Not Even Not Zen 366: Fifteen Pages About Daffodils

Fifteen Pages About Daffodils

It should never be illegal to write about daffodils

but maybe fifteen pages of verse 

on daffodils

should result in a warning from the court

instead of publication 

and eventual enshrinement in the curriculum,

that's all I'm saying. 

Maybe the poem is a metaphor for something else,

a beat-generation, wandering prose-story

not about yellow petals so much

as hookers, nuns, heroin, and blues music.

But as I'm scanning page one

I see a lot of green leaves and coronas,

floral tubes and ovaries,

tepals, pollen, and stamen.

The poet really loves this flower. 

And details.

A flip through pages two and three features 

petals hanging down or erect, 

bulbs and stems, 

stalks, sap, terminal buds

and a shotgun blast of small, round stains

where a previous reader sneezed

while drinking diet cola.

Skip to page seven, 

and, thank heavens, it's different.

We are down in the roots

in the dark, bacterial soil,

shrinking down with the bulb

full of black seeds

and maybe the the depths of the poet's soul 

or so I think we are meant to gather.

It's death and rebirth, death and rebirth,

all the way down.

Down to page fourteen, scanning ahead 

and sadly, the bud is bursting forth.

We're probably going to get a reprise of page one

as we're slipping off our

membranous tunic,

pushing away the corky stern

and seeing coronas once again,

like an acid trip without dropping acid,

full of tepals and floral tubes.

The last verse, on page fifteen, 

is still about daffodils.

There's not a broken bottle

nor a cigarette stub in sight,

not a hippie, nor an innocent child,

not even a poet,

someone to ponder life's lesson

or wonder what it's all about.

Well, it's about fifteen pages, dude.

And that's my poem

about a poem 

about fifteen pages

on daffodils. 

  -- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 365: Just Another Pet

Just Another Pet

She was just another pet 

for fourteen years.

We let her have the lickings.

She served as our canine dishwasher, a job she loved

and we loved to see her take an interest in her work.

During dinner, she waited in the next room, 

studying our shadows in silence, tail at half wag,

thumping to full rhythm when I stopped by her hallway bed

to pet and hug, to let her sniff my ear and cheek. 

When the family rose from the table, she listened 

for the clink of a plate against the floor

and clambered from her cushion. 

It was as good as calling her name.

Summoning her brown, smooth body to work,

no longer hunting or herding, 

just watching the family, drumming her tail,

helping us clear plates 

- she wiggled herself all over

as she sniffed and started to clean.

Now I stand at the sink 

and every plate I pick up, I turn and look,

searching for her. 

Her bed is not empty. We have other pets.

Today, her favorite cat rests there, alone.

But I remember her. 

And I put down the plate to think. 

I have adjusted

except when I remember her job.

I sigh and rinse the dishes

and turn to pick up a bowl, unwashed,

and think of her again. 

 -- Eric Gallagher

Not Even Not Zen 364: Biomythography - Note 104: Riots in the Streets

Riots in the Streets

When I was seven years old, anti-war protesters flooded onto college campuses across the nation. Hand-drawn signs, long hair, people in sunglasses, and fists raised high in the air appeared in the news. I didn't understand what the protesters wanted, who the 'pigs' were, why we were involved in a war overseas or, well, pretty nearly anything. I lived within walking distance of a university, though, and I dimly understood the adults were up to something. 

"There's a riot on campus," my mother told my father one day. 

She had heard a news report on the radio, apparently, and glanced out the window. She could see the signs of a problem. 

"If I can get out to the store," she continued, "I'll never get back."

She cancelled the errand, for which I previously had been drafted. Now I had most of the afternoon free. 

"Go out," she told me. "Shoo, go and play."

After I changed into my stained pants, the ones my mother insisted were the best for outside games, I headed out to round up other kids in the neighborhood. When I marched from door to door, though, I found my friends either weren't home or couldn't come out. I hiked across the street into the park. For a few minutes, I threw stones in the ball field and pretended I was throwing strikes. After a while, I climbed the flood levees to gaze down at the fields below.

The sky was blue with light, wispy clouds. The air was warm but not hot. If there had been someone to play with, it would have been a pretty good afternoon. 

After a while, my younger brother wandered out of the front door. He was a long way off, but my house was in plain view, so I noticed him. I watched him search our yard for a while and then catch sight of me across the road. I hopped down from the dike wall and marched south. We met at the street and I made sure it was safe for him to cross.  

"No game?" he asked as we met. Together, we hopped the ditch to march back into the park. 

"Nah." I grabbed a stick and threw it at a tree. "No one can come out."

"Okay." He pointed north along the levee wall and across the big ditch to the traffic jam on University Boulevard. "What's that?"

"The riot, I guess." I threw up my arms. I wasn't sure what a riot meant, exactly, but it seemed to involve a lot of stopped cars. As my brother and I watched, drivers started to get out of their vehicles. They knew they were in for a long wait, whatever the reason.

"Can we go see?" my brother asked. 

I glanced back toward our white, aluminum-sided house. We had no parents in the yard. They wouldn't know if we crossed the dike and ditch.

"Okay." I nodded.

We trudged across the two ball fields to the north slope of the levee. When we crested the slope, I could see a man outside of his green sedan, wearing a grey suit and smoking a cigarette. In front of him, a woman sat slumped in her white convertible with her eyes closed. In the lane behind, a couple men were talking through their open windows. They looked grown up and boring. 

I climbed down the north side of the levee into the ditch and back up to the road with my brother following. He grabbed onto the tall reeds of the cat-o-nine-tails to pull himself across the rivulet of water between slopes. That looked like a good idea, so I did it, too. 

At the top, we reached the road and I headed east along the rows of cars. There was a young woman with blonde hair, flowers in her hair, and sunglasses. She looked all sorts of fashionable and cool sitting in her VW Beetle. When I asked her if she wanted to play, though, she gave me a startled look. She seemed kindly enough after that moment of surprise but she waved me further east, where a quartet of college-aged folks were kicking a ball around. 

They seemed awfully big and scary. I stopped to stare. My brother came to a halt behind me. 

After a moment to think and observe, I marched two cars further down the line, where a long-haired, clean-shaven young man had gotten out of his car. He wasn't smoking, just standing and resting.

"Do you want to play?" I asked him.

"Huh." He gave me a thoughtful look. The girl in the car in front of him waved to him for some reason, as if to encourage him. He gave her a gesture of acknowledgement. Then he turned his attention back to me. "Well, did you kids bring a ball or something?"

"No." I knocked myself in the head with my fist. My little brother had gotten a pretty great idea, it seemed, but we hadn't come ready for it. The young man frowned for a moment. Then he turned and gazed at me out of the corner of his eye.

"Can you throw a frisbee?" he asked.

"Yeah!" I hopped on my toes. Frisbees were kind of new. Not every kid could throw one. My brother couldn't. But I could. 

The young man smiled at us. He walked to the back of his car, popped open the trunk, and pulled out a fluorescent green disk. It looked battered but it was in better shape than the red one my mother had bought for me, probably because I had used mine to play with my dog. 

"Hey, you're pretty good!" he shouted as I made my first throw to him. I managed to keep a straight line between rows of cars. He caught the disk and snapped it right back to me. The game was on. The young student maneuvered my brother and I between rows of cars, motioning us to take different strategic spots. Half of the other drivers had stepped out of their vehicles. They made room for us, maybe because they saw my brother, only four and trying hard to learn. 

In retrospect, the other drivers must have gotten tired of my brother and I slamming the frisbee against their windows or skimming it along their hoods and roofs. Every time they started to shout at us, though, with one middle aged man going so far as to get out of his car, they took a look at who we were and stopped. Even the middle aged fellow sort of slumped and said, "Hey, be more careful."

"We'll move back down the road a bit," volunteered our young man, who was probably a college student.

"Good." The fellow sat back down, grumpy but mollified. 

We played long enough to switch up games, trying someone's softball, realizing it was dangerous, then going back to the frisbee again. Sometimes we paused to talk to other drivers. Around us, members of the unmoving traffic jam gave my brother sips from their soda cans, played card games standing up, talked about the news, and played music on their radios.

Finally, up ahead, the young man with the frisbee saw movement. 

"Okay," he said. "Looks like this is it. You need to get out of the road."

"Aw." My brother couldn't see the cars starting to roll. He didn't want to stop.

"Are you guys going to be okay?" asked the young man. The woman who had sat in her car most of the time got out to check on us. She wanted to make sure we stayed safe, too. 

"Yeah." I pointed towards my house. It was hard to make out across the park and the line of trees on Metzerott Road but it was still in my line of sight. "We'll just climb down to the playground."

"Wave to us from the field, okay?" said the woman. 

From that day on, whenever I heard there was a riot somewhere, I rushed to my window to check the traffic on University Boulevard. Four times more, if I'm remembering correctly, I discovered gridlock again, parked cars with people standing beside them. I always rushed out to play. That's what a riot meant to me at the time, a chance to play in the street with drivers who had nowhere to go. 

The college kids on their way to the University of Maryland would get out of their vehicles if they weren't already. They'd play guitars, throw footballs, kick beach balls, share their drinks (one man tried to give my brother and I each a beer but the other college students frowned him down), and they would generally just talk and relax. I would play until the brake lights ahead started to flicker. Then the grown men would say, "Sorry, kid, here's your ball back. We've got to go."

Not Even Not Zen 363: Biomythography - Note 103: How Does It Feel?

How Does It Feel?

Four of us hunkered down in the recreation room. Like any nine year old, I wiggled into place in front of the television, which was our steel-grey Zenith Chromacolor. I took my seat on the checkered, tan and brown footrest. That thing was a piece of furniture we never used for our feet. My brothers and I had turned it into our favorite backless chair. 

After my father pulled out the start knob, he slowly spun the television dial to channel 7, our local ABC station. For a moment, I stared at the faint, yellow glow of the station number. With a rush of static, the big tube hummed to life. The colors swirled for a moment. When they came into a faded sort of focus, they showed us a stadium with a gravel track. Runners had finished a race, apparently. They walked, half-stumbling, hands on hips. 

This was another night of the 1972 Olympics. After a two day break, the games had resumed. Earlier, I had watched announcements about how ABC was broadcasting the events live to our television all the way from Munich, Germany. The production team ran articles on the satellite technologies they were using. They were obviously proud and I was excited for them.

Mostly, in the track and field events, I focused on the decathlon. That's what my father announced as the event determining "the best athlete in the world."

After a commercial, the scene cut to a different event, a medal ceremony. 

A reporter pushed a microphone in the face of an athlete in a track suit and asked, "How does it feel?"

I turned to my parents, perplexed, and said, "Why did he ask that?"

Reporters had done it a couple of times before. Now I was noticing how irritating it was. My father took his cigar out of his mouth for a moment to answer. 

"I don’t know," he said. He shrugged. Behind him to his left, my mother grunted.

"Didn't he work his whole life for the race?" I pointed to the athlete on the television. My parents had told me most of them trained for ten or fifteen years to get this good. 

"Yes." My father nodded.

"Doesn’t everybody know how he feels? Can’t everybody see it?"

"Everyone can see it," my mother agreed.

"Then why ask?" It was such a waste of time. I knew I could be learning about how to throw a javelin, or to run faster, or take a racing dive in swimming, or something more satisfying than this, anything. Anything but this embarrassment of stumbled phrases applied to what I already knew. 

"It’s just a question," my mother said.

I thought about it for half a minute.

"Don’t the reporters have brains?" I asked her. I tried to imagine how they could fail to know how someone felt, especially when the feelings were so obvious. 

"Yeah. They think we don’t have any," my father answered.

#

The sports-reporter question of 'how do you feel' became a standard one, accepted everywhere. We hear it asked at almost every major event as if it's part of a ritual, which of course it is. It even comes with ritualized responses. We know, as an audience, that the question is meaningless and the answer is another step in the ritual. People would miss it if interviewers stopped asking it, even though everyone pretty much knows how everyone else feels in the moment. 

Not Even Not Zen 362: Biomythography - Note 102: Embarrassment

Embarrassment

As teenagers, we mostly live in a state of mortification - some of us, at least. In my teens, I couldn't bear to have people stare at me when things were going wrong. To my mind, they always were. But I also agonized if no one noticed me.

In tenth grade at Sidwell Friends, I correctly used the quip "How gauche" in a sarcastic conversation. Unfortunately, I had learned the word from reading, not from hearing it, so I pronounced it "gow-chee." This is how I said it to the son of a diplomat who was already in third year French. He burst into laughter, pointed at me, and called over other students of French and everyone else nearby so he could tell them how I'd mispronounced it. 

In retrospect, I sympathize. It’s still sort of funny, even to me. But the fact that I remember the incident is an indication of the emotion behind my teenaged self-reminders of Just Shut Up And Here's Why. Everything I said or did seemed horribly wrong in some way. 

Later, in a different school, I took theater classes, where I did embarrassing things because they were required. And I found I could do them in character, which somehow made it better. 

In my early college years, I came to a decision to let go of my desires (a process that took around three years, starting at sixteen, or seven years starting when I read Siddhartha at age twelve, or one year when I decided to really get serious about my practice). At around the age of nineteen, my bouts of severe embarrassment faded along with my desires. Then came dropping back into college, where my friends hated my lack of desires and said so, repeatedly. I considered deliberate reattachment. And with reattachment to the reasons for suffering came troubled emotions.

This time, though, I could choose to let go of them. It was interesting, a trick I tried to share in my conversations with friends. No one wanted to hear about it. The benefit remained mostly private. I continued to let go of attachments selectively. 

And I chose to lean into the embarrassment. And to enjoy it. Because I could.

In my early twenties, I stood in the parking lot outside a popular bar. I was talking to a young woman who had invited me out. And now she was turning me down. She had changed her mind three or four times during the night. Yes, then no, then yes, then no. She was the sort of person who did that, and who didn't like doing anything at all if she wasn't sure about it. This was the type of romantic experience I had once shied away from. But I leaned in. 

"I know this must be confusing for you," she said. 

"It's okay."

“Well, it’s even more confusing for me!” She wailed. And I realized that although I was enjoying the embarrassment of the situation, she was agonized by it even though she was the one calling the shots, or so I thought. (Eventually, and not in any parking lot, she explained the traumatic events that seemed to leave her so conflicted about everything.)

In college, I found myself confronted by a writing professor. 

"I wouldn't have accepted you if I knew you wrote science fiction."

He talked about how my writing was worthwhile but my liking science fiction was not. I needed to have more appropriate tastes, ones that rose to the proper level of a college intellect. I immediately agreed I would not turn in any science fiction in his class, which should have made him happy. That’s what he said he wanted. Instead, in the face of my acquiescence, he got increasingly embarrassed and defensive - although he eventually accepted me on those terms. 

And of course I ran into many more confrontations, more situations that should have seemed embarrassing for me but my leaning into it had gotten so fast, so reflexive, that I might have seemed like I was seeking out the situations.

Of course, sometimes people would confront me with the idea of shaming me about something they thought was embarrassing, most often about sex, and I would just sort of lean into the conversation and make the issue bigger and bigger, so that everyone around us felt the tension. Even the person who initially approached me would realize the situation had gotten weird and, somehow, extra confrontational.

It was always sort of funny, always sort of fun. Even now, it makes me laugh. Because I used to run away from embarrassment so hard. And at some point, I learned to lean in. It made so much difference.

If I had written about this in my twenties I would have stopped there. But after a while, I also stopped leaning into making things more embarrassing because, as it turns out, that’s just a bit mean and there’s no need. Unless someone is trying to be cruel, of course, and they're usually not, very much. 

Not Even Not Zen 361: Biomythography - Note 101: The Fourth Plane

The Fourth Plane

In the fall when I was seventeen, I lived alone in a basement apartment. The apartment sat within a mile of the University of Maryland.

This wasn't a good year for me at UMD. It was a fast-food-working year. It was full of relationships failing, college courses flunking, over-drinking, and a bit of learning. But the learning wasn't scholarly. For distraction from my various failures, I had access to a television and a radio. One afternoon, I turned on the radio while I was cleaning. 

"... the lighter side of the news."

Radio news was important. I couldn't afford the newspaper. So when the story resumed, I turned to make my bed, so I could stay close.

"When a fire broke out at an asylum in Massachusetts, the staff fled. They left the residents locked in their rooms with no means to escape the fire." The narrator paused long enough for me to wonder why this was light news. "Fortunately, a set of patients had prepared for this eventuality.

"These patients escaped their locked hallway. They went to the safe where the master keys were kept. They knew the combination. And when they opened it, keys in hand, they started freeing other patients. Because these patients, now the ones in charge, had planned well."

Again, the announcer paused for effect. He was pretty good at it.

"The patients not only freed the ones who were trapped in their rooms, they lined them up. They marched everyone out of the building and lined them up again on the front lawn. Who were these patients?"

In the background of the radio studio, I could hear the rustle of a piece of paper.

"They were the paranoids. The patients diagnosed with paranoia were the ones who were prepared."

After I finished making my bed, I got out the vacuum and started on the recreation room. I chuckled about the news until I sighed about my looming course homework.

By the end of the week, I found myself still thinking about the radio article. I started to wonder why I found the story reassuring. Maybe it was because it reaffirmed my general approach.

I had a certain amount of wariness, usually, and it likely came from the decade or more that my father crept up behind me while I was distracted. He always slapped me on the back of the head. Those years of getting hit tended to make me slightly aware, even when I was otherwise lost in my reading. I would keep a sense of the noises around me, the scratch of pencil against paper, the click of the screen door latch, the squeak of a floorboard. Often, I would react too late and get hit. But I had built up a level of awareness, however inconsistent it might be.

One of my younger brothers would launch sneak attacks, now and then. It was another reason to stay wary, especially out in the yard. In the road, of course, cars would speed through. Four times, they ran over our pets. I retained some awareness there, too, although the road would vibrate under my feet. Even if I hadn't been paying attention before, I could feel a car coming.

Awareness was useful in the woods, where I could be silent enough, sometimes, to see animals. It was useful in public school, where the football players were not able to knock my books out of my hands and I was able to tease them into giving up.

Years later, in the fall of 2001, I wondered if my background level of paranoia was normal. I stayed home from work to tend to my sick kids on September 11. I turned on the news. When I returned to the room with diaper wipes, a television announcer told me that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

My response was, "Again?"

No one had driven a plane into the World Trade Center before, of course, but the place had been bombed. And bombed again. And there was another bombing attempt. And again. I had figured someone would try a passenger jet just because planes had always seemed so easy to weaponize if you could take over the cockpit. A series of hijacking incidents had, in the past generation, indicated it wasn't hard to take over.

A week later, I visited my friends Richard and Andrea. Richard had seen and felt the attack on the Pentagon that day. He and everyone around him had known the explosion meant they were in an emergency situation. But he hadn't been able to call Andrea with the airwaves clogged. His phone had turned into a useless block of metal that day. His standard modes of transportation had ground to a halt. The subway had closed down and turned away passengers. Cars had flooded the streets and halted, blocked by one another. Taxis couldn't get anywhere. Richard had to hike out from the center of the city to get home.

"What do you mean, you expected the attacks?" Richard asked me, rather reasonably, when I said I felt they were years late.

"It's just that we've been bombed before. And at the World Trade Center before. And the Pentagon is a military target."

"You weren't surprised at all?"

"Well, yes," I replied after a moment of consideration. "I was surprised the buildings fell."

That calmed Richard for a moment. He nodded.

"Everyone was surprised by that part," he agreed.

"But they used passenger jets," said Andrea. "That was new."

"Not ... really." I flashed back to all the hijackings and mis-uses of planes. Andrea was right, strictly speaking. No one had quite done this. But I was right, too, if only I could articulate the thoughts I hadn't spoken. "I've been expecting planes to get used in attacks."

"Why?" asked Richard.  

It was a hard part to describe. The pattern of attacks seemed readily evident. What about them seemed less obvious to my friends? They seemed to be constantly expressing their shock about the planes in New York, the jet in DC, and the fourth one crashing over Pennsylvania. And why did so many people forget about the heroism of the passengers in the fourth plane? 

The fourth flight, I realized, is where I automatically put myself. Even on September 11, when the news had broken late that fighter jets were scrambling toward the Maryland-Pennsylvania border, I had thought of being a passenger caught up in the battle.

Our country had been attacked many times. And we had responded with violence. And we had bombed towns. And we had supported one side or other in wars. We had done a lot of things other countries would say deserved revenge. How could people not know, in the face of so many attempts to murder us, that people wanted to murder us? It seemed incredible.

Part of our national awareness problem was that so many people lived lives of peace. War makers, then and now, are a minority. Another difficulty is the distance. It’s easy to forget about remote horrors.

But I think the main difference is a variation in our personal senses of revenge. Most people seem to give up on it after a while. They have problems believing that someone whose brother was killed by an American missile might be committed to acts of vengeance a decade later.

I remember burning with the desire for vengeance as a child. Maybe mostly as a child, although sometimes as a teen. And I had exacted it, too. I had waited for years, sometimes, to take revenge. My brothers plotted for years, too. I thought plotting for years was normal. Mostly, I planned for my defense. But I fought for what I perceived as justice. I imagined committing murders, dying in righteous battles, and more.

"If I thought Americans killed my friends, I'd hate Americans, too." I considered the problem for a moment longer. "Well, maybe."

I didn't know if that was actually true. Even when I had wanted vengeance as a child, I had wanted it due to specific incidents with specific perpetrators involved. I knew who deserved cruel, cruel justice. I hadn't often been in a situation where I didn't know the perpetrator and, in those few times I didn't, I had tried to find out rather than committing random violence.

That's why, mentally, I was on the fourth plane. I genuinely expected attacks and it wasn’t that I thought I could do anything useful about them. Sometimes in my best mental scenarios I would be caught at a disadvantage and die. But in all my plans, really, I expected to die trying. I would always attempt some sort of defense, even if the situation was hopeless.  

Between my watchfulness and my sense of how people seek revenge, I found that I had been waiting for the World Trade Center attacks for years. It made me feel like a paranoid in contrast to my friends. But in my defense, the expectation was right.

People want justice. They will plot for years to achieve it. Then they will commit injustice because they lack the social power, expertise, and sense of dispassion to achieve real justice. Recognizing this seems cynical. Maybe it even seems paranoid. But it's true. 

Not Even Not Zen 360: Biomythography - Note 100: Driving at 120

Driving at 120

An old girlfriend called me up at noon.  She said, "I'm getting married at three o'clock at the courthouse.  Can you come?"

I knew I would have to get permission from my bartending job. But I also knew that three o'clock in the afternoon is a great time to take off in the restaurant business.

"Yes," I replied.

Six months later, the same woman called me from Georgia.

"I"m breaking up with my husband. Can you help me get my stuff out of our house?"

"Are you sure?"

"I've got my sister helping me with my divorce." Her sister was a lawyer. This was serious. "I am not staying with him. No matter what. I could really use a friend to help me make the trip."

"Okay." I would have done it for any friend in need. And she seemed to be really in need. I had hoped for a happier marriage for her, obviously. But if she had been a guy, I would have done it. No fair to dodge out because she was an old girlfriend and I had thought her husband seemed nice.

She drove an Oldsmobile Omega, a crappy car. But she met me in it. She had a plan. This was the sedan into which we would pack all her earthly belongings.

“You’ll like it,” she assured me. “I’ve gotten used to driving fast.”

I made a skeptical noise. When we dated, years ago, she had not been thrilled when I took cars above 95 mph. She had shown absurd confidence in me, though. She had watched me drive with just my legs and laughed. We had talked about cars a little, sometimes.

I had forgotten her father was a mechanic.

When we got onto the highway, she pressed the pedal all the way down. I watched the speedometer, which only went to 85. The needle pressed up against the bar at the far right around where the number 100 would have been. The needle was trying to go higher than the meter allowed it to display. How fast were we going? For a while, I didn’t know. I couldn’t.

She started passing cars on the highway like they were standing still and she was going sixty. That’s a weird feeling. I’d gotten to 105 before. I’d gotten above 110 once. But that had been when I had a highway to myself and under ideal conditions.

This felt way, way different.

“Holy shit!”

I had to repress the instinct to grab the panic handle on my upper right. At these speeds, nothing was going to help if she made a mistake. And as she weaved in and out of cars standing still, like we were driving at highway speeds through a parking lot, I began to relax.

She was good at this. She was making no mistakes.

Her father had been a mechanic for thirty five years. He’d ‘fixed’ her car a bunch of times. Whatever he’d done to this little sedan, it was for sure more powerful than the manufacturers specified.

“I try not to ever hit the brakes,” she said. “The sound they make worries me.”

“Okay.” I hadn’t want to hit brakes at high speeds in my parents cars either. It felt dangerous, as if I might fishtail at a hundred.

She talked with me about her strategies for driving through this highway parking lot. Her eyes scanned the traffic as far forward as she could see, usually a quarter mile.

“The cars up close are kind of irrelevant,” she said when I mentioned it. “I’ve already made my decisions about them.”

“What about when the gaps are changing?”

“That’s a problem,” she admitted. Primly, as if it were their fault, she added, “I wish they wouldn’t do that.”

My alarm subsided into a state of heightened awareness. The air noise outside meant we could hear each other but the other road noises seemed distant. I didn’t know what I could do if there was a problem but my body was ready to react. In the meantime, I watched as she compensated for changes in gaps as one car tried to pass another, as usual, unaware we were barreling down on them at twice their speed. And I learned.

Partway through North Carolina. she announced, “I’m tired.”

“My turn?”

“I’m going to pull into this gas station up ahead. I’ll pay. And then you drive.”

“How fast were we going?” I wondered for the hundredth time.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “Pretty fast.”

About two years later, the same young woman made a similar drive down the east coast. This time, she got caught in Virginia by a speed trap.

“I tried to cry my way out of it,” she confessed. “But it didn’t work this time.  They didn’t even reduce my ticket much.”

“What did they clock you at?” I asked.

“Just one hundred twenty. But that’s plenty. I’m suspended.”

When I got back on the road, I had no clear idea of our previous speed but I knew what felt comfortable. With an eye out for cops, I pegged the speedometer needle to the right.

After five minutes of this, my ex laughed at me. She had lost her patience.

“Press the pedal all the way down,” she said.

“But that’s passing gear.”  Her car, like most automatic transmission vehicles, had a kick-ass passing gear. In my driver's education class they had told me it was only for emergency use.

“I drove all the way through Maryland, Virginia, and most of North Carolina in passing gear,” she pointed out. “It’s my car. I say it’s fine. Put the pedal down.”

I pressed the pedal all the way to the floor.

Before, I know from my experiences in other cars I'd been over a hundred-five. That was nothing. When I hit passing gear, the car leaped forward. The sound of the air changed.

Right away, my ex started to coach me how do drive through the avenue of parked cars while we were going sixty miles per hour faster than them.

“You’re not looking far enough ahead,” she said. “You’ve got to know how you’re steering through them farther in advance.”

“Okay, okay.” I concentrated. This was like skiing. I had to hit my marks.

After a while, it was easier than skiing. I wasn’t tired, for one thing. I was hitting my rhythm. We kept an eye out for cops. She urged me to go faster until there was no faster to go. Eventually we hit Georgia, she took over, and we rolled into her neighborhood next to the army base.

Cursing, she directed me to load up her car. She had to make choices about what to leave behind. And then we were done. We started the drive back.

I got to drive through South and North Carolina.

Sometimes life gets fast. I don’t mean physically, not usually, but everything gets to be too much. Deadlines come up, one after another after another. And there’s no control over some of them. Life becomes reacting, moving from one crisis to the next, and grabbing enough time to savor the gaps between. You want to look as far ahead as you can but you have to react to the things close up.

And I remember that drive, the other cars as obstacles, and the speed.

Not Even Not Traveling 53: Idaho II

Idaho II

Craters of the Moon National Monument

Millions of years ago, the caldera (the hot spot near the surface) of the Yellowstone supervolcano seethed under the lands of Idaho. The continental plates and the lava have shifted since then. Slowly, the heat underneath has moved hundreds of miles and into Wyoming.

Only 15,000 years ago, though, the caldera burst out in lava flows and it did so in eastern Idaho. Only 2,000 years ago, it erupted again (in a minor way, or we wouldn't be here). It created more lava on the plains of Idaho. According to most geologists, the volcanic fissures at Craters of the Moon are dormant, not extinct. Ugh. So they are expected to erupt again in the next thousand years. 

Underneath the Snake River Plain, which runs through Idaho, is a feature called the Great Rift. It's an area where the ground gapes open in spots, with some of the clefts as deep as eight hundred feet. Naturally, the major lava pools formed along the path of the Great Rift. 

Even now, the environment on the Snake River Plain is harsh. The dry winds and heat-absorbing lava rocks sap water from the area. Summer soil temperatures exceed 150 degrees Fahrenheit. Plant cover is less than 5% on the cinder cones, where we hiked, and about 15% over the entire park.

It is not a hospitable place.

The features are darned unique, though. And hiking here is another sneaky way to visit Yellowstone without the crowds. At the visitor center, I didn't have to wait in line. I strolled straight to the desk. There, a young man asked if he could help and I said, "My wife isn't here yet but I know what she's going to ask. Where can we go and not see any other people?"

The two women next to me overheard and burst into laughter. But they nodded. 

"Okay, I can't get you to no other people at all," he replied. He unfolded a map for me and circled three different trails. "But I can get you to where there's hardly anyone else."

"Sold," I replied, maybe a bit quickly. He had a plan and I patiently listened to the details. Not surprisingly, the longest and most exposed trails were the least popular. 

Inferno Cone

Some of the popular attractions at Craters of the Moon are so alluring that we waded into them anyway, despite the presence of other people. One of them was the Inferno Cone, the largest cinder cone in the park. It looked so great, I had to pull into the lot. We emerged from the car smiling at the sight. 

"Do you want to climb that basalt mountain?" my wife asked.

"Yeah, that's a terrible idea," I agreed. "Let's go."

She took a few steps along the path. She stopped and turned, eyes narrowed in a suspicious glare. "What did you just say?"

"Let's go." I passed her on the way. 

After we had hiked a couple hundred feet up, maybe halfway to the top, we paused. The elevation and the incline were both pretty high. The experience started to remind me of one I'd had at the Bear Dunes park in Michigan. There, almost twenty years before, I decided to run down a sand dune mountain that started on a  bluff and proceeded far below to the shores of Lake Michigan. After the journey to the water, of course, I had to trudge back up the bluff. It took ages. Naturally, everyone gave me grief about it but, in my defense, everyone had warned me not to do it. 

I had no such defense this time. Granulated basalt is a much, much easier surface than sand, though. We enjoyed the climb. When we got to the highest rocks on the peak, we adored the view, too. 

Broken Top Trail 

This was a great, highly recommended hike. The trail took us up the northwest side of the mountain (Broken Top) and then around it, down, and back to the west. From the overlook, and in several other places, we could see another mountain that probably deserved to be called broken, too. Really, all of the features around us were probably cones or buttes. To our south, we could see Big Cinder Butte, not much taller than the place we were hiking. 

Part of what made the trail so good was the wildlife at the top and the desolation at the bottom. At the bottom, we passed into the lands of the Great Rift. We explored some of the earth-cracking fissures and, gracefully enough, we did not fall in. (For most of them, it would have taken a lot of effort to get into a position to fall. A fall would not have been recoverable in any way, though. No one would have even recovered a body.) We did look fairly closely into Buffalo Caves, though, since the other cave trails were closed due to park maintenance.  

Tree Molds Trail 

On the way back to the same parking area, we hiked on some of the Tree Molds path. It wasn't hard to see why it got its name.

In fact, as a general observation, I felt I could understand why some of the Apollo astronauts - Alan Shepard, Eugene Cernan, Joe Engle, and Edgar Mitchell - performed part of their training at Craters of the Moon as they tried to learn to look for the best rock specimens in a harsh environment.

Wednesday, July 3

Boise, Idaho

Okay, so we hardly looked at it. We stayed in Boise. We know it has good coffee shops. We drove around and looked. But Boise is actually pretty big. 

Unlike most of the towns we stayed in, Boise has all the elements of a good-sized city. It's the opposite of touring the national parks. We arrived without much time to explore before our flight. We were surprised to see the number of high-rises. I was pleased to drive by a professional football stadium, a basketball and hockey arena, and evidence of nightlife. Boise has a lot going on. We dined at a restaurant in the Basque district. Boise has districts!

Our basement apartment AirBNB was well tended but it was so plain (bare concrete floors, no tiles, terrible water, odd smells), I grumped about it quite a bit. Still, I left with the impression there is plenty to do in Boise. There's plenty during the summers, at least, and probably all year round. We hadn't seen enough - which is how we end many of our multi-state tours.

Not Even Not Traveling 52: Idaho I

Idaho I 

In Shelley, our room was small but beautiful.

Beautiful is not the same as practical. The apartment design was open, no doors anywhere in our miniature suite, not even the bathroom. The corridors in the suite were too narrow for more than one person at a time. The tiny fridge was fine. The controls to the hot tub were a mystery in that they didn't quite work according to the instructions. The room's wireless service was decent.

In Shelley, we had taken a room in a motel. As noted above, the results were generally pretty good. However, the situation was unique. For one, the address wasn't advertised as a motel although, viewed from the outside, that's what it looked like to me. Someone on AirBNB said they were renovating old hotel rooms. They offered a special rate during the construction phase. The rooms looked fine in the ad and, surprisingly, they proved to be slightly better when we checked into one. 

I know what I've said about local ownership of motels before. Local properties often doesn't turn out to be well maintained. But this place was nice. The new owners had picked a good spot. They had given a theme to each room as they had renovated it. The themes were interesting. Someone involved had an artistic touch.

I'd rent a room there again. The suites are small, yes, but they were built 1950s originally. It wasn't too bad an era for construction. The dimensions are more cramped than you might find in modern construction but the refurbished results are nice. 

Tuesday, July 2

In the morning, Diane noticed a sign on the way to our next scheduled stop, the Craters of the Moon park. My eyes had vaguely glanced over a yellowish rectangle with red lettering but I didn't read it. Since I was the person steering the vehicle, I didn't much notice it, even. In my defense, reading while driving is generally frowned upon, although I suppose it might be appropriate to read about the Darwin Awards.

"There's an Atomic History Museum," Diane pointed out.

"What, where?" This part of Idaho looked deserted. It didn't even have potatoes, just distant mountains. "Around here?"

"We passed a sign." She put a finger on her chin. "After I thought about it for a second, it seemed like one of those weird places you might like to stop in at."

She was totally right. I started trying to read the signs. Cryptically, the red letters said: EBR-1. Other billboards along our way had details about atomic history although I still couldn't read them. Diane did her best to convey the information.

We pulled into the parking lot of EBR-1 at 9:04. A sign there said they opened at 9:00. Two teenagers outside the building greeted us with looks that said, "Oh no, visitors!" They scooted in through a side door, as if fleeing from our car as we parked it. Our presence seemed to be ruining their nice, quiet morning of doing nothing. (That turned out to not be entirely true, though, because other atomic tourists started arriving ten minutes later.)

Inside the main door, I learned EBR stood for Experimental Breeder Reactor. This building had housed the first nuclear power plant in the world, apparently. What kind of sight-seers would this place get? 

Well, EBR-1 is beautiful and simple. It is pretty much "The Little Nuclear Plant That Could." As one of the teenagers explained to us, the staff in 1951 built a simple heat exchanger that powered a turbine. They chose NAK (a sodium-potassium alloy) for the heat exchanging material because it is technically a liquid metal, very efficient for the job, and NAK stays liquid over a wide range of temperatures. 

I walked around in a state of constant shock over how straightforward everything seemed. Of course, I grew up reading about this stuff, but still. The place reminded me of a pool pump and filtration system. It was not much more complicated than that. If you found the gauges and pipes under a municipal swim center or a boiler room, you wouldn't think anything about it. Well, although the engineering was was easy, the science was still nuclear physics. By 1953, experiments in EBR-1 proved that the reactor was, in fact, producing the plutonium the scientists had hoped to create.

The tourist materials lying around as we toured read like the equivalent of a "Nuclear Power for Dummies" manual. I was vastly entertained by the straightforwardness of it. I kept thinking, "Huh, I should get one of these for my house." At my work, in fact, we're talking about building data centers. Those are always constrained by the limits of our local power company. Again, it gave me the thought, "So let's just have one of these."

Radiation is scary. The usefulness of it never fails to impress, though. I have to agree with XKCD about uranium - it's a suspicious macguffin in our narrative reality. If you were reading a fantasy book and the characters came across a magic metal that could power them to the stars or blow the top off a mountain, you'd think it was pretty farfetched. And yet here it is. We use it to light our homes. 

As an unplanned stop, EBR-1 was pretty great. The nearby town of Arco preserves some of its atomic energy heritage, too. (It was the first town powered solely by nuclear power, albeit as a proof of concept.) Naturally, we took pictures. And we freshened up our coffee.

Not Even Not Traveling 51: Wyoming (Yellowstone)

Yellowstone

Monday, July 1

This day represented another change in our plans. By accident, we added Yellowstone to our itinerary. A rainstorm came through in the early morning and canceled our horse ride at Chico Hot Springs. It would’ve been nice to hit the trails there, but the guides wouldn't let our group move during the downpour. Looking for an alternative, Diane poured over our maps. She found a way for us to get to Idaho, our next state, by taking a road through Yellowstone.

We were lucky it was such a rainy day. The crowds at the northwest entrance of Yellowstone started out as reasonable ones, initially. They got bad fast, which resulted in traffic jams well before the rain eased off. Despite the density of our fellow tourists, we managed to inspect a few of the interesting geographical features along our route. Mammoth Springs is great, by the way, and we would strongly recommend it. You can hike across most of the place on wooden boardwalks. (I'm generally in favor of interacting with nature at some level, not merely gazing at it like on a television.)  

At a nondescript stopping point near Indian Creek, we encountered stinky, bubbling pools low to the ground, like they were part of a swamp. Technically, I'm sure the place wasn't even a marsh. But it lay down in a wooded glade of sorts and it frothed with steamy warmth, green algae, minerals, and burping gases. No one else seemed to want to come near it. That made it even better for us. We did a lot of pointing things out to each other.

As we exited the site, an elderly couple approached me. The man asked, "Is it worth it?"

"Just smell the fresh air!" I exclaimed. He leaned back his head and roared. His wife chuckled, too. They were practically the only ones besides us to stop here so I had to wonder what attracted them.  

"I can feel it already," she nodded. She wrinkled her nose. "It it far?"

"Not even a football field away into the trees."

She sighed as she stumped off along the path. She was struggling with a noticeable limp, so the distance was important to her. Likewise, she probably enjoyed the definite lack of the usual crowd at a Yellowstone attraction. After a moment of rest when she reached the nearest line of trees, she plodded on out of view. The whole time, she seemed to maintain a slightly grumpy air about the mildly rotten air.  

In our car, we passed Sheepeater Cliff on our left, then we drove across the bridge over Indian Creek. As we rolled over the creek, Diane caught sight of a something by the side of the road. Whatever the species, a largish animal had found a spot between the bridge and the water. What it was doing there all alone was hard to say, but Diane tapped my arm. She has a rapid, hard, blade-of-the-hand touch she uses for urgent situations. This qualified. 

"Pull off! Pull off!" She pointed to a spot in back of us, where I could not go. 

Up and to the right, I saw a lay-by, apparently paved there for people who wanted to stop and hike to the creek. I pulled in and discovered, behind the bushes and stubby trees, a parking lot of sorts. It could fit a half-dozen cars although it lay mostly empty. There was a single picnic table on the sand beyond the lot. A grandmother and two children sat at it with their lunch. The clever Yellowstone park rangers had situated an outhouse building thirty feet in back of the table. It was the dual-outhouse that drew the crowd, small as it was. Six people stood in a line to pass through either door. 

While I gawked at the people for a moment, I glimpsed my wife to my left. She was not leaving me but had already left and was returning. She grabbed my left arm. 

"It's over here," she said. "I think it's an elk."

She led me on a brief hike to the south shore of the creek, From there, I could see the animal was, in fact, an elk. Or maybe I don't know the difference between an elk and some other large quadruped without antlers, which is possible. (A little while later, it turned out I didn't know what a weasel looked like.) Anyway, the creature was pretty big. Even lying down in a thicket of weeds across the river, it was a substantial presence. But we didn't have to worry about it charging us across the stream, so we could get as close as we liked. 

Besides, some nut (some *other* nut), as always happens, managed to pull off the road next to the bridge, the way my wife had wanted me to do. That put his car within twenty feet of the elk. When the driver got out, the distance suddenly looked even smaller. 

It looked small to the driver, too. After a moment of excitement while getting his picture, he backpedaled toward the open door of his car. 

Obsidian Cliff

This was another Yellowstone site where the crowd was minimal. How many people want to look at rocks in a cliff or on the ground? Not many. But historically, the obsidian sites in the United States were important. The tribes traded pretty extensively for the shards and blades, which were pretty much the sharpest available. 

Roaring Mountain 

This really looks cool. My first glimpse made me pull the car off into a lot. Okay, so the throng of picture-takers at this site seemed too much. I could see why they wanted to be here. I'd recommend it despite the difficulties getting in. People, people, people. Yellowstone has too many people in it. But this mountain is genuinely cool (and hot, technically). 

Geyser Basin

Whoops, the geyser basin was so packed with tourists, we decided to drive through without stopping. Maybe some other day. Maybe in the winter. And maybe with more time to devote to a hike through the geyser area while dodging the crowds as much as possible. 

Gibbon Falls 

Compared to the geysers, I guess a waterfall seems ordinary. Anywhere else but Yellowstone, though, and this view would have been a major tourist spot. It was still kind of popular, actually. 

Clearwater Springs

This is a 'nothing' kind of place but we liked it. Now, that's partly because there were less than a dozen other tourists on the walkways with us. There isn't much to see, a few mineral pools and interesting plants, except there was also a fast, little animal zooming around. The animal caught most of our attention. It zipped along a log, posed for a moment, popped onto a rock, skipped back to the log, and skittered back to the other end.

We followed it and took pictures. We got blurry, awkward shots. The animal wasn't a chipmunk. It wasn't a squirrel. It wasn't large, though. It was certainly no bigger than most cats, and it was even faster. 

Only when we came home and showed our friends the photos did we find out (thanks, Ted) that we had not known what a weasel looks like. 

Heading to Idaho

Since we only drove through the northwest quadrant of Yellowstone park, our experience of it was necessarily limited. But the road took us into the last state of our trip, Idaho. We were bound for Shelley - not an old girlfriend. It's a town.