'...love the detour...'

~Flathead Lake, Montana, across from the Flathead Lake Brewing Company~

~~~~~

I'm still thinking and seeing Montana in my head - all day long - as I sat through a series of meetings, as I stood in my garden this evening (water hose in hand), as I prepared dinner tonight.  I'm drinking water out of my Glacier Brewing Company glass (Polson, MT) and I'm still smiling about the woman who walked into the Flathead Lake Brewing Company and asked for a Miller Lite (the whole place stopped and turned to look at her - I mean, this is a place that has won international awards for it's beer).

 

I really liked Montana, but boy - you can't garden very much there, at least in the northwestern part of the state.  First you're limited by region (and it's almost semi-arid by late summer), but then - if you don't have a tall fence up - deer mow down everything.  Tonight as I was watering the garden (we're really dry right now), I couldn't help but think about how attached I am to gardening in the south, and our almost 12-month long growing season.  There are irises blooming all over the place (all kinds)

and hydrangeas are budding out and the late blooming native azaleas are gorgeous and the crinums are growing and the pomegranates have buds - and this is just what I can come up with after a long day.

~~~~~

 

At work today - being a Wednesday - at 12:30 pm we had lab meeting.  My group was off the hook, since a student whose thesis committee I'm on wanted some input from a room full of opinionated microbiologists.  Nonetheless, Katherine presented a poem - a rather nice one from a poet, Jim Harrison, that has spent many days in Montana.  I hadn't heard of Harrison before, but I have decided this evening that I really like him, especially after reading the paragraph below that I found on his MySpace page:

 

I don’t want to teach anybody anything. Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves. That’s my attitude anyway. Just read all that is good and then write. I’m shocked when I go around giving lectures, how little some people have read in these M.F.A. programs. It’s pretty startling. How can you know how to write unless you’ve read the best? That’s my attitude anyway. But it’s partly that our educational system sucks, so there you are. For every good university, there are 100 colleges that aren’t much good at all. Eat well; of course, avoiding the ninny diets and mincing cuisines that demonize appetite and make unthinkable a tasty snack of hog jowls. We're all going to die, might as well enjoy a little fat along the way. Pursue love and sex, no matter discrepancies of desire and age. Romance is worth the humbling. Doing it outdoors on stumps, in clearings and even swarmed by mosquitoes is particularly recommended. Welcome animals, especially bears, ravens and wolves, into your waking and dream life. An acceptance of our common creaturedom is essential not just to the health of the planet but to our ordinary happiness. We are mere participants in natural cycles, not the kings of them. And finally, love the detour. Take the longest route between two points, since the journey is the thing, a notion to which, contaminated by the Zen-fascist slogans of advertising ("just do it!"), we all pay lip service but few of us indulge. Rather than lighting out for territory, we ought to try living in it.

Here's the poem that Katherine read to us today... 

Age Sixty-nine by Jim Harrison

 

I keep waiting without knowing
what I'm waiting for.
I saw the setting moon at dawn
roll over the mountain
and perhaps into the dragon's mouth
until tomorrow evening.

There is this circle I walk
that I have learned to love.
I hope one day to be a spiral
but to the birds I'm a circle.

A thousand Spaniards died looking
for gold in a swamp when it was
in the mountains in clear sight beyond.

Here, though, on local earth my heart
is at rest as a groundling, letting
my mind take flight as it will,
no longer waiting for good or bad news.

Often, lately, the night is a cold maw
and stars the scattered white teeth of the gods,
which spare none of us. At dawn I have birds,
clearly divine messengers that I don't understand
yet day by day feel the grace of their intentions.

Comments

[Les]

I can't believe anyone could be so clueless to have asked for a Miller Lite there. If it is any comfort, this part of VA is also dry.

[Pomona Belvedere]

I so enjoyed this, also your comments on 'difference as diversity' over on Dave Perry's Garden. I was thwarted by an early-morning calculus class, so I never became a scientist, but I've always felt that poetry and science cover a lot of the same mystical and mystifying ground. Perhaps this fusion explains the Miller incident...