43. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath

            When I was living and teaching in Devon, England I was asked to teach some of the poetry of Sylvia Plath.  The head of the department came in and talked for awhile about Plath’s life and told some nonsense about American’s having detention facilities during the war for the Germans as we did for the Japanese and that that was somehow a fear of the Plath family due to some German ancestry. The department head was an Irish woman who viewed herself as foreign to England just as I was as an American (she must have forgotten that Northern Ireland, like England, is part of the UK). At that time in my life I would never have corrected her in front of the students (might not even now) but after she had gone I took it upon myself to tell my students that the largest ethnic group in the United States is, in fact, German and not (simply because we speak it) English and that it would be impossible for us to have had detention facilities for 40% of our population.

            All of this got me thinking more about Sylvia Plath and how the English fully accept her as an English poet because she married an Englishman and lived there for some time (and died there). But as an American living in Devon, I realized that she was every bit as American as ever and that that nationality which you are born with can not simply be swept away by leaving your homeland. As an example I turn to her poem "Blackberrying." The setting is very English but the berries are obviously American or they would be called bramble-berries.

            Sylvia Plath’s poetry is, indeed, a gift to both Americans and British alike. Its sense of confession can sometimes make you feel as if you’ve been slapped across the face while at other times it can bring you to tears. When you know about her life, her tempestuous relationship with her philandering husband, Ted Hughes and her suicide, you can’t help but feel a deep anguish. When I taught her poetry to my English students I liked to joke about the different aspects of our nationalities, that the English are prone to keep a stiff upper lip and put up with things while Americans tend to believe they can improve anything and everything. The house we were living in had a cooker (cook stove) that’s oven jets needed a good banging to get the gas through them. I told my students that Ms. Plath was frustrated with her husband’s “make do” attitude with a faulty cooker so she decided to bake anyway. Because she wanted her children to have some good old fashioned American cookies she decided to fix that oven, but because of the risks involved, to protect the children she taped off all the possible escape routes for the gas. In the end it killed her. Of course I was only joking and my students seemed somewhat entertained by the joke allowing a sense of humor at the expense of both nationalities (both being stubborn in some way, I suppose).

            I can’t help but feel grateful for Sylvia Plath, not only for her poetry but for her American presence in Devon that was still very palpable to me even though she died about the time I was born. Her life in Devon and New England, however difficult, provided me with a sense of comfort at being American even in the foreign land of my ancestors where the consanguinity of my British brethren could not.

42. The poetry of Robert Frost

            Poetry is the written expression of our existence whether it be purely visual or sung to the rhythm of an instrument.  It records the very fiber of our being with all the rhythm of the heart and every sense of our existence.  Certain poets have a way of speaking to me in particular and I find the poetry of Robert Frost to be especially communicative to me.  He took the ordinary things from his New England existence and put them on paper in such a beautiful display of vibrancy and reality for me that I feel comfort when I read his poems.  “When I see birches… I like to think some boy’s been…” “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” “Nothing gold can stay…” When I read his poetry I know that this man was not only in touch with his surroundings, he also was in touch with his fellow man.

            I don’t ever remember not liking his poetry, so it’s no surprise that when I went to Ripton, Vermont to his farm there adjacent to the Bread Loaf Campus of Middlebury College I felt completely at ease with the surroundings.  The Green Mountains have the same sense of comfort that the mountains of North Idaho have.  While they are less rugged than many of the mountains I have encountered here and their elevation can seem comically low to one from the west, they still have a rugged beauty that pulls in a westerner such as me or Robert Frost.  Frost brought that sense of beauty and pain that comes with mountain living right into every word he seemed to commit to paper.  I am constantly drawn to the ideas of being in the woods and perusing the changing leaves, the choices made in life compared to the choices of walking down a wooded path in autumn or the splendor of a snowfall in the evening.  These things are written along with the poems of marital difficulties, getting along with neighbors and typical life struggles. His poetry conveys both the difficulty and beauty of life in such a way that I feel connected to him as an old friend who has good advice for me.  I am very thankful for the poetry of Robert Frost.

41. The Mississippi

I grew up on a river and I loved it. People often think or even equate Idaho to Nevada, a place with little to no water, but that isn’t the case at all. Idaho is home to some very large rivers and lakes so we Idahoans love the water. It should come as no surprise that I love the water. I guess, since I was born a Cancer, I’m supposed to love water anyway, but I don’t hold much stock in astrology. I think most Americans have some attraction to large bodies of water no matter where they live.

            Mark Twain gave us the mighty Mississippi with his riverboat tales in novels and autobiography and I have latched onto all the mythology of that great river. I have no clear memories of ever having seen it anywhere south of Iowa, though I was there as a child. But even in Iowa that river is huge. With all of the big paddle wheel boats and the slow steady flow to the Gulf of Mexico, it is the great divide of East and West in our country. It is a highway of trade from North to South. I love seeing it on a June night when the fireflies illuminate its banks like some mythical otherworld. How can this vast river be here in the land of grass and prairie? What has it seen? Is this why we are the land of the free because even here on the vast expanses of plains our waters flow? I love the thought of drops from the Rockies commingling with drops from Appalachia. This is the meeting place of all of America. And I love it.

            I know I’m just some punk kid from a little hole in the ground town in a part of Idaho that even most people from Idaho don’t know about, but when I climb the western slope of the Rockies onto that continental spine I can feel myself flow both Pacifically and Atlantically somewhere down in Missouri or Oregon or both and I taste the fiber of my being as the drops of my existence flow into a greater expanse of my home, the land of the free.

            I love the Mississippi.

The Color of Love

He walks in all cocky

Like a professional athlete

Who just won an Olympic Gold.

His bow and arrow are slung awry

Over his shoulder looking like an arrogant Senior

Thinking his looks will get him a diploma.

(Put a shirt on, Jackass.)

But before I can say that to him

He’s nocked an arrow and aimed it

Right at my chest

And BAM!

That arrow slams my heart.

An ache emanates through

My entire being

Shattering glass pain

Clouding my vision blood red

Throbbing with every beat of my

Heart. And the bastard’s gone

Leaving me here, screaming in pain

While your rouged lips

Laugh at me in disdain.

My Reason for Running

          “When the sweet showers of April have pierced/The drought of March… Then people long to go on pilgrimages…”  And so the ritual of a religious pilgrimage was described by the father of English poetry in his ever so famous Canterbury Tales. Well I have my own ritual that, while not religious, is certainly important to me and, at times, even keeps me grounded in my faith. When it’s winter, as it is now, I only go on a run two or three times a week but running is a ritual for me. When spring, summer and fall are here my runs get longer and more frequent because it’s light and the days are longer. This ritual is important to me because it keeps me in shape, it gives me time to think, and it lifts my mood as a big part of my social existence.

            Running allows me to make social connections. I have been running since I was a kid and I have made friends who are also runners. Just like the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Tales, I get to tell my running friends stories. People know me as a runner. I have also coached young runners for the past 33 years in track and cross country. I have never been the sit-on-the-sidelines, do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do coach, but the guy that runs with the kids. Even now, in my fifties, I still run with them (okay, maybe behind them) and they know that I know about running from experience. Telling stories is one of my many coaching techniques. Many of the people I have coached have gone on to run in college and many more have become the day to day runners that enter fun runs and keep the running community alive. The sport of cross country in Idaho has grown exponentially since I started a cross country team here in Potlatch. I know those coaches. I have mentored many of those coaches. Some of those coaches were running in school when I started coaching. Running keeps those connections across the generations alive for me. Running connects me to other people who understand perseverance, who understand the need to move, who understand meditation in motion.

          Seven years ago, when I was 48, I was picking up my running intensity in the spring, thinking about running Bloomsday, the premiere social running event of the Inland Northwest. I noticed that when my heart rate increased my chest started aching. To say it hurt would be wrong, but because it was in my chest, I got a little scared and I finally checked myself into the emergency room at Pullman Memorial Hospital. They rushed me Sacred Heart in Spokane and the next day I had robotic heart bypass surgery. I didn’t have a heart attack so no great damage was done. In fact, I would say it is fair to say that running saved my life. I did not know that I suffer from coronary artery disease at the time but because of that incident I found out and I changed my eating habits. The very act of running lead me to the hospital. The very act of running changed my diet. The very act of running let me know I needed to get something fixed. Running has always kept me healthy.

           But everything is not always perfect about running because I thought since it kept my weight down I could basically eat whatever I wanted. Because of running I largely ignored the earlier signs of heart disease, including the fact that I had actually had a mild heart attack a year earlier. I am human so like everyone I do lose sight of balance. Just because one exercises does not mean one can eat whatever they want, whenever they want. So this one needs to remember that and running helps with that.

            Besides keeping me in shape, aware of my body and healthy, running also gives me time to think. The world gets pretty hectic for a teacher. English teachers have these crazy schedules where we are loaded down with grading galore and forced into getting the equivalent of four crappy novels read over one weekend so that we can complete report cards. We are bombarded with requests to write letters of recommendation at the same time (because of scheduling done by outside forces, not the students) and then we still have the demands of our family which can be crazy. And then we somehow, usually miraculously, accomplish all that work with the help of sleeplessness and coffee and disgruntled spouses. And then we are finished. And then we don’t know what to do with ourselves, so we plan these amazing lessons (or so we like to think). As I previously noted, I would have long since expired from heart disease if I didn’t get out and run.

            Running allows me the time to stop viewing my students and their shoddy work as monsters. I can actually fester over them for a mile or so, get a small sweat worked up and then they become human beings again and I pace my heart into a steady beat. I become a choir master with all the voices of those young people and I actually begin to love them. They sound so beautiful and I imagine how to tweak those little squawks into harmonious being. Then I actually want to write those letters of recommendation and extol the virtues of my students.

            Running allows me time to get myself physically tired so that no matter how much coffee (and I dearly love coffee) I drink, I will still sleep. In my restful sleep I am able to dream of wading in Mumbles Bay off the coast of Swansea, Wales. Dylan Thomas recites poetry to me in my head (and strangely enough his accent is more conversational than deep booming British dry). And I “Do not go gentle into that good night,” but “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”  Every step I take dissipates frustration, anger and hypertension. I am able to smell the roses, syringa, lilacs and whatever other flower grows along the way. I am able to look to the hills, and recognize that my strength comes from the Lord. (Psalm 121)  I am able to pray. I am able to forget the stress of inadequate papers. I am able to forget the fact that I am all caught up and need to make phenomenal lesson plans. I can just run and feel the wind in my face.

            The ritual of running, lacing up those shoes, stepping into the wind and moving is important to me because it lets me know I am alive. It helps me be alive. It helps me connect with other people who are alive. And it lets me share those stories, those successes. It keeps me balanced. Sometimes I wonder if running isn’t life itself.

40. Bend, Oregon

By now you have probably gleaned that I am a fan of the Northwest.  I grew up in Idaho, my wife grew up in Washington and now my parents live in Oregon so I’m familiar with all those states. I lived in Eastern Idaho for years so to get back North I had to travel through Montana and, of course, I was close to Wyoming so I went there often as well.

            One particular small town that I have watched boom into a small city is Bend, Oregon. The growing pains of the city have removed much of the typical small town friendliness of the Northwest and I do regret that. But one thing about the place that has not been destroyed and that I love about Bend is its proximity to the mountains and desert. It’s definitely a desert city, but it sits in a Juniper forest that gradually gives way to Ponderosa Pines right within the city limits. If you travel a few miles north or east (I mean like Redmond or the east side of the city) you are in Great Basin sage brush desert. If you drive a few miles west you are in the Cascades and able to ski down Mt. Bachelor.

            It is this vast array of landscapes, constant sunny dry weather and complete four seasons that has lead the town to grow into the little city it is. Dot-commers have moved here from the east, people tired of the coastal drizzle have moved over the hill and, like all the Northwest, Californians have moved north for the quieter, slow paced life.

            The place abounds in outdoor activities from skiing and hiking to white water rafting. The city has a variety of micro breweries and an array of shopping.  And it isn’t far from Crater Lake either. While I don’t spend a lot of time in Bend, I do enjoy my trips there and the surrounding areas. While I wouldn’t want to jump ship and move there, I am thankful that communities like Bend are around. I’m thankful for Bend and if you get the time I’d recommend a visit.