June 20, 2010
I spent much of the morning at a lake quite near my house, in the rain, watching and photographing a baby flicker being coaxed from its nest--unsuccessfully so far--by its patient (again, so far) parents. I'd seen it yesterday, still being fed, the classic gaping, desperate pink mouth; More! More!, the parental back-and-forth. But today was strictly business, it seemed. I waited perhaps fifteen minutes for Junior to make his first tentative appearance, nudging his head out of the hole, scanning the skies for Mom and Dad. Eventually they appeared, but not with food. Their strategy seemed to be to perch just behind the nest snag and call out some Flicker equivalent (I presume) of " You eat when you fly up here on your own!" By the time the rain drove me back indoors Junior had managed to get almost his whole body out of the hole, twisting every which-way to try to see where they were. But whether it was nerves, the rain, my presence (I hope not) or that of a large menacing crow in a nearby maple who was watching the entire drama as carefully as I, he was still home-bound when I left. I'll go back later. Yes, I'm easily amused. Very easily.
Despite ingesting enough (prescribed) codeine to have knocked out Hunter S. Thompson, my ear pain last night persisted to the point that I spent several hours trying to distract myself with reading, currently the Peter Carey novel The Tax Inspector. I'm a Carey fan rather in the way that I'm a T.C. Boyle or Howard Norman fan; few of his novels/stories are "just right," and some miss the mark (for me) entirely, but overall the work is satisfying, the style captivating, the subject matter just quirky enough, the settings compelling and in some ways I feel the company of a kindred spirit. I suppose any spirit seems kindred at 3:30am with your head pain-pulsing like a BP oil well. But I realized after a few hours of fitful codeine sleep (and the Devil's own dreams, let me tell you) that spending all those hours with Mr. Carey may not have been wise, as I have vowed to get some "serious" work done today wrapping up my new novel ms. It sits before me now, a fat stack of paper clipped into provisional chapters and sections, roughly ordered (at last) and demanding to be read through as a manuscript for the first time, with all attendant corrections, edits, embarrassment, frustration, despair, reworking and inevitable recognition of how much work there is left to do. Between being an ear-infected bubble-brain and the persistent lovely March weather in mid-June, there's no excuse not to work on it. But now I have Carey's voice--wonderful, learned, funny, rich, textured, idiosyncratic and very Aussie--in my head, and I fear I'll end up in one of those writerly funks where all I'm really aware of, reading my own stuff, is that I'm, well, no Peter Carey. Typically I'd take a break to play or at least listen to a bunch of music to clear my head, but there will be no head clearing today, or until the medical folks figure out how to pry the solid cotton medicine ball out of the right half of my cranium. So I'll just have to work with Mr. Carey's living ghost hovering over my shoulder, tsking. Maybe I'll drink a can of Foster's, to get me in the mood.
I used to think I'd like to learn to fly--airplanes, that is, not dream-flying, which of course we'd all love. I'm no more a fan of jet-plane commercial flight than is any rational non-masochist, but after my first few forays as a passenger in small aircraft--float planes in Southeast Alaska and the San Juan Islands, especially--I briefly talked myself into the notion of becoming an amateur pilot, whisking away to remote islands on sun-kissed summer days, smirking at the ferry lines as I took my friends and family on stunning trips over the Skagit Valley and Vancouver Island. I read a few library books, did some online research, talked to pilots, bought flying magazines, checked into lessons....and one morning looked at the stack of literature I'd accumulated and thought, gee, what the hell do you think you're doing you don't even like to drive a car??!!--which isn't strictly true, as there are kinds of driving I enjoy just fine, and they're much like the kinds of flying I was imagining: lovely weather, uncrowded, smooth, pretty, safe... But then I tried to conjure the in-flight equivalents of unexpected, high-risk motoring situations I'd encountered; white-knuckle moments of desert squalls or freeway chaos or icy whiteouts or flat tires. And I imagined how I'd responded to such events in the past, and how I might expect to handle similarly nerve-wracking situations while, say, 3000 feet in the air. Would I want me to be in charge in such an emergency? Back went the library books...
Not that my little Flicker friend is feeling the same apprehension. He/she was born to fly, after all (and to eat bugs). But what it must all look like, from the lifelong safety of a nest snug in a snag: the swooping swallows (the air at the lake is thick with them now); the soaring eagles above, the stunt-pilot hummingbirds, the ungainly herons, the treacherous crows. He's got to be wondering if it's worth it, leaving a warm dry pile of whatever the hell Flickers sleep in or on, to make at the least an idiot and at the worst someone's lunch out of himself, trying to join their ranks. It is worth it, of course, and he'll know it soon. But I can't fault him for his apprehension.
It's not the notion of some jaunty two-seater today that grants me an imagined sense of kinship with my long-beaked buddy. It's that stack of papers. I mean, I could really screw this up. But then I won't have far to fall. And no one will be watching. So what's to lose? Hardly even my dignity, or what's left of it. And if...just if...I manage to stay aloft...
