Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

 

“It’s…the only life.” –-Water Rat, Wind in the Willows

I’ve just — nanoseconds ago — snapped back into the kind of awareness that allows one to, for example, express thoughts in written language. The movie let out. That is, my innertube has jarringly scraped free of its recent gravel bed emergency brake and I’ve spun as slowly as possible to still call it “movement” (but still a human centrifuge) past the house-sized concave riverbank rock that has (perhaps forever) been showing the silent feature called, “Reflection Of and Maybe For Underwater Life.”

Now I’m nearly at the next curve, and I have to decide, even as I notice I’m composing the lead to my next Dispatch, into which channel the most water is spilling. It’s a subtle but important decision (involving both anterior and dorsal seal imitation), since I’d prefer to spill down that channel, too, and not get stuck yet again with a parting gift of more lower back gravel lacerations.

Even if the crucial but pre-Monsoon-parched river is barely deep enough to float a man and his tube, it’s generally a very solid sign when you’re participating in an activity which would have been included, no matter how forced the rhyme, had you been the lyricist for “My Favorite Things.” Not much rhymes with “innertubing” but plenty does with “bliss.” Now that I think about it, I welcome the offering in the comments section of this Dispatch of anyone who wishes to write a verse of their own personal “My Favorite Things.” Consider it a remix. I’m a wholehearted participant in the Remix Era.

As a result of this (nearly finished) day and a half of Very Very Likely (I don’t ever like to imply “Guaranteed”) Bliss, this return to Now Equilibrium, I am emerging as well-rested as I can remember being, at least since becoming a father for the second time. I’ve been rocked to sleep the past couple of nights by the kind of organic music that some folks pay to listen to on ambient bedside compilations: river current strings, sunset sandpiper glockenspiel, that kind of symphony. I feel like a farmer whose strength comes from the knowledge that he’s responsible for his own food. I’m growing my own contentment.

In an effort at concentration to find a more appropriate-feeling synonym for “growing” than “cultivating,” I just tried very hard to close my ears for a few moments, but the loud quiet in this wilderness (formerly “our entire planet as given”) keeps working its way back in. Its white noise is a synonym for sanity. For what I believe (and often note in these Dispatches) is one of life’s crucial health maintenance reminders: that the best interpretation of anything, anyone, any situation, is the true one. If I (or anyone else) says it is. The best in every way. Every.

I’ve crunched to the bank in a world smelling of pennyroyal, reminding myself to strengthen those who feel to me as though they operate from a place of good. I’ve lingered over (actually, mostly under) one final swimming hole before stuffing my dry bag for the half mile squish-hike back to the road. As I prepare to load the R.O.A.T. and try to remember what an ignition key is for, I see that my dry bag is aging. Its less-than-impervious seams are reminding me that this is maintenance. This river trip. It is re-sealing my own seams. Ah, there’s the synonym for “growing.”

Ah. I also, in the same stick-my-hand-in-and-see-what-items-and-ideas-I-come-up-with motion, notice that a critter of some kind has taken a fancy to my granola. There are clear teeth marks (raccoon? Beaver?) in the oft-reused co-op bulk bag. Am I angry? Hardly. I lean toward the harvesters (farmers, fishers) who accept and even welcome many of the other species that allegedly pose a threat to their “bottom-line.”

In New Mexico, I have a neighbor who devotes an entire ten-acre field to nitrogen-fixing alfalfa “for the deer.” In Alaska, I and my friends yelled playfully at (rather than bombed) the seals who tried to treat my salmon net like a free take-out sushi buffet (you see this process mimicked in actual sushi bars: the kind where you pull each order of hamachi, et al. off the boats drifting past). In fact, I first moved to the Last Frontier in large part because, stretching outside my tent one morning, I saw a wolf raiding my freeze-dried food stash during a trip just like this one –- it my first week in-State. I figured, “Any place with a healthy predator/prey balance at the dawn of the Twenty-First Century has a lot going for it.”

Just as I slam the truck bed closed, I hear my old friend Wren in a cottonwood above me. Three like notes followed by a final, vibrating diminished third or so. If I looked in the Blissed-Out-English/Wren dictionary, I’m pretty sure I’d see the translation, “Now now now NOW!”

But in this Now my cell phone is back on, struggling with satellites banging off mountains and nearly picking up a signal, though admittedly it’s being used at the moment to play some very Now Shpongle through the R.O.A.T’s speakers. Soon, I know and am feeling re-sealed enough to admit, time as I experience it will have factors like “society” and “deadlines” and “clothes” factored upon it. Like smudges on sunglasses lenses. No idea why that metaphor is in my head, I think as I nearly veer off this remote road trying to wipe my own lenses clean.

I’m not worried. About holding fast in the Now even in the asteroid belt of non-river life. As long as the Monsoon comes on soon, I have no complaints. In fact, in what I take as a good sign, I see on the passenger seat that before I left “civilization,” I received my author copy of the latest New Mexico Magazine issue (August, of course, showing once again that print media deadlines are one of those regions of the universe that are pretty much by definition not able to live in the Now), in which I spell out in my column just how vital is the annual atmospheric re-hydration that I hope is about to complement, perhaps complete, my spiritual one. Here it is, in slightly fuller, more vintage form:

 

The Monsoon Metaphor

A Reminder That We’re All Still At Earth’s Beck and Call

“Everything’s better when wet.” –-Steve Miller

Whether it’s tears, sneezes, or honest opinions about an in-law, a body always feels better after it lets go. The Chinese call this Ch’i, or flow. We feel better, too, when the Earth releases its pent-up tension. By this time of year here in the Land of Enchantment, everything and everyone is so ready for moisture of any kind that we all resemble those morose wildebeest in the old nature documentaries which the narrator inevitably describes as “aching pathetically for the cooling Monsoon rains.”

We need precipitation so badly come summer that we willingly forget any side-effects that come with our Monsoon downpours: flash floods, hail damage to our trucks, and lightning strikes inches to the side of our hips during the afternoon goat milking. I tremble when I think of all those poor planets, right here in the solar system, that don’t have any water at all. Boy, would that affect my tomato harvest.

Indeed, here on the Funky Butte Ranch, the unabashed anticipation extends to my thirsty garden crops, which by now are stretching their arms as though in worship toward the sky, in a gesture amazingly similar to my own extended palm when that first drop hits the ground. We can’t wait.

Added to the mix in recent years has been Climate Change, whose unpredictable effects give us almost no Monsoon one year, and Biblical floods the next. I can’t even in good faith describe one of those storms that wipes out the Funky Butte Ranch’s dirt driveway as a “hundred year event” anymore. We’ve had three in the last decade. It’s confusing to my kids, who read in books that spring comes in April, as opposed to August and September as they experience it…but only sometimes.

Yes, the New Monsoon Normal is such now that it’s a mid-Monsoon ritual for my old-timer neighbors, essentially meteorological historians, to push their sweat-stained hats back by the brim, scratch their heads, and say, “Nope. Never happened like this that I recall.” We don’t even know what an average year is anymore.

I try to put this all in perspective: geologists tell us that the whole summer Monsoon phenomenon is only seven or eight hundred years old, and that its switch from a winter rainy season to our current, tenuous summer model might be one of the reasons our Mogollon predecessors left the Land of Enchantment for neo-Rugged Individualists like me to enjoy.

So this is really just a chapter in the larger story of all life on Earth: you just have to live in New Mexico through one parched, windy spring in order to realize how most humans have always lived –- that is, totally at the mercy of nature. And you simultaneously realize why so many cultures have developed intricate rain dances.

But none of this can stem the anticipation I feel now. Because I’m panting as I type. Even the hummingbirds seem a little listless. You could use my skin as sandpaper.

At this point I’m pointedly not concerned with my place in geologic history. I just want that heavenly, daily allegro symphony of thunder cellos coursing below the soft violin-and-piccolo tap of a 45-minute downpour on my roof –- the melody that sends my ducks into ecstatic quacking fits, and allows me to drastically reduce the drip irrigation time for my apples.

For now, though, I’m like the wildebeest low on Ch’i, staring up pathetically at the sky during the goat milking each afternoon at a situation completely out of my control. Every morning I wonder if there is perhaps some kind of dance I could perform, with or without my ducks, to make the blessed cooling rains come and reconstitute my life again.

Postscript: I’ve been back at the Ranch for a day now, and even though the setting for my working life kind of feels like where I’d like to retire, as always, the challenge after a river trip is to maintain the vibe, to hold on to the energy of timelessness when returning to time. I’m fortunate in that I do have an acute mnemonic device for the recharge lessons of this short, to-the-Cosmic-point trip — if not a visceral one than an epidermal one. Sort of, if not an ace in the hole, then an unintentional spring in my step. Care of two awkwardly second-degree burned legs (ankle to thigh, like I’ve been spray painted only on the front half). Several people on my one run since my “return” have sensed and pulled over for a sort of approaching fire engine. One inquired, “What is that you’re yelping with every step?” To which I answered, “nOW! nOW!”

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