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Showing posts with label family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label family. Show all posts

Sunday, August 24, 2014

The FisherPoets Anthology is a Reality. And it's for sale!








The Fisherpoets Anthology: Anchored in Deep Water, is a seven-book set of work by writers, poets and songwriters who have performed at the annual Fisherpoets Gathering in Astoria, Oregon, edited by fisherpoet Patrick Dixon. Over 40 writers from the USA, Canada and Japan are represented, with seven interviews of the fishermen and women engaged in commercial fishing along the coasts of the North American continent. Covers of the books are shown above, designed by the award-winning Portland artist Chelsea Stephen. All the books are 50+ pages long, and thematically organized: 'Family Dynamic' is about the family issues inherent in commercial fishing; 'Every Boat Has a Wave' is about risk and survival; 'Illusions of Separateness' speaks to politics and the environment; 'Making Waves' is written solely by women in the fishery, and deals with the issues women have that originate from working in a male-dominated profession; 'For the Love of Fish' discusses the love (and hate) of the work; 'Gathering' is about the community commercial fishermen work within; and 'Mending Holes' is about the history of commercial fishing. To find out more information about the individual books or to order, go HERE.

Saturday, June 29, 2013

This is for my friend Cyndi and her son, Logan








Thirst


I sat alone with my dying friend
in the back room of her house, where she reclined
on a bed of pillows. It was getting close,
and even the ice chips weren’t effective any more.
She was delirious and drugged, just like mom
all those years ago in the hospital back in Logansport,
lost in the morphine of that Indiana spring. I sat next to her
for hours that night, trying to slip between the haze
of the drips sliding into her arm; to find my way in once more,
back to her heart. But it was a closed system, and I was empty
and outside it. All I have is her brief surfacing
long enough to flutter her eyelids like butterfly kisses, and
 (is this memory or what I wanted to happen?)
– a reach of her hand to mine.

I know she said, “Oh, you’re here.” And I was, even now.

I thought of that moment as I sat vigil next to my friend,
and considered what it was I wanted to say to her,
her son in the next room with other family and friends.
Her eyes opened wide then, and she sat upright. In a rush
she threw her legs over the edge of the bed, and tried to stand.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked as I gently stopped her.
“I have to leave.”
“I know. Wait a little bit first, ok?”
She sat back. I struggled to find my words, and watched her
raise a glass that only she could see to her lips,
lips that hadn’t felt a sip of water for days.
She took a long drink. She looked at me as she wiped her mouth
with the back of her hand. “You know it’s ok, don’t you?” I whispered,
my throat suddenly parched. “We’ll take care of him.”

She nodded as if she heard me and relaxed a bit.
I helped her lie back down on her pillows.
I don’t know if I got through to her either. It seemed to me
she was breathing a little easier when I finally tiptoed from the room
on my way to the kitchen for a glass of water.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

The Guitar

Though this one isn't about fishing, it has a bit of it tucked inside...flavored with how hard it was to leave fishing and Alaska for me, and the first steps I took to recover. But mostly this is about my brother, Mike. I feel a need to provide a disclaimer here that is extremely important: I have a wonderful family. Both my brothers and my sister are kind, loving and thoughtful people, and the families they have created, one and all, and I know this is unbelievable to many people, but it's true: are all a fantastic bunch of folks I am proud to call family and delighted to know. This story is just one special example of how I feel about them all... except maybe for Jeff, Mike's son. And my two sons, Dylan and Kessler. Except for them, and oh, yeah, Jeanne. And Amy. And, well, Monte and his daughter Savannah. But that's all. Really. Well, there IS Mike Smith... heh.

________________________



I opened the door of the apartment to find a tall cardboard box on the top step. Reaching over the top of it with his hand holding the electronic signature pad was the man in brown. "Package for Patrick Dixon," he said. "Sign here."

Surprised, I took the pad, signed it and gave it back. "Have a Merry Christmas," he said, and walked back down the sidewalk to his truck. It pulled away as I read the return address, from Mike Dixon in Maryland. No mistake, then. My brother, the woodworker, the musician, eight years older than I, and the one who had shown up unannounced with his wife Alice on our doorstep in Olympia a year ago to help my family get settled three days after we moved here from Alaska, had sent this package. I picked it up and carried it into the dim living room of our cheap rental duplex.

"Who was that?" asked Veronica.
"UPS. A package from Mike." I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a paring knife out of the laminated wooden knife block Mike made us years ago.
"Your brother?"
"Yeah."
"What is it?"
"No idea."
"Well open it and find out." She came into the living room, wiping her hands with a towel.

Of all my siblings, it's ironic that I feel closest to the one who tortured me the most while growing up. Mike sat on my six-year-old chest as a fourteen-year-old and dangled spit in my face and sprinkled handfuls of grass in my eyes and mouth; Mike would play "Patrick is a fat boy," on his guitar just to make me angry whenever the family was gathered around to hear him play; Mike was the one who held the lazy-Susan with his thumb when we were eating dinner one night with mom and dad and I was trying to turn it. When I pulled harder, he let go and the pitcher of milk flew onto dad's plate, spilling in his lap. I was the one who got sent to my room without dinner. Yet it was Mike who loaned us the last $2,000 we needed to seal the deal on our fishing permit when we bought in twenty years ago. It was Mike who decided to come to Alaska and be with me after our mom died, and I couldn't afford to go to the funeral.

I ran the knife along the seam of the cardboard, cut open the top and peered in. A round, black shape was there, made of some sort of vinyl. I put the box on its side and pulled out a guitar case. "Oh, my God," I breathed. "It's a guitar!" Mike had been promising to make me a guitar for two years, ever since he'd converted his wooden cutting board and humidor business into hand-making custom guitars. An accomplished musician, he worked with wood for most of his career, and nearing retirement decided to reinvent himself as a custom guitar builder. I had jokingly been asking him, "Where is my guitar?" every time we talked on the phone since.

What slid out of the case was not a guitar he had made, but one of the several he had collected over the past couple of decades. Hand-built to Mike’s specifications by a craftsman from Hawaii, it was a jumbo cutaway - a guitar I had played and admired the last time we had visited in Maryland a few years before. Inlay abalone doves on the neck, the box was polished bubinga wood with more abalone along the edge of the top and down the center of the back. It was a work of art.




For a brief moment I strummed the strings. The sound was deep and warm, like diving into a tropical lagoon of resonance. It was too much. I didn’t deserve this gift. Mike was an accomplished guitarist, while I fumbled at it at best. Suddenly overwhelmed at what I held in my hands, I felt the crush of what to me had been a year of bad decisions press down upon me. Nine months ago we packed up the home we built in Alaska and moved to Washington for a job at the local state college that hadn’t gone well. For 23 years I was proud to call myself an Alaskan and a commercial fisherman. But last spring we sold the house, the boat and permit, and I nose-dived into a different lagoon: one filled with the cold water of depression and self-doubt. Our family was in crisis. More than once I had gotten into my truck and driven off, intending never to return, heading north, heading east, heading anywhere but here. And suddenly in my hands was this thing of beauty and creativity, and I could neither accept it nor give it back. To Veronica’s amazement, I slid it back into its case and clipped the latches.

“Aren’t you going to play it?’
“Maybe later,” I answered, and for a short moment that evening I did. When my twelve-year-old son Dylan went to bed, I pulled it out and sat on his bed and played in the dark. In a letter I wrote to Mike three months later, I described the experience:

I closed my eyes and played...and the music filled the room. Full and deep, my fingers felt as if they were touching glass, not wood and metal. Even my voice, my rhythm, my soul resonated in ways I never felt before. I played the guitar far less than it played me.

Afterwards, even more besieged by my feelings, I put it back in the case and avoided it. After the emotion of the moment faded, Veronica and I talked it out in the dark of our bedroom and I did my best to explain my feelings, but I’m sure I was less than honest – even with myself – and far from articulate. Inside I continued to dance around the fire of my own self-immolation, burning brightly against the darkness surrounding me, and the gift that my brother sent me sat silent in its case in the corner.

*

By March the rains of that first winter in Olympia began to ease. We bought a yellow house in a wooded neighborhood that promised to be a better fit for us. As we prepared to move, my sixteen-year-old son Kessler was packing boxes in the basement of the duplex. He picked up the box the guitar had shipped in, and out fell a plastic bag with documents about the guitar in it. There were picks, strings, the receipt and a letter. Kessler bounded up the stairs and said,  “Dad! Look what I found!” waving the bag at me.
Indeed.

The letter is dated December 21, 1998. Winter solstice, the darkest day of the year, at 3:00 am. In it, my brother describes the forces that mysteriously wake us up in the middle of the night with their voices echoing in our ears, telling us what we need to do. Somehow he knew how hard my life had become, how the trough of my sea was threatening to drown me, and that this, this gift was not a Christmas present – the timing just happened to be the same, he said – but was a lifeline, a buoy for me to grab to pull myself up to the next crest. In pencil, I still have his counsel:

Use it wisely. When in doubt about future decisions concerning life’s crossroads – meditate with it. It’s like a wisdom tonic if you use it appropriately. Strum it softly and it will speak back to you... it is a magic wand which I can only loan you. I don’t really own it. I just happened to possess it for awhile and then pass it on. Someday you do the same.

After reading the letter for the first time, I walked into the living room where the guitar had spent the first three months of its stay with me, and it was halfway out of its case when I opened the lid. It seemed to leap into my hands. Together we went outside and sat on the step in front of the duplex I was happy to be leaving – the same step I stood on three months earlier when it arrived – and we played. And as we played I began to understand that life is full of changes. Some we control, some we don’t. Some we choose, and sometimes those choices don’t work out as we intended. Some changes come to us dressed in cardboard, yet contain gifts beyond measure. I still play – not as often as I feel I should, but each time I do, I think of my brother Mike – and how lucky I am to have him in my life.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

So Much Has Gone




I got an email from a good friend in Kenai the other day who said she'd gone down to the old Columbia Wards' Cannery I used spend my summers at as a fisherman - and the warehouse where I'd spent so much of my time, where my locker was, where I stored supplies, used the crane to haul shackles of web up and down from the loft, where I'd driven my truck to grab gear, driven forklifts to haul it, where fishermen for decades hung their nets, where I'd walked hundreds of times with my camera, was no longer there. Gone were the beefy rafters in the egg house, where cannery workers of all nationalities scrawled their names and the years they worked in the plant – some of them as far back as the 1920’s, when the cannery was rebuilt after the fire. But now that warehouse was no more. The entrepreneur who bought the cannery after Wards' Cove shuttered it in 2000 decided it was a bad investment and sold the warehouse for its lumber - old growth Douglas firs made up those massive rafters. Work crews tore down the structure this past summer, hauling the pieces away while the fishermen who used to dock there tied their boats to buoys downriver, and like all good fishermen paid more attention to the fish, the winds and the tides than to a piece of their history sinking in their wake.

I've visited the cannery every time I've returned to Kenai since I moved away in 1998. Far more so than Indiana, where I spent my childhood, it was really where I grew up, and it had always been a second home to me. Except for when they were rebuilding right after the sale - putting in a restaurant and making hotel rooms out of the old fishermen bunkhouses - it felt like a ghost town. Through the thin veil of time and memory, I could hear in my mind fishermen long gone still laughing on the dock; forklift backup alarms beeping as they moved fish totes into the freezer plant from the dock; boats starting up with the throaty roar only a Jimmy can make.  I thought about what to write in tribute to this passing, and decided I needed to re-publish the following piece. It's about a warehouse that's fortunate to be still standing across the Inlet. Some fishermen (not entrepreneurs) bought it a few years ago. They're trying to keep it alive and working - not as a cannery, but as a lodge. They haven't changed it much, from what I've been told. They're trying to keep it from going further into disrepair. They "get" what it is that they purchased.

------------------------



Snug Harbor Cannery
Chisik Island, Alaska



Deck slippers sound muffled on wood. The thick plank floor of the cannery, worn smooth by decades of footsteps, transmits the noise of my passing with little more than a whisper. I walk back in time. My eyes adjust to dim yellow light. I pick my way through strewn manila line and coiled electrical cords. The warehouse echoes silently in my head with years of engine repairs and assembly-line canning of salmon. Rusted saws and axes still lean against rough-hewn plank walls and stout support beams. Palette after palette of diesel boat engines wait silently in a row, wrapped in dust-covered plastic. Nets bundled in torn and ragged burlap bags sit piled high in dark, forgotten corners like old fat men in a steam bath. Nestled sheets of fiberglass roofing lean against a wall beneath broken windows.

Below my feet I can hear the small waves of the incoming tide roll the gravel of this remote Alaskan beach. The warehouse sits on pilings above the tide line of Tuxedni Bay, Alaska. Mesmerized, I drift up the stairs to the web loft, where I find wooden floors worn smooth and bare with years of dragging nets and line to racks for mending or hooks for hanging. Outboard motors hang in a row on racks of their own under a ceiling of huge, latticed wooden beams. The immensity of the structure, of the beams themselves, lends a cathredral-like quality to the experience of standing under them. They are dark and dry, old-growth Doug fir I am told years after, with deep, rough grooves in their sides and white and yellow words and numbers scrawled on them. “Gebenini,” “Mohr,” “Humbolt, “Showalter,” “63,64,65,” 58, 59, 60.” “Tanaka, 34.”

Over the years, countless cannery workers, tendermen and fishermen crawled high among these rafters to write their names. After their names they put the dates of the summers they spent working the cannery: from as recently as last year to well before I was born. Filipino names, Japanese names, Italian, Norwegian, Native Alaskan. Some with only one date after them, others with repeated, sequential numbers, testifying to summer after summer spent working fish.  The gear locker doors below the beams display more names written in marker pen. Names crossed out, one after another, in a legacy of the owners of the lockers’ contents, until only one was left uncrossed: Hoyt: -xed-out; Pugh: -xed-out; Hansen: -xed-out; “Thompson.” Behind the mute locker wire wait stores of gear: buoys, line, nets, props. I find a piece of chalk on the floor near one locker door and bend down and pick it up. I look up, and for a moment consider writing my name, too. But I am only a green deckhand at the start of my first season, and I think I haven’t yet earned the privilege. Maybe another year, if I survive. So I put the chalk down, and walk away.



Ten years later, after ten seasons fishing as a crew and skipper, after finally learning ropes I hadn’t even realized were there to learn, and learning how to catch fish, fix boats and survive rough weather, I return, this time looking for chalk. I find it, pretty much where I'd left it.

***

Ten years after that I find myself back again, this time with my eleven-year-old son. Together we climb the old stairs to the loft. I show him my name on a beam near the windows, and the years that are written next to it. There are some more to add today. It is his third season with me, and neither of us know it’s to be our last. I ask him if he wants to put his name up there too, next to mine. Together we find half a piece of chalk on a table filled with old mending twine and needles. As I had done alone so many years ago, together we climb steep steps up to the planks that weave through the center of the latticed rafters. We lie down and stretch, one at a time, to reach the beam waiting for us. Our beam. It’s just above the window that looks out on Tuxedni Bay. Looks out on Snug Harbor. I add my years to the space beyond my name, then hand him the chalk. “Hang on a minute,” I say. I go down the stairs, and as he writes his name above mine, I take his photograph.


***

After the film is developed, back at home later that month we see it together: the picture is dim and blurred, but he is there forever, more in my mind’s eye than on the film, writing his name upon the rafters of our history, of our past, of our lives.



In her email about the Kenai warehouse, my friend said, "I was blown away by the size of the area it enclosed." That's true in more ways than one.





Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Fukishima and my granddaughter

The 9.0 earthquake that generated the tidal wave that took out four nuclear reactors on the northeastern coast of Japen occurred March 11, 2011. A little over a year later, Ella Dixon Geyer was born, on April 28, 2012. This is a short poem about those two very disparate, but powerful events.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Same-Sex Marriage - Destructive? Really?

>Let me get this straight...Charlie Sheen can make a "porn family", Kelsey Grammer can end a 15 year marriage over the phone, Larry King can be on divorce #9, Britney Spears had a 55 hour marriage, Jesse James and Tiger Woods, while married, were having sex with EVERYONE. Yet, the idea of same-sex marriage is going to destroy the institution of marriage? Really? Really? *sigh*

Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Fallout

We need to respond to what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico with all the creative energy we can bring to bear. This is so huge in such a negative way, if you are someone who is disturbed by what is slowly smothering us day by day, then let's rise up and DO something about it. Join together. Create. Write songs, poems, stories real and imagined; paint, draw, photograph, sculpt, carve. Create a body of work as vast in scope and size as this ever-growing spill, and let the oil companies and politicians know how many people all over the world are being affected by this catastrophe!

Send examples of your creations or post them on the new Facebook Page: "Artists Respond to the Gulf Oil Spill."
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Artists-Respond-to-the-Gulf-Oil-Spill/122378651135559

Here's one from me, written 21 years ago, after the Exxon Valdez disaster:

Fallout

Innocence in your eyes,

you ask,

"Daddy, we will be safe from the oil?"

I swallow hard.

How can I say to you,

"No! One day it or something like it

something we have created

something I have given my blessing to

(if only by my silence)

will kill us all."

instead I lie,

"Yes, punkin. We'll be safe."