Suffering The Benz – Page 3 – Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right

Do not go gentle into that good night …

I’ve watched the entire Deadwood series at least 5 times. I’ve also rewatched John from Cincinnati multiple times. And I’m still astounded by David Milch’s writing. Who else could put a chunk of dialogue like this in a character’s mouth:

“I may have fucked up my life flatter ’n hammered shit, but I stand here before you today beholden to no human cocksucker, and workin’ a payin’ fuckin’ gold claim, and not the U.S. government sayin’ I’m trespassin’, or the savage fuckin’ red man himself or any of these other limber-dick cocksuckers passin’ themselves off as prospectors had better try and stop me.”

In a recent New Yorker interview with Milch, Mark Singer calls out that quote from Deadwood as an example of how “Milch’s dialogue transformed the frontier demotic into something baroquely profane.”

I stopped in Deadwood last summer during a jaunt to Montana just to check it out. I was worried I was walking into a tourist trap, and to some degree, I definitely was, but it still was a worthwhile side trip. I couldn’t help but hear Milch’s versions of Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane ricocheting around in my head as I visited their graves at the cemetery.

The New Yorker interview offers insights into his writing process and approach to storytelling, but what resonated most with my is his battle with Alzheimer’s. It’s heartbreaking to see this type of intellect slowly slipping away, but Milch isn’t surrendering without a fight:

While writing the screenplay for “Deadwood: The Movie,” I was in the last part of the privacy of my faculties, and that’s gone now. I was able to believe that— You know, we all make deals, I suppose, in terms of how we think about the process of our aging. It’s a series of givings away, a making peace with givings away. I had thought, as many or most people do, that I was in an earlier stage of givings away than it turns out I am. It’s kind of a relentless series of adjustments to what you can do, in particular the way you can’t think any longer. Your inability to sustain a continuity of focus. And those are accumulated deletions of ability. And you adjust—you’d better adjust, or you adjust whether you want to or not.

The interview reminded me of a marvelous New York Times story about a woman’s struggle with early onset Alzheimer’s. I used this story in a feature writing class I taught at Ohio University a few years ago, fearing the college-age students wouldn’t be able to relate to a tale about aging. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. They could relate. They have witnessed the devastation that dementia wreaks in their own families. Writer N.R. Kleinfield detailed emotions that the article subject was feeling as she realized she had dementia and things were only going to get worse. That period fascinates and terrifies me. That span where you know you’re slipping away, trying to hang on to a thread of who you were, grappling with a world that grows increasingly less familiar.

Meanwhile, the Deadwood movie launches May 31 on HBO. I’ll definitely be watching. Probably repeatedly. But as I watch, I’ll be thinking about Milch as we continues writing, working, resisting the inevitable march of Alzheimer’s.

Walking in the footsteps of the Moundbuilders

We’re standing in front of a 4-foot mound of debris beside the railroad tracks in Newark, Ohio. Jeff Gill, our guide, tells us he caught two kids huffing here once, and during that encounter he wondered if this pile of detritus might be something more, something that once was part of the ancient Newark Earthworks.

We were walking the streets of Newark on that spring day, looking for traces of a past civilization scattered among second-hand stores, golf courses and residential neighborhoods. Sometimes, the traces were easy to see. Others, it required close observation and a dose of conjecture to spot them. As we walked, we paid especial attention to alleys, which, as Gill explained, tend to follow the natural lay of the land rather than being graded like regular roads. That allowed us to see subtle swells and uneven stretches that align, more or less, with where the walls leading into the earthworks once stood.

The Newark site was surveyed by Squier and Davis in Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, a book published by the Smithsonian in 1848.

“These works are so complicated, that it is impossible to give anything like a comprehensible description of them,” Squire and Davis wrote.

While Ancient Monuments is flawed in many places, it’s an invaluable reference guide to the mounds scattered across middle America. Many of the sites Squier and Davis surveyed have been destroyed by “progress” in the intervening years. In fact, a key part of the Newark Earthworks, the Octagon, is now Mound Builders Country Club, a golf course that allows public access to the mounds only four times a year, and that only begrudgingly. A recent court ruling provides hope of greatly improved access, possibly even removal of the golf course and restoration of this archeological treasure.

This tour, unfortunately, is not held during a public access day, so all we can do is stand across a busy road and view the Octagon mounds from a distance. It reminds me, vaguely and strangely, of the first time I saw Templo Mayor in Mexico City decades ago. I marveled at the urban swirl around an archeological dig exposing the remains of the Mexica’s main temple in their capital city of Tenochtitlán. While urban Newark has little in common with Mexico City, it does share this pre-Colombian grandeur intertwined with the mechanics of 21st century life. It’s also a mortal reminder of how small we are in the stream of time. So much came before us. So much will (hopefully) continue after.

That trip to Mexico in 1990 was the beginning of my fascination with archeological sites, ranging from Machu Picchu to Teotihuacán to Chaco Canyon to Cahokia to Serpent Mound.

Shortly after moving to Athens, I learned Ohio is dotted with thousands of mounds, prompting me to explore Serpent Mound, Newark Earthworks and Hopewell Culture National Historical Park in short order. Even the local trails at Strouds Run State Park lead me past the remnants of mounds.

While cycling in Athens, I’m constantly — sometimes painfully — reminded that brick roads tend to spread and undulate as the roadbed beneath them shifts over time. But here in Newark, Gill points out a brick alley that is more than 100 years old, each brick remaining level and true. That suggests, he says, a foundation beneath it that served as a road bed long before we arrived, the constant pressure of foot traffic compacting the soil, preparing the perfect site for this alley we’re now standing on. As he speaks, I flash to Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, which sits atop a towering sandstone mesa. Walking up to the site, visitors tread a path marked by the indentations of human foot traffic dating back nearly a millennium. It’s all connected. Somehow.

As we viewed the Wright Earthworks, a site tucked next to a welding yard off Newark’s beaten path, several local residents said they had never been to this spot. It struck me how important it is that we educate ourselves about what came before us. Gill repeatedly cited newspaper accounts to bolster or diminish theories about the site. What will happen 100 years from now, when newspapers are long gone and digital archives spotty? Will the decimation of local media sever us from our past?

Even the street names in Newark give hints of ancient origins. Roads like Ridgeview, where there is no ridge in view, suggest that when it initially was plotted, there was in fact a ridge (part of the earthworks) that has since been leveled. Intimations of immortality are everywhere. One just has to pay attention — and find the right guide.

Gill, an engaging, erudite mashup of a preacher and John Lithgow, proves the perfect leader for this tour of Newark. He’s quick to say “I don’t know” when the answer is uncertain. Archeology can reveal only so much, leaving us to speculate about what the material facts add up to. He is, in fact, a man of the cloth, though not one who seems inclined to traffic in dogma. The walking tour takes the better part of a Saturday, leading us on a circle that starts and ends at the Cherry Valley Ellipse. This is the mortuary area, where the Hopewell buried their dead, and it’s also where the Shaman of Newark was unearthed in 1881. It’s believed the deceased were left on nearby hilltops until only their bones remained, which were then bundled up and brought to the Ellipse for burial.

At the end of the tour, there are more questions than answers. What does this all mean? What were the Hopewell trying to accomplish in this sprawling complex. Only part of it — the Ellipse — appears to have been funerary in purpose.

“The site may be more like a pre-Colombian Large Hadron Collider — a vast machine, or device, designed and built to unleash primordial forces,” posits Bradley T. Lepper in The Newark Earthworks, A Monumental Engine of World Renewal in The Newark Earthworks: Enduring Monuments, Contested Meanings.

During my first visit to Newark, I was surprised to see what appeared to be moats at the earthworks. But they were inside the walls. Why the hell would they put moats inside? Perhaps these ditches weren’t for defensive purposes. Lepper suggests they might actually have been designed to contain the spirits of the dead within the circle during the rituals conducted there. Lepper also notes that later peoples continued to treat the earthworks as sacred space. He cites Allan Eckert’s The Frontiersmen, where protagonist Sam Kenton notes the Shawnee were making pilgrimages to this area long after the Hopewell were gone.

It’s all connected. Somehow.

Settling in

After a week at Innisfree, we’re starting to feel at home. Sydney and Sunny are settling into their routines. Sydney even managed to draw first blood on the cabin, feasting briefly on the cedar baseboard behind his cage. So I’ll spend this weekend crafting an Anti-Sydney Device to place behind his cage. Come to think of it, there hasn’t been a place we’ve lived in during the past 30 years that Sydney hasn’t defaced in some way. Innisfree is in good company.

I also removed a stack of firewood someone — presumably the real estate agent — stacked there in an attempt to stage the house. During that process I came across a magnificent snake skin. I’m assuming (hoping) that snake shed his skin out in the wood pile, not here in the house. It was a big one, based on the skin. Maybe 5 feet …

Seeing the forest — and the trees

One the cusp of buying a cabin with 16 acres of forest, I started obsessing about trees. The book Seeing Trees: Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees has been aiding and abetting my new fixation.

One of the recommendations author Nancy Ross Hugo makes in Seeing Trees is to name specific trees and watch them closely, over time. We tend to see trees as massive brown/green blobs. Closer inspection reveals what complex ecosystems they are. So upon arriving here at Innisfree, I started sizing up the trees on the property. There are numerous white oaks and maples, but there are two trees that caught my eye immediately.

The first is Alpha Oak, a massive beast of a tree that’s west of Dove Cottage. Based on its size, I’m betting it’s a few hundred years old, and as I stood there looking at it in awe with a friend, he noticed that high up in the branches there’s some sort of block and tackle mechanism. I’d love to how — and why — it got there.

The second is the much more diminutive Dancer, which is near Innisfree. I’m to sure yet what type of tree it is (Hugo recommends not obsessing too much about that early on — to just get out and get acquainted with the tree). But the way the tree gracefully raises its branches to stake out a sunny spot in the forest canopy is beautiful. I’m going to pick up some binoculars so I can try to make an ID on what type of tree Dancer is, but that’s not stopping me from watching it sway in the wind as I sit on the deck at Innisfree.

At our place in town, there’s Maude, a massive tulip poplar that shades Maude’s Place. Both the house and tree are named after Ruth Gordon’s role in the 1971 film Harold & Maude. It was a year or two before I really even looked at that tree. It was the incredible flowers it produces that caught my attention, and from there, I started noticing what a beautiful tree it is year-round.

During the winter, Sunny and I spent hours hiking the trails of Strouds Run State Park, where I often paused (despite Sunny’s desire to push onward) to watch leafless trees sway and creek in the winter gusts, reminding me of a wooden ship bucking the ocean, it’s timber masts straining and creaking under sail. Now that it’s spring and I’m living in the forest, I’m looking closely at trees that I used to view only in profile and realizing what incredibly complex organisms they are. I’m spending a lot of time looking up, noticing deciduous details that I’d been oblivious to previously.

Slo-mo Sydney

Our umbrella cockatoo stretches his wings at Innisfree, our cabin in the woods.

Our cabin in the woods

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

— The Lake Isle of Innisfree, W.B. Yeats

I’ve dreamed of living in the woods almost as long as I can remember. As a child, I’d spend countless hours in the jumble of thorn trees, crab apples and ragweed we called “The Woods.”

A year or three ago I stumbled across a 1943 book titled “Your Cabin in the Woods,” and while Conrad Meinecke’s sweet ode to simple living struck a chord deep within me, I wasn’t foolish enough to think I could build a cabin. It takes everything I have to hang a picture.

So when a cabin and cottage on 16 acres just outside Athens came available, it definitely caught my eye. Lara and I took a look and talked. A lot. The property is eclectic. The cabin is beautiful, featuring a wood stove, a magnificent fireplace and a south-facing porch that makes it feel as if you’re sitting in the forest. But overall, it’s small, with only one loft bedroom and two baths. The cottage, which has two beds and one bath, we targeted as a potential rental, and to be honest, I was fairly dismissive of it early on. After walking through the beautiful assemblage of wood that is the cabin, the cottage felt, well, pedestrian.

In the end, we decided to purchase the property, rent the cottage and use the cabin as our home in the woods. Things became confusing quickly so we decided to name each structure. Our place in Athens, which has become Lara’s primary nest, is now known as Maude’s Place, after Hal Ashby’s quirky, iconic May-December romance movie, Harold & Maude. We’re calling the cabin Innisfree, after a W.B. Yeats poem that has spoken to me since the first time I encountered it as an undergrad more than 30 years ago. And the cottage will be known as Dove Cottage, after the place William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, called home in England’s Lake District. Several of the Romantic poet’s greatest works were created there.

The close on the property was uneventful, as such things go, but it took an odd twist as I left the bank and set off to Innisfree afterward. My Nissan Titan started rumbling strangely as I rolled down U.S. 33, and as I turned to exit onto 690 it was clear something was massively wrong. Perhaps my first, best clue was the large metal cylinder my truck spit up when it finally gave up the ghost. I was praying that wasn’t the transmission, though I had no idea what one would look like and whether it could fall off the bottom of a truck like this. The AAA driver who came to tow me in to Athens Auto Repair set me straight. That cylinder was my drive shaft. Fortunately, the guys at Athens Auto are awesome and honest. It cost only about 100 bucks to replace the U-joint and get my truck back on the road.

The past several days have been a blur of trips from Innisfree into Athens as we furnish and equip the cottage. One of the things that really attracted me to this property is its proximity to Athens and Maude’s Place. I can go from being in the woods to civilization (or as close as Athens gets to civilization) in 15 minutes. Some of the other places in the woods I was looking at were 30 or more minutes from Athens. That can become a real time suck, not to mention the cost of feeding my truck.

Lara and I spent the weekend here imposing order, and we got our first tastes of how magical this place is.

On Saturday night, we sat on the porch sipping mezcal during a drenching spring rainstorm. The forest surrounded us while Sunny the Sweet Pyrenees snoozed nearby and Sydney the Angry Cockatoo settled in to sleep in his cage beside us.

Of course, I insisted on sleeping here the first night we took possession, so Sunny and I set up a mattress on the floor and then sat outside to watch the forest slip into darkness. It wasn’t long before I saw the flickers of early fireflies and when I looked up, through the spreading limbs of white oaks that surround Innisfree, I could see the stars glimmering. through the newly emerged leaves.

Dove Cottage is really sweet. A friend came by on Friday to talk about building a deck at the entrance, and he was impressed, forcing me to reassess my view of Dove as an underachiever. At that point, my intent was to rent it as a regular monthly rental but now we’re leaning toward an Air BnB setup that focuses on a spot where families and groups can gather. The driveway that descends from the ridge onto the property Y’s, with the left fork leading to Innisfree and the right to Dove. The two buildings are invisible to each other thanks to the woods and well-thought-out site design. There are a pair of lilacs beside Dove, a grove of poplars out back, a large grassy area where a tent or two could be pitched, and a fire pit. A riot of daffodils fills the front yard. And the grassy area beside Dove yields to a tongue of forest that rolls gently down into a hollow. There’s a massive white oak back there, the largest I’ve seen on the property so far, and I think with a little trail building it can be a truly magical space.

The nits? Well, the previous owner — who had lived here since 1974 — is a diminutive man. While the design of the cabin is incredible, there are several spaces where low clearance make me feel like an ocean freighter trying to negotiate a creek. I’ve smacked my head several times already and have learned not to wear baseball caps indoors (the bill of the cap hides overhead threats). I’m sure I’ll find more negatives as I go, but as I sit here on a Monday morning gushing about Innisfree, I’m confident those negatives will be minor.

And the biggest upside? I’m writing again, something I really haven’t done since returning from Costa Rica last fall.

Celebrating 2 years of Sunshine

Rest in peace, W.S. Merwin

I became hooked more than 30 years ago, the first time I encountered his poems in The Carrier of Ladders. It was beautiful, stunning, strange. Sad to hear Merwin has moved on. As for the rest of us, well …

We continue

by W S Merwin
For Galway Kinnell

The rust a little pile of western color lies
At the end of its travels
Our instrument no longer.

Those who believe
In death have their worship cut out for them.
As for myself we
Continue

An old
Scar of light our trumpet
Pilgrims with thorns
To the eye of the cold
Under flags made by the blind
In one fist

Their letter that vanishes
If the hand opens:
Charity come home
Begin.

I’m struttin’ my stuff, y’all …

¡Vamanos Pens!

(This is my last installment in El Gringo Feo’s Costa Rica Diary. I left sooner than planned due to family issues and realized I’d never posted this final entry. If you want to read El Gringo Feo from the beginning, start here.)

October 26, 2018 — Sadness at leaving. No howlers this morning. Even the agouti is scarce. But as I’m feeling sorry for myself, a blue morpho butterfly drifts past. I’ve seen them only 8 or 10 times in the 3 months I’ve been here. An omen? The skies are blue. Well, at least by Uvita rain-season standards, and I had an incredible pasta dinner at Gian and Sara’s last night, including time to play with Misha and her Kong toy. I was the human Kong.

There are tears in my eyes as I depart. Uvita has been good to me. I’ll be back. Thanks to Jeff and Lauri for trusting me to keep an eye on the place for the past three months.

Later, while killing time in the tourist shops at the airport, I spot a gorgeous blue morpho butterfly dried and mounted for display. It supposedly was “farm raised.” Whatever the fuck that means. I decide to pass. Having a dead one hanging on the wall just seems so weak compared to seeing a real one whirling through the wild.

While I’m standing in the passport control line at the airport in San Jose, I notice a guy in front of me is wearing a Penguins shirt.

¡Vamanos Pens! I yell.

He spins around and instantly starts talking about last night’s game. He’s going to a game on Tuesday night. I ask him where he’s going.

Columbus. Same as me.

Turns out he’s heading down to the infamous Athens Halloween party. He had a place in Chillicothe for a while but it wasn’t doing it for him so now he’s trying Costa Rica.

Small world indeed.