The Old House
There’s not much to say about the old house where I spent many happy years of my childhood except that it looks like a crime scene. For reasons too complex to address the house has been destroyed by time, vandals and neglect. Picking through First Editions now white with mold, scattered papers on the floor that could be anything including tax returns, poems or paintings there was little to save.
Dingy fluttering curtains hang limply against windows held together seemingly by cobwebs. Blackened lumps of indefinable objects lie in a kitchen sink, the bathroom toilet a scene fit for a Stephan King novel.
Grotesque renderings of mold and mildew spatter the whole place like Jackson Pollock gone mad. A fireplace built by hand looks like it was bombed. Boxes filled with rotting books once meant for rescue are scattered throughout a living room where nothing lives but mice, spiders and viral monstrosities.
The beds upstairs where children were conceived sag and lean; burnt-out candles and filthy sleeping bags hint that indigent people found life bearable here a while. No one knows when the vandals came or when they will return. Sunlight still filters in through the spider-web clogged windows and falls in wan strips upon the ruined debris. A forgotten pair of mold-splattered white pumps sits on a warped dresser; a cracked door leads to a closet so dark we don’t venture in.
Outside, flowers still bloom in an abandoned garden, a stream still meanders into a bay now mostly filled in with silt. Next to the property a CEO has built a summerhouse fit for royalty. A fence clogged with blackberries and vegetation gone mad separates the properties. A maple split by lightning or disease threatens to fall most likely on the summerhouse. No one knows how this scenario will end.
What is there to say? Whether it is outrage or grief no words can describe the grotesque shape of the ruined piano where my hands first stuttered across a keyboard fit for a Beethoven once upon a time, no words can bring back the courage of those who once lived here in health. A family who long ago survived the first sweep of swine flu at the turn of a century, who produced a family of misfits, alcoholics and artists, who lived on the land when it was still wild, long before rich people arrived and circled a quiet bay where Indian canoes once graced the quiet, pure waters of Hood Canal.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Friday, May 22, 2009
Monte Cristo Musings
Monte Cristo Memory (written years ago)
A small item in the local newspaper had major significance some months ago. The Lodge at Monte Cristo had burnt to the ground. Undoubtedly arson. Or carelessness. Ten sentences reduced Monte Cristo to rubble and somewhere out in the world, some pallid, feverish man with faded eyes was sitting in the back booth of a bar playing with matches, feeling at last that he has achieved significance. At least, I am almost certain it was such a man or perhaps a group of clammy-palmed boys high on booze or drugs or perhaps it was even the group of sinister men I saw rolling down an old dirt road in a car the color of blood stains.
News of the fire kept me away for a while. I couldn’t bear the thought of walking to the end of the road and seeing the place leveled. I had known happiness at Monte Cristo and shared that happiness with others. I still have the green T-shirt I bought there on my first visit as a tourist that says “Monte Cristo” in yellow letters. The only other shirt I have with words on it is one a friend gave me when I stopped drinking that reads, “Blue Moon Tavern.” That, of course, is another story and here, not relevant.
What comes to mind when I remember Monte Cristo is the way the Lodge looked at night. One night in particular, I couldn’t sleep and stood outside the cabin we had rented, looking up toward the stars as if the stars had a message for me. I believed in messages in those days. I thought if I looked long enough I would find the words that could change my life.
The night was very dark and the stars were very bright. The Lodge was lit up from within and JR, caretaker of the Lodge, was silhouetted against a warm, yellow window writing in his journal. It was the only light in the world. If I were high on acid, I could easily see JR as God, sitting in the light at the center of the world, keeping the darkness at bay. Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, they say. JR did it with kerosene lanterns. JR made light in a dark world. JR also kept the water running, the generator working, made sure there were cracked but usable plates in the rented cabins. He’d turned one of the buildings into a free school and at one time had a few pupils.
The Lodge was overrun with children, animals and tourists rattling maps and asking the same questions over and over “How far is Sunday Falls?” “Is there really gold here?” but JR kept a revolver in his desk drawer. There’d been trouble in the past and probably would be again. Drunks from Granite Falls would come in sometimes late at night looking for trouble. This was before the road washed out, of course. After the road was closed to vehicles most of the drunks stayed in Granite Falls.
This particular night I stood outside the Lodge and felt the warm peace within and JR’s gentle head outlined against the light. How had he achieved it? What tools had he used to find such peace? What did he have to leave behind to stay in Monte Cristo? How high the price he had to pay? What was I doing wrong that I had to keep leaving the mountains and returning to the city?
That night the Lodge looked like a perfect little world, running flawlessly through the senseless machinery of Time. I wanted in but JR was the guardian of that world and he wouldn’t just let anyone in. He knew the password but wasn’t talking. I stood outside the Lodge until I got cold enough to return to the cabin. The light was still burning in the Lodge. It still burns in my mind.
Karen
A small item in the local newspaper had major significance some months ago. The Lodge at Monte Cristo had burnt to the ground. Undoubtedly arson. Or carelessness. Ten sentences reduced Monte Cristo to rubble and somewhere out in the world, some pallid, feverish man with faded eyes was sitting in the back booth of a bar playing with matches, feeling at last that he has achieved significance. At least, I am almost certain it was such a man or perhaps a group of clammy-palmed boys high on booze or drugs or perhaps it was even the group of sinister men I saw rolling down an old dirt road in a car the color of blood stains.
News of the fire kept me away for a while. I couldn’t bear the thought of walking to the end of the road and seeing the place leveled. I had known happiness at Monte Cristo and shared that happiness with others. I still have the green T-shirt I bought there on my first visit as a tourist that says “Monte Cristo” in yellow letters. The only other shirt I have with words on it is one a friend gave me when I stopped drinking that reads, “Blue Moon Tavern.” That, of course, is another story and here, not relevant.
What comes to mind when I remember Monte Cristo is the way the Lodge looked at night. One night in particular, I couldn’t sleep and stood outside the cabin we had rented, looking up toward the stars as if the stars had a message for me. I believed in messages in those days. I thought if I looked long enough I would find the words that could change my life.
The night was very dark and the stars were very bright. The Lodge was lit up from within and JR, caretaker of the Lodge, was silhouetted against a warm, yellow window writing in his journal. It was the only light in the world. If I were high on acid, I could easily see JR as God, sitting in the light at the center of the world, keeping the darkness at bay. Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, they say. JR did it with kerosene lanterns. JR made light in a dark world. JR also kept the water running, the generator working, made sure there were cracked but usable plates in the rented cabins. He’d turned one of the buildings into a free school and at one time had a few pupils.
The Lodge was overrun with children, animals and tourists rattling maps and asking the same questions over and over “How far is Sunday Falls?” “Is there really gold here?” but JR kept a revolver in his desk drawer. There’d been trouble in the past and probably would be again. Drunks from Granite Falls would come in sometimes late at night looking for trouble. This was before the road washed out, of course. After the road was closed to vehicles most of the drunks stayed in Granite Falls.
This particular night I stood outside the Lodge and felt the warm peace within and JR’s gentle head outlined against the light. How had he achieved it? What tools had he used to find such peace? What did he have to leave behind to stay in Monte Cristo? How high the price he had to pay? What was I doing wrong that I had to keep leaving the mountains and returning to the city?
That night the Lodge looked like a perfect little world, running flawlessly through the senseless machinery of Time. I wanted in but JR was the guardian of that world and he wouldn’t just let anyone in. He knew the password but wasn’t talking. I stood outside the Lodge until I got cold enough to return to the cabin. The light was still burning in the Lodge. It still burns in my mind.
Karen
A more recent poem
POEM FOR JOHN
So what if
We dreamed of high, green hills
With a view
And Tibetan flags
Floating on the sea
Does it matter
If we could not see
The face of the man
At the top of the hill
Who cares if the trails
Were muddy and steep
You said it was the greenest grass
You ever saw
Don’t you wonder
How we managed to climb
So high when we were so broken
Like children
Struck by cars
While at play
So what if
We dreamed of high, green hills
With a view
And Tibetan flags
Floating on the sea
Does it matter
If we could not see
The face of the man
At the top of the hill
Who cares if the trails
Were muddy and steep
You said it was the greenest grass
You ever saw
Don’t you wonder
How we managed to climb
So high when we were so broken
Like children
Struck by cars
While at play
Karen Waring in the late 1960s
Well, I've changed. Older, of course. Back in those days I wore nothing but high heels, smoked 2-3 packs of cigarettes a day and drank a lot. I also wrote a lot of poetry.
Now the poetry is harder to get at - it's still festering but hard to reach. I believe it will come back though the focus has changed. Taverns have been replaced by mountains for one thing. There have been marriages and there have been deaths. I never thought I'd live to be this old. I hope I can still say that 20 years from now.
In the meantime, I wait for the poetry to return.
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