Happy Birthday, Mary

It's Mary Oliver's birthday today, a celebration of a life lived deeply and given freely through poetry. No one else I know of has lived more in tune with the natural world--and with our humanity--than has Mary Oliver.

"Forest Sunrise" by Alfred Bierstadt (1830-1903)

MORNING POEM

Every morning

the world

is created.

Under the orange

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again

and fasten themselves to the high branches--

and ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands

of summer lilies.

If it is your nature to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails

for hours, your imagination

alighting everywhere.

And if your spirit

carries within it

the thorn

that is heavier than lead--

if it's all you can do

to keep on trudging--

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted--

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly,

every morning,

whether or not

you have ever dared to be happy,

whether or not

you have ever dared to pray.

"Morning Poem" by Mary Oliver, from Dream Work, 1986.

Family Post: Celebrating a Family

I'm back. I flew out Tuesday before dawn and flew back Friday night. This time I left my computer at home, so was incommunicado as far as the blog was concerned.

I met my brothers in Kansas City and drove with them through the Flint Hills to where my parents live. My sister would fly in later in the day.

There were hawks on almost every perch, flocks of singing meadow larks, and skeins of geese winding and unwinding overhead.

During our visit my brothers and I had time to take in some of the sights in the area. We drove up to Lindsborg, a Swedish heritage community, so my brother Pete could pick up a gift for his Swedish wife.

We went to the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson.

It's the home of many exhibits documenting the rise of our space program, including an SR 71 Blackbird spy plane and a full-size space shuttle mockup...

A lunar lander...

And the actual Apollo 13 capsule.

We even strolled through a Bass Pro Shop on our way back to Kansas City on Friday.

The real purpose of the visit, though, was to celebrate my Mother's 90th birthday on Thursday. My Dad is 91, so both parents are now nonagenarians.

It was a bittersweet experience. When we sat around the table in the assisted living facility where they live, we were the whole family together again.

But we were keenly aware of the family members who were not there. There would be seven children, and now only four of us remain. (The top three in this photo, and the baby on our sister's lap.) And we wondered if we would ever all be together again.

That is the way of things, and of families. Looking through old albums in our parents' room we were able to put our own time and loss in perspective. Looking at old photos like this one of our Great-grandfather Jeroby, on the left, we were reminded again that each of us in the family comes and goes, but the family lives on. And we live on in our family.

So we celebrated a birthday, and we celebrated a family. Happy birthday, Mother.

Happy Birthday, Annie Proulx

This woman can flat out write. You may want to go where she can take you.

As this piece from The Writer's Almanac points out, she started out writing about fishing and hunting.

It's the birthday of Annie Proulx, (books by this author) born Edna Annie Proulx in Norwich, Connecticut (1935). As a young woman, she lived in Vermont, published a small newspaper, and supported herself writing how-to books about things like apple cider and fence-building. Some of her early stories were about hunting and fishing, since she was passionate about those pursuits; the only outlet for them was men's outdoor magazines, though, and the editors made her publish them as E.A. Proulx, believing men wouldn't read them if they knew a woman had written them. "The ones who suggested it were from a small Vermont publication," she told Paris Review, "and I got back this awful letter, full of bad spelling and clumsy syntax, suggesting that I should change my name to initials. Very tiresome." She put up with it for a while, but then started writing as "E. Annie" and then "Annie."

She went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News, and to win fame and notoriety for her short story Brokeback Mountain. The Shipping News is well worth a read, but I recommend you begin with her early work.

Her first novel, Postcards, received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. It's the story of a homeless man for whom the length and breadth of the West becomes the only home he knows.

Then dig into her short stories. This is my favorite collection, stories about real-life Wyoming. This is funny, gritty, heartbreaking, cowboy boots-on-the-ground, hands-in-the-dirt writing. It includes Brokeback Mountain.

The writing is so spare and clean that you feel stripped down to the essential core after reading it. Here's a quote from Close Range:

“You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country--indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky--provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut...
...Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that.” 

Finally, here is some wisdom for writers from Annie Proulx:

“What I find to be very bad advice is the snappy little sentence, 'Write what you know.' It is the most tiresome and stupid advice that could possibly be given. If we write simply about what we know we never grow. We don't develop any facility for languages, or an interest in others, or a desire to travel and explore and face experience head-on. We just coil tighter and tighter into our boring little selves. What one should write about is what interests one.” 

For a New York Times piece about Proulx from 1994 after she had won the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, click HERE.

For the Wikipedia entry on Proulx, click HERE.

Happy Birthday Again, Albert

It's Albert Einstein's  birthday again. His 135th.

I make mention of it because my Happy Birthday, Albert post of last march is this blog's third most popular post ever. And this is a fishing blog. Makes you think. Which is altogether fitting.

I am hereby designating the month of March, now and in perpetuity, as Einstein Steelhead Energy and Mass Relativity Month. All efforts in that month to catch Steelhead, the Nobel Prize of fish, will be dedicated to the genius of Albert Einstein.

According to Andrew Zimmerman Jones and Daniel Robbins in String Theory for Dummies (no slouches themselves, I'm sure, in the brain department; just writing "for dummies" until the world finally recognizes their own massive genius) Einstein's genius can be described thusly:

The genius of Einstein's discoveries is that he looked at the experiments and assumed the findings were true. This was the exact opposite of what other physicists seemed to be doing. Instead of assuming the theory was correct and that the experiments failed, he assumed that the experiments were correct and the theory had failed.

That, I submit, is the secret to successful Steelhead angling.

As if that weren't enough, it is Einstein who proved scientifically that a Steelhead (mass) can be caught by a fisherman (energy, or the other way around) moving at a constant speed relative to each other (the relative motion) by proving that "matter can be turned into energy and energy can be turned into matter because a fundamental connection exists between the two types of substance."

There it is. Remember that when you're making your one thousandth or two thousandth cast.

But what I really like about the man is that he had the genius to say such things as this:

"The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity

in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives."

That I can understand. And, coincidentally, that is why I fish. Happy birthday, Albert.

Zennnnnnnnn: Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac

It's the birthday of Jack Kerouac.

He wrote On the Road in twenty days in April 1951. He typed it all out on a 120 foot roll of tracing paper.

In a letter to Neal Cassady he said:

"Went fast because the road is fast...

just rolled it through typewriter

and in fact no paragraphs...

rolled it out on floor

and it looks

like a road."

Dude, Check This Out: Townes Van Zandt

John Townes Van Zandt was born on this date in 1944. He was a tortured super-addict. You name it, he was addicted to it. His ravaged body gave out January 1, 1997.

In his short time on this earth, though, he wrote some beautiful songs. He never made it big himself as a performing artist, but, starting with the likes of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, and including Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan, his songs were covered by everybody who was anybody.

These songs are from his 1972 album, The Late, Great Townes Van Zandt.

Maybe his best-known song, and most covered--and my favorite--is this one, Pancho and Lefty. I discovered it on one of Emmylou's albums, and I still like her cover version best. But I really like Van Zandt's original.

Having lived with addicts, and having loved and lost addicts, I have sympathy for their pain. But I have no patience anymore for the romanticizing of the "outlaw" or "troubled genius" lifestyle. So I reject the view of Van Zandt and his ilk that downplays the addiction by saying, "But look at what he was able to accomplish."

No. Rather think of the cost to friends and family and children. And think of what he might have accomplished.

That said, these next songs are beautiful and poignant--and deeply sad. The title of the last one, To Live Is to Fly, is engraved on his tombstone.

Happy Birthday, George Harrison

Today is the birthday of George Harrison. He was born in 1943, and died too soon in 2001.

It goes without saying that he was a major part of the soundtrack of my generation. But more than that, he became a courageous advocate for the best that humanity can be. I admired him as a gentle prophet. And I miss his incisive voice.

So Happy Birthday, George, and thanks for the light. It's still shining.

Happy Birthday, Ansel

It's the birthday of photographer Ansel Adams, born 1920, died 1984.

He said, "I hesitate to define just what the qualities of a true wilderness experience are. Like music and art, wilderness can be defined only on its own terms. The less talk, the better."

Yes. Just look. And see.

 The Tetons and the Snake River, 1942

Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, 1937 

Evening, McDonald Lake, Glacier National Park, 1942

Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, 1963 

Aspens, Dawn, Dolores River Canyon, Colorado, 1937

Happy Birthday, Jim and Tom 2013

Raise one to these gentlemen and wish them many happy returns.

This write up is from The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of the writer who said: "To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime." That's Jim Harrison (books by this author), born in Grayling, Michigan (1937).
He had a couple of major accidents that ended up changing his writing career. When he was seven years old, he was playing with a friend and she accidentally cut him across the face and he went blind in one eye. He felt as though that set him apart from other kids, and he started turning to nature, to the woods and creeks and fields. And then, when he was in his 30s, he hurt his back badly while he was hunting and he was confined to bed. He was an active person, loved to be outdoors, and he didn't know what to do with so much time. His good friend, the novelist Thomas McGuane, suggested he try working on a novel. In 1971, he published Wolf: A False Memoir. His first major success was Legends of the Fall (1979), a collection of three novellas. He's written many more novels and novellas, in addition to several poetry collections. For a long time, he thought of himself as a poet more than anything else, and said about his novels: "They sometimes strike me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life though a few of them approach some of the conditions of poetry."
Harrison's latest poetry book is called Songs of Unreason (2011), and a collection of his novellas, Brown Dog (2013), will be published this month.
Jim Harrison said: "Life is sentimental. Why should I be cold and hard about it? That's the main content. The biggest thing in people's lives is their loves and dreams and visions, you know."

And it's the birthday of the writer Thomas McGuane (books by this author), the one who convinced Jim Harrison to write his first novel, born in Wyandotte, Michigan (1939). As a kid, he wanted to be a scientist who studied fish, but when he was 10 years old, he decided to become a writer instead. He and a friend started to write a novel together, but they disagreed about how to describe a sunset and got in a fistfight and that was the end of that novel. He went to college and flunked out, but by the third college he went to, he shaped up and did a lot of writing and ended up graduating with honors. He had a couple of manuscripts rejected, but he won a scholarship to Stanford, and he finished another novel he was working on, and he gave it to Jim Harrison, who passed it on to a friend with connections to a publishing house. It was accepted, and The Sporting Club came out in 1969. And McGuane has gone on to write 10 novels, two books of short stories, and six books of nonfiction. His most recent novel is Driving on the Rim (2010). He lives on a 3,000-acre ranch in Montana, where he raises cutting horses and runs cattle and writes books.
He said: "Literature is still the source of my greatest excitement. My prayer is that it is irreplaceable. Literature can carry the consciousness of human times and social life better than anything else. Look at the movies of the 1920s, watch the Murrow broadcasts, you can't recognize any of the people. Now, read Fitzgerald — that's it. That is the truth of the times. Somebody has to be committed to the idea of truth."

Happy Birthday, Georgia

Today is the birthday of Georgia O'Keeffe. Would that we could see even a fraction of the beauty and sensuality that she saw in nature.

The Beautiful Blue and Green Music, 1921 

Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, 1931 

Deer's Skull With Pedernal, 1936 

From the Faraway Nearby, 1937 

Rust Red Hills, 1930

An Orchid, 1941 

Flower Abstraction, 1924

Ram's Head, White Hollyhock, and Little Hills, 1935 

Oriental Poppies, 1928 

Red Hills and Bones, 1941

Blue Morning Glories, 1935