Roads
Mike Finley
Published in an edition of one, December 8, 1995. Written during our family vacation to Puget Sound.
Copyright © 1994 by Mike Finley.
All rights reserved.
For a nicer text, download the e-book
version. Roads
Roads speed through the countryside,
every bend a mystery, every moment of unevenness a jolt
into something new and not known.
Roads on islands are conflicted because they do not get you anywhere really,
they are failures and sorry.
The dead end road is indeed a death, sudden and irreversible,
we avoid them at all costs
until the one time we wish to go someplace and not return.
Macadam, asphalt, concrete, slag,
blacktop, gravel, cobbles, tar.
Mountain roads that turn cars into athletes, grinding uphill
and then falling, falling all the way down,
a shiver down every spine.
Shore roads and causeways that lick the water and the water licks them.
City streets boulevards illuminated as if each passing car were on parade.
Alleys where cats trip by on tiptoes.
Frontage roads like caged animals prowling their perimeters, pining to be free.
Expressways and beltways that traffic courses through like blood through muscle,
cars by the thousand, every destination important.
suburban lanes that guide us to our garages,
the narrow road that takes me to your house.
Applause for Crow
I believe you are the blackest bird I ever saw,
blacker than blackbird or raven, grackle or daw.
Your wingspread blacker than onyx without flaw,
Lacquered jacket black as a chaw
of tar or ink or the mountain blueberries in your craw.
Your eye so keen there ought to be a law,
Diving down and snatching every stray gewgaw
Clutch of diamond, gum wrapper or straw,
snatched quicker than a talon or a monkey's hairy paw,
spurs remorseless as a mongoose claw.
Mightier in legend than the donkey's jaw,
from the ice of January to April's dreary thaw,
from summer's roasted pastures to autumn's hem and haw.
Your disdain for the usual forest foofraw,
your pitlilessness for feathered things carried off in a wet dog's maw,
and tendency to repeat yourself are transwoodland topics of awe.
Over and over every morning, the first breath I draw
that voice like tearing paper, only still more raw,
the hard spank of morning cries caw.
Wilderness Computer User
[San Juan Island, Puget Sound] - I type this message on a notebook PC perched on a log, wired to the cigarette lighter of my minivan. We are camped in the bucolic surroundings of a primitive campground on this charming island where Great Britain and the United States almost went to war over the killing of a pig. Whales slide through the blue waters off Limekiln Park, and I remind myself to turn the idle screw down tomorrow morning -- the engine is racing a bit.
People who have not ventured out of the city into the pristine wilderness can know little of the serenity and beauty of real nature. And people without a laptop computer will be unable to record the feelings of grandeur I felt yesterday, for instance, on the snowy slopes of Mt. Baker, where all was silent and majestic, with the exception of the rumble of the gasoline generator powering my system.
Earlier in the trip the kids seemed intent on squabbling in the back seat. Now, as they tote the generator together up 2,500 feet of slippery mountain paths, they seem united in some higher purpose that I can only guess at. Kids!
There were those, early in my camping and computing days, who told me that the two didn't mix. That I was combining forces so disparate, so alien to one another, that it was an alliance of the devil. That I should switch off my headlights and let everyone in the campground get some sleep.
That was OK with me. I accepted that I had to prove myself and my vision to the simple folk of the backpack and canoe. I relished the challenge, and I feel that in the past few days I have more than answered it.
In the early dawn hours at base camp, I met a group of businessmen gearing up for a day of mountain hiking. Their leader was the picture of the contemporary outdoorsman -- lean, serious, a man who subsisted entirely on seeds. He had just announced to his charges that the hike would commence at 7 AM and head for the Paradise Glacier, where they would engage in heavy rope climbing through the early hours of the morning.
It seemed an excellent plan to me, and I spoke up to say that, by consulting America Online's recreation forum, and by scanning several GIF photos of the mountain's face, I had identified eight locations most suitable for a successful climb by a group of their skill level.
The businessmen crowded around, eager to see the graphic. Soon I had them seated around me as I dialed up weather conditions in the Rockies, and then took requests. We had finished off our second platter of flapjacks, and looked up stock quotes for a dozen initial public offerings before we noticed the groupleader, and the morning, had slipped away.
Later, pulling the PC up a rock face on a set of pulleys, the family and I clambered up to a rocky outcropping. To the east the sun had taken refuge behind a wall of massive cumulus clouds, its rays backlighting their silvery edges. A pair of young people were sitting with their packs on a moss-blanketed log by a sunny, turquoise mountain lake, behind which rose the blue shadow of a glaciered peak. Newlyweds, from the look of them.
I hailed them, and they turned to greet me, a look of wide-eyed delight on their faces.
"In case you're curious, this lake is called Twenty Two Lake," I told them, reading from the screen of my CD-ROM multimedia disk about vacationing in America's great northwest. "The altitude here is 8,650 feet. The lake was formed from an ancient volcanic crater. The soil here is rich in nitrates and nickel," I told our new friends. "According to my CD-ROM, this hike is rated medium difficult. Besides recreation, these mountains are also used to harvest a host of renewable natural resources."
It is hard to describe the look they gave me. It was sort of a frown, like when a dog is feeling perplexed. But then it got more intense, indicating great focus. Whatever it was, it was reward aplenty for the small service I was pleased to provide.
It is Friday night in the campground, the onset of Labor Day weekend. All around me are the noisy sounds of campers bedding down. The engine is running. It is night, and the headlights illumine the tents of a dozen campers. Inside their tents, I can see their occupants in pantomime, gesturing at me -- I believe it is a good-natured wave. Hello back at you, friends!
It gives me a good feeling, as I prepare to sign off under the vast starry canopy of night. The world is in harmony, and the moon is in its heaven. There is so much useful information on my hard disk or available online. So much to share, so many ways to help.
As I type, a curious odor of hot tar has wafted through our campsite. Guess I will wrap this column up later. A delegation of campers with flashlights has asked me to demonstrate how my screensaver works.
I think I'm really getting through to these people.
Outdoors Man
I want the night to be over.
I want my air mattress to reinflate.
I want my sleeping bag to stay where I put it
and not slide toward the lowest corner of the tent.
I want the morning to suddenly be here.
I want the pain in my kidneys to ease.
I want to be able to get up, find the zipper
and pee in the bushes with walking into
fresh spiderweb and imagining its builder
tightening its noose around my penis.
I want to close my eyes and dream
of happy times and happy places,
not children tied to chairs and forced
by cruel kidnappers to eat cold chop suey
with pimentos, the canned kind.
I would ask that whatever is making that chug and response sound
down by the lake edge finish its business and be quiet.
I wish my teeth did not taste like someone else's.
I wish that I could take a long shower
and wash my butt, and shampoo the pine sap
out of my hair.
I wish that, when morning finally does come,
that I could stand and walk the way I used to,
not this rickety poststroke hitch
last night left me with.
I wish for a day so sunny and so dry
that it will drive the damp like Rommel's camels
from my sodden bag and towels.
I wish for zippers that zip, stakes that don't bend double,
socks that do not electrostatically attract
pine needle, foxtail and burr.
I wish my wife, who is sleeping so beautiful beside me,
cheekbones catching the halfmoon light,
would awaken and hold me and offer me
comfort and succor for all my pains.
I wish that nature did not require this expensive entourage
for me to spend a night in it,
and I call on God and Goddess
with all the influence I can summon in these matters
allowing first that I do love the mountain and I do love the tree
to explain why the cost of a little beauty is so much pain,
while I slouch like Achilles in my tent,
blinking at the nylon sky.
The Sugar Trap
To keep yellowjackets from our tentsite
I filled a pop bottle half-full
with sugar water and strawberry jelly.
As the day grew warmer the bees would alight on the rim
and one after another descend
to sample the pink nectar.
By day's end there were over forty bees in the bottle,
most of them drowned
with a few still clambering over
their fellows to climb out.
But the walls are too steep
and their wings too wet
and the water is too sweet
to avoid very long.
First they fly down, and spin inside the bottle,
delighted with their find,
enough sugar to feed their community for a month.
The sight of their comrades floating face-down
does not seem to be a major minus to them.
It is only when they set that first foot
in the water that they suspect,
and the struggle to rise up somehow is on.
It is impossible, they fall back
into the sticky syrup, their wings now covered.
Furious, the start twitching their abdomens.
This must be someone else's fault,
they seem to be saying,
I never sought sugar for my own personal use,
it was always for the hive.
But community mindedness has fled
and in their wretchedness
they sting their comrades the dead and the dying,
spasmodic, undulating, thrusting in ther pool
and this can go on for hours, and more.
I did not see any bee trying to warn off any other bee
either by gesture or sound,
even though the arrival of the newcomer
spells sting after sting.
It is as if in their misery they call out to come join them.
It is good to share this meal my brothers
it is good to drink the common cup,
so cold, so sweet,
this wine.
Slugs
You can pluck them from their surfaces
and hear the sucking sound of slime releasing.
Sprinkle salt on them, it is said,
and you break their chemical seal,
and it burns, and they twist from the pain.
In the rain forest they are everywhere
on leaf and stem and stone.
But on the islands it has not rained in months.
They drag themselves on meager dew
from pebble to twig like dead men left out in the open
their futile horns extending slowly
like a remark you are anxious to hurry along.
They hunch forward gradually, and the weight slides forward
like tiny beached whales trying to make themselves comfortable.
Yellow, brown, black, red,
they make their way to some lookout place
and lift blind heads and smell salt sea.
Entrepreneur
This spider studied real estate.
He built a web at the corner station
over the sign flashing Quaker State --
location, location, location.
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