Sunday Before Labor Day

September 5, 2010.  Sunday.

Situation:  I work all day today, and afterwards I’m going to a Labor Day party.  Mway will just have to wait till tomorrow for me to take her for a walk.

Goldenrod Rises Like a Maze

September 1, 2010.  Wednesday.

Situation:  Have to work tonight, and I need to leave about 3:45.  (About my night and weekend work, I’d like to say that there’s no limit to the amount of preparatory work, to maintain a certain level of performance, that I can do, the many hours of which are not directly billed to anyone; if I were to calculate these hours into what I do get paid, I would probably arrive at a sub-minimum wage – I have not been making mention of this preparatory work in this journal, and, though I say I have to work tonight, I’ve actually already worked about 3 hours this morning – and this is typical for any given day.)  That means I’ll have to take Mway for a walk about 2:30, to do all the things I want to do.  Right now Mway and Moi are taking a nap, but whenever they get up, Mway and I will be going for a walk.

State of the Path:  The ground is again turning white.  In the old orchard, next to the Boy’s tree fort is another tree that looks like it has a fort, for all the monkey vines that clamber up it.  Though I clipped some of the branches on the multiflora near the hedgerow yesterday, some of its other branches still snag me on the shoulder.  As I pass through the goldenrod that rises like a ten-foot green and yellow maze all around me, I feel like I can’t breathe.  Down by the creek, I’m already getting too hot.  Is the vine I see down here some sort of morning glory, or is it more of that bindweed? – I don’t see any big trumpet flowers on it.  I’m still disappointed no dayflowers have bloomed (I see some these days in the garden, where I also see another wildflower I don’t see along the path: one of my favorites, foxtail, with its caterpillar-like flowers that turn silver after a frost).  Lots of bumblebees (but no honey bees – ours must stick by the house), monarchs (or viceroys), black and tiger swallowtails, cabbage butterflies, yellow sulphors (is there such a thing? spelling?), fritillaries, something that looks like a cecropia moth, black wings with an orange mark.

State of the Creek:  For some reason, the pool at the log jam has turned cloudy and chalky, while the other pools remain clear.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing – guess what? – Mway fetches the stick more times than I care to throw it.  I take delight that, on our way back, Mway, who tries to pass me like an aggressive driver, can’t get past me until we reach the walled garden.

Charge Down the Path, Looking at Nothing

July 2, 2010.  Friday.

Situation:  Last night I had a rough time at work, a fight with a co-worker (Wade), and afterwards I fell asleep in front of the TV, slipping in and out of consciousness, and not going upstairs to bed until the Colbert Report was running a second time.  So I was surprised when I woke up – I wasn’t sure when, because the clock in my room had stopped, but I can tell from the clock on my computer now that it must’ve been before 8 o’clock.  Squeak turns up her nose at the canned cat food I give her, but then I see that the dish tower containing her dried cat food, which is her main food, is empty; fortunately, I bought more cat food yesterday, and I’m able to refill it.  Outside, while I’m letting out the chickens and throwing feed on the ground for them, then wondering whether or not the pool filter needs back flushing (something Moi usually does), Mway starts to get impatient.  When I pick up the stick from the porch, she starts leaping and gamboling around the yard, expecting me to throw it there (as I did yesterday afternoon before going to work), and she ends up knocking over the chickens’ water dish.

State of the Path:  I vaguely look over at the day lilies – the flowers weren’t open, but – I can’t remember now – it seems that the spot they are in was awfully shady and the flowers were dried up (looking out my office window now, I see that the day lilies by the summer house still have not opened up this early in the morning).  Without thinking too much about it, I head straight down the main path, my mind a blur amidst all the plants with their various leaves criss-crossing this way and that.  I do notice the Canada thistles in the middle of the field, and reflect on how they’re doing their best to find a place to grow and blossom among so much goldenrod.  Down at the seeps of bug land, it seems to me that the grasses are a bit bedraggled – but, I don’t know, this is just a vague impression I have now in thinking about it.   Other than this, I more or less just charge down the path, looking at nothing and thinking of nothing except getting to the clearing as quickly as possible.

State of the Creek:  I do take some time, however, to look fairly closely at the creek.   When we arrive at the tree stand, Mway, instead of heading to the creek like she has so many times in the past, simply turns right onto the path, just like she did yesterday.  I step forward to look at the creek, and I see why she didn’t go down to it – all the water below the tree stand is gone, the pool has dried up, a fact Mway must have discovered two days ago.  I start checking on each pool of water.  There is still a little water sitting in the creek bed at the log jam, but the next pool of water, below the black walnut tree, is also dry.  So that’s two fewer pools of water than a couple days ago.  Below the big trees, where the creek bends, the double pool of water still has water in it.  I then go over to the crest of the skating pond; the pool of water below the swale from bug land is still there, but its lower half has completely dried.  While I’m there at the skating pond, I brace myself to step through the goldenrod to check on the cattails – that’s surely what they are, with their “brownish cylinder of female flowers” (as described by Audubon) sticking up.  I wonder if there’s any water in the pond.  I doubt it very much, but I don’t bother to step into it to check.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, I see that the spot where I’ve been standing to toss the stick is very well trampled down, showing nothing but brown grass and a few remaining stems of smashed- down goldenrod, so I take my stance at another spot.  My muscles are not sore today, probably because I took a break from swimming yesterday, but I still don’t feel much like throwing the stick, and Mway has me throwing it many more times than I care to.  Between throws, I try to take in the vista from the clearing:  I look down at the cattails in the skating pond, which look very striking from here, and I look around at the red berries that appear very bright these days on the sumacs.  But before I can look very long at something, Mway arrives back with the stick, ready for the next toss.  After many tosses, she starts playing “Put it down,” and she does this a lot, showing no signs of quitting.  Finally I have to simply turn around and start heading back to the house.

Walk to Mark the Silence

            Toward the end of 2009, I decided to start keeping a daily journal about taking my wife’s dog for a walk, as an exercise in defiance of a silence that had imposed itself around me (metaphysically, politically, culturally, psychologically – in short, in every way but literally, i.e. aurally).  It was not my expectation to dispel the silence: metaphysically it was necessary for a sense of self in the first place; in the other ways it was too powerful for me to do anything about.  I only hoped, by a wan gesture of protest, to mark the fact of its imposition, and to the extent that for an entire year I disciplined myself, after I took the dog for a walk (which I did almost every day), to sit down and write about it, I feel that I have been successful in fulfilling that hope.

            The journal bears all the scars of the exigencies of its production.  The walk and the writing usually occurring in the midst of a busy, noisy day, I often didn’t have time to write as much as I wanted, and seldom, if ever, the time to write as well as I would’ve liked.  Reflection and revision were practically impossible.  Such research as was needed had to be done in a hurry and was often incomplete.  Awkward phrases, clumsy transitions, redundancies, sloppy word choices, underdeveloped passages, slapdash punctuation, even misspellings – I haven’t had the chance to reread much, but these must be abundant.  The word “get,” I’m sure, must stand in frequently as le mot juste.  Such as it is then, the effort, the sheer commitment to the page and to the occasion, goes to being nearly everything; and perhaps the significance of what I’ve written – what’s interesting about it -- is solely sociological, if not medical.

            Nevertheless, there is content, a whole year’s worth, as much as anyone could want; and by happenstance, because I live near fields and woods, it turns out to be, somewhat startling to me, a nature journal -- however uninformed by any of the biological and geological sciences, and though less influenced perhaps by the roster of nature writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, than by the de-naturalist perspective of Vivian in Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” or the vision of nature de trop in the works of Samuel Beckett.  “The infinite variety of Nature,” Vivian says, “that is a pure myth….It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her”: hence, day after day as I took Mwayla for a walk near my house, noting a shrub first bare, then in leaf, another still bare, the first now in flower, the second finally in leaf, the first suddenly bearing fruit, the second yet in leaf, both at last bare again, I felt not only that I was witnessing the change of seasons but also that, like a weak jazz musician, I was stumbling, chorus after chorus, through the chord changes of a difficult tune.  Walks with Mway I call it; the title should bring to mind John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, though the differences are striking.  Steinbeck travels with his poodle in a truck camper from Maine to California in search of America; Mway and I stay entirely within our property, and only go as far as one of the neighbors can hit a golf ball.

            Part way through, it occurred to me I should be writing it as a blog.  But how could I do something that I’d only heard about?  My wife, more computer savvy than I am, eventually steered me in the right direction.  I’m starting late, so I’ve proposed to at least keep things even, putting December 25, 2009, up on line on December 25, 2010, December 26, 2009, up on line on December 26, 2010, and so on through the days of the year until December 24, 2010, my last entry, goes up on December 24, 2011.  The effect will be like nothing except what occurs in science fiction: a man, stuck in the past with his wife’s dog, sending messages through time to the present to anyone in the world who might hear him.

            Good reading everyone,

           

            Sisyphus Gregor