Lost Coyote

2012-02-15T19:06:00.002-07:00

I think teaching is school is very, very difficult...

I've needed something optimistic about for some time now. Clint Eastwood, as “Man-With-No-Name” says, 'I've never seen so many men wasted so badly' in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. These lines are delivered while our hero is watching a bloody, human engagement over a bridge during the American Civil War.

He and Tuco, i.e. “The Ugly,” blow that bridge to Hell, thus giving the men on both sides nothing more to fight over.

I have the intense, unshakable urge to blow my bridge to Hell, metaphorically speaking...I'm sure...

The truth is, everyday we watch people being wasted...and sometimes we get to do something about it and sometimes we don't. But, then again, that's not very optimistic at all, is it?

2012-02-12T16:23:00.003-07:00

My first fish of this new year was a hybrid trout, "born" over one hundred miles from where it was planted in a man made irrigation pond. It was then washed into a creek during high water. There, it lived happily until I annoyed it.

It snowed, as they said it would. It's nothing to worry about or be thankful for, it's just a thing that happens ocasionally this time of year. I wasn't going to leave if it didn't snow, and I'd stay even if it snowed more...lots more...

Yesterday, I was miles from home, wandering creeks and looking around in South Central Utah. This patch green grass was made possible by an apparently warm(er) water spring struck me as odd, but beautiful.

There is always snow, but there is always green grass...both somewhere, sometimes at the sameplace.

Henry David Thoreau said, “We can never have enough of nature.”

More and more, the only place where anything matters is at home, the school, or in the woods, canyons, mountains and etc.

Life is becoming more simple.

2012-02-07T18:36:00.002-07:00

Last night I dreamed. I was sitting on a bitter-smelling, rain soaked, fallen aspen in Big Basin of Black Canyon with a weapon on my lap. The wind rustled the moist, yellowing grass. I was breathing deep, sucking thin air, sweating in the shade.

Soon the wind dried my soaked back, a thoughtful wind that delivered an intentional kiss sent from a Winter to come.

Dreams of my mountain adventures haunt me as I struggle to sleep during the dark nights we endure.

Electronic representations of the first snowstorm in Black Canyon remind me of a sleeping world far from this one. A world that exists in dreams and memories, but one I can't touch smell feel or wander...and won't be able to until late May or early June. I will dream many dreams before then.

But, the sun is on the move...and we have more of it now than we did a week ago.

Buddha taught that, “three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”

I'm going to need more sun, if I can't have the canyons.

2012-02-04T11:27:00.002-07:00

Is there spirit in inanimate objects? Does God want me to have dominion over the things he created for me to abuse? Once upon a time, a colleague of mine who is a vegetarian, was asked, right there in the faculty room, this question: Why are you a vegetarian?

All conversation stopped.

“I don't know, I just don't like the idea of eating anything that had a face.”

“What about the scriptures? You know the Doctrine and Covenants.”

This just got interesting...

“I don't really read Mormon scriptures.”

Someone else, a relief society president (no kidding) said, “you should read them...I mean God wants us to use the gifts that he provided for us.”

“Once, my mom gave me a fire extinguisher as a Christmas gift,” I said, in an attempt to change the subject, “I told her that I'd hang it on the wall in my basement..for the meth lab.”

We haven't spoken of vegetarianism or meth labs, as a faculty, since...

I really like Edward Abbey:

"If the life of natural things, millions of years old, does not seem sacred to us, then what can be sacred? Human vanity alone? Contempt for the natural world implies contempt for life. The domination of nature leads to the domination of human nature. Anything becomes permissible."

If we can convince ourselves that God wants us, nay, would be offended if, we didn't dominate nature...then yes...any number of sins are not only permissible, but sanctioned by God.

I, personally, still like meat, I'm not...one of THOSE...you know what I'm talking about.

2012-02-02T14:00:00.003-07:00

On a weekday in late August (I don't remember which one), I taught school until about 3:30. I drove home and put a camouflage button-up over the T-shirt I taught school in and grabbed my Bow, a Snickers and a quart of water. I drove to the Canal Canyon trail head in a dusty blur.

Eighty-nine degrees. Didn't need the extra shirt.

Up hill, up the dusty trail, but a hesitant, heated slump would not get me into the clearing I wanted to watch before dark.
Salt in my eyes burned. Both shirts became saturated, and sweat dripped off my pack. Thin air and deep breaths.

Turkeys in my clearing, but they moved off and left the place to me. I found a place to sit and regulate my circulatory system.
The new school year fresh on my mind, the worries jumbled thoughts that would not regulate. Kids I didn't even know with problems that I had to solve in 180 days.

A twig snap. Probably nothing.

Leaves at the top of the trees, green Summer leaves tremble without the presence of perceptible wind. A chipmunk ran the length of a fallen evergreen, jumped to the ground, stopped and yelled a chittering rebuke that I didn't even listen to.

The worries of a new school year ran away with him.

I looked out with a freshly emptied mind to see and bull elk in the clearing. I don't know how, or when he got there. He might have been dropped from the sky...Elk are goofy and spiritual, and this story didn't end there.

But, today, February 2nd, while my colleagues at the Autism Conference are enjoying a lunch served to them while they sit in the same seats they've been in all morning. Not me, I sit alone in Coffee Shop, The Coffee Garden at 9th and 9th in Salt Lake City, thinking about that hunt.

The woman is telling the man in the table crowded next to mine:
“He's lived all over the world, and I mean everywhere, Tokyo, Bangladesh everywhere. He will be fine in (scoff) New York...”

Behind me, a woman tells the woman she is sitting with:
“I've expected this divorce for a long time, I've laid the groundwork, and it's just a matter of ensuring the dignity of both parties.”

There were other conversations, but I don't know what those people were saying to each other.

No twig to snap, no leaves to rustle. I felt alone and isolated in a unmapped wilderness, I don't really know why I was thinking of that hunt at this time...

Abraham Maslow, the Humanistic Psychologist, talked about plateau experiences characterized by a sense of tranquility in a natural setting. Some evidence suggests that many spiritual leaders had such experiences in wilderness, e.g., Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, Black Elk etc.

Similar spiritual experiences in nature are available, is the point, the point that I am trying to make...

2012-01-27T13:35:00.002-07:00

Neo-animists, like myself, tend to look toward Paul Shepard as a guide-light in the darkness: “The nomadic Bedouin does not dote on scenery, paint landscapes, or compile a non-utilitarian natural history....His life is so profoundly in transaction with nature that there is no place for abstraction or esthetics or a 'nature philosophy' which can be separated from the rest of his life...”

There is at least a day's worth in that quote, but I'm here to focus on one question: what is the value of nature, of wilderness?
Folk from both sides, assign the wild-places with an ECONOMIC value. Sierra Club spokespeople are arguing against expansion of the Alton Coal enterprise near Brice Canyon because of it's negative effect on a million visitor a year tourist INDUSTRY centered around the park.

The coal-people promise more jobs and a more sustainable economic base. I don't know enough of the facts to lean either way, but both sides want support based on the ability to create MONEY.

Back to Mr. Shepard. Is the only UTILATARIAN value of wilderness in economics? For my part, for what little it is worth, I'm probably wrong, but I think the true value of these place far exceeds the small circle of economics.

My food, (deer, elk and antelope meat, as well as brook trout fillets, berries and the occasional wild onion) and water, (from developed natural springs that are piped into my town and the undeveloped ones I wander into) come from the mountains I travel.

But, more than those physical needs are the mental health issues resolved by escaping to the forest, desert and high places. I'd go crazy, dead crazy, dead and crazy without these places. Is there any value in that?

Beyond even mental health are the spiritual lessons I've learned in the sacred places I've explored. My “witness”, my “testimony”, is open-sky and the beauty of the Earth. Has that any worth?

Chief Seattle said: “Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.”

Sacredness, memory, experience...worthless?

2012-01-23T22:07:00.002-07:00

If we are to continue on this round rock of oceans, mountains deserts and forests, I fear that a change may need to take hold. I have no scientific evidence to support that bold statement, but I believe it based on observation and an anemic grip on logical thought.

Does anyone really think that this life-style is going to last?

We could make all money we can squeeze from those who have no power to do anything about it.

I'd rather enter a place of peace, a place where perceptions of the needed change will, to me, seem plausible. I'm not that good with money.

Here's what Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh said:

“'I have arrived'” means I am already where I want to be—with life itself—and I don't need to rush anywhere, I don't have to go looking for anything more. 'I am home' means I've come back to my true home, which is life here on the present moment.”

The clutter in my life will have to go. Open space, room to breathe and expand inwardly and outwardly...yes but how?

Anyone?

2012-01-21T09:57:00.001-07:00

The problem with meeting the family of students is a misperception of who they, the children, are. It's easy to think of the kids I teach as characters in a sitcom that I watch from 7:30 to 3:30 each weekday...

After meeting with their parents (whether biological, step, adopted, well-wishing, etc.) I realize that each student is an actual person with a life that extends beyond the school day.

Troubling? Yes, because I worry about actual children more than the fake ones.
(None of this crap is making any sense.)

So, to sort it all out, I went for a long, warm, muddy and glorious hike.

Life in the canyon, blood pumping, ice melting, wind whipping and water flowing. Why should this January be like last year's?
Death in the canyon. We all need to eat, right...

My perceptions of life and death and children and parents and freezing and flawing are all muddled and whisper quiet. Is each new moment, or child, or breath, or snowstorm a gift?

No, not if we don't see them that way.

Robert Pirsig writes in his book of scripture, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

“Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. Then, when you are no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end but a unique event in itself.”

2012-01-16T20:28:00.001-07:00

Wendell Berry advises:

“Speak to your fellow humans as your place has taught you to speak, as it has spoken to you...”

If Haystack Mountain spoke to me this evening, I really don't know what it said. However standing in fresh snow, looking up and the flat topped mountain, did me no harm. There are so many voices these days. Flickering screams of digital articulation obscure the truth embedded in silence and empty space.

“There is a certain feeling, at high altitudes...you are out on the edge of the human world. The cash and credit cards in your pocket will not help you. All bets are off...”
--Rob Schultheis

2012-01-16T10:48:00.001-07:00

I am having trouble internalizing the occupy movement. I live in the middle part of Utah, Sanpete County, in a very, very small town.

I know, that's no excuse.

So, I follow you on Facebook, wishing I was closer and more intimately involved.

As the movement matures, I wonder about it's future.

My hero, Edward Abbey, wrote, in his iconic work, Desert Solitaire these lines:
“I would like to introduce here an entirely new argument in what now has become a stylized debate: the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it some day not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny.”

Ed may be right. It may be time to “occupy” the open spaces that, for whatever reason, we are blessed with in this crazy, crazy Utah.

2012-01-14T15:06:00.003-07:00

I take an unhealthy pride spending my time in the same place, doing the same thing(s) as the Eagles do. Huntington Creek provided us with more to watch than to catch today, but watching is good.

If there is a God, does he want us to fly fish? Use Dynamite? Farm Salmon? Genetically modify species of fish to make a “sport” fish that can't reproduce, and, in that way, we, us, and those like us, will have total population control of given habitats?

Sometimes, it's better to live as if there is no God, whether there is a God or not.

Isolated moments of beauty are neither created or understood. These need no acknowledgment. They exist with or with out my worship.

The canyons are religion without dogma, tax-deductible status or hierarchy...

Somehow, eventually, what I say, believe and do will become all the same.

2012-01-02T21:13:00.001-07:00

Spring has sprung here in Central Utah, and it's a good thing after that long winter. Creeks are rising, snow is melting. Another week or two of this weather and high water will commence and the trees will bud out. I figured I'd drink from this mountain spring sometime in 2012, but I didn't think it would be in January.

Jose Ortega y Gasset said, “I am I and my surroundings.” I'm glad water from a high canyon spring will be part of me.

2012-01-01T19:07:00.001-07:00

"Civilized life has altogether grown too tame, and if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting" — Bertrand Russell

I have found no 'outlet' to replace hunting. So I don't try. I hunt, but I think and think and think about it.

Guilt. Sometimes...

But I eat meat, so I feel like I have to get some of it myself.

These pictures represent yesterday's hunt, the last hunt of the year...Pine Hen...a bit of protein in the cold time.

Next, up? Turkey, in late March into April. I will have to make do with the camera until then.

2011-12-30T19:33:00.002-07:00

Resolved: Over the past two years, I've had knee surgery, wrist surgery, hernia surgery, a hip replacement and a pulmonary embolism.

I won't spend a night in the hospital this year.

I miss, miss , miss, miss, miss the mountains. I can't access the higher elevations during the winter months, but I will spend more time in the highlands during the spring, summer and falltime.

I am a father, even though we've never done the DNA testing that would prove it...I have to be a better dad...and, I have to give all I have to the kids at school...because, they are more than awesome...

 Don't let yesterday use up too much of today. --Cherokee Indian Proverb

There is beauty all around, and I will stop and see it.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. --Buddha

2011-12-21T20:27:00.001-07:00

“A city man is a home anywhere, for all big cities are much alike. But a country man has a place where he belongs, where he always returns, and where, when the time comes, he is willing to die.”
--Edward Abbey

I am living a childhood dream. My goal in elementary school was to become a teacher and live in my hometown.

Spring City is a small town in Sanpete County. Whenever someone from near about Sate Lake City asks me where I'm from, I have to replay, “Spring City...that's in Sanpete County.” No one ever knows where Spring City is, very few have even heard of Sanpete...

Interstate 15 bypasses my homeland, completely.

This morning at the Maverick (a conveniance store) there were three girls, dressed as snow-bunnies, rolling backwards, out of a parking place in an older Nissan Pick-up that would not start.

I guy in work boots and denim gave me that look and nod and we hit the back bumper at the same time.

“Uphill,” I grunted.

“It's always uphill...”

I cooked dinner tonight.

So when I walked in to pick-up our 'call-in' at the local greasy spoon, I noticed that everyone working there either went to high school with me or was a cousin of mine.

Good burgers.

There is a whole WORLD out there. I'm just too tired, too old and too happy to go see it.

2011-12-06T20:58:00.003-07:00

I'm struggling over this one. Here's the thing, compassion is not really observable. Yet, we judge people according to what we can see, here, smell etc., but mostly see. The faculty at the elementary school where I teach is being trained, one Monday a month, for nine months, in a behavior management program that done correctly, asks teachers to demonstrate compassion to the students. How can you possible have a problem with that?

The thing is, it asks teachers to develop an empathetic statement to say every time they have to lay a punishment on a kid.
For instance, “Darn, it looks like you have decided to miss recess.”

Or, “It must make you feel bad that you have to stay after school.”

Is that compassion?

Actually, I need to revise that...IT IS NOT COMPASSION!!!

Compassion...co-passion...implies a relationship of equals where both parties have a similar passion. It is RARLEY demonstrated in schools, because most teachers don't see their students as anywhere near equal to them, the TEACHER.

Can I have compassion, real compassion, that is NOT OBSERVABLE by those walking pass my classroom?

My favorite student is a girl who moved into our school when her mother married a guy from town. She misses her friends, dad, house and life that a divorce and re-marriage took from her.

Today she had a small, glass, sheep on her desk. I guy, a boy walked passed her desk and took the sheep and said, “Hey what's this?” She grabbed for it as if it was gold. In the brief struggle it fell to the floor. It appeared unbroken, but the incident demanded the attention of the class.

I stepped in and she began to cry. The weight behind that cry came years of fear, unhappiness and worry.
Later, in the hall, I asked where the lamb came from.

She responded with the saddest thing I have ever heard a student say to me. I know, it sounds like I'm overstating it, but you will just have to trust me.

She said, “It came from my old house.”

Then, she repeated it, over and over....

There are “compassionate” teachers in my school who would have taken the sheep from her and told her that she could get it after school. But they would have said, “It's sad for you that I'm taking this sheep from you, darn it, you can get it after school, but I don't ever want to see it again.”

2011-12-04T16:39:00.000-07:00

How To Be a Poet
(to remind myself)

By: Wendell Berry

Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill — more of each
than you have — inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your work,
doubt their judgment.

Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
There are only sacred places
And desecrated places.

2011-12-01T18:04:00.002-07:00

"Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it." - A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Me, I'm sick of the darkness. I don't like it, and I don't like that it arrives minutes after I get home from work.
But, I did see a Bald Eagle fly pass me, up Canal Canyon and disappear as a black dot toward Temple Fork.
And, I was merrily alone in the canyon this afternoon. Which for me, is dear of soul.

2011-11-30T11:11:00.002-07:00

“... there's a silent voice in the wilderness that we hear only when no one else is around. When you go far, far beyond, out across the netherlands of the Known, the din of human static slowly fades away, over and out.”
― Rob Schultheis

I drift aimlessly and alone in the canyons, searching for my way out. It's up there, I just haven't the physical or mental capacity for it. I'll go back to search again...and again. When I find it, you won't have to worry about me and my opinions any more.

The wind tastes of snow and winter is lasting, here, in my homeland.

2011-11-27T17:50:00.003-07:00

I don't know what I'm trying to say here, but I know that my dad was the oldest guy I saw over a mile from the road during the mountain hunts this year. He packed his share of two different elk, a couple deer and an antelope. He has NOT yet become a maker of arrows.

“Among the San Bushmen of southern Africa . . . the hunt for game with poison-tipped arrows depends on moving rapidly across the veld. . . . When men become too old to participate in the hunt, they become the makers of arrows — and tradition ascribes to the arrow maker the primary credit for the kill,” writes author and cultural anthropologist, Mary Catherine Bateson, who divides her time between New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

These two deer represent years of hunting Black Canyon and Reeder Ridge.

Speaking of deer...love is in the air...I hope they make a few babies for me to look at in the years to come.

2011-11-26T11:53:00.001-07:00

The Henry Mountains move. One of the last-surveyed and last-named mountain ranges in the lower forty-eight, the Henrys hold the middle of the Colorado Plateau, as an Island on a sandy sea of stone cut into by what little water runs. I drive, hike and wander around and near those mountains. They never remain where I think they should be. They shift, left to right, near to far...never constant on the horizon.

2011-11-20T15:16:00.002-07:00

Fishing, whether good, bad or ugly, takes me to beautiful places. Some of those places are in my back yard. Thistle Creek is not protected or managed as a fishery. Most of it runs across private land. But it is beautiful...

"Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after," said Henry David Thoreau. I'm starting to figure it out.

2011-11-18T11:33:00.001-07:00

I can't divine meaning from digitally created photos of the places I visit, but I like to take and keep them. Truth comes to me while I am there, in canyon, in person, fully alive...

Canal sits in the middle of Utah. Far from any major population center, it is ignored most of the time. Even so, the canyon seems “okay” with where it lives. It is not national park, it is not national monument. It's not advertised. However, wandering the canyon alone, I sensed no animosity concerning its isolation from people. I am happy to be isolated and ignored in Central Utah as well.

The canyon IS and that's enough, it's not trying to be anything more, and it CANNOT be anything less. I AM, for now, anything beyond that, for me, is HOPE. I got the sense that the canyon doesn't worry, at all, as I walked through snow and mud.

As always, my thoughts paraphrase Edward Abbey:

“Under the desert sun, in the dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. The air is clean, the rock cuts cruelly into flesh; shatter the rock and the odor of flint rises to your nostrils, bitter and sharp. Whirlwinds dance across the salt flats, a pillar of dust by day; the thornbush breaks into flame at night. What does it mean? It means nothing. It is as it is and has no need for meaning. The desert lies beneath and soars beyond any possible human qualification. Therefore, sublime.”

2011-11-12T12:31:00.002-07:00

Barry Lopez wrote:

“Hunting in my experience—and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land—is a state of mind. All of one's faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than a analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have land around you like clothing.”

I miss hunting.

Now-a-days, I just wander around looking at stuff, frantically, before the sun sets. I run darkness off on my way to work, but it doesn't go far, it waits for me to leave and quickly takes my place saying, “you didn't call it!” whatever that means...

2011-11-10T12:18:00.003-07:00

I walked into this fast food place. Not a franchise, just some guy trying to make a living cooking double-cheese burgers and curly fries. They make pretty good milk shakes.

Amy was at work, I had to cook for the kids. So, I walked in to pick up my order and noticed that my cousin's daughter was behind the counter taking money. She glanced up at the high schoolers she was serving, and to my eye, she transformed into my Grandma. I saw in her, my Grandma who she had never met My Grandma who died nearly twenty years ago.

If you look deeply into the palm of your hand, you will see your parents and all generations of your ancestors. All of them are alive in this moment. Each is present in your body. You are the continuation of each of these people.

--Thich Nhat Hanh

2011-11-06T13:17:00.002-07:00

I have come to the conclusion that I am going to die. My recent health crisis cemented this in sidewalks of my mind. Previously, I didn't really believe that I had the capability that death requires. I thought I was somehow above all that. It's not true. I will not live forever.

This changes everything.

I don't know why the world's empty places are filled with so much beauty. I don't know why so much of it is ignored.

But, if I have to be truthful, I'm glad that I had Canal Canyon to myself.

2011-10-31T10:39:00.001-06:00

Edward Abbey said, “The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern to the desert.”

The desert doesn't care if I show up, it doesn't even think about me. I think about it often, and my conclusions remain incomplete. Even Jesus, it is said, wandered in the wilderness, looking for answers.

I had a dream. I sat in the desert and a raven flew from behind me, directly over my head, cawing as he passed, marking my location for all interested parties. The soft sound of air through his black feathers seemed unleashed an avalanche of sound, sound that was there all along, waiting to be heard. I mean if a tree falls in the forest and all the people near it are listening to the news…does the tree make a sound?

Birds calling, deer fleeing, a morning breeze, a barking dog and the firing of some other early rising fool’s gasoline-combustion engine, all came to me...and I woke to silence.

Ernie Pyle, the World War Two photographer, who wrote in a letter to his wife in 1945, from the field of battle, “Of course I am very sick of the war and would like to leave it, and yet I know I can't. I've been part of the misery and tragedy of it for so long that I feel if I left it, it would be like a soldier deserting.” Spent the declining years of his life, drifting like hollow Autumn leaf, about the deserts of the American Southwest, trying to forget about the war in the same way the leaves are now forgetting about spring.

He said, and you have read this before on this blog, “The only way to feel country is to pause in it. In the desert it is likely to occur to you that our daily lives on the cities are of no damn consequence whatsoever.”

Our daily lives that consist of TeeVee and fast food and berating the one-percent while trying our worst, sacrificing our values, to join them. Our gadgets bring us no peace. The end for all of us is the same. Dust. It's no sad fate. I find beauty in dust and rock and empty places.

2011-10-28T19:28:00.003-06:00

The doctor told me that I shouldn't be running for a few weeks. He didn't want anymore blood clots to break loose. I didn't bother to remind him that my metal hip makes running uncomfortable. A couple years ago, I crashed my mountain bike, broke both arms, and wandered off the Star Trail with Adam carrying both our bikes behind me.

I don't run, I don't mountain bike.

But, I can't go many days without wandering in the woods.

Here's what Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh said about walking and wandering:

Each step brings you back to life.

“I have arrived” means I am already where I want to be—with life itself—and I don't need to rush anywhere, I don't have to go looking for anything more. “I am home” means I've come back to my true home, which is life here on the present moment.

Breathing out, you may like to take three steps and say to yourself, “I have arrived; I am home.”

You have arrived at your true home and the wonders of life that are there for you; you don't need to wander around looking for something more. You stop running. When you can stop, your parents, your grand parents, and all you're ancestors can stop. If you can stop running and take all your steps freely like that, you are expressing the most real and concrete love, faithfulness, and devotion to your parents and all your ancestors.

2011-10-26T13:23:00.003-06:00

Huntington Canyon is dying, entering the season of frozen animation, no spirit. Waiting for a white cloth of sacrament to cover it as it sleeps.

I'm tired, breathless, but I am not ready for sleep...not yet...

2011-10-20T10:20:00.001-06:00

Little things like this catch my eye. In the slant-sunset, these feathers became translucent. The leaves glowed below and through them. But, then, the sun went down. It got cold and I walked out of the canyon.

2011-10-17T15:22:00.002-06:00

I was not in church. I was sitting on a rock, during a cool, but not cold Mid-October morning next to Grizzly Creek, at the base of The Yellowbrush Ridge, thinking about everything but where I was and the scene around me. Slowly, eventually, my mind rested, calm and quiet like a yellow leaf that fell into the dying grass.

The sound made by flowing water held a constant in pitch and volume. The rustle of Quaky leaves moved in and out of phase with the creek, depending on the wind. A chipmunk ran the length of a fallen evergreen and jumped to the ground and drank standing water from an elk track pressed deep in the wet trail. When he noticed that I was watching, he chittered an annoyed rebuke, and ran off.

It's hard to think about the, “world in the valley,” at near two miles above the surface of the ocean, once the realization of one's true setting is established. We (and by we I mean, us, the humans) are meant to start their day with mornings such as these.

2011-10-15T13:51:00.002-06:00

After re-giving up on hunting forever and re-becoming a vegetarian, last week's storm re-stirred something in my soul, or at least my bones. A baptism, Tabu-la rasa, a clean slate...

The week old snow patches that remain after a few days of above normal temperatures, are aging, pocked and rotten. This Fall snow melt has brought new light to the mountain. Grass is freshened, Quaky leaves have eagerly accepted the bronze offered by the Sun.

Why can't I fish anymore?

I wander up and down creeks, avoiding reservoirs, avoiding crowds. I cast only occasionally. Catching fish breaks the cleansing silence in my head. I believe with complete optimism what Ed Abbey said, “There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.” The more I fail, the more satisfied I become.

I leave the world as much as a father of three and 6th grade teacher can. When I go, it's usually into the mountains and canyons to search-out a place to hide.

When the hunts are over, and horses and ATVs are put away, my favorite time in the wilderness begins, the lonely time.

“Going to the mountains-into what one nineteenth-century poet called 'that weird white realm'-is like pushing through the fur coats into Narnia. In the mountainous world things behave in odd and unexpected ways. Time, too, bends and alters. Your interest and awareness of the world beyond the mountains falls away and is replaced with a much more immediate hierarchy of needs: warmth, food, direction, shelter, survival. Temporarily you have a new centre of existence.”
From: Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit, by Robert MacFarlane

2011-10-14T11:43:00.002-06:00

I like reading and listening to Barry Lopez.

“Hunting in my experience—and by hunting I simply mean being out on the land—is a state of mind.”

There have been times during this year's hunt that I have not liked myself, at all. Times when my state of mind about hunting was muddled.

“All of one's faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than a analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have land around you like clothing.”

There were also times when, yes, even I, felt the “land around me like clothing.” Sitting under a beetle-killed, former evergreen, during a rainstorm on the ridge between Mill Fork and Meadow Fork in Black Canyon activates all physical and some spiritual senses. It wears heavy but cold.

“And then to recognize that things exist only insofar as they can be related to other things. These relationships—fresh drops of moisture on top of rocks at a river crossing and a raven's distant voice—become patterns.”

Good hunger, good fatigue, good pain and good connection. I grieve for time NOT spent in the wilderness. The loss is as leaving good company.

“Suddenly the pattern—which includes physical hunger, a memory of your family, and memories of the valley you are walking through—takes in the Caribou.”

Animals fade in and out of the landscape like Ghosts between this and spiritual realms. Once, my brother and I tracked a small band of Elk, one was dripping blood, into a clearing covered with a perfect blanket of snow. Tracks took us into the center of the clearing, then continued no more, in any direction. Elk were lifted into the sky.

“The release of the arrow is like a word spoken out loud. It occurs at the periphery of your concentration.”
(From: Arctic Dreams)

The release of the arrow is a prayer. The sound of a shot from a gun is a vile curse. The impact of the arrow cuts, the impact of the bullet explodes. I've seen both in the last few months. In either way, animals die, so, there you go.

2011-10-08T15:39:00.002-06:00

I am done hunting, but I'm not done being on the mountain. In fact, the call of the highlands is loud, clear and persistent. But, I'm tagged out, finished, accomplished, successful, done, giving it up, changing...thinking very, very differently about...hunting...

And, it's snowing up there.

What reason do I have for entering that, "fresh landscape?"

Barry Lopez said it better than me, better than anyone:

“A fresh landscape brings out awe, desire, and apprehension in us. But one like North America, undeveloped, also encourages a vague feeling that we can either augment or waste our lives in such places, depending on what we do. And we are still asking ourselves: What is worth acquiring here?”

Is it a wasted life to wander game trails unarmed? Is it a lazy consumption, entering the wilds only to return empty handed? What if the only thing acquired is peace?

"...the spiritual landscape refers more to relationships that infuse our religious thought..."

Ah, yes, Mr. Lopez, I didn't go to the mountain, I went to church.

2011-10-05T14:23:00.001-06:00

Gary Snyder: Zen just means meditation. It should go back to that.

Jim Harrison: Yeah, to the simplest form.

Gary Snyder: Sitting on a stump.

Jim Harrison: Yeah, maybe. Or under a stump. Under a stump is quite wonderful.

Gary Snyder: On a stump in good weather and under it in bad weather.

2011-10-04T14:11:00.002-06:00

Clean air!

Hunting CHECK! Violence CHECK!

2011-10-03T13:50:00.002-06:00

There are fleeting moments on this Earth, during the days we've been given, that come as close to perfect as seems possible. Fifteen minutes of Saturday sunrise on Round Lake was one of these times...

This blew my mind. Leaves, floating flat, caught water from the sky. Droplets would evaporate before ever becoming part of the lake. Dead leaves either keeping them from, or allowing them to reach, their destiny. There's plenty of things to think about, but I waist my mind on the mysteries I observe.

2011-09-29T11:25:00.002-06:00

The final nail has been driven. New York City poet, Audri Lorde, said, “When I speak of change...I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.” A radical alteration of my assumptions? Am I that brave?

Paul Shepard wrote:
“We may not need to start at the top and uproot political systems, turn lifeways on their heads, emulate hunters and gatherers or naturalists, or try to live lives of austere privation or tribal organization. The civilized ways inconsistent with human maturity will themselves wither in a world where children move normally through their ontogeny.”

A quote that I've read, thought about and absorbed in my mind. But, for some reason, I haven't gotten past the two words that stick out to me, “emulate hunters.” Shepard advocates also, “lives of austere privation or tribal organization.” He further promises that, “The civilized ways inconsistent with human maturity will themselves wither...”

I've never gotten pass hunting, again.

During the kill, the dress, the search for a shady tree on an uncommonly hot Autumn day, I re-thought one of my favorite quotes... “That beast out there is already home, while I have yet to find my way,” wrote David Petersen, in his book 'On the Wild Edge.'

I hope even slain beasts find their home. I hope, someday, I will.

2011-09-21T14:10:00.003-06:00

I don't usually go places I haven't been... It's like meeting new people. Very uncomfortable.

Ten years ago, Rufus trailed the back tire of my mountain bike, his nose in the dust inches from the tread, running full out, downhill. Two broken arms and a metal hip later, (Mine, all mine) she nips and my heals as we walk...

Amy says these berries are a week away from ripe.

Choke Cherries in Bear Shit. They must have been ripe, earlier this day. The rest of the crap in this pile was ripe, still. Rufus and I walked with our heads up, wondering if this bear was a full out vegetarian...

I swear to you, there are weeks in the summer and months in the winter when Canal Canyon changes not at all. It seems to move on an hourly plan these days...

2011-09-19T14:56:00.002-06:00

“We keep each other alive with our stories. We need to share them, as much as we need to share food. We also require for our health the presence of good companions. One of the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place, and speak of the need.” --Barry Lopez

I ran into a guy from my home town, a guy I grew up with, I guy I've known for more years than I've known my wife or kids...
He asked me where my little brother shot a deer last year, because he thought that he'd seen that deer earlier in the year. (Many people from Spring City hunt in the same places, places where game animals tend to move, live and do their thing. Place where our fathers and grandfathers hunted.) I explained the spot with, “you know where that little creek that some years is dry...” and, “so you have to climb up onto that bench, where in flattens out...”
I'm convinced he knew the exact spot where the deer died. I think the picture of the place in his mind was as kindred to the I picture in mine.

He had been there.

“One on the most extraordinary things about the land is that it knows this—and it compels language from some of us so that as a community we may converse about this or that place...”

The many places I hold as beloved each grew, as a tinder-fire on my heart because of the stories and the people who also belong to those places.

Landscapes without stories are like the bodies of our forefathers (and mothers) silent in the ground.

2011-09-16T09:43:00.002-06:00

I have never seen anything like this before. This thistle is drying and dying. It appears that the winged creatures who landed on it, are drying and dead. They passed with wings extended, their empty bodies ready for flight...

These leaves are dying as well. No longer able to make food for themselves, they make color for us instead...

2011-09-15T12:21:00.004-06:00

The best line in the movie, “The Crow (1994),” is delivered by the protagonist played by Brandon Lee:

“You are all going to die.”

And he, Brandon Lee, did, thus cementing the line's significance, and the movie's legend.

“If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying," is a Bob Dylan line I think about, sometimes, not all the time, but enough, you know?

We are all going to die, that's a fact. It's the purchase price for this crazy, freestyle dance...

We may not get to choose the manner of our death, but we get to choose how we live.

Ed Abbey said: "Death is every man's final critic. To die well you must live bravely."

A-ho.

Ed died in March 1989. He'd been fighting esophageal hemorrhaging for near a week. His body was transported in the bed of a pickup truck. No embalming. No coffin, just an old sleeping bag.

"I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree...no formal speeches desired, though the deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all simple and brief....and a flood of beer and booze! Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking."

2011-09-11T09:03:00.004-06:00

Ernie Pyle, the great World War II reporter once said, “in the desert, it’s likely to occur to you that our daily lives in the cities are full of seeing, hearing, and worrying over a great many things that are of no damn consequence whatsoever."

Change of venue. No weapons. No animals to hunt. My wife and I wandering desert landscapes, looking for a rain-fresh perspective.

Ed Abbey, no stranger to Utah's desert, put it this way: "Mountains complement desert as desert complements city, as wilderness complements and completes civilization."

I thought nothing could compete with a mountain thunder storm. It turns out, rain in the desert and rain in the mountain "complement" each other...in both cases, the rain makes things very beautiful...

Hooray ATVs! Hooray! It's always good to see signs of recreation...I hope someone has figured out how to be happy in this world...I hope someone is making money off the landscape...

Not me, I use it (the landscape) for emotional and spiritual renewal. And it's that kind of thinking that keeps me in my place, on the outside looking in.

"The desert will still be here in the spring. And then comes another thought. When I return will it be the same? Will I be the same? Will anything ever be quite the same again? If I return." That's something to think about, Cactus Ed.

Here's my take, ready or not: The desert remains, I figure, but we change. And, my bet, my dream, my hope is, the more time we spend out in the wild, the more like it we become.

2011-09-08T12:00:00.001-06:00

Sometimes, leaves at the top of aspen trees begin to tremble before the wild blows. A small number of them start, not all, but a few...

How does the tree know which leaves should tremble first? Why don't they all move?

A lone Spike Bull stumbled into the mountain clearing I was watching last night. He didn't know I was there. I shot a LASER at his chest and that laser bounced back to the device in my hand that informed me of the Elk's distance from me in yards.

125.

Out of “bow range.”

My heart slowed, blood settled in my muscles. A yearling Elk is young but big.

Hiding in the trees and the wind, I closed the distance...looking for a better number, 40 or 30, but not 125.

It's all statistics, we can boil every little thing down to a number. Time, calendars, horn length and width, meaningless numbers.

If I had any courage at all, I think I would stop killing things but continue hunting them. I might, but I'm scared.

Speaking of being scared, the waxing gibbous moon was particularly bright last night. My moonlight shadow fell into Canal Creek, where it danced with the water. I lingered for a few moments before proceeding in fear of what I could not see in the night.

The woods are lovely, it's true, but they are also DARK and DEEP...

2011-09-06T14:05:00.002-06:00

There's a one-hundred year old pile of “slab” wood that remains from a saw mill in Buck Basin of Black Canyon.

I like the solitude, but when ever I walk past the mill site, I think about what it might have been like once, in that lonely canyon.

No one much uses the trees from anywhere near Buck now. Motorized vehicle traffic is restricted form two to ten miles away, depending on direction.

I spend my days climbing over large, dead trees that fall across Elk Trails, near sawmills that haven't been used in decades.

In my quiet wanderings, I think about restoration...and solitude...

Abbey says:
In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made...

2011-09-02T11:30:00.002-06:00

“These days, I don't know what sort of hunter I am. All I know is, my passions for elk and elk hunting burn hotter than ever. Ironically, though, my passions for the hunt accounts for my killing less and less often, because the killing kills the hunt. The September elk archery season is the apogee of my year, every year. It's one of my life's greatest pleasures.”
--David Petersen (My personal hunting mentor, whether he knows it or not.)

It's true that “killing kills the hunt,” but maybe a dead hunt is what I need...maybe?

It's has been a reveling week in the highlands. Rained out of the hills a couple times, sunsets and sunshine and lone bull elk.
The annual “rut” with its screaming calls and sex crazed bulls and large herds of elk-kind wallowing and wandering together, HAS NOT BEGUN TO START...

It's just to damned hot.

Close encounters with lonely bull elk, well, it's a bit like looking into a mirror...for me. He sniffed. That six point, and in that moment he knew more about me than I would ever know about him, and I have the internet. He knew I was armed, he knew what I had for lunch and he knew that my clothes contained some artificial fibers...and that's not all...I can learn about his kind, his species, but nothing personal. I'm not that good.

I'll paraphrase Petersen here, “What does an elk need with a P.H.D?”

Hell what do I need with one?

Me and a bull elk, alone in a road-less canyon playing what Rob Schultheis would call a “Bone Game.”

“...there is a potency in solitude that surpasseth understanding. Playing these games solo, NONCOMPETITIVELY, we enter marvelous turf.”

I've hunted “dead” hunts where I've killed deer, elk or antelope but I've also hunted LIVING hunts where no blood was shed.

2011-08-26T15:08:00.001-06:00

I sat in this meadow until full-on dark last night. There may be many reasons
to become dissappointed in mankind. Maybe. But having a place where a two
hour hike isolates one from everyone else AND from all my disappointments, is nice.
It's an argument for maintaining public lands, even if those places never make
anyone any money. Even if those places are empty of human influence most of
the time.

It took me much less time, walking back home, than walking away from home, I noticed.

Ed Abbey said, "A journey into the wilderness is the freest, cheapest, most
nonprivileged of pleasures. Anyone with two legs and the price of a pair of
army surplus combat boots may enter."

A "nonprivileged pleasure?"

I like that.

I sat quietly, under a Doug-Fir, waiting for elk. A hen turkey and her four
poults waddled past me at less than ten yards. They clucked at each other from
a place deep in their throats. Knocking seed from mature grass, they ignored
me completely.

As if they didn't need me around...at all...

2011-08-23T14:52:00.002-06:00

“There is a certain feeling, at high altitudes...you are out on the edge of the human world. The cash and credit cards in your pocket will not help you. All bets are off...”
--Rob Schultheis

Lying next to my wife is kind of like lying in mountains, under the stars, and just as breathtaking. It is safe and crazy at the same time. Yet, this afternoon, I will walk away from all that, into the wilds. I won't miss the TV or the radio or the electric fan or the microwave or the sound of a lone truck slowly rolling down the empty street...but I will miss my wife and my kids, and that will lead to the eventual abandonment of the day's hunt.

Sometime, after dark, I'll stumble up the steps of my house.

My boys will be momentarily disappointed when I tell them that I didn't “get” anything, but, I don't think Amy will care about that at all.

Then, shortly after my arrival, I'll realize that tomorrow is the first day of my new school year. I will be ready to teach children, again, I hope...

2011-08-19T09:16:00.000-06:00

Why I Hunt by RICK BASS

In the fall, it's what I want to do. It would be unnatural and dishonest to sit on my hands; I'm a hunter, a predator (in the fall), with eyes in front of my head, like a bear's or a wolf's or even an owl's. Prey have their eyes on the sides of their heads, in order to see in all directions, in order to be ready to run. But predators--and that's us, or at least some of us--have our eyes before us, out in front, with which to focus, to a single point.

For two months of the year--or until I have killed one deer and one elk--that's what I do. I want to be out in the woods, walking quietly, walking slowly--or not walking at all but just sitting in some leaves, completely hidden and motionless--waiting, and waiting. To not pursue the thing one wants would be a waste of one's life.

In the fall, I can do things I couldn't do in my normal, civilized life. I can disappear into the woods, and over the next mountain, the next ridge. My roaming has meaning--it's no longer just roaming, but hunting. The year's meat supply is in question. My meat, my family' s meat, not some rancher's heifer from Minnesota. Meat from my valley, where I hope to live and die--where I cut firewood, where I pick huckleberries, where I walk, where I watch the stars-- my valley.

For these two months, I am after something: something tangible, something that's moving away from me, and something that I must have, for the coming year. It's as simple as that.

Over the next ridge. The new life of stores and towns falls away, and the old life returns. There's a loveliness to looking ahead--looking straight ahead--that only hunting brings out.

The other ten months are okay, too--I can be the artist, can loll around eating grapes and reading poetry, but the fall comes like a splash of water to my face on a hot, dusty day; and the dust, and my new ways, new feelings--the ones bound by rules--are washed away, leaving the old ways revealed.

I keep eating those lovely candlelit dinners--grouse and potatoes, and the red, almost purple heartthrob steaks from elk; fried trout for breakfast, and homemade huckleberry jam . . . I feel alive . . . I draw immense strength from those meals, strength to live my life, and it feels good. I can eat about a pound and a half of meat a day. The cancer studies for this kind of diet alarm me, but I have to trust that they apply to fatty steroid beef, and cattle that must have been raised in pesticide fields. I was seven miles into the mountains when I shot last year's elk, and I carried him out in three trips over a twenty-four-hour period.

Into those same dark woods I go each year, looking straight ahead, and stopping and listening, and turning my head . . .

Of course, it's possible that there's a greater life force that judges us; and of course, sometimes I feel guilty about being a hunter, a killer--a killer of deer and elk, though not moose, because they're too easy, and not bears, because . . . well, bears themselves are meant to hunt. During part of the year they're predators, not prey. it seems unnatural to hunt predators.

I'm scared, sometimes, that all the animals I've killed--few as they are--add up, and that I'm liable for them.

I wouldn't mind paying for them with my life someday--we must all give up our lives--but sometimes I get scared I may have to pay afterward, in the afterlife, for my gluttony, my insatiable hunger for clean meat, and so much of it.

Nonetheless, I've studied it, and have come up with this: I am who I am, and I've come from the place we all came from--the past--but I still remember, and love, that place. Some of us are glad to be away from that place, but I'm not one of those people--not in the fall.

The worst day I ever had hunting was when I shot an elk in the neck, where I was aiming, but it made me feel strangely ashamed, after it was over. I broke the elk's neck, the way I always try to do--that instant drop--but he groaned when I walked up to him. He couldn't have been feeling anything, and I hope it was just air leaving his lungs--but it was still a groan.

For a fact--or rather, for me--hunting's better than killing. It takes a while, after it's over--sometimes a long while--before you can think of it as meat. You can't go straight from a living animal to 250 pounds of elk steaks. There's too much knife and ax work involved--and you' re the one that has to do it--skinning the animal, and pulling the hide back to reveal your crime, the meat--and already, sometimes, the call of ravens drifting in, black-winged shapes flying through the treetops, past the sun . . .

Instead of trying to make that instantaneous conversion--which I cannot do--life to meat--what I do is pray, sort of. I give heartfelt, shaky thanks to the animal as I clean it--ravens calling to ravens--and I do this with deer and grouse too, and even, if I can remember--which I don't always--with fish. A man or a woman who apologizes for hunting is a fool. It's a man's or a woman's choice, and he or she must live with it.

I don't do it for profit or gain; and rarely do I tell anyone about it after I've done it.

I watch ravens in the off-season. I think ravens have more of a soul than humans--and I think ravens understand the hunt better than I ever will. Sometimes ravens, in Alaska, lead hunters-- wolves, or humans-- to prey, and then they eat the pickings from the kill.

Ravens, black as coal, shiny and greasy, flying in the sun, like winged, black devils . . . I feel as if I'm on their side, and it scares me, but it would be a lie, in the fall, to switch sides: to pretend that I'm not. I'm a killer, sometimes. I wish I weren't, but I am. I've wrestled with it but can't escape it, any more than--until death- one can escape one's skin.[1]

Rick Bass is a petroleum geologist, environmental activist, and writer who lives in Montana. His most recent book is Notes from Montana (Houghton Mifflin/ Seymour Lawrence, 1991).

2011-08-14T08:26:00.002-06:00

Hunting Revisited...Again...and again later...probably...

“It is a convention of popular sociology that modern man leads a frustratingly inadequate life in which hunting becomes both overcompensation for a sense of impotence and an attempt to re-root oneself in the natural world.”

Okay, Barry Lopez, that's cool...strong words, maybe, I mean impotence was brought right up.

Me, I hunt for that other reason, not the impotence, you know the connection to the natural world stuff.

“The modern hunter pays lip service to the ethics of the warrior hunter—respect for the animal, a taboo against waste, pride taken in highly developed skills like tracking—but his actions betray him.”

Lip service you say?

“...oddly, is the almost spiritual sense of identification that comes over the hunter in the presence of a wolf.”

Oh, no, here we go...

“Here is an animal capable of killing a man, an animal of legendary endurance and spirit, an animal that embodies marvelous integration with its environment.”

Hey, Mr. Barry Lopez is describing ME! “an animal capable of killing a man,” CHECK! “An animal of legendary endurance and spirit.” SURE! “An animal that embodies marvelous integration with its environment.” OF CORSE, WHY NOT!

“This is exactly what the frustrated modern hunter would like: the noble qualities imagined; a sense of fitting into the world. the hunter wants to be the wolf.”

The hunter wants to be the wolf?

...a sense of fitting into the (natural) world?

It might be a long, HARD hunting season of conflict for the LOST COYOTE. I hope I survive.

2011-08-12T16:26:00.002-06:00

Tom Russell is becoming more and more important to me:

"Tonight we rock, Tonight we roll
We'll rob the Juarez liquor store for the Reposado Gold
And if we drink ourselves to death, ain't that the cowboy way to go?

Tonight we ride, tonight we ride
Tonight we fly, we're headin' west
Toward the mountains and the ocean where the eagle makes his nest
If our bones bleach on the desert, we'll consider we are blessed
Tonight we ride, Tonight we ride"

I have gone and hit a low point, I can groan and wiggle, but when I hit, I lost
my breath... I need to get my head put back together before school starts, but
it's a short, dusty, downhill, deadend road...leading into THE brick wall of
SUCCESS!

I have less money now than I've ever had. But I'm putting more money right
into the economy, so, you know, because of my contribution, things should be on
the up "swang" as they say...

Tonight we ride...tonight we ride...

...I need to make a over-the-sky and dramatic change in my preceptions and
lifestyle...

Love.

Friendship.

Beauty.

Wildness.

Wilderness.

Now.

No promises for the future, no guilt from the past.

Tonight we ride.

Wendell Berry says it right:

I leave behind even
my walking stick. My knife
is in my pocket, but that
I have forgot. I bring
no car, no cell phone,
no computer, no camera,
no CD player, no fax, no
TV, not even a book. I go
into the woods. I sit down on
a log provided at no cost.
It is the earth I've come to,
the earth itself, sadly
abused by the stupidity
only humans are capable of
but, as ever, itself. Free.
A bargain! Get it while it lasts!

2011-08-12T11:52:00.002-06:00

Tom Russell is becoming more important to me:

"Tonight we rock, Tonight we roll
We'll rob the Juarez liquor store for the Reposado Gold
And if we drink ourselves to death, ain't that the cowboy way to go?

Tonight we ride, tonight we ride
Tonight we fly, we're headin' west
Toward the mountains and the ocean where the eagle makes his nest
If our bones bleach on the desert, we'll consider we are blessed
Tonight we ride, Tonight we ride"

I have gone and hit the low point in the pit I'm falling in. I can groan and wiggle, but when I hit bottom, I lost my breath... I need to get my head back together before school starts, but it's a short, dusty, downhill, deadend road...leading into a brick wall of SUCCESS!

I have less money now than I've ever had. But I'm putting more money right into the economy, so, you know, because of my contribution, things should be on the up "swang" as they say...

Tonight we ride...tonight we ride...

...I need to make a over-the-sky and dramatic change in my preceptions and lifestyle...

Love.

Friendship.

Beauty.

Wildness.

Wilderness.

Now.

No promises for the future, no guilt from the past.

Tonight we ride.

2011-08-10T21:06:00.003-06:00

Fire can be as revelatory as scripture, but much less dangerous...

I'm convinced (which means that it isn't true) that there is beauty that only I get to see. It's a by-product of my lifestyle...

It is hard to defend the chaos in the forest along North Creek, on the Upper Escalante, as beautiful. You don't even have to pay to see it, you don't even have to pay to camp along its banks...

The poor can partake.

"Paradise is not a garden of bliss and changless perfection where lions lie down like lambs (what would they eat?) and the angles and cherubim and seraphim rotate in endless idiotic circles, like clockwork...the Paradise of which I write and wish to praise is with us yet, the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand."

Said Ed Abbey

Me. I'm here, while I can still stand...iron hip and all.

I want to live the way I want to live from now on.

2011-08-06T21:47:00.002-06:00

During summer term, we failed to reach the last paragraph of “The Road” by  Cormac McCarthy.

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Living among the beetle killed trees reminds me of that “which could not be put back.”

I actually hug trees: Ponderosa Trees are my favorite because they smell of Vanilla mixed with Butterscotch.

But, these trees, these trees look like fire wood...

The sun will rise again, but its angle will be different than it was today, its light will come from a different place.

2011-08-03T14:16:00.002-06:00

In every attempt at normalcy, at playing the game, at appearing as expected, I'm rejected. The rejection in solid, acrid and mean.

"In the beginning there was only man and nature. Men came bearing crosses and drove the heathen to the fringes of the earth"

I'm being driven to the fringes, but I can't blame the Christians. Actually, sure I can, I can blame them for everything...

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time,” said Edward Abbey, whose advice on how to live is only as potent as how he actually lived. Potent.

The question is; Am I living my life in such away as to be ready to die at any moment, including this one? Or that one, or any of these moments that I waste

I won’t be ready to die until I find some measure peace.

“There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.” --Black Elk

Peace between nations, a nice thought, I wish I could accomplish the peace in the nations of my heart.

2011-08-01T12:30:00.002-06:00

I can't decide if we are eternal or if the 70 some years we have in this state is just...it. The answer to this question might actually change, in a dramatic way, how I live my life. If we are eternal, then I could quit my job and spend three months considering a wild rose, or "the lillies of the field..."

But, we might not be eternal.

August. We will have hot, hot weather...

But, smoky memories from Autumn are haunting me like ghosts. A can feel my blood change as the air glimmers. It is time to drag ourselves out of the gutters of the world and seek shelter in the Highlands. The hunt is afoot and beauty is maturing...

2011-07-31T19:41:00.003-06:00

We, here at the Lost Coyote, have wasted the weekend, in the flint and steel intersection of the natural and artificial world. There is loudness where man-made and nature collide.

"All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God." --Thomas Browne

I spent part of Saturday wandering Huntington Creek without a fishing pole, or rod, of any kind. (I caught only a few less fish than I usually do.)

I wandered an unknown streambed. High water invented a new place. The usual beaver damns had been removed, blown away, changed to memories, a tangle of limbs and this one lawn chair. As I walked back to my car, I thought about the sorry ass that, had previously, come to rest in the lost chair.

Some of us have no place to sit.

2011-07-27T14:01:00.002-06:00

Is it more important to be nice or to be right?

Forget that.

It’s a dumb question, we all know the answer…

I’ve decided. I no longer think that Canal Canyon belongs to me.

(I thought it did for a long time. I’m in the canyon nearly everyday, never going more than three days without checking things up there generally. This includes wintertime. My tracks may not reach the upper canyon in January, but I love the loneliness when everyone else in sitting near heat vents. So, the fact that I’m in the canyon more than anyone else, made me think that I owned the canyon.)

I was wrong.

I think, now, that Canal Canyon owns me.

The lightning thought struck me as I approached a favorite meadow, is fleeting breath after an uphill climb.

The meadow in question is so important to me as to be on the short list of possible places I will, eventually, be buried.

In this sacred place where I've walked with ghosts in the semi-dark, where I’ve felt the hot breath of wild creatures on the back of my neck and where I’ve communed with the ideas of eternity.

I took twenty-plus pictures of that meadow yesterday evening. Pictures of the trembling aspen leaves and open to the sky wild rose and the thunderhead developing and the seeded grass and the wise evergreen and the skeleton trees who didn’t endure the snow as well as we did.

Pictures are wanting, not remembering…

2011-07-18T10:58:00.002-06:00

So, for the twentieth time, I'm off fishing. Thanks, to Adam. He showed me this dead fish near a poorly concealed fire pit near the shore of Deep Creek Lake. Fresh wrappers, flies a buzz and a dead fresh frozen in death strain.

I will write no more about how seeing this waste of a life in a beautiful setting, a place of spirit, affected me, personally...

The problem is this: I love the places I "used" fish. They are beautiful, spiritual, a balm to my sad soul.

A fishing pole in hand, changes completely my perception of these places. (Having a high powered rifle in hand changes, in the same way, my perception of an alpine canyon where elk live, eat and breed.)

I expect to see these places anew, with new eyes, as time goes by.

I hope I'm not too far crazy....

2011-07-07T12:54:00.002-06:00

I have left my mark, and I seldom venture out to the places I've never been...it's a problem...

In less than a week, we'll push my uncle's sheep through the insane amount of snow that remains above 9000 feet. Dirty, heavy, aged snow...

I can't live like this anymore. I'm going crazy. As I walked into South Fork, my mind jumped between looking at wildflowers and picking good places to ambush and slaughter deer. Sometimes, I thought of the trail as, and I quote, "wicked singletrack," for my mountain bike and sometimes I tried to figure if the little buck, working to grow horns, was within bow range. I know how I want to think, but can I live and think that way?

2011-07-02T10:54:00.002-06:00

Listening to my kids read the poetry of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry in the smoke of a sage a juniper fire was one of the best things I've ever done. Spirit and smoke and stars and poems...

Gary Snyder:

How Poetry Comes to Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

2011-07-02T10:48:00.001-06:00

I’m working to process a week-long vacation, a trip, a search for beauty.
Where?
Right where I live.
For this vacation, I owe thanks to the road-weary traveler from a far-away land. She had never been to Calf Creek, Spring City or the dark streets of Salt Lake City in the middle of the night.
Walking away from the emerald pool below Calf Creek Falls at mid-morning, before the invasion, before the hot times, as the crowds arrived…they’d ask:
“Where are you from?”
“Paris,” I thought, or “Spring City,” maybe…
No.
“Um,” she hesitated in confusion due to the silly question, “we are FROM the falls.”
Sitting in my house, the one that sits in the town where I grew up; the town where I spent most of my days, where I wasted most of my time. She was stuck by light through dusty shades that fell on the walls of my tired living space.
She was taken by the town’s horses, those horses I ignore every day. They are beautiful, they are tame, she feed them apples, she loved them and she believed that they loved her.
They probably did, I mean, why not? And, who knows the mind of a horse?
Floods in the middle part of the country delayed the train that would come to take her away from us. We wandered the emptying streets of Utah’s biggest town squinting in windows of empty shops and crowded bars looking for peace, love and beauty.
My dear wife, our dear friend and I shared a night together, floating in-between life and death, fading in and out of reality, disembodied spirits damned to wander the Earth, if not the Earth, then at least, those dark city streets, together.
I’ve not seen the places I’ve seen so many times…so beautifully...

2011-06-20T11:10:00.003-06:00

Mud and water in Canal Canyon
Low clouds cover June's Blizzard
Rain here, snow there

The guilt must melt like summer snow
To be replaced with love and beauty
The big guilt
The re-birth

May red blood dust conceal dark selfishness
Blood, water and fire of rebirth
Then, ashes

May ash fall at my feet as I stand in circle
With Friends, Lovers, Strangers and Kin

2011-05-17T09:36:00.003-06:00

The smell of blooming cactus during a desert rainstorm is keeping me alive, it's air to a drowning man...Why is it easier to be depressed than to be happy?

Rain in the desert. The most dangerous beauty...well, except the human female. Our hero, John Wayne said, "I fear no man, but women scare the hell out of me, I've always been afraid of them."

The green of fern and blue of water among the red of desert rock.

2011-05-12T13:43:00.000-06:00

Swahili warriors sing: “Life has meaning only in the struggle. Triumph or defeat are in the hands of the Gods. So let us celebrate the struggle!”

I don't even know what I'm fighting for anymore. I don't really know what victory will look like.

The Southern Utah politician says, “These backpackers, 'dirt-baggers', they come down here to see the 'wilderness' and, well they come with a pair of shorts and a twenty dollar bill, they stay for two weeks and they don't change either one.”

That's really funny.

I go down there with a pair of shorts and five dollars and, well, it doesn't really matter what I do...but, I'm searching for a place, struggling for a place, free from the influence of the world of money and progress and competition and such.

"You are out there on the edge of the human; even as you long for the warmth, the noise, the comfort and the reassurance of the world, something else draws you farther out, into the unknown. The cash and the credit cards in your pocket will not help you." --From, Bone Games, by Rob Schultheis

2011-05-09T14:39:00.002-06:00

This is a picture of snow, the first snow that fell in the high country last August. Some of that snow is now melting and filling the creek beds and dry washes in Sanpete valley.

Snow restricts travel on some mountain roads East of Spring City into and through July. It covers the highest peaks and falls upon maturing Blue Bells in August, weeks before Aspen leaves begin to change.

I like the first snow, but I really like when it runs pass my house and town and canyons in its muddy and violent escape.

And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord!
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron

2011-05-06T09:10:00.002-06:00

"Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking."
--Black Elk

I tend to visit places where Elk live and where they sleep and dream. Elk, it seems, have the same taste in scenery as I do, though I have yet to believe we share dreams.

Do I believe that you'd believe me if I told you I caught a fish out of Lower Fish Creek. I guess not. Because, as this fish was gasping for breath, I dragged it right on shore and took its picture. Just so you'd know, that I caught a fish...and now I know that you know. So, there you go.

2011-04-29T11:51:00.002-06:00

“Being and non-being create each other,” --The Tao

The term animism comes from the Latin word anima meaning breath or soul. It's an old idea, most likely dating to the Paleolithic age. The idea that a soul or spirit exists in every object, even if inanimate, appeals to me.
A British anthropologist Sir Edward Burnett Tylor in "Primitive Culture" (1871) defined animism "as a general belief in spiritual beings and considered 'a minimum definition of religion.'"
Here in Utah there is, only one REAL religion.

Recently, this statement was made by LDS (Mormon) Presiding Bishop H. David Burton and recorded in the Salt Lake Tribune: (http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/home/51497060-76/church-downtown-ogden-lake.html.csp)
“This church gave birth to this city, it wasn’t the other way around”
We created this place, this place had no part in creating us? This place has nothing to do with who we are? That did not hold with me...

I recently began me latest re-reading of “Heartsblood: Hunting, Spirituality and Wildness in America” by David Petersen. A work of personal scripture for me, I carry it in a little black bag with a handle, etc.

In that book, Petersen quotes Jose Ortega y Gasset, “I am I and my surroundings.”

That seems right to me. I am who I am because of the spirit of the places where I live and visit. The places, where I love, wander, bleed, weep and eventually, where I will die.

I, believe that the places make me, or rather, we work together to make each other. But maybe, place and me and the other things that share that space are all the same spirit. Now THAT'S what I believe...

I was turned on to animism in the books of David Petersen, he was introduced to animism by his mentor, Paul Shepard, who wrote:
“Perhaps we do not need new religious, economic, technological, ideological, aesthetic, or philosophical revolutions. We may not need to start at the top and uproot political systems, turn lifeways on their heads, emulate hunters and gatherers or naturalists, or try to live lives of austere privation or tribal organization. The civilized ways inconsistent with human maturity will themselves wither in a world where children move normally through their ontogeny.”

And I do hunt, but I hope I'm doing it right...

Brooke Williams wrote in his book, “Halflives,”
“Hunting forges deep obligations, people to people and people to the gods. It weaves a bond between the hunter and wild landscape so pure and complete that the line where one ends and the other begins is invisible.”

Hunting, place, family, spirit, sex, trees, religion, teaching, rocks, eating and death, it's all connected, it's all the same.

There is no line.

2011-04-27T11:34:00.003-06:00

“Our ancestors knew more than we do: not only how to endure cold, blunt knives with their naked flesh, dance on pinpoints, but how to skin a flint, read buffalo in the flying scrolls of birds, whittle a flute out of your own fingerbone and play rain out of a dry sky...”
--Rob Schultheis, Bone Games

I teach school for a living, for the money, for the money I use to “grow” the economy, that's the reason I teach; but I teach none of the things Schultheis speaks of in this short passage.

In my heart, in my genome, in my blood, there is a lone voice crying. It thinks we should be teaching students the things we are NOT.

Here's part of a letter I wrote as a member of a committee studying the impacts of retention in our school district:

When retention is used as a consequence for NOT passing CORE classes then the teachers don't have to accept the responsibility for their students. The current middle school retention policy puts ALL the responsibility on the students. Students are still children, and not developed as adults. We don't let Middle School aged children drive cars, even though some of them may be physically able, we don't let them because they have not developed cognitively the reasoned responsibility to do so. Giving students all the responsibility MAY allow teachers who MAY assign what they want to metaphorically “sit back” and leave it up to the students to fail or pass. Teachers MAY feel that they no longer need to motivate, because if the kids don't do the work, they will be retained. Students, MAY feel trapped, knowing that the teachers carry little or none of the burden of student failure. This has the POTENTIAL to levy untold and unmeasurable damage on students at a time when nurturing, relationships and growth are premium.

My opinions don't matter to anyone.

Yesterday, I drifted aimlessly in Canal Canyon, searching for a way out...it's up there, I just haven't the physical or mental capacity to find it. I'm going to go back...and when I find it, you won't have to worry about me and my opinions any more.

It's not as sad as it sounds. I believe with optimism what Ed Abbey said: “There is a deep, abiding, unshakable satisfaction in a life of complete failure.”

2011-04-18T17:47:00.000-06:00

This sign is an important personal landmark. Sanpete County has been my home for a lifetime, but just one. When Amy and I were going to Snow College, before we were married, we'd go for these long rides, burning dollar gas like it'd always be that cheap. Once, I took her over the mountain, passed this sign, where we made silly comments about leaving the county, together...

Winter is a long time leaving...when you are this high...

I'd have rather been bloodied from a fight with a Bear or Montain Cat, but the picker bush I fell into reminded me that there was blood flowing...like the sap, that flows again in awakening plants in the canyons.

2011-03-22T11:57:00.000-06:00

Hooray, Spring!

Looks like snow is a'coming!

I'm cold. I'm looking out a window into the blood teeth of a heavy sky.

The Lost Coyote stayed close to home this weekend. The diluted moments of direct sunshine were powerless against the daylong south wind. I live for moments of sunshine.

I wandered with purpose, as if I had someplace to go. There really wasn't anyplace place to be. I travelled the inner roads, at-heart roads, in a pace of annoyance.

I'd follow elk tracks for a bit, then lose my mind and angrily head of in a tangent of fear.

I needed perspiration. I'm sick of heaters and thermostats even the nice crackling heat of a fire won't warm me, anymore. I had a primal craving for the heat that comes from inside-out...you know?

I walk in circles.

“The world always works in circles and everything tries to be round” -Black Elk

2011-03-07T15:06:00.003-07:00

When the Clint Eastwood, “Man-With-No-Name” says:

'I've never seen so many men wasted so badly'

In The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he is watching a bloody, human engagement over a bridge during the Civil War.

He and Tuco, i.e. “The Ugly,” blow that bridge to Hell, thus giving the men on both sides nothing more to fight over. Clint then takes the iconic cigar from his lips and holds it to the lips of a dying soldier whose last earthly breath is the exhale of tobacco smoke.

I have the intense, unshakable urge to blow my bridge to Hell, metaphorically speaking...I'm sure...

Ed Abbey says, “I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over your enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators, I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.”

And I think of my daily engagement with, “desk bound people.”

“I need everyone to sit in their desks,” I have said.

“Guys, before we move on, I need you all to sit and stare at me,” I say to the students, onetime or a few.

I judge that I'm creating people who are tethered with chain and steel to the confines of “civil” society...

Black Elk, a contemporary of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, dictated his autobiography, recounting Lakota history and traditions in an effort to preserve them in the book, “Black Elk Speaks.”

He said, “One should pay attention to even the smallest crawling creature, for these too may have a valuable lesson to teach us.”

Who's doing the teaching here, me or the kids?

2011-02-28T11:46:00.002-07:00

Do you ever feel like opening yourself to the beauty and sadness in the world is a great big mistake. I always say, "that hurts my heart..." when I see or hear something really sad or really pretty.

The only way i can avoid the "pain" is by watching TV or playing my video game. That's as honest as I can be...

I'm very, very sick of snow. Adam, my friend, told me that he can not conceive of a world without snow. It's sad.

Of the sixty sixth graders I teach each day, I wonder how many of them have walked through the desert with their parents. It's not that my kids are that much better off, my kid's parents are poor.

We have a terrible society, I think we did a bad job, it's not working out...

But, then again, there are still a couple beautiful places.

2011-02-07T13:09:00.002-07:00

I’d like to think I’ve killed my last animal with a high powered rifle, or a less powerful,

black powder rifle

Actually, no one uses black powder any more

Pyrodex

A modern, clean, more effeciant, black powder substitute

I shopped for recurve bows on the internet this morning

Hunting for a weapon to hunt with

Hunting for a way of hunting that would allow me to live with myself

Thousands of Utahns drove to the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City this weekend

We all payed money, to have our names entered into a lottery type draw for hunts for different animals and areas around the state

Then, we all went to eat at fast food places

I've never been more ashamed

2011-02-01T11:39:00.002-07:00

Last night, I dreamed a memory. I was sitting on a bitter-smelling, fallen quaky in Big Basin of Black Canyon with a weapon on my lap. The wind rustled the yellowing grass, and in that wind was a kiss from the winter to come.

That kiss was the birth of a relationship with the season that is ongoing. Dreams of my mountain adventures continue to haunt me as I struggle to sleep during the dark nights we endure.

The pictures I took during the storm may provide hope that Black Canyon will be there in the Spring. It has every year of my life, but these are strange days, and I am all out of Faith...

From where I sit, easy in the valley, I can not see Black Canyon at all.

I can't express in words how badly I want to be up there right now...

Electronic representations of the first snowstorm remind me of a sleeping world far from this one. There was no kiss in the morning's wind today.

It was a slap.

But, the sun is on the move...

2011-01-24T15:09:00.002-07:00

I can't write. I told the students that they can't write, "One reason I feel this way is that..." I told them, they have to write, "One reason I feel this way is..."

They told me that they have to make it look like (that) it has enough words so (that) I'd give them a good grade.

Canal Canyon, on snowshoes, in January, the month that refuses to die. It's sad to be this sad about the things I can't change. What a wuss.

The fresh air, the unfrozen water, the empty canyon, these keep me alive, for whatever it's worth, during this time of year.

2011-01-10T11:35:00.003-07:00

Background: True Grit was my Grandpa's favorite movie. Watching it with him was FORMATIVE. There are now two movies that tell the story of a girl, Maddie Ross, whose father is killed in cold blood. The girl hires a U.S. Marshal to track the killer in the Indian Nations.

This is not a "true" story.

It is not "historical."

Here is some history. I ate pancakes this morning.

It's true, it's historical, but it is in no way inspiring or significant...

When ever I watch the climactic scene, the one where Rooster rides alone, at four outlaws, firing a gun in each hand...I get chills.

That little idea, the idea that even if you are numbered or out gunned, if you ride hard enough at a problem and shoot fast enough, you'll be fine, you may lose your horse, but you'll be fine...

That little idea has got me where I am today...right where I am today...

2010-12-29T18:10:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, we'd sometimes run into other people from Spring City in the mountains east of town.

They'd say, "We saw that white Ford on the road there and knew you'd be around here somewhere..."

People knew each other by the trucks they kept for decades.

Now, any urbanite with a better job than me can afford a forty thousand dollar truck to pull thier fifty thousand dollar trailer and ATV combo into the hills while listening to satilite radio and basking in duel climate control.

From 1987 to 1992, before the rebuild, we had to park in a downhill direction to push start dad's truck.

I own a 1989 Toyota truck. It's a peice of crap. The speed-o-meter doesn't work, it stopped with over 250,000 miles on the odometer...

I kind of like it.

2010-12-14T09:16:00.003-07:00

Thistle Creek wanders in and out of private property, as if it can't read the "No Trespassing" signs, right along Highway 89, between Utah and Sanpete Counties, as if it doesn't mind the traffic. As with most of the places I visit, it's ignored. Actually, Thistle Creek has been discovered. The "re-introduction" of cutthroat trout in Diamond Fork has ruined that as a fishery. Fly-fishermen have been forced to a less spectacular, less popular stretch of creek.

Henry David says, "Alas! how little does the memory of these human inhabitants enhance the beauty of the landscape!"

I was interested in not only the landscape. but the creek itself, a creek that houses and protects Brown Trout, a fish that is not native, not "managed" and not struggling to survive.

I don't know why, but I was glad that there were no other fishermen who saw what I saw Saturday morning.

Snow melting in scrub sage and steamy air floating above clear water.

Drops of dew hung tight to naked arms and legs of trees asleep.

There is beauty all around.

2010-12-10T09:51:00.005-07:00

I stopped for an older gentleman, a hitch hiker, wearing a thin denim jacket and slick bottomed cowboy boots, near the newest Mormon church, the one being built just north of town. You know, the one right next to the power substation and the highway that takes us to our jobs. The old, new Mormon Church has been in use for only a hundred years (there's older churches than it, but they aren't being used as churches any more).

So, I picked up this hitchhiker right near where the “Visitors Welcome” sign will be posted on the security fence that is built to protect the newest church from hitchhikers.

He told me that he grew up in Lindon Utah, that his address was just a rural route number and that the house he grew up in was torn down and replace with a strip mall. He told me that he'd lived in Boise, Portland, Salt Lake, Utah County, Cheyenne, and near Seattle and that Spring City was, “it” so far as he could see. He has no money, his wife left him, his kids ignore him and he was walking down this road to get to a Chevron station twenty miles north to meet with a guy who was going to rent him a one bedroom cabin for a couple hundred dollars a month...

He wanted to live in a small, forgotten place and just “be” as he said, just, “live and work and be...” he talked slow, as if he really meant the things he said, as if he thought about what he was saying long before he said it. As he talked, I'd glance past him to the east at Haystack Mountain with it's elk herd and fresh water springs and steep trails, and the Bluffs along the Skyline, and the Horseshoe...

I began to think that Spring City, my home town since birth, might not be that bad of a place after-all.

2010-11-30T15:34:00.002-07:00

There are places in Utah where, during this time of year, the sun never comes up, a constant dawn followed by a long dark...

We walked the bottom of Red Canyon, the one near the Central Utah town, Sigard. A mostly ignored piece of Utah Wilderness.

The tourists stay away by the thousands.

We walked on and off an ATV trail, in and out of the small creek.

Light at winter angles animated the rock at the top of canyon walls. Residual light glowed and caught in the ice at the canyon floor, spoke softly with the freeze/thaw creek.

Dark lines and heavy contrasts sat stoic in preparation for the worst of winter yet to come.

2010-11-17T13:36:00.005-07:00

“Avoid the world. It's just a lot of dust and drag and means nothing in the end.”

--Jack Kerouac

It's so hard Jack.

I leave the world, well, as much as a father of three and public school teacher can.

The storm has been blown away by a chill wind and I'm slipping into a search for peace in Canal Canyon. There will be snow and mud and cold and ice and I will be the only person up there.

The hunts are over and the horses are put away.

It's the beginning of my favorite time in the canyons, the lonely time.

I will not be alone.

The birds, some of them, stay and sing even on the coldest of winter days. Tracks left by predator and prey will trouble the settled snow, leaving a story that I try to read with effort like a 1st grader in one of the 'pull out classes.'

Special Education.

Usually, I get home from work with the weight of the 120, 5th and 6th graders on my back...

“Mr. Syme, I made a bet with him, I told him that if he did his victory dance in front of the class I'd give him ten dollars, I don't have ten dollars and my mom won't give it to me and if I tell her I made a bet she'll be mad and he just keeps asking for it and he says that if I don't give it to him that he'll beat my little brother up...”

“My dad slept on the couch last night...”

“I didn't get breakfast this morning...”

So, I sit on my couch and I don't usually get up until supper or bed time...but not tonight...tonight I'm walking away from all of that, and into wind...but then...

...as I leave the school, I see her sitting there, the girl with dim eyes, light-less eyes...

“My mom isn't here,” she says...

“But dude, it's like four, school's been over for an hour.”

“Sometimes she forgets me, can you take me home?”

I don't respond, I just stand and stare for a while, then I mumble something about “the law” and sit on the bricks next to her. Those where cold bricks. She talks and I half listen, thinking about the dark canyon in my heart...

Her mom finally does remember.

There was no light left in the canyon, it was waiting for me in the clouds.

2010-11-09T14:22:00.003-07:00

See, the thing is, his book is up-side-down...he, he...

The thought that NINETY-NINE PERCENT of all species that have ever lived have gone extinct, including every one of our hominid ancestors has made me reconsider everything about the value of humanity in whole and as individual units.

I just finished a book, a very good children's book, a children's book that adults should read, called “Walk Two Moons” with a group of 6th graders. It was written by Sharon Creech.

“It seems to me that we can't explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can't fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside us is something we can manage, something that isn't as awful as it had first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot LIKE US: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.”

The book covers death and fear and insecurity and most of the bad things in the world and hope. Thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle, proud of her country roots and the "Indian-ness in her blood," travels from Ohio to Idaho with her eccentric grandparents. Along the way, she tells them of the story of Phoebe Winterbottom, who received mysterious messages, who met a "potential lunatic," and whose mother disappeared.   Beneath Phoebe's stories Salamanca's own story and that of her mother, who left on April morning for Idaho, promising to return before the tulips bloomed. Sal's mother has not, however, returned, and the trip to Idaho takes on a growing urgency as Salamanca hopes to get to Idaho in time for her mother's birthday and bring her back, despite her father's warning that she is “fishing in the air”.   

The assignment, the original assignment, my idea of an assignment was a silent reading deal where I'd read ahead and then write questions for the students to answer as they did their daily reading.

This worked very poorly.

Kids have to be taught to read, I'm not talking decoding here, but they need to be taught to learn to love reading, to love the characters in the book, to love the language authors use. Kids don't need to be taught to read to answer the questions, kids get enough of that...

I figure they can read to answer questions in college...

So we read the book together, with no questions and no answers.

It was pretty cool.

I have some of the coolest kids I've ever taught...

I told them that the title of the story had to be, “Jack and the Magic Beans”

Some kid wrote:

“Jack, a.k.a the semi automatic super ugly, fun to play with, not the brightest, kid with a wart on his nose that looks like many moons, twenty-one year old baby in troll years, with ears as big as Dumbo's, who eats fresh (well, microwave fresh) worms, that can write in lower and upper case letters even though it doesn't look it, who can find treasure a.k.a beans that he thinks are magic because they can blow him up, the guy who doesn't have any friends because they died in a nuclear war, well that's his excuse for not having friends, that's what he told his mom, that guy, Jack, got hit by a car and died.”

So, do you now see what I mean?

2010-11-05T11:35:00.000-06:00

Every day between now and the big snow feels to me, a wasted day.

“I know my limitations, and I was climbing way, way beyond them. One small part of me trembled with fear and fatigue, cried out to be rescued, to be whisked away to any place other then this bleak precipice. The rest, confident, full of an unsane joy, revelled in the animal dance of survival, admired the brilliant crystals in the granite, the drunken calligraphy of ice crystals… was totally possessed by the act of mountaineering, rejoiced in the immense vertigo of the place. It was like certain dreams I have had…”
“Bone Games” by Rob Shultheis

I wake in fits of panic, physical anxiety. The young girl hit in front of the school, dragged past the “Tobacco Free Zone” sign, she will never dream again. It all makes me want to live in the mountains, sleep in caves, drink from clear streams and eat raw meat.

I don’t know if I can hunt anymore.

I haven’t worn socks in a week.

I wonder if the people are looking at my feet.

Do they still think I’m a man?

I miss the mountains.

2010-10-26T16:03:00.002-06:00

If Spring City Canyon has been closed due to this last storm, then my access to Black Canyon is severed until at least mid-June.

Black Canyon is far away, but sometimes it's very close, sometimes I dream of the grass and trees and the dark, pine covered side-hills that glare at the bright Aspen covered sloped across the canyon. I dream of Elk and Ravens' calls, and Wolves I can't see.

Deer hide in the ledges and bluffs that crown each basin and the Elk run in the bottoms, near the spring creeks...

Elk and Deer have been killed in the canyon this year, their meat rests in the freezers of my brothers and I.

I hope that when we cook and eat in gratitude, the voices that flaot on the canyon breezes will rest in my traveling heart again.

The pictures I took during the storm may provide hope that Black Canyon will be there in the Spring. It has every year of my life, but these are strange days, and I am fresh out of Faith...

2010-10-12T08:46:00.002-06:00

Royal Allred 'Old Royal' carved his name near the site of the saw mill in Buck Basin of Black Canyon. His kin, Roger Allred was my first Elementary Principal. He, along with my Grandpa on my mother's side inspired my Dad's career in education. Now I teach school and wander hills with names of folks who affected my life all about me.

Their ghosts haunt me.

I could almost hear the noise of a century old saw mill as I kicked around the leavings in Buck. I have no concept for what really happened here. It looks to have been work.

A bear den was cut and a cozy in the biggest pile of slash. Empty, I checked.

"I might live here," I thought, "If things go wrong, or if they go right..."

Then, an elk screamed a call that brought me to my senses, pulled me back out of the past with a team of matched mules, and I wandered off, down through the creek, out of Buck, back toward a truck, parked miles away.

2010-10-05T10:23:00.002-06:00

From where I sit, easy in the valley, there appears to be rain and snow and mud and fog and blood and tears in the mountain basins above Spring City.

I can't express in words how badly I want to be up there right now...

From here, it looks as if the storm has beaten most of the colored leaves to the ground, a bittersweet, and inevitable occurrence. They were beautiful this year...

The colors fought the dust during a desiccated Autumn. Ah, the new road, we'll soon see if this was a mistake...

My Grandpa told me that he used to drive his Pontiac up to The Well in Canal Canyon...that's just a foot trail now...nothing is forever, I guess.

After giving up on hunting forever and becoming a vegetarian, the storm has re-stirred something in my soul, or at least my bones, a earthly baptism, Tabu-la rasa, a clean slate...

The sound of an ornery Bull Elk that cuts through the fog and pat of a crisp rain fall is heart-stopping. One HAS to stop and listen, there is no other choice...

2010-09-28T13:42:00.000-06:00

U.M. Creek originates from the broken ground on the top of Fish Lake Mountain and it ends up in the Fremont River and then, on to the Colorado.

It flows beautifully in the highlands as most things do, beautiful until it rolls and tumbles down to where the people live, where they need the water...

We fished with no idea of success...the best way to fish...

Then Adam cooked eggs and I read and we breathed and sat and drove about and came home...flowing a bit ourselves...

It was decided, over a year ago, that the Utah 2010 Muzzleloader hunt would begin on Wednesday the 29th of September. They didn't know then that it would be so hot on Wednesday the 29th of September and that a deer shot would spoil before it hit the ground...

We hunt dates not animals...

I don't think we hunt at all, anymore. Our prehistoric, primitive, ancestors did, they did hunt. They needed meat protein for a brain that was expanding...

I won't glorify them beyond this simple equation...meat equals a bigger brain. That is enough glory for me...

We no longer need meat as a singular source of protein, but some of us need to chase game animals in order to feel human...

...and, some of us don't.

Me, I fish in beautiful places...and often fail...

I hunt away from the crowds, with no intention of success.

Don't worry. I've killed before. I've washed blood and bile from my hands in icy spring water. I've ripped the heart and lungs from dead animal carcasses at my feet.

That was then and this is today. Today I pray for a chase throughout the beautiful places of my world.

2010-09-26T09:21:00.001-06:00

Abbey on NBC from Eric Temple on Vimeo.

2010-09-21T12:10:00.002-06:00

This is a picture of some kids my friend, Kato Paul, teaches in his school in Africa:

I've been telling my students that they need to 'write pictures' so we practiced by writing pictures of our classroom. This one kid wrote:

“In the top left corner of this room there's a window, but all you can see is the curtain covering it. If you get at just the right angle, you can see pass it. It makes me lose all hope and my head fills with the cold feeling of despair. You know the window is there, but there is only one possible way of looking out it. I think the government designed it as a form of torture...”

I'll probably quit teaching now...I'll probably leave society and move into a crude shelter in the wilderness and live out my days.

2010-09-17T14:47:00.000-06:00

In the back of my mind, always simmering is the idea of a world like this:

We wanted to blast the world free of history.... picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course. You'll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five degree angle. We'll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what's left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against the bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night.
"Imagine," Tyler said, "stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you'll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you'll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you'll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you'll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles." ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club, Chapter 16

I hunt and I fish and I maintain this low level of physical fitness so that when what ever happens to end civilization and society occurs, I will be ready...

Abbey says:

When the cities are gone...and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix, Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe freemen and wildwomen on horses, free women and wild men can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom--goddamit! Herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! Banjos! Steel guitars! by the light of the reborn moon!--by God--Yes!

2010-09-08T14:39:00.001-06:00

There was a stiff breeze, blowing change on the upper plateau of the Colorado.

All the rivulets and springs that I stumble over on the far side of the Mountain end up in the Colorado. Actually, that's a lie. A big lie that we continue to preach to make ourselves feel that much better, the truth is, that water ends up on a few crops and a bunch of Kentucky Bluegrass before it reaches the river.

It was warm, much too warm for hunting, so I sat in the shade of an Evergreen and read some David Peterson:

Wildness, from a biological point of view, is not a place but a stated of being; it is a condition of unfettered ecological self determination, free of human manipulation...

He's right, Hell if he ain't...

Now. What's more natural than a human? Nothing. We've evolved and grown along with the Bison and Elk and Wolf and Deer, since the end of the last ice age...but, unlike them, we PROGRESSED beyond our own nature to this sick society we live in today...

Will we die when all the wild places, those opportunities for “unfettered ecological self determination” are taken away? Maybe not. But I won't want to live anymore...

Ed Abbey says, “I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over your enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators, I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards”

To Ed: I'm gonna try...

2010-09-03T11:04:00.002-06:00

QUESTIONNAIRE By Wendell Berry

1. How much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons.

2. For the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with yoru favorite evil acts of hatred.

3. What sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines, and works of art you would most willingly destroy.

4. In the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without.

5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name please the children you would be willing to kill.

2010-08-30T12:01:00.002-06:00

At 6:30 in the morning, Dave, THE Dave from Dave's Country Trading Post in Sigurd Utah, is sitting at the counter, on a worn stool, drinking coffee, flipping through a farm implements catalog.

He rubs his long grey beard, as if he really is in the market for a new bailer. Then he adjusts his curled, brown cowboy hat and looks toward the sky, figuring...

Adam and I walk in, sit down...Dave doesn't look up, doesn't even acknowledge...we sit down and look at the hundred-some old, worn, sweated-in, wide-brimmed, apparently retired hats that hang from the ceiling beams and walls about his place...dust and coffee...the second amendment posted on the wall...

“Where you from?”

“Sanpete...”

“Part?”

“Spring City”

“Where you going?”

“Deer Creek, Green Lake, maybe, if it doesn't rain...”

He sips his coffee in silence, time stops...

Five, ten, twenty minutes, it don't matter. A flip of the page.

“What can I make you?”

“Eggs, sausage...”

“O.K. I got it, what about you...”

“Same,” Adam said.

“Coffee's over there, help yourself just like the sign says...”

As he cooks, he shouts out names of people from Sanpete, most a generation or two ahead of me, but all sound familiar, he serves more food than either of had eaten for breakfast all week, his eggs, are good eggs...

We made small talk, covering the topics of the day. Concerning a mad hunt for a cop killer in Southern Utah he said, “I hope they never find him, stuff like that makes things interesting...”

2010-08-27T09:38:00.001-06:00

I sat on a log.

I was tired and weak. I'd gone too far, too soon...

I heard an animal bounding toward form below the high terrace where I rested.

Thoughts:

“That has to be a deer”

“It's probably a buck”

“I should get my bow ready”

I sat in silence as a tall, dark and wide, five by five buck stopped just feet behind me, burning my back with an electric stare...I felt hot breath on my neck.

I twitched a tense hand toward my bow, and he jumped in what seemed to me one bound, ending up 150 yards from where I sat. This was his world, his rules...and I was out classed. His eyes, they were crazy eyes...

“That beast out there is already home, while I have yet to find my way,” David Petersen from his book 'On the Wild Edge.'

2010-08-20T12:44:00.002-06:00

The anticipation at the beginning of the Bow Hunt is a little different. The odds of killing a Mule Deer in the mountains they hide with archery equipment are so small as to not even be mentioned. Yet, by mentioning that I'm bow hunting, I've put myself out there, on that wispy limb, in the place where everyone gets to say, “did you get you deer?...because so-and-so got his deer, he said that he shot it off the road, he saw lots of deer, I was up there myself just driving around and I saw like five bucks, you didn't shot one, that's interesting, it seems like there are lots of deer up there...”

I don't plan on shooting anything, just so everyone out there knows it...

I plan on getting into shape, so that when the elk hunt, the real hunt, starts I can get my broken body into the canyons where elk live. Those places far from the road and deep in the mountains, places where the rule of law and the gossip of those who never walk about with primitive weapons, those who never have to search for the protein needed to maintain their human brain, won't tread. I plan on wandering the autumn woods in an attempt to get my mind straight. But I don't plan on shooting anything...

The Swahili warriors sing: “Life has meaning only in the struggle. Triumph or defeat are in the hands of the Gods. So let us celebrate the struggle!”

If the Gods allow a deer in my path, within fifty yards, if the Gods guide an arrow through the light and wind into the soft heart of said deer, then the credit will be theirs, not mine.

2010-08-12T17:01:00.002-06:00

we see things that others don't

stopping in the shade of the ponderosa, to nap on the boulder mountian and listen to the red squirrel’s angry squeel, I'm not alone at all

I sling feathered jigs at clear water that flows in and out of high mountains and most human people don't show up, no one ever does

the world as we know it is not as we know it, or as I know it...in fact, I don't understand the world at all...I have no sence of reality

it's my opinion, that the most important activity that we engage in is preparing the body to chase the animals we eat

nothing can be so beautiful as death said walt whitman, in an attempt to understand the realities of the world as he saw it

as the deer and elk that live above my home in this mountain valley prepare for the insanity that is only a week from being dropped on their heads...shiny new dodge trucks and four wheeled motor cycles...on the heads of those who sleep in the hottest part of the day

I can't join the hunters and their trucks, my truck is far too old and rusty

I'll limp away, and parallel everyone, in my own lonley reality, with my weapons and water and food on my back

2010-08-10T12:42:00.003-06:00

Did anyone else feel Autumn in the air yesterday...the wind whispered a change...make no mistake...

I chase and harass all sorts of beautiful creatures in the Fall.

Deer, elk, bald eagles...women

And Brook Trout from a jewel of a lake called “Little Grassy”:

Chasing the Earth's creatures has been done by humans for a long, long time. The Tarahumara of Northern Mexico live today much like they did generations ago. consider this, from my favorite single page in any of the books I've ever read, page 27, in Scott Carrier's book, “Running After Antelope":

“1990
I found an ethnography, dated 1935, on the Tarahumara, on of the tribes my brother said can run down big game.

The Tarahumara keep the deer constantly on the move. Only occasionally does he get a glimpse on his quarry, but follows it unerring through his on canny ability to read the tracks. The Indian chases the deer until the creature falls from exhaustion, often with its hooves completely worn away. It is then throttled by the man or killed by the dogs.

But then this was written by a couple of anthropologists who didn't actually go out with the Indians, so there's no way to know whether this is actually true. There's no doubt, though, that the Tarahumara are crazy about running. Another ethnography (Bernard Fontana's 1989 “The Tarahumara”) describes races where a group of men from a village eat peyote and smear themselves with white grease and run as a team, tossing a leather ball the size of a hackeysack down a trail with their toes. They run for three days, close to three hundred miles, and the winning team gets to sleep with all the available women in the local village.
This is the way I want to live.”

That is the way I want to live as well. Unfortunately, I'm stuck and participate in a world where fat people chase about MY mountain on ATVs.

My knee hurts, that's my pathetic excuse...I own that excuse...and I own an ATV...

I gotta make some changes.

New York City poet, Audre Lorde, said, “When I speak of change, I do not mean a simple switch of positions or a temporary lessening of tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good. I am speaking of a basic and radical alteration in all those assumptions underlining our lives.”

A radical alteration of my assumptions, am I willing to go that far?

2010-07-27T11:14:00.002-06:00

My body’s been asleep now for far to long. Over the weekend, I tried to walk into a canyon that sits above ten thousand feet with my 10 year old son. He did much, much better than me.

“Are there deer up here?”

“wheeze”

“Are there bears up here?”

“Let’s stop and get our breaths”

“Did you ever see a deer over here”

“Wheeze”

“I thought I saw a bear but it was just a stump, when did you start hunting are you going to hunt in here this year when can I start hunting do you like your gun or your bow I want to go shooting again I like your bow its not loud can you bow hunt in here how far is it where does this trail end how for is this trail can you drive in here I want a horse are you tired I’m not tired the wind is cool did you ever get sunburned up here…”

As we sat on that ridge between space, time and two of the basins that make up Black Canyon, he became quiet…

My breathing slowed, as the air became thoughts held for only seconds before being released into the space between here and there. Ten-year-olds have been coming into these hills for thousands of years. Most never watched TeeVee or played a video game…but all had questions, more questions than answers…even the brown skinned chasers of deer and elk who weren't Christian or didn't go to school...had questions.

We were both created from scratch as we descended, new men who needed the Mountain much more than it needed us…

Ed Abbey:

We need wilderness because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout deserves a forest to get lost, miserable, and starving in. Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For the terror, freedom, and delirium. Because we need brutality and raw adventure, because men and women first learned to love in, under, and all around trees, because we need for every pair of feet and legs about ten leagues of naked nature, crags to leap from, mountains to measure by, deserts to finally die in when the heart fails.

2010-07-22T11:44:00.002-06:00

We have become a society of slaves to gadgets and info.

In time passed, our ancestors spend most of their waking hours and burnt most of their calories in the act of obtaining protein. This simple lifestyle was humanity's purpose for hundreds of thousands of years.

Read a book called "Bone Games" by Rob Schultheis about how men (and women) can reach a spiritual high, a sphere of godliness here on earth...as they push their physical bodies into the deepest ocean of survival and effort...yet they breath the air of life while doing it.

Chasing elk around the canyons they spend 100 percent of their time is a loosing game. Every year some poor, innocent spike is rushed across the road, to be blown away by some fat hunter in an new Dodge Ram.

Every year, elk allude all hunters, even those who walk, and make it to winter...