Book Covers

Chelsea was gone all last week and so I set myself to work decorating the house. On Friday I spotted a box of old classics basically torn to shreds on the second floor of Dell House. So, I took some of the book covers and gorilla glued them to an old cardboard box we used to store Chelsea's books while we were in Ghana. One of the covers has a dedication in Latin. Another has some Eisenhower Library check out information that looks like a bunch of old price tags. All the covers are neat in their own right. They just don't make books like they used to.

Found Haiku: Prayer From the Ether

While we were moving I found the following enigmatically written on the bottom of a to-do list. I think I wrote it just after my Master comps and just before we left for Ghana. Because of its length I thought I might try my had at a haiku. After reading that a haiku is based on moras and not syllables, however, I'm not quite sure that I've been able to really convert it into an authentic haiku. And I like the original is better anyway.


[Original]

Prepare me,
like the Quixote,
to step out from my library
into the world.

[Haiku]

Prepare me, like the
Quixote, to leap from my
books into ether.

Three Days in Southern Utah

[7.20.9]

Curiously, an orchard runs through one of Capitol Reef's canyons. Irrigation ditches run along side the canyon walls. Rock slides have covered portions of ditches. Desert varnish slides down the red slick rock at a glacial pace. Erosive art and hand carved deities hover above. The sky is charcoal today yet it does not rain. The canyon floor is green, so green that deer nibble on grasses, bushes, and trees well into summer. Some pioneers -- Native American, Mormon -- have carved their stories, their names above the fine sand footpaths. Sand sifts into my sneakers. Today is a perfect day, a temperate day in the otherwise unforgiving desert.

[7.21.9]

Some observations at Bown Reservoir, Dixie National Forest. Along this 300 yard long man made lake low water lays bare green grasses and golden white rushes. In the morning all is still, silent except for one duck and another unidentified bird singing. To the west: the pink, salmon, and white of the canyon lands roll towards the horizon. To the east: the green, hunter, and black of the forest.

[7.22.9]

A walk along Bryce Canyon's rim from Sunrise Point to Sunset Point. A thought: solitude on public display. A Paiute legend: the hoodoos are evil people turned to stone, sentenced to stand until erosion has its way with them. The sunrise extravaganza was a bit like being at a rock show. Rows of spectators (myself included) jockeyed for position with cameras in hand as the light changed the clouds pink and then clipped the canyon walls. On my walk I notice that if I filter out the highway and the foreign languages I can hear the breeze and some birds and Bryce's solitude.

Later on. The Sevier is gray except for the whitewater train that leads us from Marysvale to the take out well past Big Rock Candy Mountain. Above the very last rapid before the take out my ducky ratchets sideways. I might have to swim this. I don't. I straighten out my small rubber skiff and plunge into what high water has transformed into a class III rapid with holes calling to my kayak. Another perfect day in Southern Utah.

Journal Entry [8.15.8]: Saint Francis

I've been trying to type up my journal entries from Ghana, but so far I haven't even gotten through last August! Instead of just typing them I've also been editing them as I go, which makes it a lot more time consuming. This one starts off talking about our good friend Paul who lives in Accra and used to work for the church. We stayed at his place in Accra for the better part of August.

Yesterday Paul’s biological brother stole 500 Ghana cedis ($375) from him. I say biological because almost everybody in Ghana is considered a sibling. Tonight after Paul drops us at the internet café his truck brakes down. By all accounts Paul is having a crap week. His friend/personal assistant, Agyeman, meets us at the café and we take a taxi to Paul’s other brother’s house. When we arrive a familiar smell floats in the air. (It is funny how smells never leave you no matter how forgetful you are and I’m plenty forgetful.)

It is the smell of the open sewer. In our village, Wiamoase, I never smell such rank smells. Honestly, this is the first time in Ghana that I can remember smelling black, lumpy sewage. That smell instantly conjures up memories of the villa miseria of Argentina—the mangy tin roofs, the cardboard and mud walls, the electric lines wrapped like black balls of yarn atop reclaimed lumber, the dirt footpaths winding between homes. The scent: dank still water mired in fungi, trash, and shit.

For me, this is the most shocking characteristic of the developing world: what Argentineans call the zanja—the open air sewer. Children fish for snakes and worms there. Old ladies use sticks with tin cans nailed to the end to wet down the dirt roads in front of their houses, the black waste arching, forming a grim rainbow in the air. One New Years day in Santa Fe I fell, my left leg half submerged in the sticky sludge, into the zanja—happy New Year! For the first time during this trip to Ghana I ask why people should have to live under these conditions.

This suburban shanty town outside Accra reeks with pollution. Poverty hangs in the air. Young toughs look on trying to hustle a quick buck. We step into Paul’s brother’s home. It is small. The lights are low. The floor consists of unpolished, uneven patches of concrete lest the reader think this is some sort of hipster loft. We are introduced to Pastor Francis, his wife, and his daughter. ‘Francis? Like Saint Francis?’ Playful small talk. ‘Yes,’ comes the contented reply of our pastor. Later a creeping thought: oh patron saint of our dear earth's natural workings, spirit us away from this forlorn backwater back to Eden. Truly only a saint could endure a lifetime of a thousand zanjas.