Danger on Peaks (7 page)

T
HE
E
MU

Driving out of the foothills heading west — there's a high layer of cloud that's thin enough to let a lot of light through, not exactly sunshine but it showed up as 5 amps on the solar charge-controller at home. At about Truxell Road I slip seriously under the fog/cloud cover. Coming from up high like this, one knows that there are two layers of clouds, a high one and this low one. Closer to Davis, the belly of the cloud is almost on the ground and now it's fog.

In this drippy gloom I manage to pick up my laser printer, which has been repaired, buy a copy of
The Economist
at Newsbeat, get Korean-style ramen at the Asian store, and then cruise down to Red Rum Burger to try eating Ostrich.

Thinking back to the Emu: there it was last summer, an Emu in the yard with a green garter (probably an identification band, maybe with a serial number and a record of its shots). Our place surrounded by a dozen miles of forest. It soon ran off. I told Shawna about that — and she changed it into an Ostrich in her mind. As an Ostrich its picture got into a zine/comic poem, garter and all.

I'm recollecting all this as I eat my Ostrich burger at the place that now calls itself “Red Rum,” which is “murder” backwards. Because for years it was called Murder Burger, until, I guess, there were just too many murders happening out there. The Ostrich burger is delicious. It's big, with lots of lettuce, onions, hot mustard, Swiss cheese, and sesame bun. In the midst of all those, you really don't taste Ostrich as anything special — it's just nice and chewy. I don't think they cook it rare. It is supposed to be good for you, low fat. And they don't use feedlots, so Ostriches probably eat lower on the food chain than steers that are being fattened on milo or corn for the slaughterhouse.

It certainly tastes just like Emu! Or vice versa. The Emu, a case of parallel evolution developing in far-off New Zealand. No garters there. But hold! Maoris might have tattooed some green designs right around those handsome thighs.

T
HE
H
IE
S
HRINE AND THE
“O
NE
-T
REE
” D
ISTRICT

The Hie Jinja in Akasaka is on a rocky tree-covered
kopje
— skull-shaped little rocky hill and surrounded by an ocean of metropolis that stretches kilometers in all directions: urban buildings all sizes, broad traffic roads, narrow-lane neighborhoods, elevated speedways, criss-crossed underground subways. The great Diet buildings are to the north and beyond that the moated island of the Imperial Palace. The upscale Capital Tokyu Hotel just abutting the jinja is built on some land the shrine sold off. A giant ginkgo tree at the foot of the broad shrine stairs leads up into a forest of evergreen broad-leaved hardwoods and dense underbrush. At the top of the steps is a flat white gravel yard in front of the main shrine structure, wood all painted red.

      Quarreling crows and crisp hopping sparrows, a dash of lizard. Green hill in the urban desert, “Island biogeography” — the shrews and geckos holed-up in the shrine-protected little forest, waiting for their time to come again. Down another set of steep steps and across the street below you go into the crowded “One-Tree” district with its many tiny multi-story buildings. Countless young Leisure Workers put out food and drink in thousands of bars til almost dawn.

C
ORMORANTS

Dropping down rock ledges toward the breakers see a long flat point spiked with upright black cormorants and a few gulls gray and white. Rocks dabbed with threads and dribbles of bird-white. “White writing” like Mark Tobey did — drawn in loops and splatters — lime-rich droppings pointing back to the fishy waves.

Some rocks more decorated than others. A dark stink as the breeze rises, whiffs of ammonia — stabs you in the back brain — the only place worse once was on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska — came alongside sea lion rocks and the whole thing blew in our face and whipped us with awful offal gassy blast.

Each bird-scholar has its own stone chair and the long full streaks below. Some rocks are unoccupied, unwritten.

Pelicans flap slow by. Cormorants fly clumsy — taking off from the water, drag their toes in the waves flap flap flap leaving scratch lines in the froth until they get just barely up and never fly much higher. Cormorants on a cliff launch out and fly downward til they drag their toes and then gain height again. Underwater they are fast as jets and full of grace.

T
O
G
O

Slopes of grassy mountains rise steep up from the narrow town of Gorman north of LA on the route of the 5. Clusters of bush and spans of spring wildflowers in bloom: California poppy, lupine, paintbrush, fiddlenecks — blue, orange, and yellow — arching across the slopes above. Afternoon angle to the sun. “Gorman” painted on a hillside water tower. At Carl's Jr. in Gorman, getting coffee, I say to the truck driver just parked on a slant and walked in behind me, “those things are huge, how the hell do you drive them.” He says, “they're really easy.” — “still, you have to find a place to park” — He laughs, “yeah, you do.”

O
NE
T
HOUSAND
C
RANES

      When Carole had a bad cancer prognosis some years back, several of her relatives got together and started folding the little
origami
called “cranes.” They made one thousand paper cranes in different colors and sent them to us, it's a loving custom, to help one get well. Carole got better, though not cured, and they now hang in swooping strings like flowers on a wall in the house.

      In East Asia cranes are noble birds of good fortune, suggesting long life, health, good luck, and troth. They are much in art. Most of the cranes of the world are now centered in Siberia and East Asia — they summer in the north, and winter in north India, eastern China, central Korea, and Japan's big south island, Kyushu.

      There are two crane species in North America. One is the endangered whooping crane and the other the gray-beige sandhill crane. One group of sandhill cranes comes down to the Great Central Valley of California: an estimated 30,000 winter over in the area around Lodi, Cosumnes, Thornton, and west toward Walnut Grove. In late February I went with a friend to Cosumnes to look at the flocks of waterfowl one more time before they went back north. We found a place of flooded ricefields full of swimming white-fronted geese, ring-necked ducks, old squaws, teals, coots, and a few tundra swans. And then looking beyond them to a far levee there were rows of cranes pacing, eating, doing their leaping and bowing dance. “Staging up to go back north,” they say.

      A month later Carole and I were in Berkeley down on 4th Street where we saw an Asian crafts store called “One Thousand Cranes.” It had that subtle incense and hinoki-wood aroma of old Japan. I asked the handsome Japanese woman “How do you say one thousand cranes?” She laughed and said
“senbazuru.”
“Oh yes: one thousand
wings
of
tsuru,
cranes.” And I told her that my wife and I lived in the Sierra Nevada and watch the cranes flying directly over our place. I remembered back to early March — Carole had been outside, I was in the shop. We began to hear the echoing crane calls. We saw a V — a V made of sub-Vs, flying northeast. They were way high but I did a count of a subsection and it
came to eighty birds. They kept coming, echelon after echelon — the cranes just specks, but the echoing calls are loud. More grand flying wedges all afternoon — at least a thousand cranes.

      So I told the lady of the store, “Not long ago we watched the cranes go over heading north. They came by all afternoon, at least a thousand.” The woman smiled. “Of course. Real life cranes. Good luck for all of us, good luck for you.”

F
OR
A
NTHEA
C
ORINNE
S
NYDER
L
OWRY

1932 – 2002

She was on the Marin County Grand Jury, heading to a meeting, south of Petaluma on the 101. The pickup ahead of her lost a grassmower off the back. She pulled onto the shoulder, and walked right out into the lane to take it off. That had always been her way. Struck by a speedy car, an instant death.

T
HE
G
REAT
B
ELL OF THE
G
ION

“The great bell of the Gion Temple reverberates into every human heart to wake us to the fact that all is impermanent and fleeting. The withered flowers of the sâla trees by Shakyamuni's deathbed remind us that even those flourishing with wealth and power will soon pass away. The life of fame and pride is as ephemeral as a springtime dream. The courageous and aggressive person too will vanish like a swirl of dust in the wind.”

Heading back to our little house in Murasakino from the Gion Shrine on New Year's eve, with a glowing wick handout from a priest — lit in the New Year sacred fire started anew by bow drill, purified. Walking and lightly swinging the long wick to keep it aglow, in a crowd of people whirling wicks and heading home, finally catch a taxi. Once home start a propane gasplate from the almost-gone wick. Now, a sacred fire in the house. The Gion's huge bell still ringing in the new year: as soft, as loud, at the house three kilometers away as it was at the temple.

VI

After Bamiyan

A
FTER
B
AMIYAN

March 2001

The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsüan Tsang described the giant, gleaming, painted carved-out Buddhas standing in their stone cave-niches at the edge of the Bamiyan Valley as he passed through there on foot, on his way to India in the seventh century CE. Last week they were blown up by the Taliban. Not just by the Taliban, but by woman-and-nature-denying authoritarian worldviews that go back much farther than Abraham. Dennis Dutton sent this poem around:

May we keep our minds clear and calm and in the present moment, and honor the dust.

April 2001

From a man who writes about Buddhism

                                      Ah yes . . . impermanence. But this is never a
reason to let compassion and focus slide, or to pass off the sufferings of others because they are merely impermanent beings. Issa's haiku goes,

A person who should know better wrote, “Many credulous and sentimental Westerners, I suspect, were upset by the destruction of the Afghan Buddha figures because they believe that so-called Eastern religion is more tender-hearted and less dogmatic . . . So — is nothing sacred? Only respect for human life and culture, which requires no divine sanction and no priesthood to inculcate it. The foolish veneration of holy places and holy texts remains a principal obstacle to that simple realization.”

— “This is another case of ‘blame the victim'” I answered. “Buddhism is not on trial here. The Bamiyan statues are part of human life and culture, they are works of art, being destroyed by idolators of the book. Is there anything ‘credulous' in respecting the art and religious culture of the past? Counting on the tender-heartedness of (most) Buddhists, you can feel safe in trashing the Bamiyan figures as though the Taliban wasn't doing a good enough job. I doubt you would have the nerve to call for launching a little missile at the Ka'aba. There are people who would put a hit on you and you know it.”

September 2001