by Amy Minato
This late winter night I turn off Siesta Lane and startle a young stallion in the middle of the road. He has jumped the wire fence slumped around five acres of grazing land. The land so ample and fence so thin as to give an illusion of liberty. But maybe long subjugation has created in the horse a psychological cage, a dependency on limits imposed by humans. What family expectations and social mores circumscribe my own life I wonder? And how solid are these boundaries? Could I risk freedom over security and stand to jump my own fences?
The horse stands regal, but paralyzed by indecision, flanks quivering with fear and freedom, eyes pleading for relief from this strange panic. I could chase him away from his owner’s land, to a wild existence with other feral horses and possible winter starvation, or lead him back to pasture.
My own inner pendulum used to swing wildly between freedom and security. One day I’d look at travel ads, the next at real estate. These days I seek a cautious freedom, an open security.
I take the stallion’s halter, walk him back through the gate, and return home slowly to my own familiar restrictions.
Darkness
It has taken months of living here to shed my anxiety about being a woman out alone at night. But finally, now, like a nocturnal animal, like a deer or a bob-cat, I leave on my night walk and enter darkness as one does a familiar room. Feeling safe, hidden, my eyes rest in shadows and my pace slows. Trees wave their gentle hands, plants release their green scents, and the low call of a great horned owl echoes through the chambers of Rainbow Valley.
This darkness feels like a presence, palpable, filling the spaces between trees and buildings, rubbing against me like a cat. Night light is receptive, resting on its haunches, the realm of dream and angel, ghost and vision. I go into darkness—this fertile place where people deepen, grow, make love, give birth—for refuge.
In Defense of Defense
Of course the robin hides her egg
for its blue is nothing else the color of.
And the western pond turtle must
pucker its soft neck
beneath the clammy rim of its shell
and the reclusive beaver slap and dunk
the poppy purse its petals
and scotch broom pollen
steal onto the leg hairs
of the digger bee.
It’s obvious why the butterfly fins
of the rainbow trout waft
in the speckled shadow of its stream
and the coyote trots to the sheep farm
always in pith of night. We know
how perfect is the dead leaf color
of the wolf spider and the fake sleep
of the garter snake surprised on the path.
Because some memory shivers
in the chamber of our cells.
Because we too harbor
the slug of our heart
from what may apprehend it.
A car rounds a curve and its headlights stab at the land. I slip behind a tree, into its safe shadow, and look up to where a great horned owl, coddled in an aura of bronze leaves, blinks back at me.
March I’ve stopped being pretty about it. I leave the window open for moths and examine dung. I take feathers from dead flickers and pheasants. Spider webs cascade the wall. I study the skin of roadkill deer, watch compost decay, ants fornicate, my cat, Quixote, chaw on a baby mole.
Spring
Silverspot
Somewhere a male silverspot butterfly
perches on a lotus of light, waits
for a female to flicker by
so he can dance with her
in a spiral of wing and air
nectar dripping from her proboscis
pollen off her legs.
When male butterflies come
he frightens them away
ferocious in his habitat of sun
place moving eastward
through the day. As our lives move
always in the direction of desire
the shifting territory of what we hope
to own. Does the butterfly
behave thus because he knows
he will die at summer’s end
or because he doesn’t know?
Caddis fly larvae collect pebbles and glue them together into little rocky cocoons inside which they transform into their adult form. In March, after one year’s incubation, the caddis flies muscle up from river bottom mud, float past the swollen mouths of trout toward the translucent rim of water before sky, and explode into wing on the riffles. And, in her two weeks of celestial life, each female dances aerially with a mate, dives back through current and seaweed to bury her eggs back in the mud, herself in the river.
The painted lady butterflies migrate through Lane County this month, coming from Mexico en route to British Columbia, heavy with nectar and new wings. Mick was driving home on West 11th, a strip of stores and signs, when a cloud of them tumbled over his car hood and across the window, fluttering and turning, flying on instinct and faith, mistaking the bold red on the billboard cowboy’s bandana for flowers.
At Siesta Lane spring creeps in the back door and hangs up her muddy parka before we know she’s here. Suddenly the field is freckled with daisies; lambs are bleating on the neighbor’s farm; and the wind is a teasing pat instead of a wet slap. The men wear bright shirts and the women cut their hair.
Restlessness shakes its rattle through the group. Raul disappears for a few days and Luke plays loud salsa music; Sara joins a Frisbee league; Jack and Rita cover the living room floor with maps of Europe. Mick meanders the valley seeking rare plants and Natalie and Paul order seeds. I, of all things, meet a man.
And after so many cold, introspective months love is sweet nectar. I get drunk on the woozy-woo.
“You’re in the love shack,” my friend Pearl observes.
And it’s all about that place, this time, not about the guy. The pink center of the rose into which I stick my head until I nearly suffocate.
Riley is a sweet guy with hair in a cloud of dark curls and an uncanny resemblance to my very first boyfriend of the same name. A rare book curator, he’s crazy for fly fishing and experimental jazz. I can generate no enthusiasm for either of these. The first makes me squeamish. I manage to avoid actually catching a fish when we go. The second, when listened to incessantly, gives me a headache.
This fellow is rabbit energy—fast and wary. He practices meditation and tai chi and hangs around me to slow himself down. But there’s a string in him drawn so tight, that, when plucked, sends him to another planet. I witness this a few times to my growing bewilderment.
The relationship is doomed but irresistible. It plays itself out like the caddis fly—brief and fatal. I’m left dizzy and chiding myself, humbled by vague longings, unsure of my instincts but drawn back to my craft, my community, and the land for sustenance, waiting out the season.
Gatherers
Most of us shop faithfully at secondhand stores, getting good at finding nice stuff in decent shape. We like knowing that no new resources were consumed just for us, that no sweatshop gets our support, that some other mysterious person once appreciated whatever we buy, and that we spend one tenth of what we’d pay for new stuff. Although I used to earn twice the income, I now spend five times less. So I have fewer debts and more freedom, if less class.
It’s a treasure hunt! Aladdin lamps, Jesus candles, ships in a bottle, all the basics. There are usually kids trying on funny hats, reading torn but legible books, or playing with toys that someone loved into their current conditions. It’s a friendly refugee camp. All of us jetsam from the fast pace and high cost of modern life.
An Ecuadorian environmental lawyer visiting Aprovecho comes along with me to a thrift store. He stares for a long time at the price of cotton shirts, wondering if his English is failing him. They are a fraction of their cost in Ecuador, and this is the expensive United States! Shirts for two dollars each! Louis begins pulling out every usable man’s shirt in the store, thinking, I’m
sure, of seeing all his friends back home in “new” shirts.
He begins in the blue section. Every once in awhile I look over as he starts in on a new rack. He methodically lifts shirts off their hangers and fills cart after cart like an assembly worker pulling bottles off a shelf.
As we go through the checkout line with our seven carts full of men’s shirts of all colors and sizes, speaking Spanish to each other, the cashier cheerfully asks him where he is from.
“Ecuador!” Louis answers, smiling, stuffing shirts into bags.
“Oh,” she replies empathetically, “I guess you probably couldn’t bring many of your own clothes with you?”
Yard sales, although offering few items, simmer with stories—the residue of someone’s life, that person sitting in her garage amid the hand-knit Christmas stockings, two for a dollar.
You look at something and the woman standing guard over her goods starts talking.
“My husband bought that canoe for us before he died. We were going to take it to Canada.”
“You can have all those canning jars for five bucks. Can’t do preserves anymore with my bad wrist.”
I look at this woman wizened by life and take her home with me, in empty jars that fill with spiced apple-sauce, stewed tomatoes, awe. And there is gathering in the more traditional sense. In early fall and spring my friend Willa, who looks like a wood sprite, and I, go gleaning. We talk and meander through lush woods, eyes open for finds. We glean wildflowers for salads, mint for teas, mushrooms for quiche, vines to make baskets, and the indomitable stinging nettle for soup.
Nettles have been harvested for food since ancient Greece, and Germans today use them as a remedy for arthritis. Their limp, pale, tear-shaped leaves are some of the first to appear in spring. To gather nettle one needs long pants, gloves, and faith. Long pants and gloves for the poisonous hairs that sting your flesh, faith that these stingers will be rendered harmless when boiled—which they are, honest.
We cut the young, new nettles, clean them, and drop them like lobsters into boiling broth. Tasting not unlike spinach, and as my new friend Joseph points out, not unlike mowed grass clippings, stinging nettle is laden with calcium and iron. After eating the cooked nettles drenched in olive oil and soy sauce, our faces flush with their potency.
In late summer we collect rose hips, the shiny red beads that roses turn into, for their vitamin C. Rose hip tea is a favorite, with its tart, berrylike flavor, though Paul chews the hips like gum. Rose hips strung together were the first rosaries, as roses are associated with Virgin Mary. I try making one for my mother, but it quickly falls apart in my hands.
Even more than thrift-store hopping, wild food gathering gives me the sense that I am in some control of my survival, puts me in touch with my ancestors, and prompts me to study the local natural environment. Sometimes, in the case of certain fruits and mushrooms, it’s even delectable.
Acuity
“Sounds like a robin.”
“But more melodious.”
“Well, then it’s an evening grosbeak. Anyway they should be arriving around now.”
Precision
How can the violet green swallow
swoop and catch in beak the curl
of floating feather, and the beaver
chew on the ash just so
it tips and slants into the stream,
and tree frogs chirp and halt
in unison, and what makes
the shooting star’s flower the same length
as the rufous hummingbird’s thin beak,
and how do the eight eyes on the spider discern
on which chip of bark to press
its spinneret’s wet tip, and why do
the blue-capped stamens of the pale flax huddle
so symmetrically around its pistil’s cotton top,
and the sun leave a gold egg on the altar
every solstice, and how can each tiny
winter wren repeat so elaborate
a song, and lovers fall into each other
so deft, and so dumb, and especially
how can the rose campion be that exact
magenta every time?
A year ago I wouldn’t even have recognized a robin’s song, let alone a variation of it. I didn’t know anything about birds, which ones appeared when and where. Flora was another area of ignorance. One yellow flower looked like another, pines were pines. Into a poem I’d toss flower names like lilac or narcissus that had literary allusions or nice sounds but that were completely out of context. Since turning my attention to the land, I have learned to distinguish a lanceolate from an elliptical leaf, a damsel-fly from a dragonfly, the call of a barn owl from that of a great horned.
My senses are whittled into finer form, honed and sharpened on nature’s whetstone. With my first pair of glasses I remember being startled by the crispness of the world lost to me for eleven years. Now, whenever I learn a new bird or plant in my daily realm it seems incredible that I didn’t notice it before. The world rushes into focus, turning those comfortable blurred edges into leaf gall, eye ring, seed head, spider web.
Making such distinctions about my environment gives me immense satisfaction. So if I have trouble deciphering computer lingo or affording life insurance ... at least I know my neighbors.
Wind
The breeze has gotten beneath my skin. Veins jiggle, sinews swirl. In Spanish, you don’t use a pronoun when speaking of your body parts. You refer to “los piernas”—the legs, not my legs. Indeed when the wind coils I can claim neither limb nor hair as my own—harkening, as they do, to this new master. The heart beats faster and the body responds to a visceral language with feelings from ecstasy to terror.
Wind is seldom welcomed in city life. It scatters papers, messes hair, drops debris across the cultivated lawn. But with no appearances to keep up, I’m mesmerized by wind, coming as it does from the ocean’s gyres, brewed air, the moon’s pull.
Sirocco—a hot, dusty, humid southeast wind. Zephyr—a light, warming breeze. Santa Ana—a strong, hot, dry wind. Mistral—a powerful, cold, dry northeasterly gale. How many words for wind? What do we call the breeze that lifts the tiny hairs on our cheeks? The one that brings trees crashing to earth, or makes hieroglyphics on the lake’s skin? How different is a blossom-scented breeze from a leaf-ravaging gust? We need words for these variations, these gestures of air. We need a way to talk back.
Wind brings whoosh and ripple, snap and sigh. It highlights the dynamic earth, shaking it before us like someone with a lucid article. “Here, read this,” wind says, “these branches scribbling sky, the calligraphy of grasses.” Or, rattling its morocco, “Listen, the world is a marimba band. Get off your chair. Go outside. Dance. Dance with the land.”
And so I do.
Reciprocity
There are many relationships with land. Nature as provider, mentor, lover, friend. But with a tweak nature may seem like withholder, beguiler, betrayer, enemy.
A tummy warms with soup from veggies grown in our garden, clean air laps lungs, water cascades through veins. Nature as sustenance ... or destroyer. When crops fail, floods rise, or flesh freezes. In our cocooned society we sometimes forget our dependency. How humbled by disease and natural disasters we become. How cocky we can seem. But in our bones, we know it. We buy insurance, store up food, and watch the sky.
A heron, still as slate in a river, teaches patience. A jay scolding my cat, courage. I remember, during a particularly tough period at the magazine, walking by the Willamette River in Eugene. Every bone and muscle sent memos to my brain, requesting vacation time. But we had a deadline in two days and I had to postpone time off until then.
In the cold grey mist I had discerned two teeth and a large stick moving across the water. A beaver was pushing a log against the current. It took no notice of me, but I strained to keep it in sight. So sleek, so slow. This diligent critter that has carved landscapes—creating wetlands, controlling floods. All that week I dreamt of the beaver. As I l
eant over a desk crazy with papers, rising early and working late, the image of that dark wet animal steadily moving its heavy load forward etched into my memory. Almost subconsciously, laced with gratitude, I had learned endurance from the beaver. Its image inscribed into my consciousness, like a template of a way to be in the world.
Rain pools in a pocket of soil, a deer with luminous eyes lifts a slender neck from a stream. Quivering, she poises to flee. Bare sienna madrone limbs curve through the woods. I tingle.
Stopped on a walk by an old cherry tree towering in bloom. Delicate white blossoms lace its thick black bark. We’re flung from our bodies into the ether of great beauty, and shaken. The Earth as lover: sensual, erotic, stimulating.
Yet increasingly in this midseason of my life, the Earth coaxes me to a more companionable love. Toward a love between friends. I’m called to a reciprocal relationship rather than one of awe and gratitude. This symbiotic acquaintance compels devotion, caretaking, active concern. It implies that land requires, as one friend to another, that I be honorable, helpful, humble. That I give of myself, and consider the future ripples of even my slightest act.
April Dreamt that I recognized a plant growing in my room in a book of rare plants. It was a treasure, and I’d had it all along in my room, not suspecting its worth. It had pale, round, flat, heart-shaped leaves with tiny crimson berries. I understood it was my task to protect it.
