Raison d'être

 

Today the day came on a little different for us when the morning warmed quickly under the hot spring sun.   We took our dog Eva for a long walk in the meadow with the Sand Hill Cranes, eagles and hawks, the gophers, and the ducks.  She left the Cranes alone on our command but sneaked up and pounced on the gophers repeatedly despite knowing that no dog has ever caught a gopher in this manner.  She was invigorated by the walk, as were we and we went about our chores content that we had gotten some warm-up exercise early.  We found a dead juvenile hawk caught under a willow wicker chair in the back yard and marveled at the intricacies and varieties of all its feathers.  Eva licked it.  Evolution is an amazing thing. 

I took Eve out for her frisbee workout with some friends and they were amazed at how she could burst out after the thrown disk, picking its flight up quickly over her head and calculating instinctively its trajectory, complete with a Fibonacci compound curved decay as well as spin, force and wind effects while keeping an eye on the terrain and any obstacles she should avoid.  She has closing speed to match Ronnie Lott’s and the peripheral vision of Wayne Gretzky (her eyes are slightly wider set and on the side of her head, in defense of Wayne). 

Breaking quickly to where the disk is going to be, she sprints at first, with a quick first step to match Karl Malone, but lays off as she approaches the interception point if she is early, or powers thru like Michael Jorden to finish strong.  Instead of jogging out under the descending frisbee and catching it as it settles to the ground like most dogs, she leaps in slow motion 4 – 5 feet in the air and snatches the disk at the apex, styling nonchalantly with her slightly curled legs, before sticking the landing and jogging away proud and triumphant. 

On the beach Eva can run super-fast in the dry or wet sand, with the dry sand being much more tiring.  She prefers to land in the water after the catch to lighten the impact and cool down.  She is self-aware and loves to style in the air and prances as she come back to me for another throw.  She self regulates and rests or stops when she is tired but she loves an audience and will continue endlessly if someone is watching.

There are no bad catches, only bad throws.  I threw one too close to a fence one day and she adjusted and picked the disk off the top of the fence like Freddy Lynn pulling a ball off the Green Monster.  Eve has never seen baseball, Fred Lynn or the Green Monster, she just made it up as she went along.  If she were a pro athlete, she would make $30 million a year and make everyone else look silly.  My friends were suitably impressed and howled and laughed with appreciation. Eva was not unaware. As many people have said ‘that dog has skills’.  And she knows it. 

The point is that Eva is always ready for whatever comes at her.  Always ready for frisbee, never sore or tired, and she always performs at a high level.  Always ready for a hike or ski tour, even if the snow is ten feet deep and it is well below zero and we are out all day.  Her coat is both warm and cool, her heat radiation efficient even though it is only thru her mouth and tongue and I have never seen her hot, cold, tired, or hurt.  Eve never really needs to eat or drink much, just 25 cents of good dog food a day and a bowl of water.  We have taught her to ‘camel up’ and drink more and chill out before long hikes.  

She is perfectly designed for whatever comes and is always game.  She is a cattle dog by nature and mutt pedigree, so she has intelligence, energy and athleticism and she demands a job, something to do, a reason to be, every day.  Frisbee is her job, no, her avocation and she loves it to obsession.  She ignores people and dogs, gophers and food, even bathroom breaks, when she is playing Frisbee, her raison d'être. 

SIMPLIFY

 

For the Covid quarantine I have been re-reading Walden.  Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 masterpiece manual of romantic transcendentalism, satire, and self-reliance.  Why not, what else is more appropriate now than sequestered nature-worship and introspection.  You are what you read. 

We all read this story in high school and loved the idea, for about ten minutes, but then went back to over-complicate our lives with college and jobs, wives and kids, houses and dogs.  We have not really come that far in our efforts to simplify.  But now we are all forced into our own little Walden, our own little 100 x 150 foot cabins in the woods or on the beach or in the city.  With this self-imposed semi-isolation, we are compelled to contemplate and experience the simple life.  All the distractions and minutia have been stripped away and we have been forced to honestly look at our lives and ourselves, who we are and who we want to be.

Thoreau self-quarantined in 1845, in his 10 x 15 cabin on the pond for a year or two.  Simplify he said.  But simple ain’t easy.  Actually, he was only a mile from Concord, and he went home on weekends to have his mother do his laundry and iron his puffy shirts, but it felt like the wilderness of western Massachusetts, and it probably was.  ‘Many men go fishing all their lives’, he said, ‘without knowing that it is not fish that they are after’. 

The first chapter of Walden is called Economics; not Adam Smith or Milton Friedman economics but personal microeconomics.  Henry talks about all the things he has but does not need, like houses and farms, animals, and imported food.  How the farmer is a slave to his farm, as the shoemaker is slave to his shop, for generations.  How we are all slaves to our own sustainability, sustenance, maintenance, and entertainment.  How most of our concerns are about stuff and not people, how eventually the possessions possess the possessor. 

His friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson owned the land around Walden, but it was too expensive for Henry to purchase at eight dollars an acre ($300 today) so he was a squatter, with permission.  Thoreau paid him back by cutting his lawn and trimming his flowers, but they had a classic have/have not relationship.  When Ralph visited Henry in jail for civil disobedience (not paying taxes) he famously asked him ‘what are you doing in there’ to which Henry replied, ‘what are you doing out there’.

Henry cleared off 2.5 acres near Walden and planted a garden the first year, but he was too busy farming the first year and had to sell much of his food for only 15 dollars ($50).  The next year he planted less than an half-acre that he could farm just ‘with his left hand, at odd hours’.  Then he built his house mostly with stuff that he found lying around for $28 ($1000) and he was all set.  No oxen, nor horses, no cows, no sheep, no fertilizer, no tractors, no bankers, no contractors, no Home Depot. 

Ralph Waldo said, ‘Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond itself, a world’.  Henry David probably said, ‘yeah/no, maybe not’.  Ralphie, the thinker and innovator, wrote his classics “Nature” and “Self-Reliance” a few years before and Thoreau, the doer, decided to give his social experiment a try.  Hank was a more approachable voice for the nature movement than Ralph, less grand-eloquent, so he went to the woods to write his first book.  Henry was set up in his cabin for life, but he only made it two years before moving on to something else.  He had TADDs - Transcendentalist Attention Deficit Disorder, and he got a little bored.     

Thoreau tried to show us that it does not take much to be happy, that less is more.  I picture him in modern days, a Rastafarian street person living under the viaduct, or a bearded curmudgeon living in a desert cave in New Mexico or cabin in Montana.  But he was well educated at Harvard, ambitious, thoughtful, and outspoken, and might be like me, living in the material world but fighting the good fight to simplify while keeping up with the Joneses. 

Our collective sequestration would appeal to Henry, as it appeals to me.  I am lucky to be safe and healthy, wealthy, and wise, or at least three out of four, so I can enjoy my plethora of free time.  They say that free time is the blessing and curse of the upper and lower class but for a while it is forced on the declining middle class.  Some can embrace it, some resist.  Some struggle, being only one paycheck or health emergency away from the poor house.  Some scream irresponsibly, to return to ‘normal’ and continue our mindless consumption and pursuit of self-entertainment for something to do.

If only we could be more like Hank and Ralphie and be content to let the day come to us, let our lives proceed by their own design.  This is an opportunity, not to get ‘back’ to normal but to evolve forward, to reinvent ourselves and the world as we know it.  Life is not a spectator sport but it is sometimes too much with us, trying to make our legacy, and would be better off if we all just tried to leave it a better place.  This is our chance to let our problems solve themselves, as they often do, with or without us, and just kick back like Henry, and let the mystery be.  We should all be more content with ourselves and each other and simplify the world we live in.

You are what you write.

‘Maybe this was a big mistake’, thought Henry David Thoreau for the umpteenth time that cold, lonely and grey Massachusetts winter.  He sat in his dreary dripping, dark and dank 10 x 15 log cabin of his own construct, looking past the dead flies on his little window sill at the sleet blowing sideways over a frozen pond and through the numerous permeable kinks in the armor of his castle.  More like a dungeon.  He heard the uncatchable rat stirring beneath his bed of rags as he put the last of his daily ration of wood on the smoldering dinner fire to cook his beans and corn gruel.  “It’s going to be another frozen night’ he thought.  ‘Simplify, my ass, I am wet and cold and hungry and lonely’.  

It seemed like such a good idea in the spring, and summer wasn’t half bad, besides the bugs, but the autumn winds blew early and he underestimated his need for fire wood.  Now he could only trudge through the deep snow to collect sticks and branches for his needs.  ‘Screw economy’, he thought as he remembered the home hearth where his father took care of the fire and his mother took care of everything else.  That home hearth was only two miles away, but his stubborn pride prevented him from abandoning his experiment and limping home in defeat.  He was a laughingstock when he went out to the pond and he would be damned if he would be a laughingstock going home.  ‘Wait till I write my book’, he fumed.

So he took out his quill pen and rough paper and began to write again, in a different voice, a voice of confidence, of character, of unrepentant joy.  He wrote of his hypothetically noble relationship with the land and the pond, the forest and the animals, his farm and his house.  He wrote of reducing his life to the basics, the things that count, time, solitude, thoughtfulness, being.  No things, no people.  He was distracted by the drip drip from the leaky roof on to his paper and dismissed thoughts of Thanksgiving dinner with the family, his clean warm bed at home or of the roll in the hay he took with a local farm girl before he self-quarantined in the wilderness.  But he persevered with his fiction.   ‘Why should I tell them’ he said with loathing self-pity.

As he scribbled his fictional account he started to warm to the task.  The last log in the fire caught an updraft and flared its heat and light into the room.  He felt inspired to tell his story, truthfully or not.  The words flowed from his pen and he dipped his quill deep and wrote hard on the rough paper with passion. He spun a yarn for the ages about self-reliance and economy.  He invented figures of superior planning and stories of enlightened experiences.  He incorporated all the high brow tales of Transcendental Naturalism, nature worship and self sufficiency he could think of and when he was done, he sat back feeling better, almost believing it himself.  He stood up and scratched his itchy butt, drank the rest of his putrid melted ice water and thought warmly, ‘Maybe this was not such a bad idea after all’.