i don’t pay attention to the
world ending.
it has ended for me
many times
and began again in the morning.

—nayyirah waheed

I usually catch up to them when they are walking ahead of me. 

They do not move quickly—he and she side by side, each with walking sticks, white-haired and old-boned in spring weather.

I live near Hendricks Head, home of Southport Island’s small public beach. Year round, folks stroll loops around our roads, sometimes parking by the beach, sometimes just heading out the front door. We are walking, always returning to our starting point.

Sometimes slowly. Painfully.

I pass the friendly elder couple and we exchange smiles and greetings. I admire them: they are bent from aching, and yet they walk.

Last year at this time, I wrote of spring peepers. Their refrain is here again, sounding hope and life. We’ve done another circuit round the sun—this one unparalleled—and here we are again.

There has been so much hurt. So much anxiety and loss. 

March 20 would have been my daughter’s 32nd birthday. She is no longer here, so I marked the day on my own, walking 32 miles.

Round and round my usual circuit, love whispering in the winds, I walked.

Ever since, my left knee has twinged. Pushing 58 years, my body is not what it once was—recovery is slow, and I wonder if I’ve added a new injury to the catalog. (Time can heal; sometimes it breaks us.)

Our COVID interlude has changed us: we began here and have returned, but we are not the same. The small frogs’ strains sound different to me now: more like a song of gratitude for what remains; a chorus of praise. And my body aches more. 

Yet here I am, and here we are.

As I write, sunlight pours in, warming my back while Schubert plays quietly in the background. It’s a lovely morning, and a lovely day for a walk.

If I am lucky, I will see my stalwart friends walking the loop. 

I will feel some joy, for still, we are here.

The post Here We Are appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

“I will sing the song of companionship.”

—Walt Whitman

Twilight.

I walk my usual neighborhood loop this autumn eve breathing in the muted air—unseasonably warm, like springtime in November. Calm visits me like an old friend as the blue dusk slips toward closure.

I exhale with half a nation.

I have felt disquieted—more than I had noticed; my knuckles whiter than I knew. To release is to realize. (I had been watching CNN for more than three days straight when I went for my walk, not noting the toll until just then.)

I breathe as I walk. I cry a little too.

In her memoir Blue Nights, Joan Didion defines this time of day as “when the twilights turn long and blue.” She describes the blue night as a period of suspension, when “you think the end of day will never come.” A caesura. Yet days do end, and next ones come—an easy rhythm, our lives shaped as perpetual glide in and out of the gloaming.

As I walk I think of the other half, and the impossible space between us. So much trauma. So much fear. So much anger. It all seems impossible.

And in these blue nights, we walk.

(I learn the night has taken another lonely boy; so many battered souls.)

*****

I am tired, and believe our world could use more kindness. I wish for some gleam of a seemingly impossible dawn.

In an era more divisive than our own, Walt Whitman witnessed much. As a nurse during the Civil War, he knew firsthand of carnage and death; pain and grief; the terror of boys dying.

(“Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,
Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood”)

Yet to the young and dying, be they friend or foe, he attended kindly, in deed and in word. We have his poetry today as witness. (Poetry cannot save us, but it helps.)

I turn to his words:

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

So very lovely—such promise of grace.

*****

“I’m struggling with ups and downs of mood swings,” writes a friend I had not heard from for some time.

I invite him for a walk.

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“In the winter, we must protect ourselves. Look after one another.”

—Ned Stark, Game of Thrones

COVID-19 will lead to this winter being “one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health,” according Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As cold weather makes outdoor socializing challenging at best, we face the hard choice of hunkering down in relative isolation or having more viral spread and with it an accompanying increase in deaths.

Winter is coming.

On a walk, I see nature is preparing. Red squirrels chase in manic territorial dispute, protecting winter middens. A solitary cricket chirps once, and again. Leaves turn. Spring peepers are settling into muddy bottoms.

Of the original 102 colonists who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, 45 died during the first winter. In the forced migration in 1838 and 1839 known as The Trail of Tears, 4,000 Cherokee people died, many from harsh winter conditions, especially children and the elderly. During Nazi Germany’s 1941-1942 siege of Leningrad, an average of 100,000 people died monthly from starvation over the peak of winter.

We may take some modest solace in knowing our 2020 challenges are less robust than what others have faced, but there is no getting around it: in the midst of a pandemic, winter is no small thing.

And we are already so weary.

“I have heard it said that winter, too, will pass,” poet Maya Angelou once said. “See, all we have to do is hang on.” (Having experienced and survived childhood trauma, the poet knows something about hanging on.)  

I too have been thinking about hanging on; what that looks like.

I have known grief; I have known trauma. I know weariness does not make wearying things go away. With time and patience, I have learned to be gentle with myself—forgiving. I have felt the gift of compassion; the return that comes with caring and gratitude. I have hung on, and discovered that hanging on requires love.

“Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody anytime,” Angelou has said, in all her earned wisdom. (And with all we know of viruses these days, that tells us that once given, it stays with us forever.)

Winter is coming—a winter of pandemic, and we are already so weary.

And yet we face a winter of hanging on.

I look out my window at sunlight shafts glimmering on leaves falling like gentle snow. On the road along my house, a couple walks by, snug in winter coats. Behind me, the wood stove crackles, heat on my back. I listen to music, alone at home. Melancholy is never far away.

But I keep it at bay, for despite my solitude, I realize I am never alone: Florian’s hand-drawn birthday card propped on my desk (he sends me one each year); photos of my daughters suspended on my refrigerator door (forever moments together); antique toy soldiers marching in timeless parade atop my living room credenza (a gift from my father before he died).

So many tokens—such caring.

And as I have received, I hope too to give; that my love—like the talismans surrounding me, undoing my seclusion—might radiate warmth into others’ winter hollows.

(“Look after one another,” admonishes Ned Stark.)

Winter is coming, and though fear, uncertainty, and isolation rise, so too do love and caring. Alone at home, I am not alone in heart: like hovering angels, friends and family are near—always.

Grace abounds, and—virus versus virus—love wins.

The post Winter Is Coming appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

“Every single one of us could use a little mercy now.”

—from Mercy Now, by Mary Gauthier

On the day of Elisif’s memorial service, after it was over, hundreds in the lobby, I hugged tight every person who came near me (a pre-COVID world).

When she fell, I fell.

More than two years later—channeling her heart; imagining her words—I wrote this:

Take my hand here.
Take my hand in our forever hearts and fall.
We are safer than you know. 
I am fallen.
I am with you and in you and all.
I am pain and love.
I am immense.
I am where fear does not show up.
I am the other side of the fire.
I am your all-white painting: anything but empty.
I am everything is possible, and all is.
The period at the end.
The pure, round dot, full of wonder and surprise.

When your daughter dies, it changes you.

*****

In 2014, the year my daughter died of an overdose, 47,054 others lost their lives in this country the same way she did.

47,054.

It gets worse. In 2018, 67,367 people in the United States died of an overdose—345 of those in Maine. The following year, Maine saw 380 such deaths, a nearly 10% increase. And thus far, for 2020, with COVID creating more isolation and less easy access to help, the state is on track for worse: 127 people are reported to have died of an overdose in the first quarter of 2020 in Maine, and second quarter numbers are projected to be 132.

132.

In three months, just about as many deaths as the state has experienced from the coronavirus pandemic in total.

The opioid epidemic is not new. It has not gone away. It has been with us for years, and it still is. It still is.

*****

Each home. Each heart. Each day. Each breath we take.

COVID. Economic insecurity. Climate change. Social injustice. Physical discomfort and emotional distress. We are in pain.

So many use substances as self-medication—to seek some relief from what is unbearable otherwise; too often, drugs are the solution before they become the problem.

Nobody asks to have substance use disorder.

Those of us who use and those who fall from it are neither weak nor immoral—we just hurt. We are people—you and me. No different, whether or not we have a disease.

We need love.

We do not deserve blame. We ought not be judged. We need not feel shame. We all are better off in a world without stigma. We all deserve mercy.

For me and for you—for Elisif and all—a little mercy now. A little love.

Please.

This piece is written in recognition of International Overdose Awareness Day, held on August 31 each year to raise awareness of overdose and reduce the stigma of drug-related deaths. 132 Candles is an event to mark the day taking place on Boothbay Common in Boothbay, Maine, from 5:45 p.m. to 7:15 p.m.

The post Each Breath appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

“You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.”

—from Citizen, VI [On the train the woman standing] by Claudia Rankine

We lay our bodies down; our bodies let us down.

*****

“Naked Athena appeared and the little boys didn’t know what to do.”

So writes journalist Donovan Farley, recording in all her strut and defiance the nude chimera before the phalanx of gas-masked men—a 2 a.m. mirage. Pepper pellets shot, her calves bleed on a dangerous night in Portland, Oregon, summer 2020. By her side, shield in hand, a friend offers what little protection he can.

She is fearless: “Here is my body—take it if you dare.”

We lay our bodies down.

*****

He was beaten with a nightstick.

Skull fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965, it was not the only time John Lewis lay his body down for justice. Just 21 years old in 1961, Lewis was one of 13 original Freedom Riders—alongside his colleagues, assaulted throughout that hot civil rights summer.

We lay our bodies down.

John Lewis died not 24 hours before Naked Athena made her debut—pancreatic cancer did him in at age 80, this titan of good trouble.

Our bodies let us down.

*****

She is brazenly alive, Naked Athena, in her pluck and posture. She reminds me of my daughter, only alive—so very alive.

(I slept as your body tumbled down—needle in your arm; spittle down your chin.)

Substance Use Disorder. Hypertension. SARS-Cov-2. Pancreatic cancer. Aging.

Our bodies let us down.

*****

“Take and eat; this is my body,” said Jesus, knowing what was to come—his mortal flesh.

Our bodies let us down, though we carry them while we can, and while we can, we lay our bodies down—in sacrifice for love, for justice, for humanity. For what we believe: our vulnerable bodies.

 (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?)

We lay our bodies down.

*****

I have been thinking about bodies—my body. How it lets me down. How I am broken. How all our bodies break. How my people are the broken people; how we are all broken.

Our bodies let us down.

I have been thinking about bodies—my body. How it once stood steady, my daughter small, my body large—protector. Her body in its living swagger (before the opioids), chest thrust out, an exalted “I am here—I am now!” Our bodies our badge our being; our naming loving clasp; our gift to give.

(“Take and eat; this is my body.”)

We lay our bodies down.

*****

Inevitably, our bodies let us down. Of that I have been thinking these COVID days, each of us so mindful of fragility—so fearful of other bodies in their proximity to ours. Schools confounded, economies collapsing, people dying—so little we control.

And yet here, on a broken July night and day, I see a most unexpected pair twinned in grace and agency: she, her anonymous body bare and powerful on a Portland protest night; he, his Black body (in harm’s way time and time and time again for justice) finally released.

A modeling: our broken bodies let us down, yet in laying them down, we are redeemed.

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“There are three things, after all, that a poem must reach: the eye, the ear, and what we may call the heart or the mind. It is most important of all to reach the heart of the reader.”

—Robert Frost

Close readers of Yarrow & Cleat will notice a change in our masthead this issue.

Our publication was previously described as “a chronicle of resilience and hope from the Boothbay Region.” Now, we are “a chronicle for hope, healing, and humanity from Boothbay and beyond.”

Why the change?

First, a bit of recent history.

When we first conceived of Yarrow & Cleat in late March of this year, the coronavirus pandemic was brand new to the region—as much uncertainty as we live with at present, there was more then. Everywhere we turned, the news was disorienting and disturbing. We believed a dose of resilience and hope might help us see our way through, and that is what we sought to provide: a chronicle of resilience and hope from the Boothbay Region.

Today—three months later—the world has transformed again.

We wonder: how can our children safely return to school this fall and allow parents to go to work? With COVID-19 cases exploding across the country, is the return of high fatality rates not far behind? As well as Maine has been doing, might the contagion spread here with force? Meanwhile, social justice and equity questions rage on, our country embroiled in hot emotion stoked by an almost-unprecedented partisan political climate. All this as for the 16th week in a row more than one million Americans filed unemployment claims.

Yarrow & Cleat has but a small voice, yet in the light of all this we are determined to do what we can for the good of all.

For the good of all.

Thus, we move from passively being of something (“resilience and hope”) to actively being for something (“hope, healing, and humanity”).

On top of that, we are experiencing anew how borderless our lives have become: what happens in Minneapolis wends its way to influencing a gathering at Boothbay Common; we watch rising COVID cases in other states knowing they may very well have some bearing on our stores remaining open. Paying attention to what lies beyond while retaining our local identity seems important. Thus: Boothbay and beyond.

Change starts at the top—quite literally, in this week’s issue of Yarrow & Cleat.

Below our new masthead are articles reflecting our clarified purpose: our two-part story in Neighbor Tales about Keith Arvanitis inspires hope, healing, and humanity—a trifecta of purpose met; for Art Spot, we reach beyond with Baltimore artist Nancye Hesaltyne, whose daily art practice offers a model for healing any of us might follow; in Nature’s Way, we turn to wild blueberries for a dose of hope, sharing our delight in this native fruit’s dependable bounty. And we welcome to our Corner Table guest contributor Patricia McHold, whose meditation on birds, gardening, and patience is nothing if not balm.

Collectively: hope, healing, and humanity.

We need this—our region needs this.

And though this particular moment seems especially rife with discord and angst, there is no expiration date on hope, healing, and humanity: all three are essential elements of our wellbeing. Always.

For the bereaved widower, locked in and lonely, fearful of COVID-19 news… for the lobsterman alarmed at the collapsing industry, not knowing what might come next, or if he can stay in business at all… for the young person trapped in a cycle of substance misuse, desperate for a way out from her living hell and not having a clue how to find the exit door, much less a loving embrace… for the new restaurant owner, working to exhaustion each day, chronically caught between fear of catching the virus and having to shut down by Governor’s order… for you and your heart: hope, healing, and humanity.

In delivering this to you, our reader, we consider our mission served.

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“the mind forgets in order to remember
the self before the violence begot.”

 —from We Drink at the Attenuation Well by Porsha Olayiwola

Trauma shapes our every bend.

 I was thinking this the other day, the tight knot returned just above my right shoulder blade.

I have begun another drawing: cobalt blue lines twist, turn, and creak in angular meander; lyric abstraction—a modest dirge. Leonard Cohen on repeat, I wonder: will I ever stop dreaming of my little girl alive? (My personal trauma, so present.)

The Boothbay Register reports all those who pass—we are an older community, so of course we are losing our own. Round and round the Dogfish Head we go, grumbling at our stuttering gait until our last day comes.

“Black Lives Matter” on a DC street spawns murals around the world, their many hues all equally visible from outer space. Fists raised and masks on, millennials cry, “Say their names!” Jon Baptiste grooves with New Orleans swagger down New York avenues—a jazz uprising within the uprising. (Collective pain claiming a global voice.)

The worldwide demand for justice sparks growing recognition of our own roles—individual, inherited—in the trauma of others (the Etchemin here long before those of European heritage, their language and tribe alike erased under the skidmark of our advance.)

Trauma shapes our every bend—warping our choices and ways as much as our bodies.

(And yet to one another, we merely nod; we say, in passing, “hello.”)

“the mind forgets in order to remember
the self before the violence begot.”

Might our “hello” flex more toward full-throated fellowship were we to remember the salt and tears we share; the wounds we give as good as we get?

In recalling that trauma shapes our every bend, I am kinder toward myself and others.

And therein lies the blessing of it all.

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“I do not have time to carry your allyship.

I am trying to build a continent,
A country,
A home.”

—from Give Your Daughters Difficult Names by Assétou Xango

I awoke in my Maine home the morning of November 9, 2016, to the sound of diesel engines: lobstermen heading to work outside my window. Early morning sun was sparkling upon the sound—all bright. Only the slightest whisper of breeze among pine needles, ever-majestic trees everywhere. I awoke, and thought: “All is okay. Despite last night, all is okay.”

(I reveal my personal politics here: so be it.)

Not quite four years later, this morning’s sun casting shadows all around, I feel no longer sure.

On this, I am thinking.

*****

I wrote the above words Tuesday morning, June 2—the day after tear gas and rubber bullets allowed President Donald Trump a photo-op. It was a strongman moment, and terrifying for me to watch: is this America?

Ask Childish Gambino, and of course the answer is “yes.”

Good morning, people—it’s beyond time to wake up.

*****

It never begins at the beginning—there is always a prelude; a long lead-up of movement as sputtering as it is inspiring. Until something takes hold—some hitherto un-arrived-at tipping point when the arc bends.

People power.

The tumultuous Prague Spring ended with Soviet tanks entering the city in a violent crackdown in 1968. More than 20 years later and after countless and ever-expanding demonstrations, the Velvet Revolution finally overturned Czechoslovakia’s leadership and ushered in democracy.

People power.

In South Africa, oppressive segregationist policies (apartheid) existed despite
decades of popular resistance led by the likes of Nelson Mandela, who was condemned
to life imprisonment for treason in 1962. In June 1976, tens of thousands of
students took to the streets to protest the imposition of the language of the white colonizers in their schools. This sparked the Soweto uprising, a turning point in
the struggle, and South Africa increasingly became viewed as an international pariah.
Protests, massive strikes and international economic sanctions persisted for years, culminating in the release of Mandela from prison on February 11, 1990. Four years later, he became the first black president of South Africa.

People power.

Philippines President Ferdinand E. Marcos proclaimed martial law in 1973 and for more than a decade violently repressed any opposition. In 1985, ailing and facing economic pressures, Marcos called an election and was declared the winner against Corazon Aquino in a fraud-riddled process. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in mass and sustained uprising, and within a week, backed by the popular majority, Aquino was inaugurated in a shadow ceremony the same day Marcos held his “official” one. A week later, Marcos fled the country, leaving Aquino in charge.

People power.

*****

“In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.”

So The 1619 Project was introduced on August 18, 2019, by The New York Times.

Just last year. And even this not until…

• 156 years, 10 months, and 26 days after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation;
• 110 years, 6 months, and 6 days after the NAACP was founded to advance justice for African Americans;
• 104 years, 6 months, and 10 days after the landmark (pro-KKK) film The Birth of a Nation premiered;
• 65 years, 3 months, and 1 day after the Supreme Court desegregated public schools in Brown v. Board of Education;
• 63 years, 11 months, and 12 days after Mamie Till-Mobley buried her murdered 14-year-old son Emmett in an open casket so the world could see what a white mob had done to him;
• 63 years, 8 months, and 17 days after Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus;
• 54 years, 5 months, and 25 days after Malcolm X was gunned down in Harlem;
• 51 years, 4 months, and 14 days after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated (a week after delivering his I’ve Been to the Mountaintop speech);
• 49 years, 8 months, and 14 days after Black Panther activist Fred Hampton, 21, was killed without provocation by FBI agents;
• 28 years, 5 months, and 15 days after Rodney King was beaten almost to death by Los Angeles police;
• 12 years, 8 months, and 5 days after Walter Lomax (one of 534,200 black men in American prisons at that time), was released after serving 39 years for a murder he did not commit;
• 6 years, 1 month, and 5 days after Black Lives Matter was founded in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin;
• 1 year, 3 months, and 12 days after Childish Gambino released This Is America.

…and 9 months and 7 days before George Floyd was murdered.

It never begins at the beginning—there is always a prelude; a long lead-up of movement as sputtering as it is inspiring. Until something takes hold—some hitherto un-arrived-at tipping point when the arc bends.

The streets of America are alive. It began in Minneapolis and has moved across the country in numbers of people and protests heretofore unknown. Hundreds of thousands in the middle of a pandemic. “Black Lives Matter” now visible outside the White House from outer space. Hundreds of us socially distanced at (of all places) the Boothbay Common, “Black Lives Matter” signs aplenty, us each taking our knee.

People power.

*****

Tuesday, June 9, 2020, in Southport, Maine.

I wake to my country convulsed in social uprising amid a worldwide pandemic. Muted light filters through new leaves as a robin trills; a tree branch quivers in sudden shake as a red squirrel completes its leap.

What is my place?

Today, I cannot answer that question. I feel discomfort in my white skin, but I welcome it, for I recognize this as a teachable moment. I have something to learn.

This I do know: on bended knee on Boothbay Common, painted heart rock in pocket and mask on face, I made a start. In awe and amen, I bow before the tilting arc of the justly rising.

People power.

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so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

—William Carlos Williams

Williams first published his one-sentence poem in 1923. Eight lines. Sixteen words. Such simplicity.

A moment stuck in time.

*****

An invitation forwarded from the Faith Action Network to join in recognizing June 1 as the National Day of Mourning and Lament (more than 100,000 dead from COVID-19). Ginger, who like me lost a child to addiction, dead this week (a motorcycle accident). Streets aboil, social media alive, decrying all the injustice (George Floyd, Minnesota on fire). Paul home from the hospital at last (thank goodness). Millions Relying on Pandemic Aid Can See Its End, and They’re Scared (reads the headline).

Moments stuck in time (so much).

*****

From When People Say “We Have Made It Through Worse” by Clint Smith:

All I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who
did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.

The dirge unfolds in staccato words, aching for solace. In emails and texts, we chant our lament—ennui and death. Laced in longing, us wanting only redemption, ventilators on, we sing our tune.

We sing so much.

*****

A spring COVID day—a zeitgeist moment:

Three teetering atop ladders, wind-slapped.

Inward as dancers oblivious to the choreography of the whole, teetering atop wind-slapped ladders, men toil. Wrists flicking—hands dipping—they lay paint on, drips pirouetting in balletic white descent like angels falling.

Clouds pass. The Boothbay Town Building stands newly bright as fresh-cut marble.

*****

Some days I feel I don’t know what to say or do when out there all over, the world has gone amok; when 100,000 and more are dead and dying; when millions are scared—I know not what to do in the face of so much.

I don’t know what to do from this peninsula, where I am as likely to come across a red wheelbarrow (glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens) as I am three men atop ladders in distanced unison slapping paint on clapboard.

 (No city siren cacophony here; no 7 p.m. pot-clanging.)

*****

“He had been a fisherman, caught porgies off Gloucester. He used to tell me how he had to work in the cold in freezing weather, standing ankle-deep in cracked ice packing down the fish. He said he didn’t feel cold. He never felt cold in his life until just recently. I liked that man, and his son Milton almost as much. In his back yard I saw the red wheelbarrow surrounded by the white chickens. I suppose my affection for the old man somehow got into the writing.”

So wrote William Carlos Williams of his neighbor Marshall, the inspiration for his poem.

Simple, and so much.

Fellowship, warmed by taciturn kindness. Basic tool and toil. Attending with all modesty to what needs tending. Red wheelbarrows and white chickens. Rural rhythm. Wind-slapped ladders. Affection, plain-spoken.

In times as we are, the world aflame, we depend upon such moments—on our humanity unadorned; on our ballads of it.

So much.

Peter Bruun is an artist and writer who moved from Baltimore to live year-round in the Boothbay Region in summer 2019.

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“Perhaps it is not odd, at the end of this tragedy where nothing much was left of the elite who came from the sky but courage struggling for oxygen, that I have often found myself thinking of my wife on her brave and lonely way to death.”

—From Young Men and Fire by Norman MacLean

(Sometimes, it’s the under story.)

Young Men and Fire is a non-fiction account of the tragic 1949 Mann Gulch fire. The book focuses upon the fate of 15 “smokejumpers,” mostly college-aged youth working summer firefighter jobs, 12 of whom died when the fire into which they had parachuted unexpectedly turned. The book’s narrative moves between description of that fateful day and an analysis of the physics behind wildfires. MacLean marvels at the young men’s will to survive, each—terrified and alone—running to the last from flames racing up the steep ridge they found themselves trapped upon. 

He saves mentioning his wife for the book’s final sentence.

MacLean does not reveal until the closing line that Young Men and Fire is as much about his own anguished feelings about his wife as it is ode to those who perished that August day in Montana.

The story underneath: a love story.

Here’s another:

I was standing on the tidal flats beneath the bridge to Pratt’s Island, the supermoon having rendered the tide low enough for such venturing. From that rare day’s remarkable perspective, the bridge’s pier supports loomed above, immense—towering wooden trunks covered with barnacles, the occasional periwinkle breaking the crustaceans’ mottled patterning. Solid and sentinel, coated with clinging life, these majestic columns were a marvel to behold—and all this time I had been passing them by without a thought.

It was Mother’s Day. (The under story.)

“I’m calling, and it’s not because it’s Mother’s Day,” I opened. She half-laughed, half-scoffed at my joking dismissal of the occasion. We then chatted, she keeping up a running narrative on the annoyance presented by Deuce, her new and not entirely housebroken puppy, I sharing of the unexpected snow we’d had recently. I asked if she’s been exercising (she has), and I volunteered I had not been as much as I ought to. She was satisfyingly startled by my story of my youngest daughter, riding out the pandemic in a Himalayan village and having had a neighbor’s dog attacked by a tiger (the dog lived).

After a while, we said good-bye.

Perhaps it is not odd, on a day begun discovering those mighty unsung piers, that I have found myself thinking of my mother afresh, of what we were really saying as we prattled on of tigers and snow, puppies and Pilates. 

(COVID-19 hanging like choke of smoke, mortality clear as weather on a supermoon morn.)

“I love you.” It is our under story.

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