the golden west volume 11 part 1 - 1997 may-july  work & days: a lifetime journal project

Vancouver, 27 May 1997

Uncle Herman died yesterday morning. He was sixty-one.

The sky opened this evening after rain all day. It has had a tender look. The clouds look washed, damp. The air is clean.

I'm willing to die, I think. I'm sorry not to be able to come back later and know how it goes on.

People die before they die. Their beauty, their wit, their beautiful human skill, die down. I mind that. I don't know what the balances are; I can do things now I couldn't do when I had more sparkle. I like what I can do now. So maybe other people whose beauty and edge I miss can also do something they couldn't earlier. Mostly I assume not.

2nd June

Libby [Davies] won in Vancouver East. Her win makes me feel membership in my riding again.

3rd

Sickening fear about money.

4th

I don't think about the checks I've had in work. I don't think them through. I don't decide what they are. I'm like a good child about them, feeling it must be my fault, but in ways I don't understand.

What checks. Paul Churchland didn't remember my paper. Gilles was warm before I gave him the metaphor paper and then he withdrew. Phil didn't praise my Dennett paper. Nicole [Gingras] tried to sabotage my writing. Babette didn't saying anything about the film or the theory.

When I look at this list I think of the connections I haven't tried. What I don't pursue. I don't know what's wrong with me that I don't pursue them.

These days my heart hurts in a simple way. It's no longer stopped at the diaphragm. That's good.

In the mornings I'm back at the metaphor notes, working through the sheets to get back to where I was before I went to San Diego. There's a way I have wasted six months.

In the afternoons I go play with Photoshop in the Publab. That enthralls me. When I'm working with color I can sit with a computer for hours and it's pleasure.

What I like are some of the systematic transformations - filters. Distort/polar coordinates iterated, if I begin with the right kind of image, makes a symmetrical swirled central infold that is like electrical fields around the two hemispheres. Render/difference cloud iterated makes something I can't describe. I found views like intercellular fluid. Noise at 999% makes starling specks in black. There are wave parameters I don't understand. I thought what I should do is go through my files and work with all the visual ideas I have - work off them to learn what I can do in that program. I had stained mists like Turner's. Storm clouds with hidden moon. When I ran a white line through and applied difference cloud it appeared after a few cycles as a dark line showing only in the fainter patches.

6th

When I was going to sleep I tried breathing through my left nostril. I came to shortly afterwards in fear that I don't know anything, that my work is delusion. (What I'm thinking about the brain, etc.) Then I lay there and thought that fear is correct for humans. It's extraordinary to be situated the way we are, not knowing how we could have come to be at all. I liked the fear, but by the time I liked it I didn't feel it anymore.

This is something else: I don't see how my work is going to be taken up into its community, and if it isn't taken up it isn't work, it is just exercise. Trapline was taken up in ways I didn't know about as it was happening. There is the other worry that people already in the arena will zoom away with what I've made. With Trapline I stayed out of sight as the film went out because I didn't want the social fact of my physical deformity to contaminate it. I don't know how much that social fact contaminates the way my theory is taken. Maybe having other people zoom away with it is the only way it will be work.

At the Goethe Institute reception yesterday the way when I was talking to Patricia [Gruben] and Donna [Zapf] both of them kept glancing away into the room - it unnerved me so I could hardly speak.

7

Began to work this morning. Looked at a phrase, "semantic field a network that interrelates words like field, vector, phase-space, tension, force, boundary, fluidity." Saw that I'd noted it for a different reason than I had thought. Remembered when I was working with the kind of mind that could know that immediately. Thought how straight-ahead academic I am now, thought I'd like to be able to integrate what I knew then, bring it through.

8th

An early Sunday in the beautiful - how can so awkward a word acquire the sheen it has - I am sitting in the beautiful day writing the outline of my thesis. My heart is an ache in the center of my chest.

Writing the thesis outline I feel achieved. I've built a good revision. It is a steady frame. Writing it will be different from finding it. It's an armature I can use to support other integration of styles of mind like the unsupported intelligence of my years of isolation. Those years when I only had my work to love. The picture of a white tower with a bit of - I can't find a name for it - a bit of the fingernail-like tough translucent star-shaped structure that protects the seeds in an apple core - the white tower with a crescent of that core-material stuck onto it for moon. I would walk in the corridor and see it glued on the wall next to a door. There was a bit of a photo torn off and stuck next to it too, the end of an egret feather against blue sky. I would walk in the corridor and see that little construction and feel there sometimes are those states where I've got across the dotted line.

What does this have to do with Tom - the way I feel no one is there who knows me, no one is there who sees me, no one is there who wants to look after me, no one is giving attention when I talk, no one's eyes are adoring me, no one is competent with me - and yet I am somehow enclosed with this person and somehow must speak and write as if as if as if I were with someone who is really there. You're starving me. I'm starved.

I'm seeing the star in it, the way I wrote it. The white tower and blue sky, and white feather and blue sky, and the fingernail moon made of real cuticle, that stuck to the paper by its own stickiness - that was a real poem made without language, which never had language in any way. It was my silent mind that felt itself when it saw that. The silent mind that made Trapline and couldn't defend it. Alright I've spoken for it today. The woman who lives in that tower. I've had to revise philosophy for her.

This is something that goes on being hard, the sense of speaking without support, with no one listening. In the journal she listens. She is happy I'm telling what she knows. When I speak to Tom something else happens. What is it? This is a good question. Something turns on this. It is the difference between talking to the mother and talking to the father, but I don't want to take the distance of that description. I want to find it another way. (But he does hate me, he is holding up a repelling field when I speak to him. The sensation of forcing myself against that shield of hatred. Daddy I need ten cents for a scribbler. Valiant, steeling. What is that sensation of using all the muscles of the body to force a sentence against resistance. I have that when I write Tom now. You don't want me to say this and I am going to say it. But I feel sad and lonely saying it.)

9

Such a good day yesterday with Louie's work party birthday party. I got to the garden at eight and set out the trees on the kids'-tank bench, walked round and looked for places for them, made lists on a clipboard. Louie came with Lydia in a gold vest. It was a brilliant blue and green day, the multifloras thick with white.

Fifteen people came. Louie and I had walked around the pond consulting about who should do which. We placed people. Val and Sue had a grove they refined. Gabriella and Dorothy were the road crew leveling the path. Jim and Margaret cut back thistles in the top corner. The boy gang - Brian, Hugh, Marcel and Peter Royce - planted two viburnums, one highbush cranberry, a dove tree, a cornus mas, two filberts, two hawthornes douglasii, and the raggy old fir. Louie and Nancy cleared back the path edge, Ina put salmonberry under the alders at the corner. Ann cut blackberry and dead branches out of the birch woods. Alexander, whose back had seized, whittled cucumbers for the Greek salad. I waded into the water over my boot tops and pried up bullrushes. It was a Tenth Day work party on Annares.

The food, and then all the bodies lying on the grass. "Everybody is so relaxed! People are never this relaxed at a party," I found myself saying right out loud. I was socially brimming.

In the evening when Tom phoned I was thinking, if he doesn't listen I'm just going to roll right over him and talk anyway. He was lit up by having seen evening light, having been able to walk out of the mission after seven. If Rebecca phones I should use my judgment, he said. He will let it go. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, I said. We laughed. Conclusion: it is not Tom's fault if I don't give myself the kind of action that makes me bright. Action and Louie's preference and company.

But here is this: I'm speedy today, too many rpm for theory. Do the laundry, run around on the bike. Go with Mag to pick halogen lights, prune pine limbs, count species roses, weed a bit, talk to Dave Carter whose truck was in Koo's. He says his baby's arms are so short he can't get them to meet across his chest.

11th

Scrapping with Tom on the phone, trying to scrap. He blew up at a kid for insubordination. I heard the story begin and thought, he has to do this, it has to unwind all the way. I held the phone away from my ear to shrink the voice I can still hear ranting. A tiny man but I'm still frightened. Then the rest of the conversation I'm yelling back. Hang up and say, howcome I'm hurt. I defended myself, howcome I'm hurt.

What was I feeling while he ranted. That he's going to blow it at the mission. He's going to lose the possibility of even that job, we're never going to be together. So all the yelling after that was not to the point.

13

Writing Tom messy simple letters, off the top, letting go. Writing the hedges as they come. Giving up, giving up, giving up. It would have to be that continually: he doesn't want this, but it's what I am.

Mag says tomorrow Luke is jumping from a plane.

Lloyd Dykk's column today - Urban Scrawl. I go back and read it again to see the liking way he names me. "With kind curiosity, Ellie Epp asked me if ...." "She designed it out of a prairie person's intuition of the country." "'He was a trickster, very charming. He'd say, 'Hey, Ellie, I see somebody got into your peas,' and I knew he was the one.'" "'Half-consciousness has its powers.'" "The Strathcona Gardens are one of the pleasantest places in the city." "She is also a Mennonite and no academic on the subject of natural beauty." "Soft-spoken, she conveys the complex and beautiful interior you often find, for some reason, in prairie people." "As the French poet Apollinaire said of the grasshoppers eaten by Saint John in the wilderness, 'a delicacy for the better people.'" [2012]

15

Luke phoned when he got back from the airport. I said: Tell me.

17

I haven't got used to the way the fight has changed. I am not struggling in gales of emotion; now it is like the dullest of landscapes, mall hell. I was going to say a dull desert, thinking of the wasteland in The tombs of Atuan, a dust desert without plants, rocks or sky. Grey light without reflection or shadow. But Cybill reruns are more like the miles of death in Rancho Santa Fe.

What do I know about this murky state. What exactly is it like. Tense and empty. TENSE and empty. I'm supposed to do something and I don't know what. Tense and helpless. Somehow found. I need to make money and finish the doc and get to Tom, and do not have the next step in any of those.

What happens: I suggest something to myself to do, and then I say no.

18

Got rid of the TV and woke from dreaming my little boy is lost in the snow. He was sick. I thought he was up ahead on the track. He must have branched off somewhere. We have to look for him. A little girl sitting on the floor drawing a map with her finger. I try to understand how she means it.

Yesterday Tom had got three of the letters and was angry. He isn't going to change, if I'm not satisfied I should ..., etc. You've been like that in all your relationships haven't you, he says. Then I rear up. "No I absolutely have not. I know how to refuse to show weakness. You were the one who wanted the real thing," etc. I'm not putting something on him, I'm putting it in front of him, etc. He smartens right up. I'll back up a few steps, he says. That was good. And it was fast. We sorted it out. But I'm thinking it was more the access of energy than what I said.

Mary's letter. A used envelope with the address cut out and a bit of paper stuck over the hole, and then my name written on it.

Three sheets of entries copied from her journal. 1945. She loved her baby. She loved her honey. She was twenty-one.

With it one of her horrible unbearable notes, pressuring and guilting. She says my personality is too strong for her. She's afraid of me.

I shouldn't have phoned her. I talk about Herman dying, about her sweetness and innocence as a young mother. She can't help it, she has to ask about her note. She does it with a little laugh. She hangs up half an hour later barely alive, it seems. I feel I'm killing her. She thought of the journal passages as a treasure - "I was giving you yourself as a treasure." "It's your treasure," I say, "it's yourself, it's your feeling." I'm thinking of my impulse to give Luke and Rowen journal passages about themselves. I guess it won't work. Better to go on knowing them in their present. Telling them my feeling for them as babies has to feel like an attempt to feed on them. It's romantic nostalgia. I didn't say that, but I said I thought she was making a claim. Why would I say such a thing, why would I think such a thing? "Why would I?" I say. She has no idea why blissful merging with her would be appalling to me.

Does she bait me just precisely so I'll contain her?

19

As soon as I wrote that, I felt better. That is what she does.

-

Tonight I'm thinking it was a better day, a good day. Worked. Late afternoon in the publishing lab working with my rockpile image, making beautiful versions. I had them in a pile when Louie showed up. Clicked them off one by one to show another underneath.

In her empty apartment reading Jamaica Kincaid's book, her harsh book. Back here - what shall I do. Look at the address book from my first two years in Vancouver. I am so different now, twenty years later, so different. About to leave, am I?

Maybe it was the music filled me suddenly with love. There was the yellow moon round in the dark blue above the roof. Maybe it was a thought of yours.

AMFM nightlight.

21st

Two things happen today, one with Mary, one with Tom. Mary phones to say she feels less hopeless. Tom phones back in the evening to say I shouldn't come tomorrow. He hasn't done his laundry. He'll be fried after work. If I come Monday we can have the motel for twenty-four hours. What he says makes sense but I'm very frightened by how hurt my feelings are. They are so hurt I don't want to come Monday either. They are so hurt I don't know how to keep going.

Our poverty is shutting us down. We're being squeezed. He is going to have to go back to San Diego. I am going to have to close down the phone.

He has been in Bellingham for three months and he can't get a job - I mean he blew the chance at mission manager by losing it with a kid who was insubordinate, as he felt it. He blew the resort because of his teeth, I imagine. (Even so, though he's got dental coverage, he won't get them fixed.) Maybe the Golden West is the only job he can handle now. There was the way he blew the restaurant reviews. This is very scary. What happened to him at the border. I thought his disorganization was booze but a year after booze, I find out it's something else. He concealed the facts when he attached me. That was theft. He is still concealing the extent of his chaos. I can barely handle my own, and handling his, I'm losing it. I haven't written a paper since December, and that one wasn't good.

22nd

Mary said she sent the journal so I would know I was loved when I was a baby, so I would know there was love. I said I knew very well what that was like. I feel it every time I fall in love. But after two years I stop loving, I stop trusting. It happens again and again. I could see she was wanting to be excused. I said that if she were a good mother she would want what is good for me, which might be for me to be mad at her. The way it might be better for Luke to be mad at me, because then he would be taking account of what I did to him. But she wants me to complete for her her story with her own mother. She said she would think about it and rang off abruptly.

I am no longer concealing from her that I have a very hard life emotionally. I guess that's more sane. I'm not spinning a certain kind of pink vapor around myself anymore. Have I gained anything from this hardship? Generosity, it says. But it seems to me that I am being brutally, brutally punished for trying to do the right thing.

25th

When we were waiting for my bus at the Greyhound station yesterday, there was a young couple sitting on the steps. He had an air of young cowboy, although there were floral and embroidered patches on his jeans. She, in what seemed like a flour-sack dress, had a look of homesteader's daughter. They were saying serious goodbyes. She was stroking his arms with grieving love. What was holding me was her feeling. She was a Scandinavian strawberry blond with a pink plain face blurred with crying. She had no consciousness of where she was. He did: he saw my curious look, though he had been crying too. He was brownskinned like a Mexican, had beautiful brown feet in sandals, and a thick glossy ponytail. His white cotton hat had the shape of a sombrero. There was a red bandana in his back pocket. His luggage was environmentally inoffensive, an old cardboard suitcase and a canvas backpack. He had the interest of a mixed message - maybe a second-generation Guatemalan-Canadian from a professional family, who is studying geography and supports hemp protests. But maybe something else. There was a quite beautiful brown compactness about his face. She was an American generations deep, liberal, and still in the aching blank of her early twenties. Love woman utterly. She will have cried herself to sleep. I'm noticing the sneer in that. And yet I couldn't take my eyes off them.

Tom and I were sitting on the ground in the shade, a compact dark-faced Canadian woman of fifty wearing a black Thai shirt with three little green airplanes as buttons, and a generations-deep fifty year old American man whose face shows his fights. We weren't grieving. We'd had a good visit and it had been long enough. We were pleased with ourselves and our adventure.

When I arrived and he came forward I was ready for what I'd see - his baseball cap and narrow temples. I took him on faith and walked into his arms. This man doesn't look like the man I've come to see, but he is.

The city bus arrived as we stepped up to the bus shelter. It was raining, not heavily. He asked about my journey. I told him. That transaction had the feel of goodwill whose awkwardness we were both accepting. We checked into the Shangri-La at ten in the morning, which gave us twenty-four hours of shelter. It was summer rates, six dollars more than he expected. He gulped and paid. We got the room we had last time.

The reason I'm not kissing you back, I said, is that we have to talk bigtime and I don't want to compromise my brain. He had noticed I had brought his photos and other stuff of his - the dragon tee-shirt.

I wanted to talk about money. He went through my figures. We argued. His idea was, you've got enough to get you through the summer. My idea was, I have to pay off my debts before the scholarship ends at the end of April, or I'll lose my Visa card. I have to get a job and suspend the doc.

Second item. I want him to really get this, this time. I want him to understand that I have a blur in my brain about attached separation. What happened with Jam. It got so I couldn't look after myself. I would have died. I'm afraid I won't know when to stop. Etc. I've come ready to break up. He considers it. He could step away. You're giving me all the outs. We consider it. He swings around. He puts his arms around me. Come here. I cry briefly. Alright we're going on. But I want to go out and get some coffee from the Baskin Robbins. Not yet, he says. I want to tell you a story about my mother, I say. I'll get some coffee, he says. Ha! I say, pulling a chain in the air. Toot, toot. I got you. That was opportunistic, because I hadn't planned. But I saw I could have. I know you were setting me up, he said. I knew he was being opportunistic too. That was alright. I went and got coffee. We sat at the table and I told him about the last week with Mary. I know you think this is taking a long time, I said. He got interested.

Now I'm going to have a nap, I said. Maybe I'll watch a little TV, he said. He lay beside me ticking through cable channels. No nap. Junior surfing championships in Hawaii. I turned around and watched it with him. Wonderful motion, wonderful rapid twanging of the tight lines from ankle to finger-tip. High culture of boy essence. Individually they pick a moment of force and make what they can of it. Show what they can make of it. It's a culture because there is a developed repertoire of moves. Highest art is to extend one of them, use it in a situation it hasn't been used in, do something unheard of. "That's a gremmie move." A young kid using the board to spin once completely around. "Why is it a gremmie move?" "Later you're too heavy." I liked when they shot horizontally along the crest.

Then what. We took our clothes off. Etc. He went out for food and brought back two 99¢ suppers from Taco Time. Brought out the pile of clippings and magazines he has saved for me. Read Lloyd Dykk's column aloud to me. Read me from his notebooks. I caught a line that said he hadn't smoked dope in two months. Sank my teeth in it. When did you start smoking again? "Not long before we left San Diego. People were saying goodbye to me. Tom Russell and I went for a ride out to the little beach. Tom said to me, I know you aren't smoking these days but I want to get stoned with you just once more for old times." After that he was chipping, a couple of tokes in the morning, a couple in the afternoon.

I was suddenly finding my backbone just when I needed it. I was right - that was the matches on the counter, his ostentatious unconvincing dumping into the wastebasket, the catastrophe at the border. Why didn't he tell me? Because it was just a little lapse, it was under control. I hit that hard. What you did was cheat me of my option. I could have said no, I don't want you to come with me under these conditions. You're right, he's saying. I am too. When we got back together you said you'd given up booze and dope. Those were the conditions I accepted you under. You tried to sneak something past me. Etc. I was riding my high horse with my famous eloquence but then I remembered there's something else I have to remember to say. It wasn't about whether you drink or smoke dope, that's between you and you. I don't care about that. What I care about is that I want to really be with you. I want to know the real you. That's what I'm with you for. You're the one I can have the real adventure with. What I'm afraid of is that I'll be attached to you and not be with you, I'll just have your ghost."

I could see from the way his left eye was gleaming silver that I was saying the right thing and he was hearing it.

There was a second when I felt a kind of silence in the space between our faces as if we were listening with the backs of our brains - something like that - as if we were listening to ourselves in a part that we aren't usually conscious in. That clarity went on through the next morning. He was already looking realer. "Alright now we'll talk about what's wonderful about you."

What I was feeling was that I was seeing his weakness with male pals and I was understanding that my distress in the last three months had something to do with his lapse and secrecy, but that in relation to where we started we have done a lot, and he has done a lot. I forgave him because I felt I can handle it. But during the night I woke with a headache and sore heart and thought of my fault in it = that I saw the matches and didn't make an issue because we were so close to leaving and I didn't want the risk. I saw I had lost my backbone there and the consequences were swift and harsh.

There was a moment in the morning when I had been saying he tricked me when he met me, he tricked me into falling in love with him. He didn't tell me how chaotic his life had really been. He was denying that it was a trick and I was holding my ground. He suddenly spoke as if with the other side of his mouth. He did what he had to do to get me. Then he as if went back on it but I counted that sentence and its tone as the beginning of something. I understood that there is no injustice. I am never without a clue. I will be as safe as I am true and that is the edge I want him for. We are going to be able to play with it, the way he did when he tricked me into walking the last stretch of the road to the station. "Let's just go this way. It's level all the way to the street." I liked the walk. He was carrying the bags.

I began to say, that when he was silent after that conversation, I asked him what he was thinking. He said he was having an image of himself at a party getting ready to hit somebody and he looked across at me and I said with my eyes, no, Tom, and he said to the man - something - letting it go. What did I feel about that. That I've made myself a helpful structure in his brain. Trusted.

I was feeling the way I used to, the pleasure I have in the otherness of his life. There was the New Yorker piece on hitting people in the face and getting hit: "The sensation was like a sound more than a shock you'd feel - two big cymbals being clanged right behind my head, followed almost immediately by cold traveling from my neck down into my toes." Tom's story, strolling downhill in town, of caddying in --- Mesa, a notebook with every possible yardage and how you calculate how to club someone. Taking his uncle, Father Joe, to a dancehall with whores in Okinawa. He danced beautifully. And to a tit bar in San Diego. Why did you do that? I was evil.

And when we were crossing park grass to a bench I had working class male etiquette demonstrated. Tom was starting to snarl, He's heading for our bench. A guy in his early forties. He was closer to it than we were. Tom was more involved in the fact than seemed necessary. And then the man veered off. He was looking at us with what was almost a little smile. "What was that about?" "The rule is that the guy who's with the woman gets the bench." "Why's that? How do you learn such a rule? - Oh, I get it, it's so you don't lose face in front of the woman. If he lets you have it she thinks, Oh darling you're the winner. Otherwise you have to make an issue of it."

I'm not going to say much about the sex but he did have winner's prerogative and I was not the loser. When he came he was done, so that later on when I said I was going to come either with him or the hairbrush, he didn't know he'd be able to get back into it. But I told him a star man story, from the beginning, through the part I knew he'd find too slow, and into the last depth where I was quite beside myself. He was talking by then but I wasn't listening. I think my ear was covered by a pillow.

26th

When I was on the Greyhound to go home, still parked in the depot, there was Tom leaned against a pillar in his leather jacket and 501's. No baseball cap and he hadn't had a haircut for a while, hair down over his forehead like a young man. I was marveling that the man who met me was a tense hick and the man who saw me off was a GQ beauty. Then he'd turn his head and I'd see the long reptile corner of his mouth - amoral rapacity plain to see, thrillingly at odds with his romantic pose against the pillar.

He used to run marijuana or prescription drugs across the Mexican border every day in his jockey shorts. When he and Lorri were up against it he'd go from bank to bank depositing blanks and pulling $175 at each machine. Once when Jim White had made a marijuana pickup in a town in the desert, he found out the two men dealing had been gunned down three-quarters of an hour after they'd been there.

What else: the way he'd stroke and stroke my hair back off my forehead.

We were in the park halfway to Fairhaven. He was on the bench reading me from his notebook. I was on my stomach on the grass. The sun had come out. He was writing about Teillard de Chardin. His life story is called Casual labor. I understood what I hadn't, that he's not hurrying to find work because he is getting his brain back. Good; but pay your share or else. A little more than your share or else; that way you'll be more impressed with your commitment.

27th

What else could I know about the visit. He counted me down, 52, 51, 50 but not all the way to zero. At eleven he said, now it's just love, but was fucking a couple of strokes a year. Do I trust this, I was thinking. Will I put myself into his hands through a hypnotic induction? I had my eye on what he was going to do at one or zero. In fact I broke in to say I wanted to make sure he knows there are negative numbers. I broke the spell. I don't ignore what I've seen in the left side of his face. There's pleasure in bending a will. Someone who's very sure he'll only ever be alone. An unmet power. What do I know about that man? That he's the strongest self-assertion I have ever been eye-to-eye with, vividly unchristian. So why aren't I afraid of that one in him? Because of what I find in me to see him with, pure curiosity. Look at that, it says. Very interested.

Here is the thing I don't understand: that visible raptor doesn't scare me, it pleases me, but something else scares me. I want to say it's that power's defeat, when it happens. Is that right? It says yes. What is it that defeats it? A misunderstanding of losses. Yes.

Something else I wanted to tell. When we were first in the motel and talking about whether to separate he said do I want that and I didn't threaten or bluff the way I used to. I said what I feel is unable to decide, there's a blur in my brain so I don't trust myself. I was trusting him. That was a large advance.

30th

Louie left for India.

Lee is going to offer me consulting work, she thinks.

1st July

Wet again. It's July and still winter.

Supervising Abbotsford Mennonite youth group people, two teams. Edgeboards and reset the posts, wild area path smoothed out, rocks moved, two saskatoons planted, most of the woodpile moved, good lumber stored under the trees and that room in the pines cleared, orchard lumps spread round, one long path weeded, another smoothed and ready for gravel.

Nedjo wants a work party for geographers.


part 2


the golden west volume 11: 1997 may-september
work & days: a lifetime journal project