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

It was while I was describing the Funky Butte winter orchard watering M.O. to a friend who was watching the ranch for me while I was on the road a short while back that I realized there was a new time of day to celebrate.

“If it stays this cold, you might have to limit yourself to sunny days between 3 and 3:45 p.m.,” I explained in a draft email of my winter irrigation philosophy. “That’s when even the most exposed hose lines usually have unfrozen enough to flow.”

That’s what I wrote, on account of the regular 70 degree temperature swings we see at this time of year here in the high desert transitional zone that seems to have more endemic species than some places have species. The fluctuation of season can be deeply confusing to someone who comes from a place where a season lasts three months, not six hours. I’m not kidding. To wake up to a frightening porch thermometer reading of “7” (and the associated goat bucket skating rinks), and then to evolve into a river-dipping humanoid under 70 degree skies by siesta time is not uncommon.

But what I meant was, “Here’s a great way to spend that magical afternoon time slot when the low-angled winter desert light has re-liquefied the world into a daytime landscape as seen through a sand sculpture; everything some version of purpling Cambrian sandstone. It has the added advantage of being beneficial to multiple species. Probably thousands, actually, if you open your mind and give the microbial critters the credit they deserve for the health of an overall fruit orchard ecosystem.”

Why, I wonder now, is this time of day not recorded to the point of rote meme since ancient song as a sacred sweet spot? We’re all from the same Star Stuff, the same Big Bang — don’t we all come to the eventual cosmic conclusions? I dunno. I guess ticks come from the same Big Bang, too.

OK, perhaps at this point you’re asking a fair question in an ultimately relative universe: how would I define those conclusions at which I expect all right thinking conscious beings will arrive? It was while I was realizing that, if done right (and after enough verses), “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” is in fact interpretive dance, that I came to that answer myself: if only the history course I teach to my toddlers was fully accurate.

Holy Gazoley, this is what I heard coming out of my mouth last week when asked by one of my offspring to explain the Liberty Bell stamp we were affixing to a bill envelope: “we used to be ruled by self-declaring monarchs, but now we’re free and kings are rare.”

What I didn’t say was, “Holy, shit, American civil liberties are so precious. Are they still intact? Am I doing enough to work on that? Ya know, the freedoms that supposedly all Americans of all parties and incomes and places of origin are ultimately all fighting for.”

I know from whence my ambivalence about my unfailingly optimistic message to my kids derives. In our pop music diet alone these days, we’re exposed to what I think of as both essential worldviews: an ultimately-benevolent-because-love-powered universe on the one hand (Bob Marley, Carl Sagan, Mr. Rogers) and a strike-first-to-survive-in-this-dog-eat-dog-world on the other (Fugees, Corporate Politics, Virtually All International Diplomacy).

Do we choose in which school we dwell? If so, should we self-identify? Today the Rastaman Vibration was the easy, obvious choice for me. It was the kind of day I love most. One that involves at once drysuit, laptop and wildflowers. Also adventure, creation and love. Maybe the answer is to just have a lot of days like this. The carpet of caramel colored cottonwood leaves on the river-crossing plank this morning looked to me like offerings in hope of such a result.

If I believe it, maybe it is. I wrote in an earlier Dispatch about choosing to remember the many affirming messages and overall sublimity of a week-long river trip rather than, ya know, the few little bits of near-death carnage and hypothermia. Seems to work in the field.

I sure hope it’s a choice. I’ll pretty much always consciously choose the skankin’ beat. Motivation wise I’d rather live in sync with the universe than in defiance of some imagined nemesis. In fact, under this lens a nemesis is just another motivating friend — a catalyst if you must think like a laboratory — on his or her own journey, who interacts with you in a particular way at a particular time. Someone who provides a lesson you needed but didn’t necessarily expect.

And I’m thinking that true inner peace may dwell within this model. That is to say, once you come to a relatively egoless, at-least-broaching-humility acceptance of your essentially divinely oriented self, all you have to do is find the ecosystem in which you best thrive. Call it home and care for it.

Not only do you win when you’ve decided you’ve won, and not only does no one else have to lose, but you’re prepared to react with an appreciative smile to just about whatever life throws your way. Or not. But it’s pleasurable to imagine such is the way the universe operates while it lasts. Maybe it’ll last.

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