds, in love with each other and our new home, surrounded by thirteen mountain ranges, we quickly developed our story for making the sudden move from the big city to the farthest reaches of the last frontier. People were dumbfounded. The locals were falling off their bar stools laughing at us — all the way from New York City? — what could two jazz musicians possibly want with a dusty life at the end of a long winding dirt road into the foothills of the Huachuca Mountains. We agreed, it made little sense, but we weren't just any pilgrims, and eventually they stopped falling off those bar stools when they saw we had forsaken our gortex and Yankee caps for straw cowboy hats, collarless shirts, a sidearms (if needed), ropers and Zuni belt buckles. We were as determined as any two kids could be to leave that ruckus behind us and adapt a quiet lifestyle in the bosom of Mother Nature.

We quickly hatched a plan to preserve it for future generations in its natural state, stewarding its flora and fauna and hosting research. Maybe the entire surrounding “area” would one day be protected thanks to our initiative, so informally I called it Birdland Ranch Wildlife Conservation Area envisioning expansion beyond our property line.

Nesting Elf Owls (smallest in the world), Birdland Ranch “surrogate nest box”

I wanted and needed a refuge within the boundaries of what was still the relatively intact natural world I had known as a child in the 1950s and 60s. A childhish obsession with the Old West had survived into adulthood.

Today we call it the “urban wildlands interface,” or something like that. Despite the warnings and disbelief of our friends and family, I couldn't help myself. I had to live what was left of my life in The West surrounded by Mother Nature, common sense not withstanding.

Shortly after our arrival and the initial renovation of our “cow-shack,” the ground opened up and a fire-breathing dragon emerged, as if to punish America for its obvious sins and convince us we had made a dreadful mistake.

First we were hit with the “dot-com bubble.” Recessions followed and the Trade Towers fell. The official “War On Terrorism” had begun. Then came warming and drought; 50 year floods; wildfires took peoples' homes out; illegal immigration blew up in our face, followed by ubiquitous federal law enforcement presence in constant pursuit. Like droning mosquitos with cameras, unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicles proliferated, checkpoints sprang up and the eventual specter of a Border Wall. The biggest open-pit copper mine ever proposed bore down on our community.

In a pristine valley between us and Tucson, in site of our ranch, home to jaguars and Yellow-billed cuckoos, un-excavated archeological sites and ancient oak forests, a 3000 foot hole was proposed with tailing piles taller than ten story buildings. Our view of the mighty Santa Rita Mountains painted into the background, 15 miles to the west of us, would be spoiled for eternity.

In 2003, we installed our “nest-box trail” practicing “citizen science” inspired by Cornell Lab of Ornithology, successfully fledging hundreds of birds in the years since. We hosted research by noted ornithologist Peter Pyle. We videotaped Elf owls in nest-boxes for the first time anywhere. We were influential in nominating our greater area as an Important Bird Area (IBA) by the Audubon Society. We became a release site for rehabilitated animals on their way back to the wild.

Prescient, ahead of her time, Kate founded Birdland Ranch Ecofashions, an early “organic clothing line.” Outgunned by better-capitalized entrepreneurs on both coasts, our remote location proved a liability, as “organic” swept the nation behind us. Slowly we realized that our true calling was to focus on flora and fauna, prolific on all sides of us, increasingly threatened by people and growth.

Next, Kate went to veterinarian nursing school. She became a certified veterinarian technician (CVT) working in local hospitals, eventually becoming a staff member at a local wildlife rehabilitation hospital where she learned difficult protocols for triaging and rehabbing injured animals.

The real estate bubble came, bank failures and the “Great Recession,” followed by the collapse of the job market, health insurance shock, the growing wealth gap, dimwitted politicians in high office and a new austerity forced on even us, who by then already lived by the most modest of means.

Through all of it we prevailed and matured, determined to fight the special interests determined to destroy our peace of mind and devastate the value of our land — all that we had left in the world.

Against an incoming tide of foolish politicians with stilted visions of what a great country could actually be if properly governed, we carried on with both the blessings and shortcomings of our self-imposed exile, never having imagined it in our comfortable urban crib. By choice, we live in a modest house — no cable television, no central heating or air conditioning, no dish washer, dryer, or enough space to stretch out or fill with the accoutrements of a material life. Property at the very end of a three mile dirt road requires hard scrapple determination, time on a tractor, and acceptance of the pervasive but always comforting solitude.

Two decades have passed planting, promoting, feeding swarms of hungry birds, living simply, drinking water from the mountain aquifer and air sanitized by the trees we have given life to — our work ideally a small but incremental difference — prayerfully, an example of how and why a solitary life in harmony with the natural world can be a meaningful one, life’s gold standard. Far from where we started out, we are happy still to be us. Greenery, gardening, silence, sunsets, wildlife, music, art and pets — it doesn't get any better for many of us who are attracted to a spartan life!

Epilogue

In 2017, we founded “Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center,” an organization committed to building, “pathways of compassionate coexistence between people and wildlife." We are both active with wildlife advocacy and community outreach, using writing, photography, videography and publishing to change minds. In 2019, in conjunction with Tucson Audubon Society, we compiled, edited, produced and published San Pedro Anthology, a book of essays commemorating the San Pedro River (under greater threat as each day passes). We are increasingly in collaboration with the Center For Biological Diversity, the most effective advocacy group in the country. We are allied with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Customs and Border Protection and other agencies active in the borderlands.

Kate Scott is a regular lecturer on “Living With Wildlife,” constructing “nest-box” trails, lobbying for an end to wildlife killing contests (the countries dirty little secret), preservation of the San Pedro River and opposition to the impending Border Wall.

We currently have 33 nest-boxes on the property. Finally, in our sixties, we were forced to install a heat pump in 2019.

Photographs by Tony Heath © copyright 2023

Please consider making a contribution to Madrean Archipelago Wildlife Center (MAWC) by visiting us online or on Facebook:

https://mawcenter.org

Related Videos by Tony Heath:

Share

Subscribe now

Share Art, Activism and Love On The Southern Border

Wild Coyote Family, Birdland Ranch

“Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man himself will find no peace.” –Albert Schweitzer


Trying to Make a Difference

This is a story about an incident that occurred around our home at our ranch in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona. It is about the moral and cultural changes our modern world must accept to remain whole, in balance with the wild kingdom and intact for our children.

My wife and I operate our ranch as a wildlife sanctuary. We sacrificed careers and money to live in this wild place and preserve and nurture it in its natural state. We advocate for the rights, respect and protection of the animals that also call our place home, their habitat, long before we ever called it “ours.” Who can deny it was always “theirs?” As thoughtful Homo sapiens with clear advantage over all other living creatures, we consider our work here a special calling. 

It was an occasion of great sadness when we discovered next to our home the death by gunshot of an animal we cherish as a source of great mystery and a symbol of freedom in the wild. It made us think and it forced us to speak out.


An Infuriating Event

About 5 p.m. on Sunday, February 18th 2007, I was carrying a pile of brush around our barn when I came upon the carcass of a female coyote. The animal had been shot twice in the abdomen and left to wander, fatally injured. Upon further inspection, we determined that the animal had come into our compound to look for a place to hide and die, odd behavior considering it was a human being that had shot it. We followed her trail of blood through the garden, past our front door and onto the porch outside our bedroom. With open wounds oozing blood, she had approached the dark window perhaps thinking it a refuge to nurse her wounds and die in peace. She had very little time left.

It all began about 2:30pm that afternoon. I was napping when unnoticed by me the animal came to our window in shock and seeking shelter. The trail of blood was there. After rising minutes later, I went outside to mow our back lawn. About that time my wife had noticed another coyote, no doubt the deceased female’s mate, standing just across our cattle guard looking in our direction. I had been mowing in the exact area where only an hour later I would find her already stiffening corpse. We placed the time of her death shortly after that, between 3 and 4 p.m. As It turned out, while I was working, our maimed friend was fighting for her life somewhere close to me.

After determining that the male coyote had moved on, we wrapped her in a sheet and gave her a dignified burial on the side of a small nearby embankment. We used a convenient hole recently dug with a backhoe to plant a box tree this coming spring. A large purple rock was placed over the grave to mark the spot. We prayed her spirit was running freer, somewhere... in a happier hunting ground.

Most puzzling was her decision to die so close to Kate and me, and despite the frightening sound of the lawn mower. Perhaps our work here is adding up to something and they are growing to trust us as we have hoped. We are here for them—their advocates first and foremost.

Kate Scott Finds a Gunshot Coyote

Bloodlust for Pleasure

Thinking about the person who condemned this marvelous animal to death and carried out the sentence, in the immediate rage that ensued, granted somewhat irrationally, I wished this person would face a similar fate and feel the same kind of suffering they had wrought on our coyote. One day, I fantasized, they too might wander the wilderness accidentally wounded by their own cowardly hand, or the weapon of another lusting for innocent blood. I believed this wanton act of cruelty to be a crime deserving as severe a punishment. Such was my rage.

What kind of a person would take pleasure on a Sunday afternoon killing a wild animal for no reason other than sport? According to an FBI study, human cruelty to animals can be an indicator of a psychopathic nature with the potential for similar acts against people. The humanitarian Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives.”

The incident was followed by a period of pensive melancholy for several days. I sought the counsel of others whose outrage would equal my own. A description of the event is not enough. My duty is to try to do a small part to educate the growing millions of people, many of whom have not developed the benevolent sentience which allows naturalists to relate to the interconnectedness of all living things.


Frontier Mentality

“Sympathy for wild animals, sympathy that is intellectual as much as emotional, has not been a strong element in the traditional American way of Life... How familiar the iterated remark: ‘I thought I might see something and so took along my gun’—as if no enjoyment or other good could come from seeing a wild animal without killing it... The majority of country-dwellers in western America today would consider it necessary to apologize for not killing a coyote they happened to see doing something unusual. This traditional killer attitude is a part of the traditional exploitation of the land.” –The Voice of The Coyote, by J. Frank Dobie (© 1949).

Lethal Control

Every year 400,000 coyotes are exterminated by the United States Government at an approximate cost to the taxpayers of $20 million (Finkel, Audubon Magazine, June 1999). Without going into details, it is accomplished using horribly brutal methods only humans could devise, like gunning them down from helicopters. Mr. Finkel also describes contests with prizes awarded to the person who kills the most coyotes in a given period of time, and hardly in sporting manner. Wildlife killing contests are far more prevalent today than the average American realizes.

In Arizona, it is legal to take a potshot at a coyote any time and for any reason. This is an outrage and should anger any thinking, caring, ethical person who understands that all higher mammals are in kind with us in fundamental biological ways. They must feed themselves, find homes in which to rest and raise their young. They feel pain and joy. Compared to us, with our highly developed brain, they are the innocents, needing our stewardship and love, as all life is precious and now in peril. In his endorsement of Marc Bekoff’s book The Emotional Lives of Animals, The Dalai Lama describes his thoughts regarding the commonality of life I refer to above: “as a boy studying Buddhism in Tibet, I was taught the importance of a caring attitude toward others.”

He continues, “Such a practice of nonviolence applies to all sentient beings—any living thing that has a mind. Where there is a mind, there are feelings such as pain, pleasure, and joy. No sentient beings want pain; instead all want happiness. Since we all share these feelings at some basic level, as rational human beings we have an obligation to contribute in whatever way we can to the happiness of other species and try our best to relieve their fears and sufferings. I firmly believe that the more we care for the happiness of others, the greater our own sense of well-being becomes...”


Our Personal Experience With Coyotes

In ten years living close to a local family group of coyotes, not one has ever come close to stalking or harassing us or our pets. The human ignorance about these animals is mind-numbing. I ‘d be rich if I had a dollar for every time a local said, “Watch your dogs. Those dastardly cunning coyotes will stalk and kill them, and that goes for the owls too. They’ll swoop down and carry them off. And if you see one of those rattly reptiles, be sure you kill it lest it come after you.” My experience in the sierra madrean pine-oak woodlands of Arizona couldn’t be farther from the myths these anxious fearful humans spread at great peril to the wildlife.

Of course, an occasional opportunistic predator acting simply on instinct is capable of harming a pet. Last year our miniature dachshund provoked an encounter with a javelina and barely survived. But understanding what we know about nature, we took no violent action against the animal. In point of fact, neighbors foolishly feeding the collared peccaries cause the animals to lose their fear of humans. They are the ones I blame for that incident, interfering in the natural processes around them. Feeding wildlife is never a good idea.

Others let their animals wander through the wilderness unchecked, reaping their own brand of havoc and invariably causing trouble. I routinely come across domestic dogs running roughshod over the land. Speaking of ethics, the owners of these dogs are putting their pets in great jeopardy. Yet when one gets torn up by coyotes defending their territory (as you would if similarly provoked), it’s always the coyote’s fault.


Livestock Predation

The issue which I have grappled with most these past two weeks is how to address the financial liability suffered by ranchers and farmers when the omnivorous coyote occasionally predates on livestock or crops. According to The National Agricultural Statistics Service, in 1995 a study found that for cattle and calf deaths, coyotes caused 1.6% of all deaths and that predators overall only caused only 2.7% of cattle and calf deaths (source: www.api4animals.org). That is—a percentage of all deaths; not a percentage of all existing domestic livestock grazing on the open range. In fact, coyotes, being omnivorous, eat almost anything of value dead or alive, animate or inanimate, but feed primarily on rodents. They do not seek out or have a preference for domestic livestock.

There is no “intent” on the coyote’s part to take money away from ranchers and farmers. They operate on a purely instinctual basis doing exactly what we do, seeking the easiest, least complicated opportunity to fill their empty stomachs. They have a right to compete and survive. As silly as it may sound, look at human culture, increasingly dominated by corporate capitalism and so-called “free-market” forces. Is it legal to shoot your neighbor because he opens a competing business across the street, forcing you to accept 25% less profit? Why do we not respect and value other forms of life as we do ourselves?

Regardless of the cost to agriculture, I believe there is an overriding ethical issue that trumps the small cost of limited predation. That being the fundamental spiritual value of almost all life forms, the possible exception being solely destructive microorganisms, although many of these organisms play a vital role as well. A collective balance is necessary to create and preserve a planet which is “whole”—intact for future generations of organisms, including humans. We are all intertwined and interdependent.


Welfare Ranching

In my state of Arizona ranching is a form of welfare, as public lands are provided to ranchers only at a deep discount. I am grateful that, at least temporarily, ranching keeps the land from being divided into little comfortable but destructive “ranchettes,” guarded by invincible lengths of endless field fencing, effectively eliminating habitat for many larger animals. Yet I can find no reason why in our wealthy, over-stuffed country dominated by special interests, pork-barrel spending, “bridges-to-nowhere,” and democracies fragilely built on the other side of the earth at great cost in American lives and money, that the coyote can’t be spared lethal, methodical extermination; or protected from the focus of one small man’s lust for blood and death on a Sunday afternoon. There are millions of children without health care insurance in the United States, yet our priority is killing coyotes and protecting the fossil fuel business.

Arizona cattlemen raise a few animals, compared to ranchers in less severe environments like Virginia, where my grandfather Charles T. Neale was a noted cattleman. Like my grandfather, many are successful businessmen more than able to offset the small cost of limited predation by coyotes. Granted, some are not, and society must act to help them as they do people in urban areas in need of public assistance.

Most frustrating, some environmental organizations with financial means have expressed willingness to pay the same or more for the same range; to set it apart, permanently yielding potentially far greater value to society than grazing, but Arizona law forbids it.


Changing Times

Many Americans have been forced to suffer harsh changes in labor practices that competition, expanding populations, demographic shifts and globalization have foisted on them. In my own case, I wanted to be a professional jazz musician, believing still that Duke Ellington’s music has great cultural value. Despite my determination to succeed in an antiquated profession, even a modest livelihood as a performer was practically impossible. There was no market in which to make a profit. I was forced to accept this, retool and move on—disappointed, frustrated and dejected. Life makes these demands on us at times and we have to accept them for the greater good.

Thus, the rancher must first accept the sometimes harsh reality of changing times. We can no longer be governed by a frontier era mindset. In a civilized world all life is precious—to be nurtured and protected. Animal products must be harvested in a sustainable and humane manner. No doubt many ranchers agree, and to them I give credit for the courage to see the truth and change. To the others, I say, it is not your right alone to make a small profit at the expense of the food chain, or the pain and suffering of countless innocent predators acting on instinct; or to expect taxpayer subsidies when the highest and best use for the land needs to be redefined for the common good, lest as we know it today it be trashed and nonexistent for our children. By ruthlessly killing predators in lock step with old-fashioned values (or lack of them), you are upsetting the balance of an already challenged ecosystem, and compromising the morality of those of us that consider the sanctity of wilderness our God with a duty to protect. We need to put our treasure into creating more parks and refuges, rather than systematically killing predators.


The Food Chain

Lastly, there is one critical issue and perhaps the most pressing that must be addressed; our “food chain,” a vital process that keeps nature in balance. We humans, the coyotes, and all living creatures contribute to it and depend on it for the equilibrium which has kept the earth intact for millions of years. Without it, an endless string of chain reactions would create an imbalance manifesting itself with potentially disastrous consequences. In their hunt for food coyotes are opportunists. They usually kill sick or weaker individuals removing them from the gene pool while providing a valuable service to the evolution of healthier animals. They feed primarily on rodents. In this way coyotes provide a valuable role in the food chain and maintaining balance.

Aside from the ethical and moral issues, controlling the rodent population alone is reason enough to end a primitive era of lethal extermination. I can tell you personally that the biggest problem we face on our ranch (other than human interference) is damage to home and vehicles by uncontrolled rodent populations. We don’t have enough coyotes. I fear hantavirus as one consequence. This issue applies equally to the rattlesnakes, also critical in controlling rodents. As an associate of ours, Sandy Anderson (an expert on rattlesnakes and other local wildlife Gray Hawk Nature Center, has said, you are highly unlikely to die from a rattlesnake bite, but you will die from hantavirus. People’s fears of these animals are often the result of naiveté.

Mother Nature created a food chain through millions of years of evolution that many of us take for granted. Humans interfering in the food chain, in an industrialized era little more than a century old, is asking for big trouble.

A Healthy, Free Coyote Surveys Our Compound

Open Spaces

Lethal control of predators must end. Wildlife must be protected from the wanton cruelty of people killing animals for no other reason than their twisted notion of sport. Laws and penalties against this behavior need to be enacted. Humane treatment of wild animals must be taught in the schools and enacted into law.

Ranchers must be better educated and made to realize, for example, that a coyote in the vicinity of his herd is not necessarily predating upon it, but may simply be after his favorite food (rodents). After all, rodents are a lot easier to catch. The rancher must be made to see that shooting every coyote he sees on sight is inhumane and morally wrong and affects the food chain, something he cannot live without. This applies equally to cougars and other wild cats, wolves, golden eagles and other predatory animals acting on instinct.

A small percentage of loss from predation is simply the cost of doing business, in the same way that a trucker must accept the volatility in the price of fuel that directly affects his bottom line.

For those dissenters, who after reading this essay may indulge in typecasting me as an Easterner who is intent on upsetting or changing life in the West for selfish, personal reasons— let me be clear—I am a lover of the myth of the old West. I was weaned on John Ford movies and my favorite actor was always the Duke. Man’s inhumanity to man may given its due in that myth, but wanton cruelty to wild animals was never part of it and has no place in it.

The open spaces are my church. I recognize God in the earth below my feet. As a realist, I realize that change is inevitable. I want to protect as much of the unspoiled open spaces as I can, and what’s left of a wild kingdom that once ruled our precious southern plains. We must all do what is required to protect our little planet from the devastating effects of human neglect, and encroachment on the habitat that our brothers and sisters in the wild depend.



Special thanks to: Indiana Coyote Rescue
Photos by Tony Heath, copyright © 2007 

Share

Subscribe now

Share Art, Activism and Love On The Southern Border