This episode of Average Mortal Radio is brought to you by Cloud Islands (cloudislands.com) and is rated R, for Rain, like the rain which is, at this moment, lashing icy and hard as a swung plank out of the north and west. In our latest episode we talk about Peter Matthiessen and artist James Barron, and their connection with us here on our gray and silver windblown island home, as well as an earlier incarnation of ourselves, a one-point-oh version, if you will, a version raised in Florida and who lived there many, many years, many, many years ago.

This is not about the Florida of condominium-stuttered coasts or drive-through Margarita palaces or even the Florida of the Mouse Who Ate Orlando or old people fitness stepping around the malls every morning. It is the Florida that inspired Peter Matthiessen’s Watson trilogy, which culminated in The Shadow Country, his single volume retelling of the tough people who inhabited the swamps, riverbanks, and boggy mosquitoy mangrove thickets.

I sent James a copy of The Shadow Country last week when I learned he was living in an old river house on the Santa Fe River.  The Santa Fe figures prominently in Matthiessen’s Watson novels and here is Matthiessen himself, in a passage that might serve as an introduction to James’ art:  Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling like that – an ant in a kaleidoscope might sense the problem.

James Barron, my cousin, my friend, for too brief a time my neighbor here on Lopez Island, can easily overwhelm with his whirling colors.  To see what I mean, go to:  http://jamesbarron.net/ and look at his paintings, drawings, sculpture, and furniture.
 
And read Peter Matthiessen, look at the colors swirling around you, be drawn into the kaleidoscope, yes, like an ant.
 

This episode of Average Mortal Radio is brought to you by Cloud Islands (cloudislands.com) and is rated R, for Ray, a novel by the Mississippi writer, Barry Hannah.

It's Tuesday, the 3rd day of March, feeling like spring after the morning rains, and I think of Louise Gluck's line:  It is Spring!  We are going to die!

But the morning rains stopped, the sun ripped into the sky like it had been howitzered there, and I drove with my wife down to a job off the middle of the island on Hunter Bay.  While she trimmed trees and tidied up ferns, I climbed onto the moss covered roof of a garage/workshop and, with a wire brush and broom, began scraping and sweeping the clustered archipelagos of mosses loose from their clutch on the asphalt shingles and dumping them over the edge of the roof, onto a tarp.

Using my iPod, I listened to a series of lectures by Barry Hannah, the brilliant Mississippi writer, author of Ray, Geronimo Rex, Yonder Stand Your Orphan, and the short story collection Airships, among other works, a pure product of Clinton, Mississippi, a place outside of Jackson of which he speaks lovingly, kindly, and with a writer's fondness for detail.

Among the lines from Ray, a short novel to be read again and again, savored like one enjoys the discovery of a great new neighborhood restaurant, are:
*I live in so many centuries.  Everybody is still alive.
*Whoever created Ray gave him a big sex engine. 
  I live near the Black Warrior River and have respect for things.
*Me and the machines saved Uncle Buster.  He woke up wanting some wine.  All ready to be a bum again.  Go out there in the park, safe from vigilant idiots who get their haircuts at fifteen dollars.
*Now I guess I should give you swaying trees and the rare geometry of cows in the meadows or the like--to break it up.  But, sorry, me and this one are over.
(The four quotations above are complete chapters.)

So Barry Hannah and I demolished verdant, rich mosses while my wife competently snipped at twigs and sawed at limbs in the garden far below where I worked.

There are worse ways to begin the process of welcoming in spring.

Because of unresolved technical difficulties, this (once more) belated episode of Average Mortal Radio is being brought to you by Cloud Islands Design (cloudislands.com) and is rated R, for rivers.

Hermann Hesse has Siddhartha saying, shortly after his enlightenment, that "...there is much to be learned from a river."  T. S. Eliot says that "I think the river/Is a strong brown god," one that dwells "within us."

I've been thinking of rivers a great deal lately, for several reasons.  One is that Adrienne and I have been helping our friend, Hank Meacham--a river guide with Osprey River Adventures (ospreyriveradventures.com) on the Methow River on the east side of the North Cascades--get a blog activated in which he will be able to apprise potential clients of river conditions, as well as discuss his love of rafting, rivers, flyfishing, and antique cars.  Another is that we were able to go rafting with Hank twice last year, once when the river was racing high and fast from the late spring melt and the other time when the water was lower, but, in its own way more exciting because the rapids were at their full, frothing power, roaring as if wild to be contained in deep canyons and between sage covered sloping hills.  Both trips were unique and memorable in their own ways and for their own reasons.

Finally, I've been thinking of rivers as the metaphor for and literal method of journeys.  In the past 2 weeks 2 dear Lopezians have died:  David Fisher of a skiing accident and Leta Currie-Marshall of a failed heart.  Both have left gaping emptiness in our small community; both have become part of the great river in which we all flow and which carries us all eventually.

I'll be bringing you more information on Hank Meacham, on how you can visit his blog and how you can arrange a raft trip with him this season, but I hear now the words of a hymn with which I grew up: 

Yes, we'll gather at the river,
The beautiful, beautiful river;
Yes, we'll gather at the river,
That flows by the throne of God.

Whoever God is to you, if there is or isn't such a Being in your life or system of beliefs, go stand by a river.  There is much to be learned.

When I went to Blossom, our local organic grocery this morning, to buy 2 Jongolds and granola for my breakfast the next few days, Simone was on duty, and the only other person in the store.

Simone is a young woman—mid 20’s—slender with bobbed dark hair and dark eyes, a small, pierced nose, and a fiercely acerbic mouth atop a cupped chin.  Her wit can be painful, it is so sharp, but, she is unfailingly funny and she has a mind that dances with a self-effacing brilliance.  

When she tallied my purchases this morning, she asked me if I needed a bag and I said, yes, please, I didn’t want to have the apples end up rolling around under the accelerator or brake pedals on my brief drive home.

When my caution registered, I began laughing, and told her that I remembered how, 20 years ago, when I was teaching high school English in the Florida Panhandle, I would get off work in the afternoon and drive straight to the beach most days.  On the way, while steering my way through 4 lanes of what was usually heavy traffic, I would remove my entire school teacher’s uniform, from necktie to underwear and re-attire myself in cut-offs and a T-shirt, often while drinking a beer.

And now, she said, you’re afraid you’ll kill yourself if you don’t bag your apples.

Yup, I told her, and she and I laughed together, although, I suspect, for different reasons, and I took my bagged apples and drove, safely, back to the cabin.

 

“The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he's done.�
          -Richard Hugo

Mid-afternoon.  I’m back at my machine now, home from the briefest reverie, a waking nap in my absent neighbors’ hammock.  I had walked over to spread cracked corn for their ducks (as I’d promised to do while they are gone to California); on the roadside on the way, I stop beside a plush wall of wild roses, their faces blossoming in half-dollar-sized frills of pink.  Pulling one closer, I inspect it for bees, then thrust my nose into its cup.  Immediately, I smell Granny’s old house in Jasper County, Mississippi, and see her broad wrinkled forehead, her squat body, her braided crown of hair—and tears begin to grow like wild roses in my eyes.

As I feed the ducks, the black shadow of a vulture’s wings draws a dark small cloud over my head and the rocks where I cast a rain of golden grain.  Before returning home, I climb into the hammock behind their house and close my eyes.  I can feel hot sun on my unshaded cheek, the sway of the hammock, the sweep of a breeze just above bare.  I hear the hollow rattle of ravens, a sparrow’s high chir, the rough cough of crows, electric insects, robins blowing thin whistles from the top of low trees, sheep crying to each other across the pasture behind the barbed wire, and a distant plane’s angry drone. 

I think of James Wright’s poem about lying in a hammock, his concluding line:  “I have wasted my life,â€? and I know in my arms and my belly that I am going to die, but I cannot believe it in my head.  It is a lie and doesn’t have even the truth of the roll of a raven’s high tongue.

I have to get out of this job or get this job out of me.  The monster’s teeth tear at my stomach, my chest, my arm, the temples of my head and the temples of my heart.

What is wrong with me that I let such a trivial beast gnaw my vitals…and what is vital?  I heard this morning:  "Expect a rock to be a rock."  Now it is up to me to listen.

 

Honeysuckle itself couldn't be sweeter than the dulcet notes of Radio Girl's words as they float out of the studio and across the airwaves. "I've got something for everyone," she purrs, and fellows everywhere assure her that they've got something for her, too.

Radio Boy takes a moment's respite from his busy day to say Hi! He longs for the time when every child in every land can put aside the cares of the world, settle down in front of a microphone, and plug in to a better way of life. "That'll be a swell thing to be a part of," he says, and you'd better believe us when we tell you that Radio Boy knows a swell thing when he sees it.

Once upon a time, there was long ago and far away, but for now, there's Average Mortal Radio. Brought to you by Cloud Islands Design, Average Mortal Radio is a bold experiment in bringing the engineering creativity of radio throughout the ages into the lives of an anachronistically contemporary couple. Though living primitively among the twitchy squirrels and furtive chipmunks of the cedar grove their cabin occupies, they pine for the bygone glorious era of the airwaves--a time when pioneers and gunslingers, knights and dinosaurs, and strolling minstrels and astronauts all lived the spectacle and magic that were the Golden Days of Radio. We'd also wanted to include Eskimos in here somewhere and I'd promised Jim Horton that I'd mention what is commonly and by consent called his wild sex engine, but I ran out of room. So we'll leave it to you, dear listener, to include these things wherever you see fit.