1978: Pre-Dive / Nostalgia

Summer 1978: 

My mom called me Fearless Fly with this state-of-the-art prescription mask on my face. 

I was getting ready for my first open-water dive, earning my C-card, the next day up on the Sonoma County coast.

Note how tan my hands and forearms are. I was spending hours in the pool every day.

Saline Drip

Asilomar: Tidepooling

Duncan's Falcon-Thoughts

MY MOTHER WOULD BE A FALCONRESS
    --by Robert Duncan, 1919 - 1988

 My mother would be a falconress,
And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist,
would fly to bring back
from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize,
where I dream in my little hood with many bells
jangling when I’d turn my head.

My mother would be a falconress,
and she sends me as far as her will goes.
She lets me ride to the end of her curb
where I fall back in anguish.
I dread that she will cast me away,
for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission.

She would bring down the little birds.
And I would bring down the little birds.
When will she let me bring down the little birds,
pierced from their flight with their necks broken,
their heads like flowers limp from the stem?

I tread my mother’s wrist and would draw blood.
Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded.
I have gone back into my hooded silence,
talking to myself and dropping off to sleep.

For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me,
sewn round with bells, jangling when I move.
She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist.
She uses a barb that brings me to cower.
She sends me abroad to try my wings
and I come back to her. I would bring down
the little birds to her
I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly.

I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood,
and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying.
She draws a limit to my flight.
Never beyond my sight, she says.
She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching.
She rewards me with meat for my dinner.
But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her.

Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me,
always, in a little hood with the bells ringing,
at her wrist, and her riding
to the great falcon hunt, and me
flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart
to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet,
straining, and then released for the flight.

My mother would be a falconress,
and I her gerfalcon raised at her will,
from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own
pride, as if her pride
knew no limits, as if her mind
sought in me flight beyond the horizon.

Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,
were the blue hills where the falcons nest.
And then I saw west to the dying sun--
it seemd my human soul went down in flames.

I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me,
until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out,
far, far beyond the curb of her will

to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where the falcons nest
I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak.
I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight,
sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist,
striking out from the blood to be free of her.

My mother would be a falconress,
and even now, years after this,
when the wounds I left her had surely healed,
and the woman is dead,
her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart
were broken, it is stilled

I would be a falcon and go free.
I tread her wrist and wear the hood,
talking to myself, and would draw blood.

------------------------------------
Thanks to JP for sharing the poem with me.

Intrepid: Mother-Daughter Abalone Divers

Mother and daughter go abalone-diving for the first time.  They had to work hard on this bright, but surgy day.

In the photo below, I'm fairly sure that's the mother talking to my friends about abalone diving.  The photo below is from the afternoon before the morning shots I caught above.   I've been abalone-diving since 1978, so I did have some advice for this woman.  She had good questions, practical questions, but she also revealed a lack of experience that troubled me.  Van Damme is a protected entry and exit point, mostly, but I wouldn't call the waters out by the arch a novice dive spot at all.  I pointed out some of the dangers as well as places I'd seen divers get lucky, but I also appreciated the sheer verve this woman had.  She wanted to get some abalone, and she was willing to swim and work to get it.   I was happy to see her and her daughter out there the next morning, but I also paddled my kayak nearby to see if they wanted any help or not.  I could see some struggling with all the surge as well as some difficulty with a weight belt, but I didn't patronize these divers by trying to help them when my help wasn't wanted.   I tend to paddle over and hover around any divers, checking whether any aid is wanted, I see out on a surgy day working the long swims.  Male or female, I'll add.  My friend E saw the two later, when they exited the water, and reports that they did not get abalone, but they saw one or two small ones.  Next time, I say.  Next time.

Shell Games

Seamus Heaney: The Boat-Funeral from "Beowulf"

Shield was still thriving when his time came

and he crossed over into the Lord's keeping.

His warrior band did what he bade them

when he laid down the law among the Danes:

they shouldered him out to the sea's flood,

the chief they revered who had long ruled them.

A ring-whorled prow rode in the harbour,

ice-clad, outbound, a craft for a prince.

They stretched their beloved lord in his boat,

laid out by the mast, amidships,

the great ring-giver. Far-fetched treasures

were piled upon him, and precious gear

I never heard before of a ship so well furbished

with battle tackle, bladed weapons

and coats of mail. The massed treasure

was loaded on top of him: it would travel far

on out into the ocean's sway.

They decked his body no less bountifully

with offerings than those first ones did

who cast him away when he was a child

and launched him alone out over the waves.

And they set a gold standard up

high above his head and let him drift

to wind and tide, bewailing him

and mourning their loss. No man can tell,

no wise man in hall or weathered veteran

knows for certain who salvaged that load.

-- translated by Seamus Heaney

Shell and Foam

Dream Vision

The other early morning I had a very vivid dream in which my (late) father called to say that he and my (late) mother were having a fine vacation and would be home soon. I'm grateful for that one.

Jaunty Mom!

My mother, back in the late 1960's/early 1970's, in front of our family tent somewhere in Northern California.  I'm thinking, perhaps, Lake Siskiyou?

I think she looks rather jaunty in Dad's hat here.

"A Jar of Pain": Lyrics By Jackie Leven

CLASSIC NORTHERN DIVERSIONS

I took a train out of leeds in the smear and stain

I saw the city pass by in the shuffling rain

I'm in huddersfield drinking in the slubber's arms

and i walked through slush by broken farms

where huddling sheep are turning grey

in the cold light of a nothing day

it took me fifty long years just to work out

that because i was angry didn't mean i was right

now i'm sitting in a bar alone

with the jukebox playing a terrible song

the bartender says I see it's you again

I been drinking deep from a jar of pain

Ch -- i remember once i went home like this

i had my mother in tears as i felt her kiss

now my mother is heavenbound

and her body lies in unmarked ground

in every heart in every home

there's a dying man who lives alone

he close the door and he turn away

and the tide rushes in on a fatal shore

i can never get too close to coal

with a glass in my hand and the ember's crack

but the fire's gone out and the chimney's closed

and there's a round jeer sticking on my back

ch --

I took a train out of leeds in the smear and stain

i saw the city pass by in the shuffling rain

and with chimneys leaning to the sea

i got the salt of sunderland creasing me

i took a jar of pain to the soaking field

and to the lonely seawall inn south shields

if i was a man which i am not

standing in the last of the rotten snow

i'd fall on my knees and cry out loud

to the snowy river and the icy flow

i took a train out of leeds in the smear and stain

i saw the city pass by in the shuffling rain

--Jackie Leven

from his CD Shining Brother Shining Sister

Montague's "Upstream"

UPSTREAM

Northwards, annually,
a journeying back,
the salmon's leap
& pull to the source:
my wife, from the shore
at Roche's Point, calls
John, come in, come home,
your mother is dead.

We pull the curragh
into shallow water,
haul her above tide
level, two sets of lean
insect legs stumbling
up the stony beach,
the curve of the boat
heavy on our napes
before we lift her
high on the trestles,
then store the long,
light oars, deliberately 
neat and calm in crisis,
keeping the mind busy.

Under the lighthouse dome
the strangeness of Evelyn
weeping for someone
she has never known --
her child's grandmother --
while I stand, dryeyed,
phoning and phoning a cousin
until, cursing, I turn
to feel his shadow loom
across the threshold.

Secret, lonely messages
along the air, older than
humming telephone wires,
blood talk, neglected 
affinities of family,
antennae of instinct
reaching through space,
first intelligence.

(The night O Riada dies
a friend wakes up in 
the South of France,
feeling a great lightness,
a bird taking off.)

--John Montague

Moya Cannon's "Prodigal"

PRODIGAL

Dark mutter tongue
rescue me,
I am drawn into outrageous worlds
where there is no pain or innocence,
only the little quiet sorrows
and the elegant joys of power.

Someone
businesslike in his desires
has torn out the moon by its roots.
Oh, my tin king is down now mother
down and broken,
my clear browed king
who seemed to know no hungers
has killed himself.
Old gutter mother
I am bereft now,
my heart has learnt nothing
but the stab of its own hungers
and the murky truth of a half-obsolete language
that holds at least the resonance 
of the throbbing, wandering earth.

Try to find me stones and mud now mother
give me somewhere to start,
green and struggling, a blade under snow,
for this place and age demand relentlessly
something I will never learn to give.

--Moya Cannon,
from Oar