Mountain stage -  

wind sings 

bamboo dances 

Crow Hates it When I Do Stuff

Out this afternoon in the clear cold mountain air, after a morning of uncertain rain that happy-ended with another of those perfect mountain-to-lake rainbows in full dayglow color that spoil us rotten out here-- another typical day in the mountains.

I was out in such a day with the big bamboo rake, intending to pull the tattered fragments of temporary firewood-cover plastic sheeting that had been blown off, stomped on, torn to tatters and tossed up into the plum tree by one of those the histrionic winds we get up here, that stormed through around dusk yesterday while I was in a big city office with no rainbow.

As soon as I opened the door to the deck I sensed that Crow had been waiting for me on his perch in the top of the big cedar out front, where he hangs out when he's got issues. Which is always. Sure enough, he was mumbling up there already, starting off on a grumbly string of tirades as soon as I came out and grabbed the big rake from where it was leaning against the deck rail, a procedure that clearly meant action on my part.

Crow hates action on my part. He's on my case whenever I start doing something outside, where he always lives and thinks he owns. When I began to walk down the steps from the deck, clearly with some intent or other - doesn't matter what - he started in, loud enough to make me think of earplugs, saying things like: "What the hell ya doin now, walker?" "Where ya goin down there?" "And what's with that rake, you gonna fix somethin?" "You think you own this place?" (jumping up and down on his branch) "You got no rights here, pal, I own all this!!" (I'm paraphrasing and editing here, for brevity and cultural clarity.)

The irony of Crow talking about rights was not lost on me. As I walked over onto the adjoining property (that really gets his darkness going), over which extended the plum tree branches that had caught most of the wind's plastic vandalism, Crow flapped all huffy over to the top of the utility pole right on the roadside there so he could be closer to whatever I was doing to his stuff, get a better look from an open platform, big beak yakkin the while. "Hey what are you doin over here, this ain't yer property either, it's mine! What the hell you up to now? You can't fool me, walker! I got my eye on you!" (Still paraphrasing; not that much nuance in Caw.)

As I reached up with the rake and began to pull down the nastily entangled ugly plastic fragments from the branches, i.e., actually doing something to achieve an objective, Crow hit the ceiling, so to speak. In an attempt to drown him out even just a bit, I started talking back (I often look like I'm talking to myself, but sometimes I'm not): "I only used this sheeting in a pinch, to cover the firewood; originally, I got it to make garden tunnels for early planting, but the monkeys made a mess of it (no real need to paraphrase here, this is pretty much word-for-word), so it's been sitting unused in the shed, and I--" "Hey, why am I explaining to you, Crow? You don't give a damn about plastic or monkeys!" "You don't own this property anyway! I own that property there, and I own this plum tree too; you don't, you're just full of caws!"

As I went on talking loudly, wrestling down the plastic and getting all the fragments into a bundle, something I said must've hit a nerve 'cause Crow took off in a big dark huff and flapped on down toward the Lake, I could hear him yelling for a long way; folks in the village were gonna get an earful.

It's a lot quieter up here now without a crow, and the plum tree looks a lot better without that plastic sheeting all up in it.

My plum tree.

On my property.

I do stuff here.

Spring wind 

wants every thing 

where it belongs

WIND vs. GUY

Bitter cold strong Siberian winds last night tried to blow me and my motorcycle off the road all the way up in the twisty dark, tumble me off down the mountain or into the deep dark of the forest just for a little windy fun, but I been there I'm from upstate NY, baby, used to ride my red-and-cream Columbia bicycle with the streamers on the handlegrips through the howling snow over ice and never even nearly fall, way back in the heart of those Tri-city winters, more like Antarctica vortexed to a frenzy through the Hudson Valley, of course I was only around ten then and I'm around multiten now, so there's that, but do I still have it, do I still have it yessss I did and do, I just hovered over the center of gravity like way back in time or hunkered over as needed, got in the zone and enjoyed the wind's frustration as it tried everything in its way big bag of airy tricks-- like a lull before a turn, then a brief hurricane during, then an even sharper opposite blast right while you're compensating the other way, stuff like that, this was Olympic level, but I still had enough to stay upright, the wind was all blustery at how blithely I was wheeling up through the best it could throw at this puny human, at least by normal earth rules, I mean after a hard day in an office in the city you gotta find some primal pride somewhere, and how better than to take on a winter wind in the dark on a twisty mountain road and win?

The wind had the last word in the morning, though, with the trillion tons of snow it brought from Siberia that I had to shovel as the air snickered all around me.

THE WIND AND I: PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH FIREWOOD

Hah. Figured I'd finally beaten the wind on this baby. The wind and I have always had a relationship problem, especially the autumn wind, the worst of the Aeolian clan vis-a-vis keeping the damn tarps on the damn ready-to-burn firewood dammit, those gusts and I not seeing eye-to-eye on this human continuity thing.

Don't get me wrong; I understand the needs of the wind, how it has to fulfill its basic mandate of leveling everything as fully and quickly as possible, there are mountains to be flattened and oceans to be shoved around, an endless list of worldwide tasks that must be done, yaggeda yaggeda, but counterposed against this are buildings and other pro tem human artifacts with precious values of their own, such as my humble stack of tarped firewood that must be protected from the elemental assignments to wet everything down, blow it away, reduce it to fungus fodder or whatever-- so I and the wind, among other of my natural relations, are always in each other's faces.

It was therefore with a smirk of satisfaction, I must say - after recovering the wind-tossed tarp from the bamboo forest behind my fresh new facecord of first-class firewood for what I guess must be the xumpteenth time in the last few years - that I came up with the idea of tying some strong traditional cord to the grommets of one tarp corner, threading it through the stack of firewood itself, then tying it taut to the grommets on the opposite corner. Hah. Bite on that, windhead.

That should do it, I thought in that hubris for which humans are famed (which also sets us apart from the animals, though unlike sinning, speaking, toolmaking, blushing etc., it is seldom mentioned in that connection). That night, the wind knowing full well what was afoot, firewood tarpwise, did its damndest to rip that tarp off there. And when I went out in the morning to gloat, that activity was out of the question. The wind had blown strongly enough to cause the tarp and its loopy rope to actually lift and topple that portion of the woodpile! Crafty! Plus more muttery labor for yours truly. Our battle had reached new heights. So then I countered with a newer and even craftier approach, on which I may be reporting any day now.

But my real reason for writing all this was the treat I was afforded while all this redoing was going on, because you know how beautiful mountainsides and all their trees can be when they set their minds to it in the peak of autumn color? Well there was that, and on top of that there was a big, thick, glorious arc of light's components rainbowing from the top of the mountain down to the lake, and through that bow of many colors the leaves of all the trees were enhanced beyond the reach of speech...

I had to stop every once in a while (beauty will do that, thank heaven), amidst my irritation and hubristically driven efforts, to admit to myself that the beauty all around was so much more important than my meager doings, so much more nourishing and truthful than anything an angry or prideful person could ever come up with in a million years if we ever get that far, the way we're going, tarpwise.

So as a result of this experience I've grown a bit more in emotional terms, learned a few things about deeper personal issues, and am on a friendlier basis with the wind now for sure; it's a good wind, but no way it can get that damn tarp off this damn time dammit.

Spring wind

wants every thing

where it's supposed to be

PUNCH LINE

Windy days are frequent this time of year, now that hurricane season is past and we're down to winds that just blow local trains off their tracks. The savage breezes also kindly remove the rest of the leaves from the trees, but can dry out all those shiitake I've still got out there unharvested. Such are the autumn zephyrs up here on the mountain, where all through the night I hear the hiss of reluctant leaves along the ground, and then in the morning the public announcement far down in the village saying something about the wind that the wind renders incomprehensible, another example of man and nature battling it out in harmony. Such early windy morning announcements probably concern train delays, but from up here I can't really tell.

I could search around on the tv channels for the transport bulletins on such mornings, but by the time I'd find out that my train is on time it would be too late to catch it. No point in calling the village station either, because the semiretired guy who works at our minor stop doesn't arrive there till about the time my train departs, so the phone in the little office would just ring until it was too late for me to catch the train if it was on time. I could call the big central train office and get put on hold, but most mornings I'm fairly sane.

This morning just after dawn I heard that chime-y PA fanfare (Bing, Bung, Bong, Bing!) that prefaces the loudspeaker announcements, then the perhaps male voice saying what seemed meteorologically like "Because of what the wind does to these announcements there's really no point in my doing this, since none of you can understand a word I'm saying, especially you folks far up the mountain, but all the same it's my job, so did you hear the one about the nun, the banker and the frog who went into a bar...." The rest was blown away by the same long, strong gust of wind that blew the ladder off the toolshed roof, but none of that mattered because today is a holiday anyway, I forget what, but I was back asleep by then.

Later when I'm down in the village I'll ask around, see if anybody heard the punch line.

WINDY RAMBLE: THE DEBRIS OF FREEDOM

Well the wind came barging across the landscape last night like it owned the place - which I suppose it does - carrying on all through the dark, toting in skyloads of Siberian chill without so much as a  how-de-do-- no passport, no visa, no customs fees, no license, no permission of any kind, not even a declared nationality such as we all have.

The rampant wind is no respecter of national borders, fences or property; it just laughs that air-sized laugh at national boundaries - roars in fact, as it  flies right over them - tossing aside all the KEEP OUT! signs like so many snowflakes, sending immigration officials scurrying indoors holding onto their hats, toying with temperatures, breaking off trees, tearing off roofs like King Kong and flinging them all over-- throwing big stuff around in general and having a greater time than any of us ever has, except for maybe that long July night in 1967 when I - but that's a tale for another time - and doing so whenever it wants.

If any of us did that we'd be in jail in a flash and deported to other borders without recourse, but governments just don't treat wind (or precipitation either, for that matter) the way they treat people, you'd think they'd be all over that blustery phenomenon and right away get it under lock and key, or at least put up a big wall like they currently want to have between Mexico and Texas to keep out people, though the even bigger Great Wall of China didn't work, either people- or weatherwise, and now it's a lucrative tourist attraction that draws folks from all over the world, puts China even more on the map historically, so you've gotta hand it to the Chinese, they take the long view of things in important matters-- but the fact that governments do pretty much whatever they want with us humans while letting the weather run free just seems like favoritism to me.

Over a century ago Mark Twain, who knew a thing or two about wind, directed public attention to humanity's chronic inaction regarding the weather; yet we've made no real advances in that regard since his clarion call. Makes me wonder about the old hierarchy of intelligence that has us humans at the top, getting all windy about freedom and such, well I'd put the wind way above us in those regards, seeing as how it's crafty enough to completely evade the fetters of human governance and run roughshod over restraints of any kind, doing pretty much what it damn well pleases despite whatever borders we sapients decree, just as it always has.

Just imagine all that the wind knows about the world. It has its songs, it has its voice, its music and its rhythms, it dances in the leaves on the ground, in sand across the deserts and in the tips of trees across the forests, flings itself along atop the waves of the sea in lyrics we can't begin to fathom. It is the breath of pure freedom, blowing wherever it will, leaving us to clean up after it, such as me right now on my deck, up to my knees in the debris of freedom.

RAINBOW CONTESTS

I love these autumny days of hingy weather when the sky puts on one cloud show after another, the whole big blue going all cumulo for a while, then getting horsetaily, then grayloomy then puffy again, and darkling as the winds rise and the rains go wild for a bit until the rainbow contests, when the leaves join in and start showing off too, all afternoon toward evening when the weather gets really ditzy, doesn't know which way to turn because its just so interesting being weather, you can do so much with heat and cold, watch this!, wind and calm, see that? rain and sun, whoa! which will it be, right to the minute so the wind is blowing now but it stopped raining - no wait, there's another rainbow - then it rains and is cloudy but no sunny and warm now cold and windy but calm at the moment and so on all the way into darkness but the sky doesn't sleep of course, for the sky it's 24 hours a day for eons

COUNTRY WINDS

Seems like the winds of March have all been compressed into the past three days, both in power and constancy. Worse than the mistral. You haven’t heard mountain wind till you hear it hissing its towering cargo of energy through the big field of winterdry mountain bamboo out front, whose leaves and stems have evolved to dissipate the effect of all that passing power not only by bending as much as necessary, but by bunching those dry-tipped papery leaves together in a million white-noise rattles. Powerful stuff.

For its part, the wind is powerful enough to blow local trains off local tracks, which receive the down mountain brunt of those big shoulders, so you’d think I’d know better by now, but noooo… This morning I headed off to work as usual, the wind so strong I couldn’t even freewheel down the mountain, the wind halting me like a big airy marshmallow, even trying to push me back up the mountain (it was trying to tell me something, I should have listened) till in my eggheadedness I finally powered my way down to the station and there beheld a growing crowd of fellow commuters just standing around in the lobby, the stationmaster hissing through his teeth at queries regarding the next departure.

After an hour of standing around checking the rural graffiti and the state of the neighboring rice paddies I gave up and wove my way back upmountain through the braids of wind to home, whence I called the office to say that unfortunately due to the powerful country winds there were no trains to the big city so I’d have to work at home today, and how it broke my heart and all. At noon the wind is even fiercer than it was this morning, and there are still no trains passing by down there, as I can see from the warm calm behind the big glass doors facing the lake over the rocking bamboo, with a good fire crackling in the stove and a nice cup of coffee in my hand, as I suffer the typical anguish of abrupt officelessness.

Oh well, I can always look forward to heading in on Tuesday, if I should come to be completely out of my mind.

FAR BEYOND MAJESTY

Late afternoon is the time of sky when the light is entering its golden phase, when the trees and grasses shine undaunted into the face of the sun, as if to say, in strong green words: I am a masterpiece. There is a great and unsung pride manifest in what we are pleased to think of as mere vegetation.

Then as sunset nears, all the air itself realizes the transition and rises over the sun-warmed lake, as the cooler mountain air floods down in replacement; the whole mountain, lit aslant by the hovering sun, becomes the bed of a vast river of cool air, rushing down in cosmic obligation. To sit in that river, feel that flood, after splitting firewood in the hot sun for two hours, is like whitewatering the grand canyon while sitting still, all in the country of the soul...

Those same dark leaves lift into paleness at the first touch of the downmountain winds and gleam white in the setting sun - clearly they have an old local relationship - they carry their vastness in their seeds...

The repose of the mountains in such settings as this, shaded green, gray and black in the summer evening sun and breeze, is often described as 'majestic,' but there is more in those ancient faces than aristocracy can ever aspire to; it's a matter of interaction with eternity, not immediate lineage or ambition.

Then when all the air is balanced at last, from out of the overmountain light come galleons of windblown pink clouds, sailing over the mountains as slowly and stately as on a tropical lagoon, wending across the calm of the sky toward unknown shores...

And when all up there is yet light, as the earth below grows dark and cool, the dragonflies enjoy the same calm air, their dashing silhouettes clearly visible -- way up in that silence they zig and zag in the way of their kind on glassine wings, like thoughts in a blue mind, with no aim but to be...

Then comes the full moon, laying her tapestry of light over the darkling land, revealing lineaments we are blind to in the day... who has not stood out in that vapor of silver, lain over all with the touch of a goddess, and not grown thereby?

We can do no better in our dreams...

ENTROPY AND FIREWOOD

Long-time visitors to this inferior endeavor will recall the frequent references to my struggle with the elements, specifically in this case the wind vis-a-vis my firewood tarps.

Well this afternoon in a briefly sunny moment (snowthunder in the mountain distance, blizzards fast approaching on big white legs) I went out to extricate my large tarps which, when last seen, had been neatly covering my stacks of firewood and weighted in place with heavy roof tiles, rocks, oak logs, you name it, maybe even a couple old automobiles for all it mattered, because it doesn't matter.

Because the two or three snowstormy nights we’ve had in the last couple weeks were each preluded by hyperSiberian winds that, howling with laughter, took my tarps, flung them free of their pinions, twisted them into complex topological forms, buried them under matterhorns of snow and stomped on the whole thing with big icy feet for good measure, the while snowing lavishly on my firewood.

So there I was this afternoon, pulling and digging and twisting and flailing and getting avalanched while digging out the tarps, undoing topological masterpieces and retarping the woodpiles. I want them neatly stacked and clean and dry and all in their places, the universe wants them down and dirty and wet and all over the place.

It's only a lifetime thing.

MORNING WAVES

The fierce wind that dragged along two steely days of heavy rain came back last night with a vengeance that threatened to clear the deck of all my seedlings, when all the while it was bringing in its train the mild morning of a fine blue day, horizon to horizon, souled by a gently muscular breeze.

In the fresh warm sun of the morning I was drawn like a magnet to go out on the deck and lay for a time in the golden light, while the breeze from the north bathed me in the honey-orange-gardenia fragrance of the full-blooming Carolina jasmine that covers the northern rail of the deck in creamy yellow blossoms.

In those moments of sun-warmed scent splashing over me on waves of Siberian cool I had a human glimpse of what we'd all feel if there were nothing but goodness and joy in the world...

THE WHOLE WIND

The wind in the city is not the whole wind, not the real wind, but torn up and scattered fragments of wind that have little relation to the entire living organism we hear at our house in these spring-bearing nights of wind coming toward us like a giant animal, a vast cat that comes sliding roarily across the forest tops and grabs the general landscape, tosses it about with lightning skill and deftness and is gone; you lie abed listening to it go, sinking into the silence it leaves behind where soon at the bottom you hear the depths of heaven until here comes another one and so it goes on until you tire of the game and doze off into a sleep that like the night is full of the cats of wind pouncing everywhere at once...