Having Everything Right

by Stafford, Kim; Pyle, Robert Michael;

  “In an age in which we often find ourselves at odds with nature, Stafford serves as a guide and interpreter listening for the way stories name a region, a country, and with familiarity and affection, explicating the terrain for those of us who have forgotten or never learned how.”

  —FROM THE 1986 CITATION OF EXCELLENCE AWARDED BY THE WESTERN STATES BOOK AWARDS

  “Having Everything Right was a joy to read. Stafford is immensely talented with an unerring ear, the clearest vision, and a lovely exactitude of language. This book is sheer pleasure.”

  —KATE WILHELM

  “Having Everything Right is not just an Indian place name but the summation of a way of living on earth in a spirit of harmony, gratitude, and adventure . . . (Stafford’s) poetic eye to nature and personal biography knit together themes and ideas, which range from the unique fragility of the earth to the breadth and courage of the human spirit.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Kim Stafford’s senses are tuned like fine instruments to perceive, record, and draw memory and meaning from the quiet daily events that surround all of us, but are lost on most of us because we are still learning how to see and hear. These pages contain a record of what we’ve missed and an invitation to wake, and become whole.”

  —ELIOT WIGGINTON

  “The energies and acuities that make Kim Stafford’s poetry so valuable are wonderfully at play here in his essays: an eager and dilated eye for lore, both human and natural; a belief in the wisdom of the stories people tell, and an enviable gift for telling his own; as well as a conviction that the more things change, the more important it is for us to apprentice ourselves to the humble things that continue and abide.”

  —JAROLD RAMSEY

  “The effort registered here is not only to understand, as Thoreau put it, where we live and what we live for, but also to translate that comprehension into belonging; to achieve a connection with earth, time, history, and the universally common elements of human existence.”

  —INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER 1986

  ebook ISBN 9781940436418

  Text copyright © 1986, 2016 by Kim R. Stafford

  Illustrations copyright © 1986 by Barbara Stafford

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Robert Michael Pyle

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Published by Confluence Press 1986

  Published by Pharos Editions 2016

  “Out of This World with Chaucer and the Astronauts” and a shorter version of “Local Character” first appeared in Sweet Reason, a publication by the Oregon Committee for the Humanities. A shorter version of “The Separate Hearth” first appeared in Northwest Magazine.

  The author thanks the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, for a grant which assisted in the writing of this book.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

  Cover and interior design by Faceout Studio

  PHAROS EDITIONS

  An Imprint of Counterpoint

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.pharoseditions.com

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  INTRODUCTION BY

  ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE

  A Rooted Companionship with Kim Stafford

  Few things have made me as plainly, outright happy on first hearing about them as the word from Pharos publisher Harry Kirchner that he would be bringing Kim Stafford’s book Having Everything Right back into print.

  Some books just don’t belong out of print. Not that there aren’t many, many titles languishing in out-of-print land that, in a smart and just world, would remain available as bright new books as well as library titles and twice-read finds in secondhand bookstores. But this book—it is simply the best volume of Northwest essays I know, and its out-of-print status was awfully hard to take. So, bravo, Harry and Pharos. And as for you readers? Celebrate!

  “Sometimes,” Kim writes, in his essay “A Few Miles Short of Wisdom,” “stories from thoughtful travelers you trust, or some old book you believe, or the mind’s own credulous pilgrim named Imagination will make a place dazzle in anticipation.” Well, that’s true. And Having Everything Right is one old book that I believe. When I reread it, or even think about it, the Northwest writ large fairly dazzles in my anticipation.

  And an old book it is, by some measures. While still just a lad compared to the great Northwest essayists that went before—say, Murray Morgan or Stewart Holbrook—Kim saw this book first published by Confluence Press in 1986: the same year my own book Wintergreen came out, just four years before Tim Egan’s The Good Rain, and five prior to Sallie Tisdale’s Stepping Westward. It is no mystery that these four titles have stridden together across the years since, sharing space in many a review, reading list, and syllabus together, as complementary windows on a region defined as much by its writers as its rain.

  But even in its natural company, Kim’s book stands apart. He goes out on adventure a dozen times plus, and from each outing fetches back a field report, a ship’s log, a dispatch from the frontier, a libretto from the human heart in all its muddling variety, through all of which he builds his own cosmology—and his highly personal approach to life, land, and language—right before our eyes. And, through that, we grow. We can’t help it, any more than we can help peeking ahead to see what the next adventure will be. But we hold back after all, and take them in turn, as they come. This book cannot be skimmed. Almost every sentence glimmers and glows with the shiny details of What Kim Finds Out There, and with lapidary words to match.

  Neither of these traits is really surprising. In “The Separate Hearth,” one of the truly great kids-in-nature works (pre-Geography of Childhood, pre-The Thunder Tree, way-pre-Last Child in the Woods), Kim testifies for the kind of freedom, encouragement, and self-organizing wanderment and wonderment that rendered his childhood the perfect springboard for seeking the way toward having things right forever after. Plus, he sprang from a house of poetry, and later lodged in an academic program of Medieval Literature, studying the very origins of our storytelling tools and traditions. None of this can have impeded his wish or ability to meet the very World Itself with words that might possibly do it justice.

  Time after time I have taught with this book. I’ve brought several of the essays to my students, and the whole book, when there was time. I sometimes put forth “A Few Miles Short of Wisdom” or “The Barn and the Bees” along with Brian Doyle’s “Van” (about Van Morrison) as examples of The Perfect Essay: “Now tell me why,” I assign. But in dozens of classrooms and workshops I have read and parsed the book’s introduction, “Naming the Northwest.” This short essay is a small masterpiece of concision, precision, and incision. It is also witty, elegiac, and wise. Kim contrasts the old ways of naming the landscape drawn from its own features and stories, as practiced by the Kwakiutl: “Two Round Things Meeting Now and Then,” “Having Coho Salmon,” “Place Where Dzonoq!wa Cried Out Oh,” with the names of the “new white tribe”—“Cannery,” “Courthouse,” “Cemetery.” He tells that the Kwakiutl named several kinds of places he-lade, meaning “Having Everything Right.” Kim says this is “a portable name, an expandable place. It could be what we call earth. But it will not,” he continues, “unless we sift from our habits the nourishing ways: listening, remembering, telling, weaving a rooted companionship with home ground.”

  Now, this
is gorgeous writing. But it is also wonderfully aphoristic. “Weaving a rooted companionship with home ground” is right up there with Pattiann Rogers’s phrase, from her poem “The Family Is All There Is”: “The grasp/ of the self on place,” and means, as I read them, the same thing. Which reminds me of a time when Kim and Pattiann and I were all traveling and reading together on one of the Orion Society’s storied “Forgotten Language Tours,” along with Scott Sanders and Ann Zwinger. We were in Ohio, kitting up to drive down to Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. We’d been out for days already. Kim was seeking a perfect piece of pie he imagined that some old cafe along this stretch of back road would hold out to us. Pattiann and Ann were getting tired of all the boy-talk in the van.

  Suddenly, and unexpectedly, we came upon the museum-home of Gene Stratton Porter, the naturalist and wildly successful novelist of an earlier era, whose Girl of the Limberlost wooed a great many young readers to think about the lost swamp where the story takes place. Each of us was swept up in our own way with the life and lore of the writer, her artifacts, faded specimens, once-upon-a-world, and life in a gentler, wilder time. I think we all felt that this was a woman with a grasp of her self on her place, with a true rooted companionship to her home ground. It filled our long, wilting trip with fresh new life. And we were all thrilled a couple of days later to learn of a movement underway to bring back the Limberlost.

  On these multi-author barnstorming tours, Kim acquired a special role. Early in the morning or whenever we were at rest and at will, he would wander the town where we had gone to ground for the night. He’d fill two or three of the special little pocket notebooks he constantly creates from single sheets of paper, with observations, snatches of overheard conversation or found poetry, and his own refraction of his spotful encounters. Then, on the last night, he would conclude the final reading with a poem constructed from the elements he’d concocted from his little notebooks. We all felt that this poem caught the essence of our gypsy band and its travels better than any number of snapshots or journal entries.

  I mention this, because it is just how Kim goes about illuminating the Northwest and the broader concerns beyond in each essay of Having Everything Right: through lyric distillation of the Field Notes he is forever gathering, refinement of the ore mined from his many human encounters (whether intentional for oral history, or deliciously random), and loving attention to minutia that most would not even notice to dismiss. In other words, he writes out of utter devotion to story, and an unshakeable belief that story lies everywhere, and never lies.

  Kim Stafford’s other published writing makes a large and eclectic corpus. Both before and after Having Everything Right, he wrote compelling books of poems, collected in A Thousand Friends of Rain. Lochsa Road: A Pilgrim in the West is a haunting love song to the land expressed through a journey up the famed Clearwater River and beyond. For Wind on the Waves, he was asked to write text to accompany the seascape photographs of Ray Atkeson and responded with fifty indelible short stories. He has written beautiful, gut-gripping memoirs of his brother (100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared) and his father (Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford). And there have been others. Kim is also a singer-songwriter with CDs I have worn out, a remarkably perceptive photographer, and lately, a digital storyteller. But for as many readers and listeners as all these have reached and touched, he has probably reached and touched even more through his legendary teaching—as long-time director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, mainstay from the start at both Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and Fishtrap, and elsewhere. It’s hard for me to think of anyone who has had as much of an impact on the Northwest literary landscape as Kim Stafford.

  Yet this work is not Cascadian alone, any more than E. B. White belonged solely to New York or Maine, or Peter Matthiessen to Long Island or Florida. Kim’s subjects and settings frequently lie in Oregon, it’s true. Yet his actual topic is the human heart and how it situates itself in place—any place where it finds itself, or better yet belongs, but never truly displaced, or unplaced. Before there was a discipline called “place-based writing,” there was Kim Stafford. Not that the loci his genius explores are all balm, tonic, or posies. Kim knows heartbreak and loss, slaughter and exile, and cruelty, oh, yes, cruelty, to self and others, humans and non-. The stories he excavates and adumbrates touch every base of emotion and experience, but good humor, love, and the kindly fruits of the earth almost always enter in such a way as to save the day, or at least salve it.

  Kim says “I want to learn place, custom, and story for my home. I want to name it in my own tongue, ‘Having Everything Right.’” To my eye and mind, his work, in seemingly every medium, especially these essays, has met his desire. It could stand for any place where humans make their way among the roads, rivers, pines, firs, battlegrounds and burying grounds, misfits and perfect fits, old-timers and astronauts, bees, bears, and barns of the whole wide world: call it h′lad.

  —ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: NAMING THE NORTHWEST

  OUT OF THIS WORLD WITH CHAUCER AND THE ASTRONAUTS

  A FEW MILES SHORT OF WISDOM

  THE STORY THAT SAVED LIFE

  DECEMBER MEDITATION AT CAMP POLK CEMETERY

  A WALK IN EARLY MAY

  THE SEPARATE HEARTH

  PINE, FIR, CEDAR, YEW

  THE GREAT DEPRESSION AS HEROIC AGE

  LOCAL CHARACTER

  RIVER & ROAD

  DANCING BEAR OF THE SIUSLAW

  THE BARN AND THE BEES

  ROOT FEAST

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION: NAMING THE NORTHWEST

  The Kwakiutl people of the Northwest coast had a habit in their naming. For them, a name was a story. We say “Vancouver,” naming an island for a captain; we say “Victoria,” naming a village for a queen. For them, a place-name would not be something that is, but something that happens. They called one patch of ocean “Where Salmon Gather.” They called one bend in the river “Insufficient Canoe.” They called a certain meadow “Blind Women Steaming Clover Roots Become Ducks.” They called a point near Knight Inlet “Hollow of the Northwest Wind.”

  Even as they divided an island into garden plots, the people would not use their own possessive names on the place. One patch they called “Small Round Beach.” Another, “Having Long Cinquefoil Roots.” Another, “Having Wind.” Another, “Place of Homesickness.” When the tide went out, two islands were sometimes joined: “Two Round Things Meeting Now and Then.”

  When Franz Boas recorded these and other place-names in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the first white settlers were just moving into Kwakiutl territory among the maze of channels and rivers at the north end of Vancouver Island. Reading the book Boas made, Geographical Names of the Kwakiutl Indians, it is a shock to follow the active native names along the beach near Alert Bay—“Tree Standing on Flat Beach,” “Having Coho Salmon,” “Sound of Dripping Water,” “Having Brant Geese”—and then to come to the names of the new white tribe: “Cannery,” “Court House,” “Cemetery,” “House of White People.”

  I want to fight my way back in time, where the new names have not yet pruned away stories with a chainsaw. I want to find new stories, and graft them living to the earth I love. I want to inhabit the Kwakiutl “Place Where Someone Grows Up.” I want to camp at the inlet they called “To Decline to Answer.” I would survive the place named “Where Dz′noq!wa Cried Out Oh!” I would rest by the river pool “Eating Straight Down.”

  But names on the charts have changed. In coastal sailing guides, directions for crossing shoals to safe water often carry the refrain, “Local knowledge is advised.” Local knowledge is that story and place called “Insufficient Canoe.” The alternative to local knowledge is shipwreck. There are old ways, and pleasant ways, to avoid this—for the solitary traveler, and for the planet.

  If they personi
fied the landscape, the Kwakiutl also naturalized society. The word “Kwakiutl” itself is supposed to mean “beach at the north side of the river.” A Kwakiutl band took the name of an ancestral creature which had broken out through the ground at a particular place, taken off its animal mask, and become human. For the first two months of life, infants took the names of the places they were born. As they grew, they took many changing names. Adults took the names of wild creatures, and of events in the natural world. We know this from the famous in other tribes: Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse of the Sioux, and Thunder Rolling in the Mountains of the Nez Perce. We know this from the list of players which appeared in a Toronto newspaper for a sporting match of the 1890s:

  LACROSSE!

  TWELVE CANADIAN GENTLEMEN

  VS. TWELVE IROQUOIS INDIANS:

  Blue Spotted

  Hickory Wood Split

  Pick the Feather

  Hole in the Sky

  Flying Name

  The Loon

  Deer House

  Crossing the River

  Outside the Multitude

  Scattered Branches

  Great Arm

  Wild Wind

  ON HER MAJESTY’S CRICKET GREEN.

  But the adoption of identity from nature did not stop with individual names. The social groups of the Kwakiutl and other original cultures of the north Pacific coast were organized into clans called by such names as Raven, Wolf, Eagle, Frog. A child of the Frog clan walking alone at night might find a real frog’s utterance comforting, familial, not only because a frog is a disguised human, but also because people imitate by turns the seasonal lethargy and quickness of frogs. The imported proverb calls this “a two-way street,” but that is too thin a way to say it. In native custom and its stories, one life is shared by a mountain named “Elder Brother,” a supernatural ancestor named “Made to Have Daylight,” a man named “Great Moon,” and a killer whale who dances beside grizzly bear in the winter ceremonial. If the Kwakiutl habits of naming were childlike, naive, they were also utterly mature. Their language shows connections where we have made separations.