Just Like Being in a Corral

 When we lived in Montana we became friendly with two much older couples. Kenny and Verna Trowbridge lived a few miles south in the little town of Darby. Carl and Billie Hopkins lived there as well. Kenny broke horses for the army in WW1. He taught me how to hand load. Billie, as a bride, came to Jenny Lake in the Tetons, one of the first white settlers in the area. Billie gave Jamie her famous recipe for corn pudding which has become Jamie's famous recipe for corn pudding. 

One day Kenny and I were in a corral, leaning on the top rail, looking out over the wide Bitterroot Valley - a stupendous sight. "Beautiful, isn't it?" I said to Kenny. He hesitated then replied, "Seems just like bein' in a corral to me." One night, when the six of us were together, Billie described what it was like being a new bride in the Wyoming wilderness. After she got over her fear of a horse drawn sled falling through the ice, she grew to love the place. Imagine the Tetons and the lake. Imagine you are there by yourself. Alone, alone and filled with the delicious happiness of  solitude. "Has she ever been back?" we asked. "Once," she said, "but no more." "Why not?" "I can't recognize the place anymore. Too many roads. I get lost." A woman who could find her way through the hills and dales of the Teton wilderness when there were no roads, now gets lost and confused by them.

When we moved to the Catskills going on forty years ago, our road was a quiet country road. If three vehicles came by in an hour we'd call it gridlock, and we could often tell which neighbor it was by the sound of their engine. It started with 9/11 and continues with the pandemic: folks from NYC began buying property up here. A hedge fund guy has bought up a goodly portion of our valley and tunneled into the mountain he bought to build his getaway. A micro-brewery up the valley and a lovely inn 1/2 mile east of us are wonderful additions as is a neighbor's charming guest cottage a bit to the west, but this has helped turn our little piece of heaven into a destination venue - who doesn't want to be here? - more traffic, more money, more houses, less country. There is a push in our small town to limit further B'n'B's and slow the traffic. I've been dreaming of those police straps embedded with nails that stretch across the road. Speed bumps have been suggested, but they would make it impossible to plow. I guess, in its way, we are becoming gentrified. I can imagine now how the locals must have felt when we first moved here. Did they think, "There goes the neighborhood?" Only, there weren't that many of us then. At our end of the valley, I counted two - me and J, and then Bev moved here with her horses. At the village end, five miles west, six people, sometime eight. Barely a dent; not even a dozen. 

But, there are pluses as well. This does not include the McMansion being built by the hedge fund manager's architect fully visible through the trees 500 yards across the creek. Suddenly, a familiar old walk becomes trespassing, but I was talking about the pluses. 

People! People are the pluses. 

I've gotten to be quite comfortable discussing pick-up trucks and bullet trajectories. It's fun but it's limited. Recently, at the local farmer's market, I actually heard two people talking about the Colbert show. There are literally six writers within a quarter mile of each other. We were invited to dinner and had cuisine and proper wines. These folks are smart and sassy and don't let their city ways keep them from  diving head-long into country. We enjoy each other. Came Rosh Hashana the tiny pod of Jewish folks met on a small bridge over our creek and tossed the contents of our pockets into the water as is the ancient custom, and the larger pod celebrates Halloween and New Year's with gusto, 4th of July and Labor Day week-end. Bourbon for an hour. A snack. We even have our own brand of Meals-n-Wheels. One of the women is an extraordinarily good and adventurous cook, and very, very generous. She'll make brisket, for example, and put a serving in each of our mailboxes. Many do maple syrup come March. I love it when a local I know well stops by for a sit/chat on our front porch, and I love it when a writer or a psychologist or an architect or an artist stops by for the same reason. We don't trespass. We live off the land and the land is us. We find ourselves part of a community, and that ain't bad, not at this stage of my game. I've surprised myself by enjoying myself. I mean, aren't Russian Jewish Intellectuals supposed to be misanthropes? So much for self awareness.

For a long time now, most of my life, I've felt a part of more than one world. I've always been able to talk with anyone - a president of the United States and the state trooper whose mother I've known forever, movie stars and mercenaries, book worms and jocks. I've tried to raise my children to be comfortable anywhere with anyone. We're no better than the next guy, and we're certainly no worse. A dear uncle, Uncle Milton, once told me that if I wanted other people to find me interesting, get them to talk about themselves. I've discovered some great stuff that way. I know what I think, but what do you think?

Back at Yale, Sartre's, "No Exit", seemed profound to me. Its last line - "Hell is other people" - struck me as God's proof. Years and years later, I've changed my mind. Heaven is other people, too.

 

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Fall, 10-10-2020

This is the time of year I feel most alive, ironic since so many things are beginning to die, an easy and delightful death, the most exuberant, most colorful, most playful of deaths.The thrill of honking wild geese hidden by heavy cover, the symmetry of their V formation when they clear the weather. The startling explosion of grouse from cover. Bears scavenge their last bits of food for winter. White tail coats darken. Heavily racked stags fight for domination. You rarely see this, if ever, but sometimes you hear the muffled crash of racks somewhere in the deep woods. Trees flush with color, "cotton candy", my kids used to say. Other seasons seem to last forever compared with this one. From the day it begins we mourn its end. Of course, other seasons change, too, but those changes are so subtle they barely seem to change at all...until they do. There's a beautiful melancholy in the air. It's easier to see. We're coming into hunting season, although good local hunters  have been scouting since August. I am one of those local hunters, although it's been awhile since I've been out there taking game. Even so, I am hunting, always hunting. My eyes automatically focus on the edges, where fields meet woods. I'm studying my world in a different way for another purpose. It doesn't matter that I'm not out there this year or last year or next.

The nerves are never so alive, the senses never so keen. The air teems with whispers and ten thousand scents, each one a driblet of information. They become attuned to the tiniest movements in the thickest brush. You don't look for the whole but the piece, for the ear that twitches, for the sun glinting on a tine, the flick of a tail. You're aware of the shifting breeze, the breeze you always want to keep in your face. You walk the way you walk in the woods - glacially, flat footed. White-tail deer. Their hearing is beyond human comprehension. Where do they bed down? What are they eating, and where do they eat it? Where do they water? When? Is that scat fresh? You'll know everything a bear's been eating by its scat, but not deer. Details. In the morning when they are still bedded down on some high slope, your scent will carry up. If you're on that high slope late in the day, your scent will carry down. Oak has made a resurgence and has been migrating down the mountain, so there you will find fresh acorns. Details. And the rifle you will carry must be sighted in so as to assure accuracy. Know what your rifle can do. Does it pull? Which way? Know the bullet you use - its weight and purpose. Know its trajectory at 25 yards, 50 yards, 100 yards. Details. When I was in the Marines we had to take our rifles apart and put them back together again - in the dark. In sand. It's your responsibility. Details. All this, and then what you must do is, "Sit still". If you're gonna do it, do it well. Sit still.

Every year is new but like the year before and the years before that. Was this the genesis of reincarnation? One tree engendered the tree growing next to it. Each creation propagates itself. Ontology recapitulates phylogeny. If I were an ancient telling legends from before time told time and time again and again, what conclusions would I come to? What stories would I concoct? Metamorphosis happens atom by atom. Becoming a part of all this simply means, "Be here now". This state is not limited to monks and seekers, the more earthiest of us can experience it, too.