Anatomy Trains

Cap’n Bill claims 61, but looks 70. He’s been a commercial captain sailing the East Coast and the Caribbean for many decades, though he looks instead like a retired executive – short silver hair, a square face, patrician features – but barefooted and unconcerned as only 3 of the 8 people booked for today actually show up. His fin-keeled sloop seems able enough, if a little rusty as we push away from the pier under the Spanish fort and lighthouse, though you could not get below for all the wire, tape, line, and detritus he has covering every surface. He does not – could not – live aboard. I am glad the rest did not show up – the cockpit holds only the four of us comfortably – the rest would have been lolling on the deck, and 1500 pounds of flesh would have affected the 30’ footer’s handling.

All I want is to sail, and the wind obligingly freshens for a beam reach across to Culebra, with the soothing sound and feel I will not have again until my boat is launched in May, but the arrogant young Frenchman with his diffident American wife is itching to show off his ability to free dive to seventy feet, so we bring her alongside a reef (with a heart-stopping moment as Cap’n Bill sails across the ridge of the reef, the water going from deep blue to coral heads right under the keel in seconds – but he does this every day, so he knows where he can go.

Yes, does this every day, with an endless procession of tourists. Cap’n Bill has long since stopped listening to what we have to say – if he ever did – something drives a man to sea, and he rides over whatever anyone else is saying with ease and aplomb. Fortunately, his patter and his stories are good enough to cancel any rudeness. I drop over and follow his directions into the coral garden of the reef – bleached like most of the Caribbean, but offshore and thus richer than most of what I’ve been seeing while snorkeling from the island. We’re on Cap’n Bill’s own mooring he set out here, in about 40 feet, so he wants the Frenchman to dive down the lines to check the shackles and thimbles for wear. Thomås puts on his huge diver’s watch and drops over the side, but in going down, he apparently catches himself on some part of the mooring gear, so that by the time I get back from my tour, he is shivering back in the boat, with a cut down his sternum as neat as a heart transplant. The poor guy is bleeding pretty profusely, even though it’s not very deep, with paper towels pressed to his chest, and his wife still reading her book. The wind has petered out and we motor back to the dock, them to their plane to frigid, snow-bound Chicago, while Cap’n Bill keeps me working for another hour on some sailor’s errands around the boat, regaling me with stories of the stupidities and the ‘There we were…’ stories that are the staple food of all sailors’ repertoires.

Saturday night in the town of Isabel Secundo, the island of Vieques, territory of Puerto Rico. All day, we have been seeing the boys washing the horses. Now, as we wander the town in the afterglow of a wonderful and well-lubricated tapas meal, they are everywhere – the boys on their horses, flashing white teeth atop the unmistakable clop-clop pattern of the pasofino gait. The small horses bear their riders in a straight line down the street, the riders leaning back – never rising to the trot, because there isn’t a trot, nor a canter, just the walking gait, somehow a throwback to an earlier time, done slow or fast.

Occasionally we see a girl riding, or an older man, but the majority are teenage boys, swelled with pride. The horse are ‘free’ – wild horses roam the island and are easily caught, and have a better life if they are – so anybody with a little gumption can have one. There are those with fancy gear, some done up with old rope and a rug as a pad. There are probably 50 horses in the few criss-crossed streets that make up the town center, and all the cars wait patiently, giving way to the proud riders and their equally proud mounts.

Down this street a live band is scratching out Latin hip-hop, down that one island pop music blares from speakers in the bed of a pick-up truck; some of the horses flare from the visceral force of the sound.

Wandering the streets in knots are the tiny girls – heartbreaking at 15, 13, 10 even – dressed in short shorts and halters, hair pulled tight, pelves cocked, aching already for that first baby.

The old men sit outside the bars and watch the world go by. The tourists have their own bars where they get increasingly slurry about real estate, the state of the local management, or how cold it is back home, and ex-pats talk knowingly about all these things, each with a different conflicting story about whatever it is – the Navy, the disappearance of the coral, why the tourists are coming or not, why this island is so special.

Turquoise won’t do it – the water atop the sandy bottom on this windy day is malachite.

We have a lovely private beach – well, as private as anything is on this seemingly communard island – textbook perfect with palms and sloping sand out to the reefs.  Except for the glass – how did so much glass get here?  Go a quarter mile in either direction and there is little, but here, it abounds.  One could imagine the locals breaking their beer bottles here – it is clear, green, and brown, mostly small pieces, some tumbled to frostiness (Annie will like that for her bottle lamps), some new and sharp.  But some is mis-shapen, and melted together as if subjected to great heat - as if a tanker full of beer exploded just offshore, and these are the remains.

A white egret perched atop a grazing horse.  This is repeated many times during our visit – an act of grooming?

The unique feature of this otherwise delightfully bland Caribbean island is the omnipresence of the pasofino horses.  Some domesticated, others left to roam but still tolerant, of people some wild in the jungled hills of the island.  These horses are as small as a pony, but with the distinctive horse shape, such that the riders look unnaturally large atop them, to our northern eyes.  They clop along with a distinctive short gait, which sounds choppy on the road, but take the rider on a straight, smooth track, rather like our Tennessee Walker.

Last night, a couple of young men sprinted down our beach, looking for all the world like Arabs with their t-shirts around their heads like jalabahs, dark skinned, bareback but for a small piece of carpet for a pad.  At the far end of the beach, they ventured out onto the coral reef – maybe a foot of water.  The horses went willingly enough, even with the waves breaking around their ankles, but it seemed so dangerous to us – one slip into a hole in the old coral…

Quan is intrigued with the horses, and when a couple of them wandered into our yard to graze on the meager grass, she went out to look.  One horse had a crop of ticks within its ear so thick they looked like mussel seed on a rock – literally hundreds of ticks in each ear.  Quan, using some bum plums we got from the market, tempted this wild horse down the beach and – reluctantly, but those plums! – into the water, where she was able to rinse and clean his hind leg where it got torn on some barbed wire.  He will not sit still for any treatment of his ears, however.

Quan has uncharacteristically adopted a dog.  A tiny Benjy-type of terrier, this beach dog was surviving on the voluminous garbage one can find in every nook and cranny here. She looks well if scruffy, but with matted fur and the usual insectivorous collection along with her.  Banjo (an evolution from Benjy) now lives with us, and eats better than most dogs in Christendom.  She guards the house when we leave, and sleeps under it at night, barking only at other dogs, and the horses, until we taught her not to.  On a long walk over rocks, I essayed picking her up to carry her to the next stretch of sand – thinking I might get bit.  But she rested easily in my arm, and clearly understood, licking her gratitude before I set her down again to run.  The local shelter worker, whom we met last night on the beach, says the dogs here eat alright, but often die of heartworm.  We are in a quandary as to what to do with her when we leave.

‘When the days get longer, the cold gets stronger’ is an old woodsman’s aphorism around here, and it is certainly true this year, where December was all mud, but February’s set in bitter.  The driveway’s a skating rink, but the pond is rubble - unskateable.

In the woods, there is the quietness of Morphée, not the hush dispersed by fresh snow - the old fall has dried into a decrepitude of ice, so that you cannot walk without making a dispelling crunch.  Not that anything is there to hear - all the animals have crept as well, into their dens to sleep with their tails over their nose.  Over the brook the ice is in thin shelves, I must cross on the icy trunks, or risk breaking through like the floors of the World Trade Center, and landing in the stream I can still hear flowing below the albic ice.

The air is piercingly blue, with a strikingly different wind chill whether you’re walking into it or away from it.  I walk down the pond, wind cowled around my back - someone’s brought an ice house onto the pond, one they can push around over different holes.

Back through the still woods in the gathering dark to avoid that wind trying to cleave my face, there is no sense of life - it is the eerie frozen-ness of a fairy tale.

If the weather is trying to convince me to stay, it is doing a terrible job - I’m wondering why I live here, and am headed for the door to the tropics.

We’ve been going through a rough time - rabbits dying of unrelated diseases, unexpected new bunnies due to mis-sexing (it only took one), depression occasioned by the inability to live the Serenity Prayer, a slump in my business, a well-loved cat missing and presumed dead, marital troubles occasioned by the visit of my daughter, on top of a really useless winter with no skating or skiing, Jersey weather - all in all, some powerful heavenly body seems to be in retrograde for us. (That said, the attitude of gratitude is never far below the surface.)

So yesterday, on the healing side of the bump in our relational road, Quan smudged the house with sweet grass, and I went out to start a sauna to burn out this wretched karma, whatever it is. Chopping kindling in the candlelight (not wise, I know), the hatchet hit a knot and bounced over to peel off a strip of flesh from my left index finger. Annoyed at first (it didn’t hurt much), I kept stuffing the split wood into the firebox, until I saw and felt the blood dripping off the heel of my hand.

I went outside in the dark and pressed snow into the cut, which immediately melted into pink stains below me. I went inside and popped some ice onto it, but the momentary look inside my skin was disconcerting. Funny how I can do dissections, and hold another’s heart in my hands without queasiness, but my own blood and fascia is immediately and viscerally dissociating. Quan was insisting I should go get it stitched, but I resisted until 15 minutes of icing had failed to staunch the bleeding. Again, I looked, and this time the vastness of the space and the movability of the skin left me lightheaded. (Wuss!)

Our neighbor, a nurse, looked at it and said it needed the stitches, as well as a good cleaning. It’s total black ice here now, so no one was on the road, and the emergency room at our local (good) hospital was empty. Even so, an hour later I was still sitting in the examining room, presssing cotton to my wound, unseen, except to take insurance data. The sweet old PA who finally wandered in injected anesthetic directly into the wound, painful in itself, but the immediate aftermath was like a scorpion sting - agonizing, inescapable, stiff-armed pain that had me doubled up or pacing, going on for 20 minutes. Finally he put some topical anesthetic on it, which toned it down, but I could still feel all the stitches going in, and since he could see me flinch as he poked through each layer, he put in fewer stitches than he should have.

Only after it was over did I get a pain med. More than two hours after arrival.

Even though I am an alternative therapist, I have nothing philosophically against the medical system, which deals with a different set of problems from the ones I am equipped to handle. Therefore I prefer the term ‘complementary’ for what I do (though I cannot abide their term ‘traditional’ for what they do - with a track record of about 300 years,surgery and biochemistry are hardly ‘traditional’ compared to acupuncture, massage, and dietary modification). If indeed what I am doing is not purely educational. But every time I enter the medical system, I am appalled. I would be out of business if I offered service on the level I received last night, and this from well-meaning and unharried people. The pain of the injury was nothing compared to the pain they inflicted on me. The waiting time - perfectly justified if they were busy - wasted an evening on trivialities. Next time, I will have some betadyne, a curvy needle, and some dental floss, and with the help of a jot of rum, do it myself.

I freely admit to being a wuss, especially on my hand, essential to my living. And my injury wasn’t remotely life-threatening. But I am amazed that the reaction is not, “Here, let’s get you a pain med, and then we’ll take your data, and then we’ll clean it up, sew it up, and bandage it.”

I needed to find a local doctor anyway - I’ve been here four years without one - and this incident pushed me into doing it. The poor guy got a pretty hard interview from me today, but he took it well - “You want to be responsible for your own health care, ” he said, and that’s a nice way of putting it.

Now that winter is finally here, us Mainers submit to the series of winter indignities and inconveniences that, (or so we insist to our friends who enjoy the winter in Vero Beach) “build character”. Shoveling snow, dressing and undressing endlessly, making love under the covers, brushing and scraping the car - or, as I was with friend John yesterday, cranking up the generator to make sure it still works after a summer’s idleness, as ever-heavier ice accumulates on the power lines outside.

Among the indignities we suffer with Puritan patience is nearly permanent ‘hat head’ - unruly hair crimped into unflattering configurations by long hours in skull-hugging woolen chapeaux. We northerners just give up on our coiffure for these months, accepting with resigned good humor the tufts, wings, sprigs, Mohawks, and bell curves that emerge as we elaborately undress once again in whatever serves as a foyer.

Myself, I have never favored hats. I never wear one in public if I can avoid it; the feeling of my churning brain being belted in just never felt right - the way some people feel about watches around the wrist, belts around their middle, or ties around ther neck. I did find one leather fedora in Taos - I call it my Indiana Jones hat - that is big enough for my large cranium; I use it when there’s a warm rain.

But in this cold and wind, the tips of the ears require coverage, so I don the usual ski hat, chosen carefully for lack of head-squeeze, but still capable of turning my straight Dutch-boy hair into a haloed swirl of keratinized protein.

The trouble is, I am going bald. I am 57, and both my brothers were well-thinned by this age, so I have had a good run based on my genetics. But now when I stand under the lamp after a shower, far too much of my scalp is visible under what’s left of the forelock I have taken for granted lo, these many years.

Going bald is an irreversible sign of decay. One can insist to oneself that a diet-and-exercise regime could take off those extra accumulating pounds, and that working out would bring back that youthful muscle tone, but losing hair is a humiliating and definitive sign that one is in the second half of one’s life.

What to do? I am not about to start applying nostrums from AM radio to my head, nor are toupees, transplants, extensions, or even comb-overs in my future. I imagine I can keep the illusion going for a while with clever arranging (as David Brooks did on public television, until the empty real estate expanded into the camera’s view), but sooner or later the facts must be faced.

As I look around, i favor the short-haired look some of my friends affect - if you can see the scalp all over, the fact that it is very visible on top makes less difference. Going back to a crew cut - my grade school do - will not be easy for this old hippie, but it beats the alternatives.

Otherwise, againg is pleasant. So much less worry, angst, ambition and desperation these days. So much more ease, calm, resilience, and yes, even wisdom. Sure, I feel 18 inside - how did this intervening 4 decade hiatus happen? But with the love of a good woman, a secure home, and useful work to do, I am content to, as my mother says, ‘deteriorate on schedule’.

Quan rushes after youth with endless programs of supplements or machines, all designed to roll back the clock in the name of health. I follow what she suggests, as a matter of interest, but in fact maintaining my vitality is all that matters to me, once the next embarrassment - would you read that fine print for me? - has been accepted. Denying all of life’s pleasures in a fight with the spiritual realities of DNA, and the rest of the natural order of death and rebirth seems to me a quixotic venture, doomed to failure - and worse, worthy of ridicule.

“You’re as young as you feel” works well when you’re by yourself, but step into society and you are as young as you look. Billion dollar industries attest to this sad fact. One observes the smoothly frozen expression of Botox or the wrinkle-free parchment of plastic surgery with amusement and detachment, but not with envy.

So, unlike Gunther Van Hagens or Captain Kangaroo, I will not be wearing a permanent hat. I will wear my emerging cranium proudly, seeing in it the shape of my skull, my death to come - which I hope I will have the presence of mind to accept happily when it comes.

In the winter the sunset lasts for hours. Finally released from a string of welcome but unending Sunday drop-ins, I headed for the shore as the sun went low to bail Dad’s boat of the latest rain, but then went on and on though the woods, alternately crouching and working with silence in silence, then crashing at speed between branches in the undergrowth - scaring the deer and crows ahead of me.

One of the few times in Maine that you can be warm yet in the woods with no bugs.

We have the tireless force for good Al Gore (oh, among others) to thank for the currency of the misnomer ‘Global Warming’. What we are more likey in the middle of is ‘Global Climate Systems Change’. The planet as a whole does seem to be warming up right now, and recent evidence suggests our activities are contributing to this, but so are other non-human factors.

But the emphasis on warming misses a larger point. Right now, we in the northeast are in the middle of an extraordinary run of warm weather - we’re all talking about global warming as it rains (simply unheard of) on the sixth of January in Maine. Who could doubt global warming when there is no ice on the ponds, the fresh-water ducks have not yet flown, the ground underfoot is muddy, and the magnolia’s all but in flower?

The people in Denver, that’s who, buried under the third snowstorm in the month. I don’t imagine they are talking about global warming out there much right now, but they are very much seeing what is really going on, which is global climate change.

The climatologists study ice cores, taken from the large ice sheets in Greenland and Antartica for instance, which reveal the year-by-year snowfall, including particulates and atmospheric gasses, for the last couple of hundred thousand years (Alley, The Two Mile Time Machine). Analysis of these cores reveals that the planet works under a stable climate for period of a few thousand years, then goes through a transitional period of wild, unpredictable weather, and then settles again into a new and didfferent system for a few thousand years, and then fluctuates wildly again.

Now the factors that precipitate these sudden launches from stable into unstable are exactly the ones we see on the move now: release of greenhouse gasses, changes in the ozone. The climate system will tolerate some variation in these levels, while still maintaining the stable climate system. At some point, some critical factor crosses a threshold, and the whole climate system goes into flux - uncontrollable, huge, unpredictable.

So the factor can vary pretty widely and still the system will adjust. Once it stops adjusting, however, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

We have no knowledge of whether we have already crossed some threshold into one of these wild transitions, but we do know this: We are in year 11,892 of the current stable climate era. Never has there been, in the time we know about, such a long period of one stable climate system. So we are way overdue for a shift.

Some folks, in fact, think that our activities may have contributed to the longevity of the era, the burning of the crops and cutting of the trees keep the climate within a narrow band. Whether or not that is the case, you have lived your whole lifem with all its weather variations, whtin this Stable Climate Era. Of course, not only you but all your ancestors - Jefferson, Jesus, even Noah - lived within the Stable Climate Era. The entire agricultural revolution that led to all our cities, which in turn grew our cultures, and most notably our current industrial agricultural foodstuff-delivery system - all this happened within this oddly long Stable Climate Era.

The SCE began with the end of the last Ice Age nearly 12,000 years ago. At that time, there was a mile of ice piled on top of where I write now. No soil, no people, no trees. The unstable period between the Ice age stable climate system and our current climate system was only three years (other transitional periods are usually on the 50-150 year range). Of course, once it settled into the current pattern, it took a few thousand years for the ice to retreat and leave New England as the ledge-ribbed, bone-scraped, stone-walled - and now sodden mess that it is this January.

So at the time Baghdad (the city we Americans now bomb with contempt) was forming as a gathering place of nomads, among the first cities within the fertile crescent, we were just getting started into the stable climate era that would carry us through the development of cotton, wheat, chickpeas, grazing herds - all the staples that made civilization possible.

So, we’re long overdue for a transition to a new system, and we’re pushing a positive feedback loop on emissions that strain the boundaries of this Stable Climate Era, and the kicker is that we will be in the transitional time, with no turning back, by the time we know that to be the case. We may have already crossed the threshold, and we may be seeing the early signs of the wildly fluctuating era in the strange warmth in the northeast, and the continual dumping on Denver.

There’s no predicting what will take place from year to year in your area if this fluctuating transitional period takes hold, and no telling when it will stabilize again, or who will be in a desert or a rainforest when it is done. Egypt wasn’t always sandy.

One set of people who are beginning to sit up and take notice of this are the insurance companies, and especially the re-insurance companies who spread large risks around - they are very interested in trends, and they see the trend toward higher weather-related payouts - on the scale of billions. It could easily rise to trillions if current trends continue.

One other prediction is sure: the price of food will skyrocket. When our industrial agricultural system - developed, refined, and automated under the Stable Climate Era - meets this degree of change, the harvest will become unreliable and the price of everything will rise astronomically. As I said on this blog a few weeks ago, get off the grid and plant a garden, and hope that the fluctuating climate allows you a crop. Hungry people go to war.

I love the current crop of young folks, and I agree with them that we will muddle through somehow, that this is not the end of the world. It could presage a Great Winnowing, when many of us will die, to leave a hardier stock to face the Brave New World, or maybe all of the foregoing is too pessimistic, and we will continue to cope, or even thrive.
http://www.anatomytrains.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/clouds.jpg
But I don’t think so. I don’t think my own (Western, USA) lifestyle is supportable for everyone on the planet to have. But I think everyone sees this lifestyle on TV and wants it, and therein lies the rub. Whatever the motivation, the consumption and waste continue, but so does the building knowledge. Which will win out? It’s fascinating.

The Farmer’s Almanac predicted a heavy winter of snow here in the northeast. They were right about the precipitation; wrong about the form. The temperatures have held up so that we reach early January without a decent layer of ice on the pond - I tried stepping on it yesterday, only to crack straight through - and all the snow has fallen again and again as rain.

We have a love-hate relationship with winter here- we hate to shovel and bundle up and have flights and events and driving cancelled, but on the other hand, we live here because it has four seasons, and we love to see the landscape change so radically as it does when the snow covers the ground in fantastic white shapes, quieting this world and revealing others in the uniqueness of the season.

But whether it’s global warming or an off season, we find ourselves with a Jersey winter, cold rains, sleet, ice in the corners, deep mud underfoot. Grays and browns are the colors of spring here, not winter. Winter is all white and black - most winters you can take a picture with black & white film or color film (I know, I am dating myself) and barely see the difference. One nice thing is that many more birds have stuck around at the feeder - a pair of cardinals in January!

But I digress, because rain is the great boundary crosser. The rain insures the mixing of everything, and reminds us that all skin is just a selectively permeable membrane. I was out walking the shore under a set of small granite cliffs, to which trees cling. Water from the rains seeps through the cracks, freezing at night into curtains and stalactites. You see them by the road, too, where the highway cuts through a rock formation and the seams in the rock sprout icicles and sheets.

This whole post comes down to this one observation: where the water passed through a stump, it turned the ice below it brown with stump nutrients. We wouldn’t see this, except for the slowing of time achieved by the freezing: the fluids in us are constantly exchanging, picking up bits of the environment, coloring them, giving them a taste, giving us a flavor, the flavor of everything around us, mixing them all together. The ‘rain’ inside our bodies, as well as in the world, turns us all into soup. We are all a mixed bag.

It’s a soupy world here right now. I wear my boots everywhere. I don’t mind this in April, but it’s January - I want the crisp sounds of ax chops riding on the thick air, the air dense in your throat like mercury, the ski tracks stretching behind you in the virgin snow of a forest fairyland, not this sloppy mud that drags us all down to a common life in the dirt.

In winter, you can pretend that you are separate, the eagle of the north, clean, sere, and aloof. This winter that feeling is denied us, and we wallow in the springtime mud, tied to our biological underpinnings, but without that hope of renewal that April has inherent. In other words, it’s Christmas, not Easter - we want the spiritual feeling of independence that the winter breeds, not the feeling of belonging that belongs with spring.

Here at the 44th parallel and in this solstice, by the time I run out of writing energy, it’s dark.  I began my walk at 5, and with the clouds there was no trace of light left.  I carried a little reflector light for when I was walking on the road, but something moved me to plunge off into the woods.

(Actually, what moved me was this: I had let Quan drive herself to her doctor’s appointment, when she was in bad enough shape that I should have done it.  The walk was an act of penance and of prayer to keep her safe while driving in an altered state, when I should have been driving her.  Like holding Misty’s plane up for her when she flies up here, woods walking in the dark was my way of holding Quan’s car on the road.)

Though I long ago practiced some of Carlos Castaneda’s techniques for walking in the dark, I was in no mood, and no longer of an age, for running high-kneed with curled fingers through a wood studded with granite boulders, old logging truck ruts, and darkened trees, the way I did in the green belt above Boulder in the ’70’s.

But I dropped into my hara, letting the ‘eye’ of my belly see the coming terrain, sensitizing the bottom of my feet to feel their way onto the next surface.  For a couple of minutes my literal eyes struggle to see, but then the mind relaxes and goes all receptive, and the skin on my front becomes an eye all its own.  At first I am walking down a woods path, but then I try my luck in the thick of the brush.  I stop for a minute, hearing the night birds, the scolding chirrups of a squirrel I have disturbed, and the clicks of the insects. Then I move forward, over the edge of the road and down toward the sound of the stream.

My hands are up in a kind of prayer position to protect my eyes from the branches, but by now my feet are sure, even on the slope.  Crossing the stream is problematic - I use the little red flasher to see the log, but cross it in the dark, blessing the soft-soled shoes that allow my feet a little prehansility.  On the other side, I step beside a root and fall through into some underlying water - so much for my Don Juan invulnerability.  I wring out my sock and continue, chastened.

But the rest of the walk home is a delight for the nose, skin, and ears - sensitive to the sigh of cold air off the hill with its promise of dew, the squidge of the soil in a record-breaking unfrozen mid-December - it should be cracking underfoot by now, the acrid whiff of horse shit as I come around the corner towards the barn, the startled ducks’ wings slap on the pond, then whine in the air, Camelot’s nicker, Morgan’s bark, my crunch on the driveway, the click of the doorknob, the smell of chainsaw oil in the shed, sawdust in the garage, the light switch on the right - and I am back in the sighted world.

Quan came home, safe but tired, much later.