I ALWAYS WANTED A MAP.

I thought it should make sense, this life.

Children are pretty matter of fact. What is, is. I see it in the traveling families. Tonight we sleep by the road, tonight we sleep in a tent, now we must try to be quiet in the car. I saw it in myself, a military kid. Today we move across the ocean.

And maybe because I grew up traveling, maybe because maps were guides…well, maps and airport lights and beacons and static filled radio broadcasts—I have long thought of life in terms of travel. The dusty roads, the places we go, the people we bump into, share a moment with, remember, the journey ahead.

I always wanted a map.

When I was 8 or 9 I prayed a lot for guidance. I wanted an angel to appear, shiny and feathery, holding a map or maybe the directions that apparently were left out of my baby hand when I tumbled into this world, nicely wrapped in my caul, and totally bewildered.

The map would be large and scrolly. There would be some sort of ribbon, and there would be stars and dotted lines and maybe a picture or two. And the angel would point to a place marked You are Here and then show me, moment by moment, year by year, the paths my feet would take.

I saw it as sort of a tangled and meandering path, even then, but I knew if I prayed enough the angel would come, and certainly the angel would tell me what it was all about.

Because…well, let’s face it, it was all pretty confusing. Even to a fairly sheltered child. Death was happening, and there were things called wars, and my mother was not expected to live..and the angel just never came with the map. Other things happened that gave me some measure of peace, but…no map for a pilgrim’s journey.

Okay, I was an odd kid. But I think of that map that never arrived and I think we are making our maps day by day, step by step, all along the way. Our own designs, canny as any spider spinning. Our own trail of memories, encounters. Our own meaning, though maybe we’d never put it into words.

I saw the man early this morning as he rose from his shelter of bushes beside the freeway. He didn’t notice me, or my dog. We were well screened by redwoods, and on a higher road. He moved awkwardly, but I didn’t stop to stare. We had appointments with squirrels and stellar jays and ravens.

But I saw him later, sitting on a low wall. I nodded hello. He had kind, wary eyes. He nodded back.  When I next saw him, having completed my uptown errand, he was walking. And he was walking with a lot of pain.

I stopped. “Your leg is hurting you?” I made it a question, because it was ridiculously apparent that this was so, and probably my remark was stupid…but I needed to ask. Yes, he said. He said he’d broken his foot a few days before, and he was out sleeping rough and had no place to go, but he had made it to the local hospital.

They said there were two breaks. They said there wasn’t a thing to be done about them. They sent him on his way.

I told him about the health center and promised respect and…well, maybe there was something to be done? His knee was paining him a lot as well. Walking was hard. He figured…well, he’d heard there was a shelter up north and he thought if he could get the bus up there, and if he could have a bed, and if he could rest up a day or two…well, then he could go on.

He refused, gently, my offer of bus fare. I’m all right, he said. Just a little broken now.

I told him when and where the bus would come, and wished him a good journey, and a place to rest, and the ability to go on.

And here we are, all of us, on our journey. Not so far apart, though oceans might separate us, though some are in deserts and some in cities and there are crises and bombs and revolutions and terrors and great delights. And we are all, maybe, just a little broken, though we are lucky and our feet don’t pain us at the moment.

And no angel came with a big map.

But you know, I think I do know the way. It’s still confusing. Death is still around. My mother died…but after more years than we imagined. Things don’t make sense.

But it doesn’t matter. I take a step at a time. Sometimes I hold someone’s hand.  I try to love the journey.

Just an old story

Did I already tell you this story?

It is an old one.

Seems a guy…or maybe it was a girl, wildhaired and dusty from her travels, or maybe it was an old guy, weary with memories of war & loss—but anyway, the wanderer came into the village.

Times had been pretty rough. Some of the crops that the villagers counted on had failed. Rain came at the wrong time, or rain didn’t come at all, or rain came in floods and sputters. Crops seeded when they shouldn’t. Crops molded as they stood. Those who thought they had good, prosperous work, were turned away. You could count the ribs on the village dogs and even the mice seemed thinner than usual and the town gossip was all about tragedy and loss, down the street, across the world. Didn’t matter.

They were for sure hurting.

The traveler had been on the road awhile & she was hungry. Or he was, or they were (maybe a band of kids, maybe a lonely man with a dog on a string and a pack on his back).

Oh, go away, cried the town folk. We ain’t got a crust to spare, and who do you think you are anyway, did you grow up here in the dry hills, were you born in this dust. We been here a long time, cried the town folk. A hundred years, or two years, more’n you. But you..you are new and the problem.

The town folk said yeah, you with the tangled hair, you with the packs, you with the wandering feet, you are ones to blame. You made the rains not fall or called them down. You seeded the crops. It’s you, you who make me want what I can’t have. You who are at fault that my love’s eyes seek someone else, that my house is falling around me, that the messages I get are only demands for payment, that my baby frets, that my heart aches.

We ain’t got nothing to spare.

But the traveler had a big cooking pot, and set it down in the public square. And some kid got some sticks. Or someone cooked up the propane or the magic heater, what do I know, it’s just an old story.

And asked for water.

Well, water’s not all that much, just a pailful. Someone brought it. And the wanderer took a fine round speckly stone, the sort that catches the sunlight, the kind that makes you think of summer nights and childhood, a good stone, and put it in the pot. Good thing, said the traveler, that I can make a fine, fine soup of water and this stone.

You do know the story, right?

And the wanderer tasted the delicious stone broth and said “oh, a bit of salt, and it would be perfect”. And then…a handful of parsley, a sprig of rosemary, some carrots, an onion…and so on.

The soup fed the whole village. And someone knew a song, and someone knew a story, and there were leftovers for the dogs too.

And they all realized…they did have something. They did have a bit to share, and together it was…well, it was soup. Or maybe (we can get all metaphorical if we like)..as each shared their gifts, it was community. It was home.

And the tangle haired stranger showed them the way.

Yeah, it’s only a story. But I think about it a lot.

(there has been a great deal of hatred directed towards the travelers and the poor in my area; I was thinking of that when I felt the need to write this little piece)

Welcome the Wild Geese

Apparently there are flocks of wild geese enjoying the water that laps over the porch & window sills of the family house on the banks of the Souris River in Minot, North Dakota. I saw a couple photos today. The street sign was helpfully in the middle of the flood waters. Otherwise it’s hard to tell. One neighborhood under flood looks kinda like another, one shocked human, counting the losses, pretty much like another. Cats perched on rooftops—well, they look like cats. That one is a dead ringer for my old cat Perdita, but Perdita left this life years ago.

I wait for word from my brother and meanwhile chat with strangers, witnessing the unfolding of drama, connections, & concern from hundreds of miles away via the online stream of a family run North Dakota TV station.

I’m not from the Magic City myself, though my kids and I spent the summer before my mother’s death there at that now flooded house, and my brother has lived there since then, more than a decade now.

So I ask questions, and there, instantly, people tell me what they know. People trying to figure out their own futures—how to clean clothes for their newborn, where to go for clean drinking water—tell me how the mail is being delivered for the flood refugees, where the shelter is, how to find photos and information specific to my family’s neighborhood.

Lots of online hugs & encouraging words are exchanged. The TV newscaster has evacuated his 4 cats & doesn’t quite know when he’ll get to go back to his own submerged home.

He stays on all through the night. 11,000 people were evacuated. The waters are still high. Of those 11,000 most were taken on by friends, family, and strangers. Churches on high ground converted extra rooms to temporary homes. Some hundreds sleep on cots at the Dome, my brother presumably among them. When there are stories from the Dome I watch eagerly, hoping to catch a glimpse of his profile, a moment in the background. To know he’s really safe.

It makes me think of the thousands throughout this world who are separated from loved ones, who have no clear lines of communication. I’m lucky. I know this flood caused no immediate deaths. I know there is not—as in Japan—an unstable reactor in the process of meltdown. I know that—although there are certainly many soldiers on the ground—my brother need not fear them. I know no drone is likely to hit the shelter in which he sleeps. And I can send word out, however tentatively, however randomly, and know that, perhaps, word will reach him.

A kind stranger let him use a cellphone to call our Mississippi brother, the one who sold his cows because of the long drought.

Tough times all over. But I can’t sit remembering my mother or the house or the watercolor paintings my uncle did, the small family treasures floating somewhere through the floodwaters, the little birch tree, the lilies of the valley.

The wild geese look really content. And I’m impressed with the city, with the warmhearted reaching out to others, the kindness of strangers and the determination to survive, to do better, to have hope.

As I waited for word of my brother and the flood, two in person conversations struck my heart.

The first was an exchange with a young travelling girl who asked early in the morning when I opened the shop. I told her, and she waited patiently, and then came in—yeah, I opened up a bit early. She needed some water. I showed her the spigot and told her to be careful of my goldfish, and said “I’m sorry you had to wait; you should have just told me, I’d have been happy to show you right then”
And she said “well, I know businesses don’t like to have people like me hanging round.”
Nonsense, I said, you’re people. Period. And you’re just fine.
But I wondered at what hurts had proceeded our encounter, what insults, how many rejections.

The second came at an official meeting at which a colleague said “well, you’re an extremist” I looked at him, asking what that meant. He said “You believe this town should treat everyone as if they were human, welcome them with respect and kindness and open arms.”
“Yes,” I said.
“But no where on earth has that ever happened. How can you think that it could happen here?”

Well, I said, we always need goals…We can’t be stymied by “it’s impossible” or “it has never happened”.

And if we’d welcome the wild geese, we can welcome our brothers and sisters. Wherever, however we find them safe.

(the beautiful photo is by someone named, obviously, Ed Porter. I hope he doesn't mind my borrowing it.)

rainbows and visitors

My English friend who lives on a unstable hillside in a newly thrown together shed, with his cat and his memories, stopped by the other morning to tell me there was a rainbow.

I immediately left the bookshop to rush out into the mixed rain and sunlight and stare at it.

I have very few rules in life, but one, as I told him, is to never miss the opportunity to stare at a rainbow. There aren't enough in a lifetime to take the risk of missing one.

He's a good man, married four or five times ("why on earth did you bother?" I once tactlessly exclaimed). He's a twin, adopted at four or five months of age with his pretty blonde sister. He was, he said, the extra--the dark and crying boychild. Much of his life...well, I don't probe where it hurts. But I see the pain.

"Stinky old dog" he greets Champ, and Champ is delighted. And because it is said with warm affection I don't get upset. Sure, call my old dog stinky and chat with my cats, it's fine.

There is an odd privilege to being the bookstore lady, the person who can be found with ease, who will take a moment to listen, who has some bowls of good fruit and a well known box of warm socks and a sort of Mary-Poppins grab bag of what-might-be-needed. I'm pretty lucky.

And people like my English friend do alert me to rainbows.

Yesterday was exceptionally full of visits and revelations, amongst the chat about the latest mystery novels, and whether someone who likes Steinbeck would like McPhee, and poetry, and rain.

What struck me was the common thread though, amongst the stories I was told.

Poppy's companion came, as he does most days, for apples and water and some bread and a biscuit for Poppy. Poppy's a little black and tan dog with white paws; to my untrained eyes she looks like a beagle, but she dances like a poodle and her person once told me she was a particular fancy sort of hound. Her person showed up last summer with her and asked for a needle and some thread to repair his sleeping bag. I had those on hand, but I also had a light sleeping bag not in need of repair, which I gave him. He said then he was moving north, just here for a day or two. Fine, said I. He said "I was once a meteorologist". Handy knowledge, I said.

So he came yesterday, got some apples. I offered him some kiwi fruit as well. He confided that pears were his very favorite. And he told me how his mom used to leave offerings of bread and fruit in the garden when he was very young, for the fairies.

We thought there were fairies, he said.

Well, maybe there were, said I, you never know. And I asked if he had many sisters and brothers or what.

And he told me. He told me his mom had been 15 when he was born, the eldest of her children. He told me his dad was drafted and sent to Vietnam, and the young girl said to hell with that, she wasn't gonna wait for a dead soldier.

And she gave her son to her sister to raise.

"How old were you?" I asked.

Four, he said. And he said when he was 15 his mother got in touch, but he didn't want to have anything to do with her. "I was 15, I didn't need a mother".

I said nothing.

"And when I was in the Navy later she wrote...well, she emailed...she had three children, she didn't need four. So that was that."

She's a nurse in Ohio. High up in some hospital, he said. He said he was proud of her. And his dad died, and his wife died, and there wasn't much to live for, so he walked out of the house with his dog, with Poppy, and that was a few years ago. And so it goes.

No sense in getting close to anyone, he said. And then he seemed a bit ashamed that he'd told me all too much, so I got busy looking for some biscuits for the dog, and wished him a good day, out there along the roads.

The next guy, with his pitbull puppy, had been thrown out again by his girlfriend. "So, I'm back beneath the bridge" he said, and he said he was sorry, cause he'd told me he was getting money together to replenish the dogfood and he didn't.

I understand, I said, things come up, don't feel bad. His girlfriend had taken up with some drugs he doesn't do, and some guys who can supply them.

I'm sorry, I said.

I know about his mom, who died long ago, and he found her. I know about the jail time and the series of girls, young women, who cling to him a while and then drift off.
The pup is looking good, though.

And then John came in. Now, I haven't seen John for a few months. The last times I saw him my heart was full of trouble. He was lean, and dirty, and desperate and sick. He was using, he was drinking, he was looking for some quick way to fortune or some quicker way to death. I'd run into him at night and his eyes were haunted.
Yes, his story has abandonment in it too, and foster care, and hardening.
John used to bring me small treasures. Small, stolen, treasures. I'd quietly try to get them back to where they belonged. He would offer me his gifts with hurting, pleading eyes.

Women liked John, especially women who shared his drugs. Oh, there were stories.

So he came in, after some months of no news, and he said "Kathy, I had to come see you. I'm clean, I'm okay. Took some jail, but I'm okay".
He'd been picked up for something minor, and had done a bit of county time, and then decided to go to a clean and sober house.
"Kathy, it's been 124 days. I'm not using, I'm not drinking, I have a job. I'm living up north, but I had to come see you".

I hugged him. I thanked him, I told him he looked great. He'd put on a little weight; had cut his long ragged black hair. He was smiling.

"You never gave up on me" he said. "You never did. So I'm not giving up either".

And then I cried.

(the photo, oddly, comes from Finland. But it so looks like my part of the world)

It wasn't Thoreau's birthday

I thought it was though, that hot summer afternoon as the Greyhound bus wound its way up over precarious mountain roads and at the edge of sheer cliffs. I waited for the redwoods, and was surprised that they were--brown, really. But so huge, so tall. The driver pointed out osprey nests. I ate a little container of yogurt and conversed with my boyfriend. Or whined. Or fought. My memory, actually, is that our nerves were strained, I was tired, and the start of a migraine beat at my left temple.

We stopped in a small town, about an hour from our destination. The hills around were dry, golden, dusty. Some sad looking children poked at a dead bat they'd found. Where on earth was I going? I thought, staring at the children, at the leathery, beautiful, sad wings of the little bat.

The bus pulled into the town we'd found, at last, on a map of the state back when we were considering journeys and we were closing up the house outside London and I was destroying the start of a novel I'd written and wondering where the year, the wonderful year of writing and freedom had gone.

The streets were bare, dust blew from the north. The friend who was supposed to meet us wasn't there. Well, the bus was, after all, over an hour late. And she did eventually show up.

But what stunned me as I stepped out onto the sidewalk, head hurting, mouth dry, was the message.

I suppose I should backtrack here and assure my readers that I am usually sane. But now and again through my life I have heard voices--internal and external. And I have seen things that apparently other people do not. So, at this moment, as I stepped onto the sidewalk of the ugly and dry and uninteresting little town, as I looked at boarded up buildings, as I wondered how long my head would ache...a voice within said "This is where you are supposed to be".

Of course I figured I was indeed not as sane as I've just assured you I was. What I thought was "great, fighting with the boyfriend, migraine, bus late...and now I am going into a major mental breakdown or something. Great".

And the quiet, patient, still voice within just said again "This is where you are supposed to be".

I took it on advisement.

We were supposed to be traveling further north after a weekend with the friend. I would work at a library, my boyfriend would write a thesis, we would live happily ever after.

So my friend arrived, and we went to the place she'd bought by the river, where there were two little extra cabins, and she kindly showed us to the one nearest the river. It being July the river was a tiny trickle over a lot of grey rock, and my friend apologized, assuring me that when she'd moved there, in November, the river had been right up to the fence. Hard to believe.

And within three days I knew I had to stay.

I've fallen in love a number of times in my life, and hope to continue to do so. I've fallen in love with men and women, with dead poets, with buildings, with dogs and cats, and with the color of the sky on a summer night. That year--indeed, that day, some three days after my arrival and two after Thoreau's real birthday (my friend the librarian was good at fact checking)--I fell in love with a landscape. I fell in love with the scent of river water running over mossy stones and with the dust that covered my sandals. I fell in love with the plants I didn't recognize, and with the white egrets. I fell in love with the way the light hits the hills, the way the sunlight filters through evergreens, the way poison oak gleams. I fell in love with the gnarled hands of lumbermill workers and the crazy stories the old timers shared with me.

This love is ever renewing. So I got a job as a motel maid, and I broke up with my boyfriend, and I fell in love, and I fell in love, and I fell in love. Sometimes with people. And my children were born, and there were as many twists and turns to my life story as you can imagine. Someday I might share a few.

But every year, on the 11th of July, at around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, I pause and think about the day I stood on the pavement with my head pounding and a voice in my mind and a sense of craziness.

There is no way I could even begin to say how glad I am, how thankful, how purely delighted, how lucky.

Thoreau would have approved.

And who is responsible?

Just tucking this in, in these busy days, until I have more time to write with more grace and detail. It's a letter sent to the local newspaper today. Of course here in my region I signed my usual name--which is not, dear friends, the one you know me by. A group of women from all the ends of my county have now met one another, and we are talking. And we are talking to lawyers and officials as well. But in the middle of our talks and our statement-recording and in the moments between D.'s constant pragmatic works of mercy (water, trips to the court, papers gotten and restored) I was thinking on the question of responsibility. No one here says they are. I had a revelation, and in this letter I tried to share it.

Dear Editor

When my friend took me to see his former home, he’d been out of jail a couple days.

I had heard from his girlfriend her story of the harsh awakening, the men with guns, and the threats of arrest for her as well, as he was cuffed and marched down the hill.

Not much remained now at the homesite.

My friend is the son of a veteran. Locally employeed, hardworking. Anyone would be proud of him.

Wasn’t much I could say there, looking out over the hillside, hearing the ravens call.

The day of the homesite raid I watched two young women who were walking on the side of the road at different times, one with her pups, one with a backpack. I watched the five or six police cars careen to a screeching halt, endangering the cars behind them. I watched the crowd of officers surround the small woman, take her photo, question her.

Later she’d tell me they said if they saw her again she’d be arrested.

I stood as the second woman, walking to her place of employment, was questioned by two officers, told if she was found sleeping outside, if she was found anywhere, she’d be arrested.

She asked questions. The officers had “no time for this”.

I asked questions—why, who, why now.

“You’ll have to step away, step back”.

I asked another question. The perhaps well meaning peace officer said, “This is none of your business”.

And I said, “Yes, it is.”

It is my business. Phoning many agencies, talking with the police in person and by phone, I have been told who they thought responsible.

Responsible for threats to the young kids with their dogs, traveling from SF to Portland for a folk fest.

Responsible for rousting people sleeping where they can, when they have no money and they can walk no longer.

Responsible for the little fawn and white puppy blasted with a spray of mace or pepperspray. “He came out of the bushes too fast”.

Responsible for promoting an atmosphere of “you aren’t welcome here”.

Who is responsible? Oh I’ve been told by “official sources” that it’s Public Health, Mental Health, CDF, the Chamber of Commerce, the State of California, the Board of Supervisiors, or, simply, “people” who are “fed up”. Agencies I have contacted, tracking down the sheriff reports, uniformly express shock and say things like “not us”.

So, obviously, none of the above are responsible.

Who is? I know. It’s me. I confess. And—you know, it’s you too. Because the final line was “it’s the community”.

And that’s me, and you, and your neighbor, and the nice young woman with the little puppy, and the kid down the road.

This stuff—what we are responsible for, what I am responsible for—it’s going to keep happening. The arrests, the hounding, the loss of property and the loss of civil liberties and the loss of our compassion, just as long as people with guns can claim “The Community wants this”.

Hatred, fear, misunderstanding.

I don’t want this, but as I said, I’m responsible. How about you?

In this life we are all transients. Life itself goes by in a flash of a moment. We are like dust whirled in the wind.

And we are all longing for home, our true home, our true community. That’s in love and justice, for everyone, even the least amongst us.

Sincerely, jarvenpa