Traveling Light:
Bristles & Bugs
Janet I. Buck
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Bristles & Bugs
After reading Jon Katz's Running to the Mountain: A Midlife Adventure, an autobiographical sketch
of a middle-aged writer finding his roots in the deep belly of the
wilderness, I decided to leave the sanctuary of easy street and drag my
laptop into the Siskiyou National Forest. My goal was to create a sequence of
poems that would do justice to my surroundings. I was on that eternal quest
for inner peace only Mother Nature can provide. Ten minutes into the
adventure, I discovered that Compaq's aren't THAT compact when you're in
worse shape than the last fly of summer in a basement of all dust and no air.
Living in the wilds is fine if you've got four hooves and a river three feet
from your snout. The rest of us like Diet Coke over ice and a sandwich on a
real plate when we need a break from lush green inspiration and the majesty
of Douglas Firs. They may be the Parthenons of The Oregon Trail, but after a
while, they all start lookin' alike when you realize you weren't smart enough
to mark your trail on the way in. And they aren't the only entity on earth
that can brag about reaching the ripe age of one hundred. Twenty minutes into
the trip, I was right on their tail, wishing for a bed in whatever hospice
had an opening and a bedpan without stickers and thorns.
In one of those Emersonian moments all writers have, I'd told my husband to
go fishing and leave me alone for my noble and aesthetic wanderings. I wanted
to "get away from it all," back to basics as it were, but I hadn't planned on
the presence of cloying bugs and dead chipmunks that run faster than I jog.
Swatters, I learned, were invented for a reason. A few leaves wrapped around
a twig and secured with a shoelace works about as well as a cap gun on a
Mafia lord.
The whole scene reminded me of the romantic comedy Overboard, where Goldie
Hawn (who is a spoiled little rich girl cruising on a shiny white yacht)
lands in the back of a pick up truck in the middle of nowhere. I doubt it was
an accident of fate that the movie was shot less than 200 miles from where I
was standing -- or collapsing, if the truth be told in its glowing entirety.
I don't mind the idea of opening one's eyes up to life, but I'd prefer that a
crop of mosquitoes didn't race right in when I did. As a poignant reminder
that poets never earn the gilded rank of movie stars, I got head-to-toe
poison oak, while Hawn's denouement landed her a sloppy, wet kiss from Kurt
Russell under the stars.
Back to the trek. The minute I discovered a fairly flat log, I set up camp
and called up a blank document on my laptop. Unfortunately, MS Word has
nothing on its tool bar for deleting bird poop. While I knew I wasn't the
first writer to be critiqued by a blue jay, it still packed a wallop. The stanza probably deserved it. It's easy to write about pine needles as metaphors
for mints on a pillowcase if they're on the page and not a good two inches
under the flesh of your bottom. Verisimilitude, as it turned out, wasn't going
to make a very pretty poem.
Two-thirds of the way through my first magnum opus of the forest, I closed up
shop and headed back to camp. The best part of the unfinished piece was the
title: Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, some dodo named Milton beat me to the
punch. What ticked me off the most was the fact that my husband sallied up
with six fat trout dangling from a fishing line and my pièce de résistance
was a pound of bark in my tennis shoes and enough sweat in my socks to raise
the lake three feet past the drought line.
As the spouse of any serious writer knows all too well, poetry putting a meal
on the table has been a myth since the dawn of time. Paradise turned out to
have little to do with verse and everything to do with a bottle of Calamine
lotion and a distracting video on the VCR. I borrowed a coat hanger from the
closet and sat down to lick my wounds.
"Did you write something publishable?" my husband asked, all wide-eyed and innocent.
When I read the fledging epic aloud that night, it was a wistful version of the new menu at Burger King and a long, hot bath.
~Janet I. Buck
An award-winning author, published in hundreds of literary magazines, Janet has also written several books. For more information on her public readings, and latest publications, visit her website, or email.
© 2002 by Janet I. Buck. All Rights Reserved.
© 2002-2004 by Cayuse Press. All Rights Reserved.