What's to come?

May 15, 2008

Dear DC,

I awoke on the couch just after 4 this morning in Trinidad. The beacon south of Julie and Lynn's house illuminates their picture windows every few seconds, welcoming planes and guiding fishermen away from the rocks in the ocean that beats time on the beach below.

A trance still had me from the night before. Jerry Martien was on the public radio station reading his poetry accompanied by a bassist. Jerry's poetry has always carried its own rhythms, especially when he himself reads it, an ageless grace as distinctive as someone's way of walking. He described how the trembling earth in Petrolia changed inner and outer landscapes, summoned leviathans in the Pacific while the bass player sounded deep, chordy tones, and described glorious hillsides of delicate wild irises whose leaves once were used to make the strongest string, a symbol of our own precarious beauty and strength.

He spoke of bitter fruit yet to be harvested in Iraq.

I had never heard Jerry read his poetry to music before. He said has a way of carrying the poems from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, filling the space where listeners otherwise wonder what the next word might be. As I read of the disasters in Myanmar and China in the local newspapers during my sojourn, I think we're all wondering what's next.

Condors and otters have appeared but no whales yet on this trip to the coast. Sunday the three of us and their big, fluffy white dog Roo drove to Dry Lagoon Beach at low tide to look for agates. Julie and I pounced on the few we found as if we'd discovered gold. Lynn has a knack for spotting a gleam in the sand and casually snatching them up. At the end of each year of collecting, Lynn weighs her agates instead of counting them.

One of the Esalen people caught a ride with me on the way north from Big Sur. Emma is a 30-year-old Brit working on an environmental project near Bolinas. It's about permaculture, an approach to agriculture that uses healthy forests as a model for growing crops. In healthy forests, trees and plants grow together in immense variety, not in the row after row of sameness the Europeans who settled America were accustomed to. They thought the indigenous people growing different crops together in profusion simply didn't know what they were doing, a common European misconception about the New World.

Permaculture has proven that small farms and even large ones can be self-sustaining by employing techniques that use less water and less fertilizer than conventional farms do.

Ever-progressive Humboldt County has its own innovative agricultural projects, including a system in which people who live in the towns buy shares in a farm in return for produce. They have a world-renowned maker of goat cheese, and oyster farming in the bay. Holly Hosterman and Paul "Yashi" Lubitz had just started their art jewelry business in a garage when I was still living here in 1981. Now they employ nearly 60 people here and Holly's creations are known all over the world.

In Humboldt County now, individuals are allowed to grow up 100 marijuana plants and marijuana can be dispensed for medicinal purposes. Some do it in hydroponic "grow houses" that have become the bane of neighborhoods. Sometimes California's progressivism backfires.

The beacon has begun disappearing into the netherworld that precedes dawn. The light that shone the way so powerfully in the blackness has become a flicker on the horizon, still keeping time like a bassist. The light itself is unchanged. The harbor is only turning toward the sun, materializing the world like a poem.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.