When you're retired is it still called a vacation?

Early in the visit our son’s little dog Kush suffers a heart attack.  She is thirteen years old and has 

previously survived a vicious attack from larger dogs and being hit by a car.  Now she has just shown off 

her I’ve still got it speed” and then collapsed with a heartbreaking yelp.  Dougal shifts into emergency 

mode and administers CPR, bringing her back to life. This little dog has been his anchor to this earth and 

no one wants to think about a world without her in it.

 

I’ve seen my old friend Ed three times in the last year.  That is, three times since his “cognitive decline” has been so pronounced that he needs to be watched 24 hours a day.  But this is the first time my wife has seen him in this new much-diminished state.  She is learning how to talk to him. 

“How long were you married to her, Ed?” My wife asks innocently enough.

“Oh,” says Ed, “I don’t know, two or three years.”

The actual number of years is 21, Ed’s son, behind him, signs to us.

Ed is hopeful that “the bad thing” that has happened to him will reverse itself as mysteriously as it came on.

“The memories are all still in there, aren’t they?” I ask, “It’s just really really hard to access them?”

“That’s it!” he says, face alight.

 

Our family is only a few generations removed from our Irish homeland. My mother is visited by my brother’s old friend Jim.  Jim tells her about his visit to distant relatives in Ireland. At the cemetery Jim asks about the epidemic that killed so many of his ancestors.

“Epidemic?” his cousin corrects, “They were starved to death.”

 

My son is the same age I was when I started graduate school.  33.  He says, “Same age as Jesus when he died.”  He pauses, adds, “Time to start overturning tables at the temples and consorting with whores.”

 

My mother’s eyebrows have gone in reverse from white to black.  Black streaks, too, now visible in her hair.  She is 93 years old.  

 

If my mother keeps losing years as I add them, in 2034 we will be the same age.

 

“I’d like to know,” Ed says, “where my motorcycle is.  And my Ford Falcon.  “I’d like to work on those,” he says, “take them out on the road.”  His son, behind him, shaking his head: no way.

 

My son is highly skeptical of the presidential choices he’s been offered in his voting life.  “Who would you happily vote for?” I ask.

“Erykah Badu,” he says, “I’d vote for her.”

 

If you were out on the lake and didn’t know the wetlands existed, you couldn’t find the channel that leads to and through them.  It’s hidden in a wall of cattails and all manner of lake vegetation, snags and stumps of a ghost forest. The channel winds through a lush swampland, home to herons and red-winged blackbirds, the swan family rules there and the loons, the pair of them, nest there, too.  My mother’s happiness as we kayak through here is almost a humming thing.  Turtles give her a special pleasure. She sits in the front seat of the two-seater; I’m in the back.  My wife is in a solo rig.  Our son has borrowed a third boat and his dog, Kush, an aging eleven-pound terror, surveys the watery terrain from his lap. We glide silently through the glassy channel, each moment suffused with a kind of holiness.

 

A summer ritual since our children were small: a hike to the lighthouse at Big Sable on Lake Michigan.  We go out on a service road through the dunes and come back on the shoreline, where sometimes the bones of an old shipwreck reveal themselves in the shifting sand.  Our family photo albums have a yearly shot of the boys.  It’s three of us now, not four.  We don’t talk about him, but I know there are long silences in which we are feeling our loss. The dog, who is not supposed to be there anyway, has to be carried through the heat. We have the coastline to ourselves.  Another holy ritual.

 

My wife takes a photograph of Ed and me. I don’t look at it until much later. The image surprises me.  Ed, always a strong guy, looks like he’s physically shrinking commensurate with his diminished memory. “It’s the way it is,” Ed said, many times during our visit.

 

My mother awakens us.  The northern lights.  We walk by the light of our phones carefully down to the lake’s edge.  We are on the south side of the lake, so there is little ambient light ahead of us. There they are: green and red, a faint shimmer.  My mother had never seen them before this summer, her 93^rd.  Now she has seen them, twice. It’s never too late for a miracle.

 

Everyday Notes, June 2024

  

 

 

My favorite piece of clothing was a track jacket made by the North Face.  I’m not sure why I liked it so much. It was little garish with bright orange zippers and burgundy and gray fabric.  I bought it at Hoarding Marmot in Anchorage, the last thing I bought there.  And I bought it a little too small and shed enough weight so that it fit well. Anyway, I lost it.  I couldn’t believe it. This felt like the ultimate senior moment.  I went back to a couple restaurants to ask if they had lost and found.  No go. 

Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. I see my jacket on a guy walking down our street with a dog and friend.  It’s raining pretty hard, but I run to catch up to him.  It’s awkward, but I told him I lost a jacket exactly like the one he was wearing. He took it off immediately and said it had been at the restaurant he worked at for months and finally he just took it.

I felt bad, because it was raining. 

But later I realized I had gone to that very restaurant looking for it and had been told they didn’t have it. 

I washed the jacket and began to happily wear it. But the jacket didn’t feel the same. 

I would have washed it twice, my wife said, adding, “To tell you the truth I never really liked that jacket.”  

I stopped wearing it.  And that restaurant, one of our favorite neighborhood hangouts: we haven’t been back.

 

We haven’t seen many pelicans yet this year.  I read that they are “cold, emaciated, and starved” in high numbers down in California.  Very disheartening.

 

 

I have tumor on my thyroid.  I’m conscious of it, but the biopsy came back benign, and so far I choose to pretend it’s not there.  Every six months I see the specialist.  He’s up in Hillsboro, two and half hours north. This time he emphasizes how large it is and tells me that one of the premier thyroid guys believes tumors of this size must always be excised.  Then, he relates an anecdote about one of his patients who had one this size who chose to have it removed, then found that the biopsy had been a false negative.  In other words it had been cancerous after all.

What is preventing you from having it removed?

Well, I said, you haven’t explicitly advised me to do so.

I know, he says, but what’s your objection?

I don’t want to be committed to taking a prescribed drug every day for the rest of my life.

How many do you take now?

None.

Oh, he said, once you get used to it, it’s not a big deal.

I didn’t say it. But it seemed to me that once the floodgates open it’s just the beginning of the end.  Anyway, I forestalled the excision decision or six months.

 

 

The thyroid doctor is three hours from home, is only five minutes from my friends', two of my best and oldest friends, the Schonhofens, live. They’ve been struggling with the recent losses of Margaret’s sister Jane and brother David in separate random health events.  My intention was to lighten the mood.

We got to talking about Mike’s obsession with screwdrivers. Even he can’t really estimate how many he owns.  Surely hundreds. Somewhere less than a thousand. Feeling picked on, Mike leads me to the refrigerator where he opens a drawer of old school 35 mm camera film.  There are perhaps thirty rolls in there, the familiar old Kodak gold boxes with black print, the green and white Fuji boxes, more obscure boxes I didn’t recognize.

These, Mike says, have been in here for over thirty years. Much laughter, now at Margaret’s expense. 

Not fair! says Margaret.  You wouldn’t let me use them!

This dates back to a driving trip through Europe where Mike wouldn’t stop the car for photographs.  (I realize this trip occurred before I met them, which if they had really been saving the film that long, was closer to fifty years ago, not thirty.)

Mike countered that he couldn’t stop the car for photos because he had bought a pair of skis in Austria, Kneissl White Stars, and they didn’t fit in the car so they drove around Europe with the skis extending out the window, stopping only for the night when the skis could be safely stashed indoors.

Mike went over to the counter and found a photo that I had printed after David died.  It was taken at Crystal Mountain after a long day of skiing in January 1979. The photos is very dark, enshadowed, taken in the parking lot after a great day.  Mike is holding his skis in the air, as if in triumph, David, more retsrained, holds his skis at his side. These are those very skis from Austria, Mike said, then sighed gently, David loved those Kneissls.

            Mike and David and I never skied together again after that day.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if David ever skied again after that.  A series of accidents rendered him quite hobbled.  But that day, yeah, that day we were kings.

 

Driving southward on I-5 heading back home after visiting the Schonhofens.  A car swerved from the right lane absolutely blindly into my lane.  I could only avoid it by also swerving–also blindly­–into the left lane.  Miraculously, there was no car in the left lane.  But I didn’t know that when I swerved. This occurred in three or four seconds and takes just three lines to tell you, but I was much shaken.

 

It takes two and a half hours to drive from our home on the coast to Portland and sometimes when we go to the airport it’s more convenient to take the shuttle.  There is only one.  It’s utterly reliable and not exorbitantly expensive.  However, the driver is a complete sociopath.  He harangues his customers, threatens to throw people off the van if he doesn’t like their opinions, and in general is a complete asshole. We sit in the backrow, put on headphones, and don’t engage. When I picked up my wife at the van stop last week from her recent work travels she told me that the driver had been his normal obnoxious self.  My wife said that when this sweet little old lady got off the van she said to him, very quietly, “You are piece of crap.”  We found this deliriously funny.

 

On the solstice we saw a perfect line of a dozen pelicans heading north. They glide in perfect synchrony, just inches off the surface of the ocean. A beautiful sight.

 

Yeah, I have to have this tumor taken out.

 

Still haven’t been back to that restaurant.

The First Quarter (of a "craft essay" I was nudged to write~)

 

Setting out into the adult world the first thing that had to be established was my draft status.  A high lottery number took care of that and suddenly my central preoccupation vanished. I wanted to write and climb mountains. I had been to Mexico on a climbing trip and found very little information in English about climbing there. I would go to Mexico, find all the information, and write a guidebook about what I found.  My ride dropped me at an intersection in the desert north of El Paso in the middle of the night and the adventure began under the darkest sky and the brightest stars I had ever seen.  

 

In my recent past life I worked with writers who were also teachers of writing. We presented “craft talks” to our students, even if we could not agree on what a craft talk actually was.  This, for example, may be a craft talk.

 

“I would write and climb mountains” doesn’t really address the reasoning.  Why do those things?  I’ve never been very articulate about that. I know that my love of writing follows my love of reading. In his journals John Cheever wrote “This, then, is the thrill of writing, of playing on this team, the truly thrilling sense of this as an adventure; . . . the density of the rain forest, the shyness of venomous serpents, the resounding conviction that one will, tomorrow, find the dugout and the paddle and the river that flows past the delta to the sea.”  I share these thrills, this conviction.  I want to play on that same team.

 

When I returned from Mexico I had notes, a journal, photographs, and a couple books.  I bought a sheaf of 500 sheets of typing paper.  Very few words were ever written and it would be about a decade before the sheaf of typing paper was used up.  I put all the Mexico stuff into a Strohs beer box and carried it around with me for a few decades.

 

Climbing was easier than writing. After about a decade, my writing caught up to my climbing.  I can’t pinpoint the moment. It happened gradually over two or three years like an iceberg rolling over in a frozen sea, captured in film in slow motion.

 

One rationalization for not writing (many would follow under other circumstances) was that if a guidebook existed it would have the effect of making the mountain travel too easy.  My reward, I rationalized, had been figuring out all that stuff for myself.  Why would I wish to deprive the next person of that experience?

 

Some of my fellow writing teachers seemed to harbor unspoken questions about whether writing could, in fact, be taught.  But I think we agreed that it can be learned, and that learning can be facilitated, encouraged, (sometimes discouraged) edited, steered, cheered. 

 

In 1981 R.J. Secor published a guide to the volcanoes of Mexico.  It was exactly the book I would have written.  But by 1981 I had no regrets whatever about this. I harbored loftier writing goals–goals I instinctively did not share with others–than writing a guidebook. 

 

Denis Johnson talking to the fiction editor at The New Yorker about his last book, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, which would be published shortly after his death.  She was asking why the book took so long, seven years, to write.  He said that seven years wasn’t long at all, and in fact it took him on average ten to twelve years to write a story from “initial impulse to abandonment.”  He never comments on “the abandonment,” but the remark suggests that the work is not actually finished, only that he has stopped working on it.  Later in the interview he remembers that one of the anecdotes recounted in the story “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” in fact, was first written down 38 years earlier.  Thus he revised his ten-to-twelve year estimate to complete a work to thirty-eight.

 

Most of my books, four of the five I’ve written, are comprised of short discrete pieces, which over time accrued and became books. The book that did not accrue in that way was a novel, Forty Crows. That took me a long time to write and was finally published in 2018.  I had around a hundred and fifty pages written, over many years, by December of 2006. On January 1, 2007 I committed to writing a single page a day for a year.  This was a contract I had entered into with myself on many a New Year’s day in the past; after all, in one year I would have 365 new pages.  But I had never before got past about day ten.  What was different this year? I was in my fifties.  I couldn’t fool myself any longer: it was now or never, with never looking the more likely scenario.

 

This was in the pre-laptop days, when our family of four shared a single computer.  The computer sat in an alcove of the dining room and looked out on our backyard in the rural Midwest.  Just below the window was an enormous forsythia bush in which I once counted nine cardinals sheltering from the wind. Every morning I tried to write for an hour before the rest of the family awoke and the daily drama of getting the kids off to school began. 

 

Among Hemingway’s more famous remarks about writing is “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”  This is commonly interpreted to mean that when one stops writing for the day they should stop almost mid-sentence so as to know where they are going when they take the work up the next day.  But often when writing Forty Crows I did not know where the story was going.  Some days when I finished writing I didn’t know what would happen next.  I only knew that something would happen, because I was committed to the writing.  This is more along the lines of E.L. Doctorow’s’ famous analogy in his Paris Review interview: “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

I think about climbing at night by headlamp, concentrating fully only on the terrain illuminated within arm’s reach, within the circle of light in front of me.

Forty Crows takes place mostly in Mexico City.  It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I began thinking about it that day after I stepped into the Texas desert, crossed the border to Ciudad Juarez and boarded the train, second class to save money, to Mexico City.  That was 1973. Although the book was finished in 2008, it didn’t find a publisher until 2018.  An expanse of forty-five years, if we use Denis Johnson’s accounting methods.

For most of the ten years between finishing Forty Crows and it being published, the manuscript had only one reader (not counting any editors who may have looked at it before rejecting it).  That reader was my son Macklin.  He didn’t say much about it.  It was like a secret we shared. 

Although my wife is almost always my first reader, she didn’t read Forty Crows until after it was published.  Upon doing so, she asked me: “Who wrote this?”

 

Unfortunate Travellers: Notes on Memory

When Garcia Marquez died in 2014 he left an unfinished novel, comprised of five drafts and nearing 800 

pages. He also left explicit instructions to his sons that it should not be published. Now, they have done so.

 Should they have?  Who is to say?

 

Did his instructions stem from his inability to write, or, as his memory failed in late years, his ability to read, to understand what he had already written before his memory began to fail?  Again, we can’t know.

 

I don’t intend to read it.  But I do intend to read both One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Choleraagain.  Since very few books written in the twentieth century measure up to those two, I don’t know why we would expect the posthumous book to do so.

 

Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, famously disobeyed Kafka’s wish to have all his unpublished work destroyed after he died.  A cause for celebration in that case.

 

I am a compulsive keeper of my own papers.  I couldn’t tell you why. Old syllabi, notes, journals, annotated calendars, rough and abandoned drafts of various projects.  Lists of gear to be packed for climbing trips. Correspondence (from the analog era). The thought of leaving this mess to my wife or son after I’m gone is truly embarrassing.  And yet . . .

 

Was going through these (six bins) the other day, looking for the first decent piece of writing I managed to do.  Something we would now, perhaps, call autofiction. It was a portrait of an old friend who performed an almost invisible heroic deed when we were sixteen years old.

 

The occasion for this search was that my friend, the subject of that story, is now suffering from some form of Alzheimers; I don’t know the exact diagnosis.  But it’s heartbreaking to observe firsthand. 

 

I saw him at an alumni gathering last in December.  He could be out in public, with his brother and sister as handlers.  He knew who I was and we were happy to see each other.  A big strong hug ensued, and lingered.  I could see that he was in there, but somehow access to his full self had been denied him.

 

When I moved off to talk with some others, he said to my sister, “I’m having such a good time,  I just wish David could have been here.”

 

When searching the bins I also came across a packet of academic essays that I wrote in graduate school, circa 1986 to about 1999. Even these I couldn’t toss. Not only did I not remember writing them, I did not remember reading many of the books (texts) upon which they were based.

 

I wrote down the titles, fourteen of them, including:

“A Recurring Moment of Negotiation: Odysseus’ Encounters with Nausicaa, Kirke, and Penelope” 

 

“A Close Reading of the Text within the Text of Jim Harrison’s ‘Legends of the Fall’”

 

“Problems of Closure in the Roman Farce: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Moby Dick”

 

 

The one that was met the most approval from my professor was on Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller.  Today, I couldn’t tell you one thing about either The Unfortunate Traveller or what I had to say about it.

 

All writing contains aa mostly unwritten  message: “I was here.”

 

During that same time I also wrote an equal amount of fiction, all of which I remember, and much of which would become my first published book, Letters from Chamonix, almost a quarter century later.

 

Last week we went to hear John Gorka, a singer songwriter of about my age. A couple audience members familiar with hi work shouted out titles of his songs they hoped he would play.  “Those are pretty good songs,” he said, paused a beat and added, “But I don’t know them.”

 

In a graduate school Henry Staten was lecturing on literary theory, probably deconstruction. “It’s like, he said, when you go to the library, and you know where the book you’re looking for is, but when you reach for it, it’s not there.  There’s a gap where you expected it to be.

 

I clearly remember Henry’s metaphor, but not the point which it was supposed to illustrate.

 

If you don’t remember something, how do you know that you don’t remember it?  You must remember that you don’t remember. You must be aware of the gap, the hole where the memory was stored. This must be related to what Henry was talking about that day.

 

At the alumni gathering,in a quiet moment my friend, confided in me, “David I am fucked. I. Am. Fucked.”

 

“We all are, my friend,” I said, “We all are.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Godspeed my friend, David Johnston, with some mid-1970s mountaineering notes

    

 

 

 My friend David Johnston passed away a couple weeks ago, alone in a small apartment on the 26^th floor of a Chicago high rise. A few more details are known, but like most of the rest of his life, these are not my stories to tell.

 

David was the brother/brother-in-law of my life-long close friends Margaret and Michael Schonhofen.  In 1975 the four of us left our suburban Midwestern homes and drove to Seattle to start new lives.  Shortly after arriving David became ill and drove straight back to the Midwest, where he mostly stayed.

 

David almost certainly could have lived longer had he taken better care of himself, but for whom among us is this not true?  He declined medical attention in his last days. I believe he expected to muddle through, independently, as he always did. But not this time.

 

I was remembering with Margaret and Michael a photograph I took of David and Mike after a day of skiing at Crystal Mountain in Washington.  I couldn’t remember exactly when I had taken it.  The day had been a spectacular and we had skied right up until the chairlifts stopped spinning. David held his skis in the air in a day-ending moment of exhilaration.

 

I decided I would look for that photograph in my archives.  This turned into a fairly deep dive.

 

My photographic slides are only somewhat organized. They have been kept dark and dry. I confined my search to three boxes, labeled: 

 

            • Mt. Rainier 1975–‘78

            • Pacific Northwest  1977–‘78

            • Dearborn pre–1975; Outtakes: Mike/Roy/John

 

While I searched through these boxes I would keep an eye out for two other photos from the era, both missing for decades: a photo of John McInerney traversing across a knife-edged section of the north ridge of Mt Stuart (summer 1975), and a photo of Denny Cliff dwarfed by an enormous serac on the north side of Mt. Rainier in winter (early 1977).

 

After poring through these boxes I had some general thoughts:

 

1.      On every single wilderness outing with Mike we were entirely alone and very very far from the cars.

 

2.     The photographs from the first winter attempt on Liberty Ridge (Mt Rainier) look forensic, as if trying to piece together how exactly disaster had struck: blurry, snowy, little-to-no visibility, crevasses everywhere.  Disaster was averted, but you’d never really guess that from the photographic evidence.

 

3.     There’s a random photograph of me climbing a dark wet slab in mountain boots, a double rope trailing down, not a piece of protection in sight. No label. No memory of it.  Just sheer dumbness captured on film.

 

4.      Up to a certain point I was wearing cotton knickers. I shudder now to think of this.

 

5.     There were a number of photos of a winter climb Rainer Burgdorfer, Denny Cliff, and I attempted above the town of Darrington.  I remember this chiefly because the three of us were packed into Rainer’s VW beetle and we left Seattle in the pre-dawn darkness and Rainier kept sticking his head out the window to stay awake, shouting “I was made for this!” into the void. We never really were sure we were even on the right mountain.  I remember the climb as being an abject failure.  But I was astonished by the photographs: they showed we had gained much altitude, the river valley far far below us.  The landscape in the photographs is stark and foreboding.  In those days we were summit-driven and saw anything less as a kind of failure.  I look at the photos now and see wild untraveled country and an amazing experience.  I see our youth. 

 

6.     Despite that during this era my friend Roy was my most frequent climbing partner, there are very few photographs of our days together. Not sure why this is so. We were so into the actual climbing that documenting it was somehow beneath us?

 

I found a couple other photographs I had thought misplaced.  One is of Mike and me on the summit of Mt. Shuksan.  There are also three or four “rejected” summit photographs, as well.  These were self-timed, the camera balanced on a rock.  A lot of time was taken to make these.  It occurs to me now that these dallying moments contributed to our eventual descending in the dark, off trail in the Fisher Chimneys, rappelling from marginal gear and a prayer.

 

The other photo I hadn’t seen in a long time is a shot of me sitting on the summit block of Mt. Stuart.  I’m wearing my white Peter Storm sweater, the kind that smelled like lanolin, that I wore for years, until it became riddled with holes, shrunken and misshapen.  The way this photo later took on meaning was that my aunt had it displayed prominently in her house.  After she died her possessions went into an enormous estate sale.  I instructed my son, who attended as our representative, to find that photo.  But the estate sale was nightmarish and everything in the house had been removed from their places in the home and laid out for sale to strangers. He could never find it. I didn’t expect to ever see the image again.

 

I found the shot of John McInerney on the knife edged traverse section on the north ridge of Stuart.  The slide is damaged.  He is wearing his gold and navy striped cotton rugby shirt.  We spent an extra unplanned night out just below the summit, out of water, a small tin of mandarin oranges our only food.

 

I did not find the shot of Denny Cliff below the huge serac.  But I well remember the speed (and terror) with which we moved through that maze of ice.

 

Finally, I found the photo of David and Mike at Crystal.  It was in the most unlikely of the boxes, “Dearborn pre–1975; Outtakes: Mike/Roy/John,” the most grab-bag-like of the group. The shot was a bit of a letdown, the memory far grander than the photographic record. It’s late afternoon and the scene is deeply enshadowed.  We are in a parking lot.  It’s Mike, not David, who is raising his skis in triumph, unrecognizable behind his ski goggles.  David on his right, smiling contentedly. I’m very glad to have found it.  Slides in those days had the processing date stamped on them: February 1979.  This day at Crystal Mountain, then, was just days before I left Washington state for southern California where I would stay for the next seven years. In other words, a momentous occasion in a young life.

 

If I could hold fast to another single moment of my times with David it would be from when we were driving west, caravanning.  David in his Pinto station wagon, me in my rusted-out Javelin, passenger door coat-hangar-wired together.  We didn’t worry whether these were road-worthy: David could fix anything with an engine. Late in one of the days, Montana, let’s say, David ahead of me, pulls over to the shoulder, flashers blinking.  I ease in behind him and he runs over and tells me to dial up a certain radio station. “They’re playing,” he said, “Rosemary, Lilly, and the Jack of Hearts.”  We drove off toward the setting sun, while Bob Dylan told us a story as we unspooled down the empty highway into the rest of our lives. 

 

The last time I saw David was back in Dearborn (Michigan) in 2012, the occasion, my father’s funeral.  I had left the funeral home to get some air and David appeared unexpectedly, freshly shaven in a razor-nicked face, a gift bottle of single malt in his hand. I had the feeling he had been waiting in his car in the parking lot for me to appear.

 

It’s a different bottle now, David, but I am raising this glass to you.

 

 

 

`

An Origin Story: the Detroit Institute of Arts

 

I was born in Detroit.  

 

Although I left there almost fifty years ago and the house I was raised in has been out of the family for decades, I still think of the place as home.  As Neil Young said, of “a town in north Ontario:” “All my changes were there.”  In my case, not all, but many, the typical changes one might experience by the age of twenty-two.  When I go back to Detroit, at least once a year, it’s to see the people. But two places, sacri loci, my sacred places, call me back: Sacred Heart on the corner of Military and Michigan Avenue where I went to school and mass and the Detroit Institute of Arts where I experienced the wonder of art for the first time.  On this recent trip COVID dashed most of my plans, but I did make it to the DIA. 

Though I had tested negative for days I was tired and spent more than a few minutes sitting on a bench in the Great Hall, an enormous room, mostly empty, that leads to another great hall that houses Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals.  I’ve never seen the DIA overly crowded the way the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago always are.  This despite that admission is free for residents of three counties.  As I sat there I watched the families taking advantage of this great gift.

From my seat at the bench I see a young girl, six years old maybe, a waif who has escaped her parents and sister.  She is attired in a faded print dress over colorful, albeit dingy, tights.  She is skipping down the center of the hall.  Suddenly she stops and stares at the art high on the wall. She is literally transfixed, awestruck, the thing on the wall has stopped her in her tracks. 

            The thing on the wall looks like an enormous piece of fabric, textile, a kind of Golden Fleece. But actually it is composed of aluminum bottle tops and copper wire. It’s called “Amemo (Mask of Humankind)” and was made by a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui.  Foe scale: if it were squared it would be about 25 feet by 25 feet.

            I am grateful to have observed this epiphanic moment.  Later I pointed the child out to my wife. Cute little ragamuffin, she said.

 

The first time I went to the DIA I was with John McInerney (with whom I would share a lifelong friendship.) I remember being stunned, my ragamuffin-in-awe moment, to see Frederic Church’s “Syria by the Sea,” an enormous painting of dramatic golden light and ruins. It’s still in the collection, but somewhat overwhelmed by another smaller, more famous, Church painting  “Cotopaxi,” which was added to the collection in 1976 five years after our first visit.  Cotopaxi is also full of light and fire, kind of portrait of the earth being born.  Aside: at some time in the last decade John made an attempt to climb Cotopaxi, turned back, as I recall, by altitude sickness.

 

A work I had never seen before was “Family Album (Blood Objects) Exhibit F: Shirt, 1993, Yoko Ono, American; bronze with blue and red patina, on hanger.” I should first state that I was never really a Beatles fan, and certainly not a Yoko Ono fan.   But inarguably Beatles’ music would be feature hugely in the soundtrack of my life. As with Kennedy’s assassination and the Challenger debacle, I remember clearly where I was when I heard the news that John Lennon had been murdered. 

This sculpture is a facsimile of the denim shirt Lennon was wearing when he was shot, complete with bullet holes and blood.  At first I thought it was the actual shirt, then I thought no, a kind of copy. I was stunned to realize it was made of bronze.  I would have sworn it was cloth.

Looking around for a potential witness and seeing none, I actually, furtively, touched it. Bronze.  It was like touching the hem of saint’s gown.  Incredible. 

 

Finally, I made my way to the Rivera room. If you’ve never seen this, I recommend a visit to Detroit for this sole purpose.  The murals, 27 of them, fill four walls of a large room, so that when you stand in the center it’s as if you have been absorbed into Rivera’s universe.  Rivera painted these in 1932–’33, financed controversially by Edsel Ford. It’s hard to summarize as its messages are many: a celebration of the worker, a critique of capitalism and the war machine, an alert to the poisoning of the environment. It contains multitudes, as Whitman would have had it.

A large part of my love for these murals has to do with the fact that I, like the factory workers Rivera portrayed, worked at “the Rouge,” or, more precisely, Ford’s Dearborn Stamping Plant, at the time the largest factory in the world. My job on the assembly line was similar to the one portrayed here:

 

I operated a spot-welding machine.  It was mind-numbingly repetitive and dangerous work. With every weld a stream of sparks, much like the ones Rivera painted, shot out from the weld points, once nearly blinding me and more than once lighting my hair afire. At the time I was not yet conscious of living inside the Riveraian universe, but when I look at the murals now they seem highly personal.  

With the money I made on the assembly line I travelled to Mexico City (the Rivera murals were not part of this decision-making process yet) where I gathered material for a book that I, for some unfounded reason, thought I would write and where I discovered Rivera in his homeland. I did not write that book. But decades later I would write a novel that was set in Mexico City in which the main character inspired by the Industry Murals is a student researcher studying Rivera’s works. The murals function as the occasion that launches the plot of the story.

 

On this visit I focus on the scene, high on the east wall, of an unborn infant in utero, being nourished by the earth. That’s me, I thought, I was born here.

 

 

 

 

Notes on Accepting the Banff Mountain Book Award

 Thanks Amy Jane (Rab Athlete who presented the award) and thanks to Rab for their continuing support of mountain culture and for sponsoring this award.

 

It is very humbling to walk through the reading room and see all the books submitted to this year’s festival.  One also senses the enormous logistical task of the judging process.  Thanks to everyone who participated in that process, from the volunteer readers on the front lines to the members of the jury, Jennifer Lowe-Anker, Kate Harris (gestures toward Kate at the podium) and especially to Tony Whittome for his kind words about my work, which mean the world to me.[1]

 

Thanks to everyone who works so hard to make this festival happen, especially the people I’ve worked with personally: Karolina, Margaret, and Kenna, and of course Jo Croston who makes this whole world spin.

 

I’ve been going to the mountains for over fifty years and I realized that although I’ve roped up with dozens of people, I’ve done most of my climbing with just three partners, John McInerney, Jim Pinter-Lucke, and Charlie Sassara. Very grateful for their good judgment, friendship, and shared laughs.  Also grateful for my friend Ralph Baldwin, who I haven’t been out with a lot, but when it counted, his cool head definitely saved my life when things looked pretty bleak.

 

My wife has the double misfortune to be married to a climber and writer.  The climber lives in the mountains and the writer, this one anyway, spends a lot of time in his own head.  

 

I was born and raised in the American midwest, lots of brothers and sisters. They don’t quite get what I do in the mountains and are generally . . . disinterested about what I have to say in most of my writing.  There’s little evidence they read any of it.

 

One day my wife got a phone call from my adult niece. She said that she had just read my book of climbing essays, Warnings Against Myself.  “Oh my God,” she told my wife, “I had no idea.  I am so sorry.”  So perhaps I owe her an apology myself. I love you, Aisha.

 

There’s a line from the great writer Leonard Cohen that I’ve taken to heart ever since I first encountered it: “I always considered myself a minor writer.  My province is small, and I try to explore it very, very thoroughly.”

 

Of course, he is not a minor writer, just a modest one.  I, however, am a minor writer with a small province.  But I believe that if one pays close attention to the specific, works hard, loves language and loves one’s subject, with a little luck we may approach the universal.

 

Thank you~

 

 

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[1] “This powerful, exact, and beautifully written article explores the relationship between photograph, subject, and observer in a series of images of climbers who have died in the mountains. Its spare prose and flattened affect at first recalls art criticism, or even the forensics of an autopsy, but this is not the whole story: it soon modulates into something questing, passionate and deeply personal which will remain in the mind of the reader.  In short compass this is an extraordinary literary achievement.”- Tony Whittome, 2023 Book Competition Jury