Louisiana and Delaware have been duly purpled. I saw at least two different Louisianas and three different Delawares.
With the exception of you-know-who, the rest of the AWOLs seem at least possible — but I can’t help remembering that I added no new plates in the last five months of 2012. As droughts go, that was unusually long.
The dangling conversation has many variations. Here’s one:
Summer resident: It couldn’t be easy, dealing with all these people all summer long.
Year-round Vineyarder: Well, the traffic does get to me, and working three jobs when the kids are out of school is exhausting . . .
Summer resident: But you’re so lucky to be able to live in such a beautiful place.
And another:
Summer resident: I bet you’ll be glad when Labor Day comes, huh.
Year-round Vineyarder: Yeah, it’s sort of a relief.
Summer resident: But if it weren’t for us, how would you people make a living?
Some variations involve only year-rounders:
Vineyarder #1: It took half an hour to get from Radio Shack to Five Corners this afternoon, then when I was finally on Beach Road heading toward OB the drawbridge went up.
Vineyarder #2: No kidding. The other day at the fish market a lady started yelling at the clerk because the oysters weren’t organic. Organic oysters? Summer people, some are not.
Vineyarder #3: Say what you will, we need them.
And here the conversation goes into indefinite-dangle mode.
Even when they bring it up, even if they act oh-so-sympathetic, summer people don’t want to hear too much about what being a year-rounder is like. As a new year-rounder, it didn’t take me long to catch on. Pretty soon I was blowing them off with a pasted-on smile: “Oh, it’s not so bad.”
It didn’t take me long because I’d already learned the drill as a woman. Most men and not a few women would only listen to so much before they got uncomfortable and sent the conversation into infinite-dangle mode with “Well, not all men are monsters, right?” (Uh, were we talking about monsters?)
And as a white, able-bodied person from a privileged class background, I had plenty of experience on the other side too. I knew how to shut a conversation down when it started making me uneasy. I knew how to shut it down in a way that never acknowledged my discomfort, or fear, or anger.
Last week the Washington Post published the results of a Post–ABC News poll about responses to the verdict in George Zimmerman’s trial for the death of Trayvon Martin. From the story: “Among African Americans, 86 percent say they disapprove of the verdict — with almost all of them saying they strongly disapprove — and 87 percent saying the shooting was unjustified.”
For white people, the corresponding figures were 31 percent (disapproved of the verdict) and 33 percent (thought the shooting was unjustified).
Black people and white people don’t live in the same US of A. From the moment we’re born, the color of our skin, and of our parents’ skin, starts creating the US we’re going to live in. Still, no high walls or wide rivers separate these various USAs. Our psychic maps may be different, but we can, black and white, communicate our experiences to each other.
We can, but we don’t. The silence you hear is hundreds of thousands of millions of dangling conversations. Privilege — in this case white-skin privilege — doesn’t have to hear anything it doesn’t want to hear. Privilege can shut down the conversation. Non-privilege learns to be circumspect, even evasive; to nudge potentially risky conversations onto safer ground before Privilege shuts them down.
And before long we’re living in different worlds.
Earlier this month President Obama tried to bridge the worlds by talking about the routine experience of young black men in this country. It was heartfelt, it was brave — it was leadership. I was thrilled. So were a lot of other people. More, I was honored, because the president was trusting me with his thoughts and experiences. To tell another person your truth, your risky, uncomfortable truth, is an act of deep respect.
But some people were outraged. No, I’m not talking about the salivating white right-wing Obamaphobes — they were outraged, sure, but what else is new? I’m talking about the polite white moderates of my acquaintance who generally vote Democratic. Quite a few of them thought the president was being divisive in alluding to experiences that they don’t share. They’re so used to being included in “we” that they feel dissed when “we” is someone else. Why can’t we just be people? they whine.
Because you’re not listening. And because you’re not listening, people aren’t telling you what you really need to hear. And because you aren’t hearing what they’re no longer willing to say, you still don’t get it.
I was scheduled to participate in two performances on July 28, the fourth edition of “World of the Troubadours and Trobairitz” and the Spirituals Choir’s annual Della Hardman Day concert at East Chop Light. Lyme disease isn’t contagious and my gimpy leg still works, albeit slowly, so no way was I going to fink out of either one.
First order of business, however, was getting my doxycycline prescription filled. Were any pharmacies open on Sunday? Consensus at the ER front desk was maybe Stop & Shop and Leslie’s. Upon arriving in Vineyard Haven, I learned that the Vineyard Haven S&S doesn’t have a pharmacy. Getting to the Edgartown store and back and still making my 2:30 call for the Troubadours program meant risking a speeding ticket, so I hobbled up to Main Street. Leslie’s was open! I got my doxy and a knee brace. A clerk locked the front door behind me when I left. Turns out they close at 2 p.m. on Sunday. My psychic map is expanding. Now it includes pharmacies that are open on Sunday.
“World of the Troubadours” followed the format of its three predecessors, but each year nearly all the poems and songs in the program are new. Dr. Marisa Galvez, an assistant professor of French at Stanford, introduced the audience to the history and culture of Occitania (now southern France) in the 12th and 13th centuries CE. Her Songbook: How Lyrics Became Poetry in Medieval Europe was published last year by the University of Chicago Press. In the poems that followed, ladies teased their lovers and dissed their husbands; gentlemen beseeched their ladies to be true or at least kind; and reader Jonathan Revere boasted of what he could accomplish if he only had a horse. (The troubadours sang about war as well as love.)
New to the ensemble this year was soprano Emily Culler, an early music specialist with a lovely voice. Returning for the second year was lutenist Rich Maloney. Rounding out the instrumentalists were recorder players Carol Loud, who’s been part of all four Troubadour programs and who also played percussion, and first-timer Fred Hotchkiss. The readers, in addition to Jonathan, were Justen Ahren, John Alley, Beth Kramer, Joe Eldredge, Rhonda Backus, and yours truly. Special kudos to Paul Levine, whose brainchild this was and who brings it to new life every year.
I went home to give Travvy his supper and hang out with him on the deck. Poor puppy hasn’t had any vigorous walks lately. Lucky for both of us, July’s heat and humidity have damped his energy down quite a bit so it’s not like he’s bouncing off the walls.
The big question was whether July’s soggy air would turn to full-out rain, as it had the previous night. I packed my rain slicker and headed for East Chop Lighthouse, which is about as far from my house in West Tisbury as you can get without going to Aquinnah.
We sang to an attentive gathering and sounded, I must say, pretty good, although singing in the open air is always a challenge. Between Jim Thomas’s drumming and Phil Dietterich’s keyboard we managed to stay together. We felt a few sprinkles before the end but not enough to make anyone put up an umbrella, never mind leave.
I’ve now sung these songs and heard Jim talk many times. It’s always moving, but in ever-changing ways.
I’ve been asked, Isn’t it depressing, singing those songs about slavery? No, it’s not. Reading about slavery can be depressing, or infuriating, or both, but singing the songs the slaves created and sang is inspiring, encouraging. That people whose lives literally were not their own could keep singing, and imagining a brighter future, and putting one foot in front of the other — the human spirit is an astonishing thing.
I couldn’t help thinking that with my malfunctioning leg I wouldn’t have been welcome on the Underground Railroad. I didn’t climb to the top of the lighthouse this year either.
Sing all the way, sing all the way
Sing all the way, my lord
Hear the angels singing!
As Jim explains, when “angels” appear in the spirituals, it means conductors on the Underground Railroad. If angels were singing out in the woods, it meant the long walk north was about to begin.
Hear the angels singing?
Long time, no blog. Can’t blame it on work: two humongous editing jobs just arrived, but for the last couple of weeks “work” has been a less-than-arduous proofread.
I’m blaming it on my left leg.
A month ago my left leg looked and behaved just like my right leg. It bent and flexed in all the same places. It walked upstairs and down, climbed in and out of the car, strode vigorously down the trail and occasionally even sprinted.
Over the course of July that changed. My left knee swelled up. It screeched at unexpected times. A charleyhorse took up permanent residence in my left calf. The swelling spread down my leg to my foot. The last time my foot got that big was when I sprained my ankle wicked bad about 20 years ago.
My #1 workspace, aka the blue chair
I’d got into some sloppy habits during my extremely busy June. I work in my blue chair. The laptop sits on the lapdesk, but because the chair’s arms aren’t quite long enough to support the lapdesk, the lapdesk occasionally winds up resting on my left knee. Left knee put up with this for a while but then started to protest by feeling sore and starting to swell.
Uh-oh. Nothing like a little pain to cure a girl of sloppy, so I started being more careful. I rarely sit in the same position for more than an hour, but now I stood up more often, massaged the knee, used an ice pad, and (of course) kept the lapdesk off my knee.
The blue chair came into my life as the result of a similar sequence of events last winter. Its predecessor, the comfy purple chair, had broken. Sitting in it for several hours a day, day in, day out, threw my back out of whack. It got so bad that I could barely get out of bed in the morning. It took almost 10 minutes to put on one sock. So I stopped sitting in the chair. I discovered Advil. I got some back-strengthening exercises and did them religiously.
A month later I could barely remember what the back pain felt like.
Note especially the difference between left knee and right, and left foot and right.
This trusty protocol — stop the stupid thing you’re doing and take steps to heal the damage — didn’t work this time. The leg got more swollen. By the middle of the past week, Travvy’s and my usually three- to four-mile brisk morning walk was down to one very slow mile. I had no idea what was going on, my left leg was so swollen that my right leg looked scrawny (trust me, it isn’t), and it wasn’t getting better.
On Friday I called Island Health Care, my primary care provider — which I hadn’t visited since 2008, when I needed to have a complete physical before the Cape Cod Eye Surgery & Laser Center would agree to get rid of my cataract. I got an appointment for 10:30 Saturday morning.
A little after 10 yesterday morning, I headed for the Triangle in Edgartown. I told Travvy I’d be home soon. He probably thought, Yeah, right — do you have any idea what “soon” means? In this case I definitely lied: I didn’t get home till almost 6:30.
The nurse practitioner at the clinic took my vital signs, looked at my leg, felt it here and there, and said she couldn’t tell what was going on but that it might be a blood clot and I should go to the ER. Off I went.
Long story short: Ultrasounding a whole leg takes a while, then the results have to be sent to Boston to be read. What-ifs wandered through my mind: What if it is a blood clot? Do I have to have surgery? Will they let me go home? What about Travvy? Maybe I should get a cell phone?
I managed to push all of the above to the very edge of my mind because I was reading Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention on my Nooky. All the same, it was a big relief when Dr. Stedman arrived with the good news that I did not have a blood clot. I did have a Baker’s cyst — a pocket of synovial fluid behind the knee, which may have been caused by my sloppy work habits — and the Baker’s cyst seemed to have ruptured, spilling out synovial fluid (whose purpose is to keep the knee joints lubricated) and causing the swelling in my lower leg and foot.
She thought, however, that something else was going on. She extracted some vile yellow-green fluid from my knee. Had I ever had Lyme? No, I said. I’m one of the few people I know who hasn’t had it. She drew blood for a Lyme test.
Tick tick tick
Guess what? I’ve got it. According to the test, it was a recent exposure. I get bitten by ticks fairly often, both dog ticks and the Lyme-bearing deer ticks, but I usually feel them biting me and so get them off promptly. Maybe I missed one. Maybe I got the body but left the head behind. Either way, I didn’t notice a rash anywhere; on the other hand, I have poison ivy here and there and maybe one of those rashes was Lyme-related. I knew from the experience of many friends and acquaintances that Lyme is a trickster and can manifest in myriad ways. While I was watching for flu-ish symptoms and general achiness, the damn thing manifested in my swollen knee. Yes, indeed: Lyme can take up residence in a particular joint and leave you feeling generally OK except in that particular joint.
Around 5:30 I was discharged, along with two tabs of doxycycline, a prescription for 20 more, and detailed instructions about Lyme disease, Baker’s cysts, and doxy. I stopped by Cumby’s for milk on the way home. Travvy got his supper very late, but he doesn’t seem to hold it against me.
General musings: The waiting was long, but I didn’t mind it until the charge on my Nooky ran out and I couldn’t read. Next time take a hardcopy book or magazine for backup.
Good diagnosing by Dr. Stedman. The combination of Lyme symptoms and ruptured-Baker’s-cyst symptoms could easily have thrown her off the track. Living on Martha’s Vineyard makes me more susceptible to Lyme, but it also increases my chances of encountering medical professionals who know Lyme’s trickster qualities well enough to keep an open mind.
Thank heavens for Commonwealth Care. For almost 25 years, until 2008, I had “major medical” insurance (useless for preventive care and for anything short of a major medical emergency) or no insurance at all. If I hadn’t had it, I would have waited even longer before getting checked out. The possibility of a blood clot wouldn’t have occurred to me. Lyme might have taken up permanent residence in my body. With the co-pays and the drugs, this episode is going to put a little dent in the checking account — but the $100 co-pay for the ER is a whole lot less than the cost of ultrasounding and blood-testing.
I write to make sense of the world. I generally don’t write for money. If someone wants to pay me for what I’ve written, hey, fine, no problem, but I don’t write for hire.
There are a couple of reasons for this. I’m not a fast writer, for one thing. The late Gerry Kelly, my colleague in my Martha’s Vineyard Times days, cranked out prose like yard goods. Being able to call on Gerry when a stringer finked out or an unexpected hole appeared in the Calendar section — this was wonderful. But I’ve never been able to do it myself.
The other thing is that writing engages head, heart, and soul in a way that editing does not. My time and my editorial expertise are for sale. My head, heart, and soul are not.
A couple of weeks ago, however, I was contacted by The Trustees of Reservations (TTOR), a conservation group that has a presence on the Vineyard. Would I be interested in writing a 500-word story for their newsletter about the restoration work under way at their Menemsha Hills property?
I thought about it. Read their descriptive materials, interview the director, maybe pay a visit to the place and see for myself? The pay seemed commensurate with the time it was likely to take, and 500 words isn’t a lot. OK, sure, I said. Send me a copy of the newsletter so I can get a feel for your style.
So yesterday, not long before sundown on yet another sweltering hot day, Travvy and I headed up the North Road into Chilmark. As always seems to happen when I don’t know where I’m going in Chilmark, there was a hulking SUV on my tail as I drove along, looking for the Menemsha Hills sign. When I spotted it, the hulk was so close it would have been in my cargo bay if I’d braked suddenly, so I pulled over, pulled a U-turn, and followed the dirt road to the trailhead.
After Trav had a good sniff around the parking lot, we headed down the trail. Almost immediately we came to a sign: NO DOGS OR HORSES PAST THIS POINT.
Uh-oh.
Moon in crook of dead tree, Waskosim’s Rock Reservation
We went to Waskosim’s Rock instead. Waskosim’s is a Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank property. The Land Bank has hands-down the best public access policies of any conservation-type organization on the Vineyard. This is because it’s a public agency. It was established by state law in 1986, it’s funded by a 2% tax on most real estate transactions, and it’s overseen by a commission to which each town elects one member and the seventh is appointed by the state secretary of environmental affairs. I love the Land Bank.
Dogs have to be leashed at Waskosim’s Rock these days, and with good reason: not only is there livestock on abutting properties, there are goats grazing in a fenced enclosure on the reservation itself. Some dogs, I’m sure, could be trusted off-leash around the goats, but Travvy is not one of them. Travvy was so excited that I wished I had his walking harness in addition to his limited-slip collar. I did have string cheese, however. That helped a lot.
So we had our walk. It was almost pitch-dark by the time we rejoined Malvina Forester at the trailhead and headed home on the North Road.
By the time I made the left turn on State Road, I knew I had to back out of the writing assignment. I’m not going to do PR for a property that doesn’t allow dogs, not unless I’m financially desperate — and though it was indeed a lean spring, desperate I am not.
Light fades from the west, Waskosim’s Rock
When I write about psychic maps, it’s usually about Martha’s Vineyard, right? Well, yeah. This is where I live and this is what I choose to write about.
One reason I choose to write about Martha’s Vineyard is that I believe writing about Martha’s Vineyard is writing about the world, just like writing about the world is writing about Martha’s Vineyard.
I won’t go into the book I recently proofread about the George W. Bush administration, with a focus on the relationship between President Bush and Vice President Cheney. You don’t want to know how often the blow-by-blow accounts of National Security Council meetings and White House staff meetings and all sorts of other meetings reminded me of meetings I’ve attended on Martha’s Vineyard. People who can’t see the forest for the trees. People who can’t see the trees for the forest. People who keep saying the same damn thing over and over even when they have no facts to support it. We’ve got it all — it’s just that they get paid more.
Plenty of Vineyarders won’t agree with me on this. Am I surprised? I am not. We don’t live on the same Martha’s Vineyard. My Martha’s Vineyard and their Martha’s Vineyard are not the same. They overlap at several points, notably Five Corners and the Vineyard Haven ferry dock, but our experiences of the place are different. Very, very different, in some cases.
Martha’s Vineyard is a small place. A hundred square miles, give or take, surrounded by ocean. If there are many Martha’s Vineyards, you’ve got to believe that there are a gazillion or so United States of Americas. OK, not a gazillion: I just Googled and the official population figure as of 2012 seems to be 313.9 million. Even allowing for considerable overlap, that’s a lot of Americas.
Sometimes, like after 9/11, it seems like the overwhelming majority of us are living in the same United States of America. We are living in the United States of America where two towers at the World Trade Center just collapsed into rubble after being hit by airplanes.
Trayvon Martin (photo swiped from Wikipedia — thank you)
Other times, like right now, in the wake of the verdict in State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, it’s crystal clear that we don’t live in the same USA at all. Our USAs have different histories, and as any alternate-history fan can tell you, different histories result in different places. Even if none of the histories are “alternate” — if they all happened in our space-time continuum — the place each of us lives in is shaped by the history we know.
I’m a white girl who grew up in a white town in Massachusetts. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, I barely knew who he was and I knew nothing about the significance of his life. (I blogged about this last year in “Homage to Dr. King.”) I started learning PDQ, and I’m still learning. But the upshot is that when Trayvon Martin was killed, he was the one I identified with. He was the one I could have been — not least because in my big-city days I was sometimes trailed down lonely streets by men whose intentions I had no way of knowing.
And that, I do believe, is what most of the visceral response to this case comes down to: Who do you identify with? Who could you have been?
At the moment I can’t even imagine myself George Zimmerman, jumping to the conclusion that the young guy walking away from the convenience store was dangerous, so dangerous that I have to get out of the car and pursue him. My hunch is that a Georgia Zimmerman would have reacted differently. But to the writer in me this is a challenge: can I expand my own psychic map to include George Zimmerman?
Don’t know, but I’ll see what I can do.
On June 26, two Alaskan malamutes, Tucker and Huey, got loose from their run in Hillsdale County, Michigan. Their owners, Dawn and Jeff McClellan, started searching for them right away.
Tucker and Huey with friend Rebel at the pond
The McClellans believe that the two dogs went to a pond on the McClellan property and that their new neighbor — let’s call him N — was there too. (N had been seen there before.) Tucker and Huey then followed him home.
At some point N called the Hillsdale County sheriff’s office. According to the official report, which was filed at 19:18 (7:18 p.m.): “Caller [N] advised that 2 Siberian Huskies [sic] were in his yard and they were aggressive. The caller advised they are circling him and that he had shot one. Caller further advised that they have no tags on or collars. Caller stated to Central that he has never seen them before.”
By his own account, the officer filing the report advised N that he had “the right to protect himself and property if he was in danger.”
Shortly afterward, Jeff McClellan showed up in his pickup, looking for his dogs. N was dragging Tucker and Huey out of the garage. Both had been shot dead. Tucker had a rope around his neck. Jeff, stunned, asked what happened. N said he shot the dogs because they wouldn’t leave. Jeff contacted Dawn, who was out looking for the dogs on their four-wheeler. She was likewise shocked by what she saw. She asked N if the dogs were threatening him or damaging anything. He said no. He did point to Huey and say that he was drooling. Jeff was on the phone with a law-enforcement officer, who told him to get in his truck and wait till the officers arrive.
Aside: Does this remind you of a case currently playing out on the national scene? One George Zimmerman uses his gun to create a problem, then uses the gun to “solve” it? He’s the only eyewitness, so his version stands? Yeah, me too.
When the officers arrived, they apparently took the McClellans to task because the dogs weren’t wearing tags and they were running loose. The lack of current tags is significant because Michigan law (MCL 287.279) specifies that unless a dog is harassing livestock or threatening people, it is unlawful “for any person, other than a law enforcement officer, to kill or injure or attempt to kill or injure any dog which bears a license tag for the current year” (emphasis mine). As far as I know, both dogs were licensed but didn’t have their collars on.
According to the official report, the case is now closed.
As you can guess, many people are very angry about what happened. The Facebook group “Justice for Tucker & Huey” currently has 3,740 members. Petitions have been created, articles have been published online, people are researching the laws in Michigan and elsewhere to see if N’s action was justified and whether it could happen elsewhere.
The case should be reopened. Even if it’s lawful under Michigan law to shoot an unlicensed dog, the McClellans and the community in general have a compelling interest in knowing what happened. N told the sheriff’s office that the dogs were being aggressive. He told the McClellans that they weren’t doing any harm; he shot them because they wouldn’t leave.
While Dawn asked him what had happened, N was cleaning up the blood in his garage. Apparently that’s where one or both dogs were killed. The official report says nothing about blood in the garage. If the dogs followed N home from the pond and were acting “aggressive,” how did they get into the garage? Somehow N got a rope around Tucker’s neck. Why did he do this, and how?
Did N have the rope, the gun, and a phone with him when the dogs followed him home? If not — well, if he had to go into the house to get them, why didn’t he stay there, call the sheriff’s office, and wait?
Another thing: N told the sheriff’s office that the dogs didn’t have tags or collars on. When Trav has a collar on, you can’t see it because his fur is so thick. You have to put your hand on his neck and feel for it. Did N do that? If he did, just how aggressive were these guys?
Time out for a little devil’s advocacy here. The McClellans have said that Tucker and Huey were the sweetest, friendliest dogs you could meet. I believe them. But people meeting a dog for the first time have no idea how friendly the dog is, especially if they don’t know how to read dog behavior. Travvy likes people, but some people freak out when he woos at them. I get it. If you don’t know northern-breed dogs, being wooed at by an 80-pound wolfy-looking creature can be scary.
That said, and having tried to make sense of the information that’s out there — did N think he was in imminent danger? I’m not convinced. All he had to do to get out of danger was to go indoors, which he apparently did, and stay there, which he apparently didn’t.
Reopening the case won’t bring Tucker and Huey back to life, so why bother? Because the McClellans have a right to know what happened. Because everyone who lives in the vicinity has a right to know, especially if they have dogs. And because the law is built on precedents. We could use some precedents that say that unless you’re in danger, it’s not reasonable to shoot a dog, even a strange dog on your own property, until you’ve taken less drastic measures to solve the problem. Getting rid of that implicit stipulation that it’s only unlawful to shoot licensed dogs would also be good.
Aside: Yes, there are plenty of differences between this case and the one that’s playing out on the national scene. But they echo each other in interesting ways, don’t they?
Revised, July 15, 12:50 p.m. EDT
The second of the three jobs that have kept me crazy-busy since Memorial Day has gone home (on time!). Finally I’m getting back to Squatters’ Speakeasy. What little writing I managed to do in June was mostly tweaking and revising. Tweaking and revising comes easy to me — hey, it’s what I do for a living, right?
First-drafting, on the other hand, takes courage and stillness and strength, and when I’m working flat-out, all three are in short supply. But this week I got back to it. Here’s proof. I do my first-drafting in longhand, with fountain pens. When you fill your pens from bottles of ink, you have to blot the nibs and (invariably) wipe your fingers. I do this on a square of paper towel that doubles as a coaster for my tea mug. To the right you’ll see what the current blotter/coaster looks like.
Pretty splashy, eh?
I’m writing the rent-party scene. Well, it’s not exactly a rent party: it’s a party to raise money so Mama Segredo’s friend Silvia can get her porch fixed. Silvia is sitting out in front of her house, knitting in her lap, cane at her side, introducing Mark (who has a guitar hung around his neck but isn’t playing at the moment) to Fernando from across the street. Nearby Suze and several members of her women’s drumming circle are drumming away, and people are dancing on the sidewalk and in the driveway. Also in the driveway, a face-painter (don’t know her name yet) is painting cat whiskers on a little girl’s cheeks, and Giles is sketching a customer’s portrait in charcoal. Out back Mama Segredo is supervising the refreshment tables while two musicians play klezmer on clarinet and bass.
OK, OK, I thought. I get the idea but I’m getting bored. Time for something to happen, OK?
Whereupon the guy who’d been watching and listening from across the street comes over. Mark watches him watching the drummers and finally says, “You’re a drummer.” To which the guy responds, “When I’m drumming, I’m a drummer.”
Pretty soon Suze and the newcomer are sitting on opposite sides of her three congas and drumming together. I watch their hands fly back and forth, hers light brown, his a little darker, as if they’d been weaving this pattern together for years.
Whew. The purpose — or maybe a purpose — of the scene had revealed itself. Just in time, too, because (1) Travvy and I hadn’t gone for our morning walk yet, and (2) it was starting to sprinkle. For the last two or three weeks it’s often felt on the verge of raining but nothing’s come of it. It’s been so humid that if you’d wrung out the air you could have watered a big garden. This sprinkling, however, felt serious enough that I donned my rain slicker.
By the time we reached the trail behind the school (a quarter mile at most), it was pouring. We walked mostly under the trees but everything below the hem of my slicker still got soaked. Travvy doesn’t like getting his paws wet but rain he doesn’t mind, and I love watching the water fly off him when he shakes. I wish I could shake like that.
Coming up Pine Hill, I walked on the raised middle of the (dirt) road while water ran in gullies on either side. Finding dry ground to walk on got hard, harder, and then impossible. My new blue hiking boots are water-resistant but definitely not waterproof. Squish squish squish.
The rain had mostly slacked off by the time we got to the nearest neighbors’. Shadows were appearing on the road. Travvy stopped dead, looking toward the neighbors’ driveway.
Where a guy I’d never seen before was walking slowly, drumming on the air with his drumsticks.
I got home from writers’ group a little after nine last night. The downstairs outside light was on, but both the deck and the apartment were dark. Getting out of the car, I couldn’t see Travvy but I knew he had his nose between the balusters because that’s where it always is when I get home.
An owl was hooting very close by. No surprise there either: a couple of days ago my neighbor called my attention to the owl family in residence, mama, papa, and by her count three owlets.
I walked up the stairs, paused to give Travvy two treats from my pocket (no wonder he’s always glad to see me), and unlatched the baby gate.
Whack!
Something hit me pretty hard on the back of the head. Huh? This didn’t make sense. I removed the gate, stepped through, and whack! This time it hit me in the face. My fingers came away from my face wet, and once I got the inside lights on I saw that yes indeed it was blood, from a little cut under my left eye.
I’m here to tell you that “she didn’t know what hit her” is not just a figure of speech. I didn’t know what it was, where it had come from, or where it had gone.
My best guess, however, was that I’d been whacked by an owl.
What does a girl do who thinks she’s just been whacked by an owl? Posts it on Facebook, of course. Within an hour I’d heard enough from my friends to confirm my suspicions, and to correct my surmise that one of the babies had done it. More likely it was one of the parents protecting one of the babies. “Owls play no games,” posted one friend. “Especially regarding territorial matters (in that, offspring most of all). Great eyesight/optical light gathering. Silent flyers, too.”
Me and my shiner
Later he elaborated: “To drive off a creature from a given area such as a nest site (rather than dispatch it as prey — living humans are far too large for any size owl to consider a viable dietary staple), a series of ‘lighter’ but increasingly deliberate demonstrations of physical persuasion (which entail less risk and expenditure of energy) certainly fit the m.o. of your avian assault.
“Not that it actually matters, but for the above reasons I am doubtful that a less than fully-grown owl was responsible for the strikes you experienced.”
I’m persuaded. This wasn’t a youngster playing games. This was a grown-up who knew exactly what he or she was doing.
This morning I woke up looking like the Tareyton smoker in the old ads who’d rather fight than switch. I used to think those shiners looked totally fake. Not anymore.
Little Owl nestled among the cookbooks
The odd thing is that many years ago I was part of a shamanic drumming circle. My spirit guide turned out to be not a horse or a dog but a saw-whet owl. One of my sister journeyers painted an owl on a rock and gave it to me. It looked very like my spirit guide and has been keeping an eye on me ever since.
Is there a message in here? Certainly, but it’ll probably take a while to reveal itself. By the way, a chapter in the book I just finished proofreading was titled “Whacked Upside the Head.”
Late yesterday afternoon I took Trav to the M.V. Land Bank’s Sepiessa Point Reservation so he could get his paws wet and we both could see something other than the same old same-old. Sepiessa is a great spit of land reaching toward the main body of Tisbury Great Pond. Tiah’s Cove is on the west side, little Tsissa on the east.
Travvy rolls in the long grass.
Travvy was more interested in the smells than the sights. It took some persuading to get him out of the parking lot and onto the trail that parallels the Tiah’s Cove shoreline. At the little canoe landing, we left the trail and walked along the beach. Trav found that even more exciting than the parking lot: shells! gulls! stinky dead stuff!
Coming toward us was a guy with a smartphone in hand.
Did I know the area? he asked.
Sort of, I said.
His daughter was out kayaking, he explained, and he was supposed to meet her here, but he thought she might have gone down the next cove over. Could he get there by car?
It took me a moment that he meant Plum Bush Point Road, the next road over, which goes to the very upscale subdivision on the other side of Tiah’s Cove. Sure, he could drive down that road, I said, but I wasn’t sure he could get to the water.
Plum Bush Point Road isn’t on my psychic map, though I’ve ridden, walked, or driven down it a few times over the years. It didn’t dawn on me till later that the cove on the other side of it is the aptly Short Cove, and it wouldn’t take a kayaker long to realize she was in the wrong place.
If she’d gone way off-course and headed down Town Cove, on the other hand, she’d probably still be paddling. Town Cove is the longest, broadest one on the pond, and it does — as its name suggests — go into town. To get there by car you’d have to hang a left out of the Sepiessa parking area, take Tiah’s Cove Road to New Lane to the Edgartown Road, bear left at the triangle, go past Alley’s, the church, and the town hall . . . Then you’d have to figure a way down to the water.
The guy probably didn’t want to know that. It’s just as well I didn’t think of it till later. Knowing too little is a problem — I do hope that father and daughter managed to find each other — but so is knowing too much.
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 