Thursday, June 28, 2018

A guest post from Janneke Brouwer


The Fire Lookout


Aangezien ik veel Engels sprekende volgers heb schrijf ik dit verhaal in het Engels.
Since I have a lot of followers that speak English, I’ll write this one in English.
This morning the weather report told us that it would be better to wait one more day to go to the Sierra Buttes Fire Lookout. Today chances of being caught in rain or thunderstorm would be high and the view would be mostly ruined by the clouds. So Gary and I decided to go tomorrow and hope that our view tomorrow will be blue sky and distant lookout.
After my morning coffee and oatmeal breakfast Gary looked outside and saw that the weather here was actually not too bad. He asked e to go with him to the Fire Lookout next to Taylorsville. That seemed to be a nice replacement activity which would be only a couple miles away in stead of a two hour drive. We packed our bags with hot coffee and an extra jacket to stay warm. Up there it might get cold and windy. At the top of some of the mountains here is still some snow. Oh, this reminds me…. I haven’t even took one sip of coffee or water out of the two bottles that I took. And here is why…
We drove all the way up the mountain and Gary parked the car. It was a beautiful view over Taylorsville, Quincy, some lakes and valleys. I had to close my eyes and walked with Gary about 10 meters / 32 feet to the front. Then I could open my eyes and wow there I saw this very gorgeous lake that appeared right below me. It was created by a glacier high in the mountains, had clear water and Gary told me he even went for a swim up here once. When we sat there and just listened to the silence and to the birds singing he told me that this was the place where he really felt home. Ever since he got here with his father and now, years later, this is the place where he really feels home. I told him I can totally understand that. This is such an amazing place with clean air, lots of green valleys and beautiful mountains and views. He’s lucky to have this.
DSCF1568
He showed me around the top of the mountain and there we saw a Fire Lookout. A small wooden house. I climbed up the stairs as far as I could and could imagine myself staying here for a while just looking around to spot fires. Again at that place we just sat for a while and looked at the clouds how they shaped and became darker and darker, to finally rain down somewhere.

After one last look, when we walked to the car and wanted to go home we saw a car passing by. Gary became excited and said: “Oh that must be the man that stays at the Fire Lookout! We heard a radio earlier that morning so he must have let that on while he went shopping or something.” And Gary was right. The man stopped in front of the Fire Lookout and we walked up to him. Gary said to me: “Just wait, probably I can talk him into showing us the Fire Lookout from the inside. I’ll just tell him about your around-the-wold-tour and that you’ve never seen this before.” Well, Gary didn’t even had to put much effort in it because when we arrived we both saw that the man had his car fully loaded and starting to carry this up the stars to bring inside his house. Groceries, books, a printer and even a small trampoline. ðŸ™‚ So after greeting the man we offered him to carry the boxes up to the kitchen and to his office in the top of the Fire Lookout. Wayne, that was his name, was happy with the help and after I carried the trampoline inside – which he uses to stay in shape! – he was also willing to tell us about his job as a Fire Lookout.
The way Wayne told his stories and his energy were very intriguing. It made me think about Jan Bakker from Amsterdam and Eddy Scott from Russell. Somehow these men probably never loose their young spirit, energy and their fascinating stories. They will never forget to learn, to enjoy and to have fun. Later on, when I was back here at Gary’s log house I read Wayne his blog and I was right. His photography and his writing are truly inspiring me. I think I’ve read three stories without even blinking. The link to his blog is http://smokysunsheaven.blogspot.com/2018/ and here are some of his photo’s, that I found on his art gallery http://www.pbase.com/wwp/lookoutlife, which I found uplifting.
At the Fire Lookout he will stay most of his summer days. When the lightning strikes he has to be aware that there could be a fire starting. He’s watching through his binoculars to spot smoke and uses the radio to report this to center where they mostly send a helicopter and someone on the ground to check it. Natural fires are generally started by lightning. But last year they had a man who would start three fires at one day and several others, one even in someones back yard. He also caused a big fire close to town and got apparently 25 years to lifelong sentenced to prison. Wayne’s job is to spot the fires and make sure they can control them i time. He told us that some storms have up to 200 lightning bolts strike the earth’s surface.
Today is just another inspiring day where we, because of  ‘bad’ weather, experienced something truly unique. If you just get out of your house, new adventures are sometimes just around the corner. Life has so many gifts to discover and so many lessons and wisdom to give us. This world has so many magnificent miracles to reveal. If we just try to catch a glimpse of it, if we just understand a little part, we will find our peace, we will find ourselves. The book is endless and the story always goes on. If you go and open your eyes you will find it. If you stay where you are you may never see it.
Something special happened at the end of our visit at the Fire Lookout…
YesterdayI wrote this in my book:
Traveling the world seems to be something very special. Even though I’ve met so many people, young and old, who have been traveling or are still traveling the world. For most people the biggest surprise is that I’ve been doing a big part of my around-the-world-tour alone. They don’t understand why, would be scared of doing something like this and always tell me to ‘be careful‘. Then there’s the other group of people that I’ve met. The ones that are curious and excited and would love to do this themselves. The ones that have seen something more of the world. The ones that know the feeling of being free to do whatever you want to do and find amazing adventures. They mostly tell me ‘have fun!‘.
Today when Wayne told me goodbye…. guess what he said. ðŸ˜‰
Thanks Gary for this nice day and making me realize any adventure can be just around the corner of our own house.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

are you ever tired of being an atlas?





this morning i have the house to myself, my housemate gone to work early, and i feel very differently. when she's  here, nothing different other than the presence of another person. when that is so, i feel rushed. i have to do things quicker, better, as though giving a performance. 

of course, this comes from childhood, a mother who demanded a kind of perfection. i can't quite imagine what that perfection might have been, she herself very self-conscious of her looks and critical of mine. she thought i was homely, i know that for a fact, hearing her say so to guests, even as i gave myself my first shaves in the mirror. 

and having brothers and sisters didn't help. conflicts always brought problems, often tears (which i've rarely shed since), me, the oldest, most often held responsible. even if i was, and i don't doubt it, the feeling of failure strong. and she expressed great hopes for me. i would be a great man and straighten out the world. alas, in my mind i often try and make a mess of it, imagining using power instead of finesse. 

boundaries, they say, make the man (or woman), and i have trouble holding my own, since i always want to avoid conflict. living with a drunk uncle at age sixteen didn't help. i slept in the living room with no door to shut against his rambling monologues and bad advice. a few months of that and i was told my character changed. i became, i suspect, more defensive than active.


even with the door shut, i keep expecting to be invaded, chided, to have the sky fall on me. yes, the sense of a sudden disaster rarely leaves me. perhaps it was being a child during world war two. maybe it was moving thirty-two times before i left high school and many times since. i'm atremble within: all the uncertain actions of the world, the ambiguities. 

it does seem very foolish to be affected by childish things on the verge of old age. well, maybe that's when they affect all of us the most, the body needing a surgery here, a surgery there to keep going. even minor ones bring out my mortality. and the odd thing is, i enjoy sitting in cafes the most, drinking coffee, reading, watching the crowd! ah, out in the open, not trapped by four walls and my own insecurities. after all, i do respond well to emergencies. it's the needs of everyday life too big. 



Monday, June 4, 2018

can madness make us happy?





how can i define a state of which i was once so afraid? i read everything i could about it, fearing i'd go off the deep-end, especially in college when i felt so alienated from my body. i'd look at my naked self in the mirror and be appalled! i still find it odd i'm so much an animal (blood, flesh, and bone) with a consciousness that flits about the universe like a butterfly. 

i have had a few insights into the loss of control. for example, an adult acting like a four-year old, dancing, singing, sticking her hands in a potted plant and throwing dirt all over the place, that's exactly what insanity can look like. catatonia another matter, the stillness of the dead. and a child running out of the hospital into the street terrified, the input of stimulae way over the top.







apparently i get 4 billion items of information hitting my eyes every second, and i can manage forty. i need a screen to be able to cope. every successful person seems to be able to meditate or walk themselves out of this level of stress. i don't know why some people can't. it takes a certain amount of self-discipline and a  presence of mind for me to land on my feet after a set-back.

i remember sliding  off the road driving down the mountain in the rain. recently logging made the surface slip as ice. barely able to maintain control, i steered my vw bus into a stump, keeping from rolling over. but i was stuck, over two miles from town, night coming on. in this day before cellphones i had to make a quick decision. my brain focused and i realized i'd better walk to town and call a tow truck.

what struck me at the time was how fast my brain worked. usually i have a terrible time making decisions. however, i came almost instantly to a conclusion. i realized i must have reserves to call upon in an emergency. had i been mad i can't imagine what would have happened. growing old enough, i realize most people's personalities don't change unless they've been  brain damaged. 

how much trauma do people need to go off the rails? a serial-killer lacks empathy, and a truly insane person can't identify with anyone but his or her self. to be encapsulated in a totally private world seems to be one symptom of craziness. and when it comes to democracy, i shouldn't be surprised of those devoted to cruelty in the last election. 

americans live in fear of losing their jobs, if not their minds. and any threat from a foreign body feels like an illness. push this far enough, and you have a population on the edge of madness. the great irony, of course, is babies are a form of mass immigration and those fearing foreigners may populate themselves out of house and home. 

and now, can we define sanity? i suppose it means realizing i do nothing on my own. thousands have created and run this airplane in which i hover over the earth. and without a certain logic i'd never get where i'm going. in dreams i give up control while my body actually paralyzed so it won't sleep-walk. and if i acted out my dreams, where would i be then? alone?





Art & Madness, April 18, 1985. a lecture to a literature class.

https://youtu.be/LhDHP_3yJIM