"A book can take you anywhere"~

Hernando Guanlao and his library in the centre of Manila in the Philippines

"a book can take you anywhere"






guardian u.k. 

NORTHERN ~



there's an exhilaration going on here — a combined landscape love and two people love in a new rental car, borrowed for four days, let loose and sweeping a landscape these passengers have returned to after an absence of decades. little has changed, unlike where they have come from and will return to. the territory is too far away from the mainstream and too extreme in its properties to be easily changed — see how the highway, built for and by farmers and woodsmen and large families and isolation, sweeps with the lay of the land, each building needed and cared for or else long gone. this is a no-fooling place, and we are self-guiding through, passing through, having been here before, exactly the same way: of love for one another and for the earth but hurdling at large speed through large landscape. for days and weeks and months and years before this moment we have been on-foot, traveling. now this. tense changes in the text will be unavoidable. someone watching this knows exactly where we are, but I'm calling it earth since we are caught in a matter of time


the film began on the far northern reaches between two states, finally stopping for gas, traveling since the middle of the night, climbing climbing to this spot, where like I say we've been here before. a corner market and not much else, still a pay phone, big old fashioned coca-cola sign white and red lettered, a much older sign rusting and saying even more of what this place once was. a beatup car pulls in next to us, solo driver, a pit-stop with a cd or tape left going, window cracked, the driver grunts getting out and will grunt when he stoops to get back in behind the wheel, pearl jam is playing. he's local — you can tell from his clothes, his walk, his familiarity, and the car has been diminished to short runs. we have pearl jam somewhere with us and so from this driver and stranger we take up his music as we continue our journey, over a landscape that will be slowly but surely disappearing, although it hasn't that much in the four decades since we've been away
 

no one is about where we are, some of these buildings we pass may be abandoned, though someone has run up that flag, and someone is caring to mow that cemetery, it's saturday and people are home, good size trucks are parked in dooryards and we're still early birds. where's this highway going? it's wilderness and expansive tracts of water, lakes, ponds, bogs, swamps, the famous pointed fir trees of another author's book title. and what will keep it all sustained? the landscape will do quite fine without us, thank you, but what of this highway and where it is all headed to? there is an exhilaration in the love and to the land, the music brought along but inspired by its use from another and taken from his car into this car, the camera is running

 

film © bob arnold
once in vermont films

LOVE IS WHAT STAYS ~

Mark Murphy

photo by Gary Brocks

Mark Murphy (born March 14, 1932)
    1956 Meet Mark Murphy (Decca)
    1957 Let Yourself Go (Decca)
    1959 This Could Be the Start of Something Big (Capitol)
    1960 Mark Murphy's Hip Parade (Capitol)
    1960 Playing the Field (Capitol)
    1961 Rah! (Riverside Records)
    1962 That's How I Love the Blues (Riverside)
    1965 Swingin' Singin' Affair (Fontana)
    1966 Who Can I Turn To (Immediate)
    1970 Midnight Mood (Saba)
    1973 Bridging a Gap (Muse)
    1975 [[Mark 2 (Muse)
    1975 Mark Murphy Sings (Muse)
    1977 Mark Murphy Sings Mostly Dorothy Fields & Cy Coleman (Audiophile)
    1978 Stolen Moments (Muse)
    1979 Satisfaction Guaranteed (Muse)
    1981 Bop for Kerouac (Muse)
    1982 The Artistry of Mark Murphy (Muse)
    1983 Brazil Song (Cancões Do Brazil) (Muse)
    1983 Mark Murphy Sings the Nat King Cole Songbook (Muse)
    1984 Living Room (Muse)
    1985 Beauty and the Beast (Muse)
    1986 Kerouac Then and Now (Muse)
    1987 September Ballads (Milestone)
    1990 What a Way to Go (Muse)
    1991 I'll Close My Eyes (Muse)
    1991 Night Mood (Milestone)
    1996 North Sea Jazz Sessions, Vol. 5 (Jazz World)
    1997 Song for the Geese (RCA)
    2000 Some Time Ago (High Note)
    2000 The Latin Porter (Go Jazz)
    2001 Links (High Note)
    2002 Lucky to Be Me (High Note)
    2003 Memories of You (High Note)
    2004 Bop for Miles (High Note)
    2004 Dim the Lights (Millennium)
    2005 Once to Every Heart (Verve)
    2007 Love Is What Stays (Verve)
    2010 Never Let Me Go (Self produced)

VOICE ~

Mary Lou Williams

PYNCHON / ORWELL ~

Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half of diversion, in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right." Looking around us at the present moment, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," themselves forms of social control — and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way television bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?"  "Orwellian, dude!"

Well, yes and no. Specific predictions are only details, after all. What is perhaps more important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in 1948 understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away, that far from having seen its day it had perhaps not yet even come into its own — the corruption of spirit, the irresistible human addiction to power, were already long in place, all well-known aspects of the third Reich and Stalin's USSR, even the British Labour party — like first drafts of a terrible future. What could prevent the same thing from happening to Britain and the United States? Moral superiority? Good intentions? Clean living?

What has steadily, insidiously improved since then, of course, making humanist arguments almost irrelevant, is the technology. We must not be too distracted by the clunkiness of the means of surveillance current in Winston Smith's era. In "our" 1984, after all, the integrated circuit chip was less than a decade old, and almost embarrassingly primitive next to the wonders of computer technology circa 2003, most notably the Internet, a development that promises social control on a scale those quaint old twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy mustaches could only dream about.

from Thomas Pynchon's foreword

 George Orwell, 1984

SPEECH ~

The Great Dictator 
(1940)





The Great Dictator is a comedy film by Charlie Chaplin released in October 1940. As usual, Chaplin wrote, produced, and directed, in addition to starring as the lead ("Adenoid Hynkel": Adolf Hitler). Having been the only Hollywood film maker to continue to make silent films well into the period of sound films, this was Chaplin's first full-fledge talking picture as well as his most commercially successful film. A digitally restored version of the film was released on DVD and Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in May 2011. In this famous scene, and the closing of the film, the dictator has come to his senses and is now playing not as a dictator or even an actor, but as Charlie Chaplin with something to say.

CLASSIC IN MY PANTS ~

Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach
(tales of brave Ulysses)



Now it's no secret that the hero Ulysses has friends high up, or, rather, a friend — in fact, the Goddess Minerva. She appears now in one, now in another, disguise. This time it was in the very male form of Ernest Hemingway.

I hope the following disclosures won't get Hemingway into trouble with the authorities — surely they wouldn't bother someone who is a Nobel Prize winner — but it was due to Hemingway that my copies of Ulysses penetrated into the United States.

I set my problem before Minerva-Hemingway. He said, "Give me twenty-four hours," and the next day he came back with a plan. I was to hear from a friend of his in Chicago, a certain Saint Bernard B., a most obliging friend, whom I call Saint Bernard because of his rescue work, and he would let me know how the business could be carried out.

This man wrote to say that he was going ahead with his preparations and that he was moving over to Canada. He asked if I would be willing to pay the rent on a studio in Toronto, which I agreed to at once, of course. Then he sent me the address of his new domicile and told me to ship all copies to him there. I sent them off, and, since there was no ban on Ulysses in Canada, they reached him safely. The job he then undertook was one requiring great courage and cunning: he had to get hundreds of these huge books across the border.

Daily, he boarded the ferry, a copy of Ulysses stuffed down inside his pants, as he described it to me later. It was in the days of bootlegging, so a certain number of odd-shaped characters were around, but that only increased the risk of being searched.

As the work progressed, and he was getting down to the last few dozen copies, Bernard imagined the port officials were beginning to eye him somewhat suspiciously. He was afraid they might soon inquire more closely into the real nature of the business — presumably selling his drawings — that took him back and forth every day. He found a friend who was willing to help him, and the two of them boarded the ferry daily, each with two copies now, since they had to work fast — one in front and one behind; they must have looked like a couple of paternity cases.

What a weight off our friend's minds, and off his person, when he got the last of his great tomes over to the other side! If Joyce had foreseen all these difficulties, maybe he would have written a smaller book.

Anyhow, the Ulysses subscribers in America who received their copies should know that they have Hemingway and Hemingway's obliging friend to thank for that large parcel the American Express delivered at their door one day.


from Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company
(Harcourt Brace, 1959)

sylvia beach & james joyce





last heard, the above book, that looks like it was left behind in the laundromat, goes for $65,000

 RANGES ~

Over four days we took off for ranges unknown. Things developed as we opened our eyes.


First there was heading down to Woodstock, New York to take care of Janine’s grave, and of course she was waiting for us, red granite flat stone from Barre, Vermont. Still young morning we knelt down and brushed the grass cuttings off the gravestone and there we were with her, hard to believe. One year has passed by. We thought to bring flowers, but no, we’ll bring garden flowers from our home next time and plant them here. The ones she told us she likes. The ones we once brought for her home and yard. The ones she never stopped talking about. For the moment we left a lemon sweet on the stone and walked up into town. . .to her favorite art store and rummaged around until something met our eye. . .and when we found the simple steel rings for a notebook, colored gold, green and Janine’s favorite red, we bought all three and returned to the grave and locked those rings together as bracelets that she also always wore and loved and how right this looked for her, and placed them on the glossy stone and left things that way. The lemon sweet shared between us as we walked away.


On the way to Woodstock, from Vermont, we played the new and quite long Bob Dylan album Tempest, and then played it again for good measure, and what do you know the last song ended just as we came into the town. . .climbing the hill. . .look to your left and there’s a restaurant with a sign in the window “Bob Drinks Here.”


I won’t say much about the album. There are lines like cartoon captions, a very long song that rolls on the waves with the familiar sway of an Irish sea-shanty. You know  the song I mean. It goes on for too long but then some people think the Irish go on for too long, others term it endurance and never go to war against the Irish. Dylan doesn’t seem to care what any of us think at this point (or at any point) in his life. Few of the songs can be taken up as one of our own. They’re all his private wonders or demons and since we’re waiting for the songs, he’s giving them to us. He doesn’t mind, it’s what he does. He’s already saved millions of lives. Think about this for a moment. He’s saved millions of lives. He being his songs and his endurance. Don’t sound ignorant, once again, by criticizing the painful and rotting sound of his voice. It’s a voice that has spoken for you. If you don’t think it has, where you been?


We drive home over back roads and along streams and rivers, hill and dale, there’s a story around every bend.


The next day, for breakfast, packed from home, we chow down in a lovely outdoor chapel in northern New Hampshire way the hell up. At the "Shrine of Our Lady of Grace" which we first came upon almost twenty years ago, a spacious cemetery for many motorcyclists, and there are lit totems to tell you just who. So far we have kept away from knowing anything more about this isolated location or any of its history. We prefer finding it on our own. We arrive after traveling before dawn, have breakfast, warm in the sun, then leave for other green pastures. The dead left in their place under the out stretched arms of angels and saints. I saw them when we arrived, I saw them when we left.


We’ll get as far east as Rangley Lakes, Maine where we haven’t been since 1974 and before that Sweetheart came here with her family in 1957 — a drive from Virginia and they stayed a week in one of the snug cabins along the shore. Her sister water-skied. It was America at the time. Wilhem Reich, one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry and a resident of the area passed away in prison the same year. He was sixty years old. If you don’t know about his morality play with the authorities while living in this remote region, go look up his tale of invention and struggle. Today one old-timer is bent down on one knee applying plastic letters to a small sign for his gift shop. Two friends in suspenders watch from a porch until he is done. Like watching him is helping him, and it is in a sort of backcountry-by-the-water-all-day-sort-of-way. I can tell much the temper of the small town by watching these three, who watch the two of us cross a dock for better purchase and a view up lake to the shadowy blue mountains. Sweetheart thinks she may have crossed this dock as a little girl. Could be.


We got here winding high at the top edge of the White Mountains. Through more stalled and junked and beaten to shit equipment that I’ve seen in the back woods any time in my life. Backhoes thunked in place in tall grass, bulldozers stopped and rusted, everywhere a snarling black or silver motorcycle, go-kart, dune buggy, ATVs shot or for sale, or just dumped onto their sides and left. Lumps of yellow work equipment all over the landscape. Homes miserable and hopefully better inside. Hellish ROMNEY signs everywhere, and small pesky flags, and even more shit-canned equipment. No one putting 2 + 2 together. (This is two days before the Romney video is released c/o Mother Jones). Not one, one! OBAMA sign in all our four days flying and weaving the roads over five broad states. Way up in somewhere and don’t ask where New Hampshire someone has mounted onto the side of their old woodshed, about the size of a sheet of plywood, a color photograph of the younger George Bush, smirk and all, with bold words scribed under the poster for all the road to see: “Miss Me Yet?” it asks. Fuck no, I say aloud, as we pass.


ROMNEY signs are all we see in Dixville Notch. Staked in anywhere you can set a stake. You know what happens there in about six weeks. Let’s watch what happens. As for “The Balsams,” the majestic and castle inn splendor of this alpine region, where we once came and had a look and taste without spending a dime, it’s all gone to seed, boarded up and falling to pieces. Dying on the vine with its towers and turrets and craftsmen shaped windows and framing, fantastical and tucked away amongst steep stone ledges and cliffs, the smell of the trees, makes it all the more wondrous of once upon a time. We’re “moving on” and leaving behind, indecently, whole traditions and lives. Expect pay back.


Mt. Washington in cloud cover, but the most beautiful cloud cover. Some mountains are meant not to always be fully seen. All my life coming to Mt. Washington I’ve seen the summit 50% of the time. I love the fact humans can’t always get what they want.


It took good friends in the midwest to tell us all about Sugar Hill, and this after we’ve combed the White Mountains for most of our lives. We were at the Robert Frost home tucked in the woods and white-framed, plunked between Sugar Hill and Franconia, it doesn’t matter — it’s in the woods, and in much better shape than we last left it a few decades ago, when we arrived and it was desolate and seemingly forgotten. Now, on the wall in the small barn renovated into a gift shop/museum, are large black and white photographs of poets who have had residency at this famous poet’s house where its costs $5 to take a self-guided tour, but I figured just like years ago standing at Robinson Jeffers' Pacific-edged home in Carmel — neither man would want us there, never mind standing in their yard, so why bother them now? We have a once-around slow walk of the house, notice the tiny eave windows, and everything bundled about the homestead facing hard the weather freight from the large-size Whites to the east. The view is grand but diminished with the influx of saplings and scrub. We need a woodsman to return.


There’s a guy, probably father and husband, who wants to sell us burgers and fries from his hamburger joint along the highway, and it does look cheery enough with all his kids and others chipping in at preparing food for Saturday night except the host is anxious and pushy and too eager, enough for us to lose our appetite in a flash! He’s got a shelf of small clipboards with menus on each one and all with a pen and nobody is in the place and the clipboards look brand new and and the kids look full of enthusiasm and the host is waiting for us to save his life except we can’t. . .we aren’t that rich.


Every night we drive all the way home through the night to get home, our home — we’ve had rascals wanting to harass our place, mildly terrorize the location, plus we can’t afford a motel room anywhere in this country any longer and instead buy the gas to move. $4 or better in New Hampshire and New York. $3.85 in Vermont. About the same in Maine. We saw one gas station at 6AM New Hampshire Sunday with a reading of $3.75 at the pump. A long line of thirsty vehicles already running out to the road. We will come for gas at this place on our return home and be ready for the next day. By then the price will be bumped to $3.79.


By the third day we’re beach bums all day at the very same place where cops one year ago shook us down for no reason whatsoever except they didn’t like something they were looking at. Or we reminded them of someone else, or something else. Who knows with idiots. I’m not calling them idiots, their superior officer all but called them idiots when we traveled to their station and put in a quiet complaint about his deputies’outrageous behavior. The poor elder ranger all but agreed with our assessment. So little is making sense any longer, except, and thankfully, most people are remaining civil and may want things to make as much sense as you do. It’s one hope.


We don’t see these bad cops anywhere during our beach combing days. Maybe they were reassigned to Siberia? There's just a friendly ranger trimming the hedge outside his outpost and taking our entry fee of $5 which is well worth preserving this birding compound, open waterland, winding dirt road into the puckerbrush and the wild blue yonder. Hiking for miles the edge of that blue yonder, with the tide out, we scavanged up nine sand dollars, none with chips. Barefoot, tramping, and becoming one with the landscape — one more little ingredient to knowing who and where you are.


Today I work in a driftwood weathered cabana open on all sides to the weather and half in the sun. A simple shelter. The ocean is right there.  I can hear some guy carrying a fishing rod over his shoulder and a Park-the-car-in-Harvard-Yard accent coming up from the shore after spending half the morning tossing out a line. It’s pretty free and clear doing what he’s doing and I’m doing; we’re just doing. Though he tells me he’s had “no bites” in over five hours. My Sweetheart naps next to me because she’s driven half the night.


On the beach we stay warm from dawn to noon by staying in the sun. Eat another home packed breakfast, my jacket off and on the wet sand where we hunker down, eyes on the water, wind in her hair.

photo ©  bob  arnold

EARTH ~

the book to own

Shambhala Books

2012

--       all day in the mountains

ants are also walking


Taneda Santoka

POOR SIDE OF TOWN ~

Link to Mother Jones article
 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/19/opinion/mitt-romney-class-warrior.html?hp

ARTIST ~

Alice Neel
John Lee Hooker

Once In Vermont film© bob arnold

EARTH ~

Vasko Popa

THE SONG OF YOUNG TRUTH


Truth sang in the darkness
On top of the limetree in the heart



The sun it said will ripen
On top of the limetree in the heart
If the eyes shine on it



We mocked the song
Seized and bound truth
And murdered it here under the limetree



The eyes were busy
Outside in another darkness
And saw nothing

ANVIL PRESS
2011

CHICAGO POEMS ~

Marilyn Monroe and Carl Sandburg
by Arnold Newman

I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB


I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is
---done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
---world's food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napo-
---leons come from me and the Lincolns. They die.
---And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lin-
---colns.

I am the seed ground. I am the prairie that will stand
---for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me.
---I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted.
---I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and
---makes me work and give up what I have. And I
---forget.

Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red
---drops for history to remember. Then—I forget.

When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the
---People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer
---forget who robbed me last year, who played me for
---a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world
---say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a
---sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision.

The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.


CARL SANDBURG
Chicago Poems
University of Illinois Press

PERMISSION ~

If you've kept up with my recent three essays on the Birdhouse, it has attempted to describe, sometimes with redundancy (cohesion comes strange), what has been happening around here, of late, with our back road and one troubling spot with one troubling family. There are a few outer satellites of people who have contributed by way of their private animosity and contempt, which has perked up and burped up and flubbed as they try to make something out of nothing, while a small but determined police force takes a look around. If you've got nothing to hide, you got nothing to worry about. The law says they are looking for the truth. So give them some. A police force in the woods is only as good as its leadership and assistance.


For ourselves, the police's presence has forced some of our neighbors to wake up, finally, to how they have been manipulated and duped, by a desperate individual (and perhaps associates?), and to maybe see what damage and heartache it has done to others, which may soon include themselves.


Speaking for myself, as a neighbor, and husband to the victim (Susan), I don't take any of this lightly. One wise old friend of ours, from far off, advises, "Hold your cards close." Nope, not this time. I mention no names, and won't, ever, it isn't my place, and I respect everyone's privacy, but I will zero in and nail down and sleep with you, if I have to, without touching, just to show what injustice and cruelness won't be allowed, to get to the bottom of this because, no one hurts the one I love. Woman, or earth.


When there were "19 witnesses", all bogus — because there were no "19 witnesses" within miles or ear shot of the altercation of this woman onto Susan on the day it happened — I watched Susan spiral and sadden into a deepness, which isn't good, at what had happened to this woodlands and river she loves. Her home. Nothing was making sense.


So it was time to make sense, real sense, not by simply watching lawmakers set up for their catch, but to enlist true spirits and doers and activists and workers and writers and educators and so many of them beautiful friends, to say a word or two as a character testimonial, at whatever their chosen length, for Susan. For fellowship. Believe me, everyone who has contributed: you are beautiful, and I know you have a very good idea what your contribution and precise timing has made for us right now.


It isn't enough to watch the lawmakers excel at their duties and diligence, often fitted into play by strict authority, intimidation, and shocking and obliging good manners. It's everything and blueberry pancakes to see people — the you's and me's — stop a moment and draw up from our pockets a skill at showing such enduring brotherhood. Thank you, every one of you. I hope this road I live on will one day wake up and see and feel and show they could be made of the same moxie as all of you.


And before these words were out of my mouth, some neighbors showed us this very thing. Just the other day, and this is how —

you know the folks I have often described as those using "fireworks"? Well, this morning they called us up and asked for a meeting. . .as soon as possible. They, of course, are not the troublemakers, but folks who seem confused and caught in the crossfire of bad acts and worse results. They wanted to come clean. Good friends had just left after a lovely day and overnight visit with us, and this visit was a blessing since it had been a long time in the making, and allowed a certain dark passage of time (the trouble here) to get shook and poked at and maybe broke open. I can't tell you how, I can only tell you I felt something. It was the start of maybe something better and better, maybe even a buckling to the crap, and a re-awakening for many involved.


We walked over to our neighbors, by sunshine, then into our woodlot, on a narrow path, out of the trees and onto their driveway and up to their kitchen door where we were welcomed inside into an immediate apology of profuse and genuine explanations. Followed by their questions and a vigorous conversation, minted by deep mugs of tea. This meant they wished for us to stay. Wished to get things off their chests and likewise take on some solid facts. We gave them the facts. Then we were shown all the home, upstairs and down, many of the rooms were private, and we were being welcomed. It was a thorough and remarkable repentance, with a generosity as if they were doing it from themselves, plus a world incapable. We could only feel calm and calmer.


Little did they know, and why should they? when they showed us one room, it was the very room I held a dying friend with cancer twenty-five years ago, as I helped move him down the hallway from there to the bathroom. I hadn't been in the bedroom or on these blond varnished floors since. Little did they know, or did I, when we returned to our home from this house would we find a phone message from his widow saying today was the anniversary of his passing. And my wife and I haven't heard from her since the cow jumped over the moon. While a half hour before, I was standing in the room where my friend expired. I don't need anyone to tell me it was my dying friend who brought us back to his house today via these lovely new neighbors, his calling widow, his guiding hand. My old friend doesn't like seeing what he is seeing. My old dying friend, as when alive, is trying to help us where he can. Help the new neighbors where he can. My old dying friend would never be called a ghost, but more a guardian angel. I could never call him dead.


Sometime, in the afternoon, looking at one another, it made Susan realize and start to cry.


No one should be trapped in a greater hopelessness.


We feel there is a break through — amongst all our friends, the pursuit of some neighbors, the living and dying who will assist. "Often I am permitted to return to a meadow."


Permitted.


Yes indeed.

Robert Duncan


photo © susan arnold
"green river early 70s"

WINDOW ~

in the living room

with me






as the sun warms the bird

it sings

photos © bob arnold

FRONTIER ~

American Story by Deborah Orr (U.K.)

"I'M YOUR WITNESS" ~
(Rural Coda)

Two old friends, Green River Vermont
(the day after Hurricane Irene, 2011)

"You have kingfisher, fox, maple, and a thousand poets on your side: no
contest!" — Malcolm Ritchie

Dear Malcolm,

I've wrung this subject out to dry for most people — the few neighbors and the some troubles — never using their names, of course, to respect their privacy, but I do wish to gain a portrait at what I believe has happened to the new rural lifestyle. So let me say a bit more since I've had some friends write me back today after reading my second essay and asking, "Hey, Bob, what the heck is going on up there?"


Here's what's going on: for an urban wise guy reading these essays and in the city, I'm sure I'd be one myself, I can imagine someone saying: "So you got a few naughty words said to you both. Your wife was picked on by someone bigger. A bunch of fools trespass, make a mess for awhile, swear at you and leave. One woman steals a pail of rocks. Some knuckleheads do some cutting. Some out-of-towners shoot a stack of fireworks off from their relatives' land with no idea really where the fireworks are going but it happens to be into your woodlot. Yeah, that's dangerous, but not the end of the world. Maybe a chicken got killed by a city slicker's dog when he came up to your woods region to play Paul Bunyan, and another woman who runs-with-the-wolves (dogs) had her pack get out of control and pester your farmyard ducks. Big deal. Stop being crybabies."


Right-o. And here's the difference — in the city you want a pack of cigarettes: a minute walk. A beer? Right around the corner. How about a slice of pizza? No problem — almost any corner. Need more milk? Got it! Want to go to any store? Hundreds of stores? Thousands? Right at your fingertips. Out in the countryside it's a long walk or drive to anywhere so we have ourselves, the essential community, or what you can make sense of existence. Some can do with a circle of squirrels. But to be healthy, wealthy and wise, without money, you want one another. And you should have one another. Otherwise, speaking for this place on earth: it's big woods (find my place by Google map, it's in the trees), and the slim, beautiful river. Steep eastern hillside and bundles of low hills to the west. When I came here forty years ago I hiked in on my own two feet, a knapsack on my back, no vehicle, a borrowed hut in the woods, and no one lived on this road but one other person and he's now long gone. Maybe dead. When he was here we built two houses together. Put up fencing, cut logs, sugared. My community. We hayed fields together. I hiked a mile up river to his place at 5 in the morning to catch a ride with him to town and shared cold pancakes with cold syrup on white paper plates. When we were done eating he 'did the dishes' — by tossing the paper plates to his pack of dogs out in the mudroom and they licked off the sweets. Two weeks later I'd find these same plates and others blown far away from his crummy shack contraption. The plates blew and sailed across a wide dismal field of rock, grass tuft, weeds and now and then potatoes. Yes, we worked that field together, too. He and I were community. Essential.


Times changed. My old buddy, born here, moved off. His son took over, but they were like night and day. I got married to a girl I would never be apart one day or night the next forty years. The valley grew people, not quickly, gradually, and a new community got sprung. Many of us did things together, even communal cookouts, families grew. Some of us protected the outer reaches by saving our covered bridge, river preservation, and of course shooting down the co-generated power plant that would have ruined the solace of this place on earth. It took togetherness.


More changes happened the more people arrived, tucked away into pockets they settled. By now I was happiest with my family, working at the manual trades of stone work, carpentry and treework, and I had plenty of work. A good deal of it right where I could walk or hike to a job from my back door. I had people who hired me for twenty years at a stretch. They could have hired anyone, the work wasn't that specialized, and they went out of their way to hire me. Not that I was special; I took it that they were special, and in my eyes they were. I could talk to you all night around a fire about the people and couples that saved my life, enriched my life, gave me more life, and it's still happening. I'm in the home I'm in today, and for almost forty years, because of the good man who fell for me and my wife. He could have made triple what we paid him for it all. He liked our work skills, he liked us. Even married us. Because we restored the house on more grit than money, and tamed the wild yard and prettied up the joint and seemed to be home all the time because of our work and lifestyle, it was said, by some, we must have money. Inherited money. Maybe one of those to be envied "trust-funders." This was even said by people who thought they knew us. Rumors ripple and slip under doors, sweep past cracks in the windows. Fly up trees. Here's what we have: my wife's family who disowned her when she moved to the woods and married this life, and $1000 gifted to us from my family when we were married in our young twenties. Period. Like good soldiers we put that $1000 in the bank where it is today. You see, what we were rich with was each other and some guardian angels.


We started our bookshop when one lovely person and then another donated whole sections of their private libraries to us. And I had already donated part of mine. There was no talk of money. We supplemented our incomes while gaining a bookshop by every job almost there was out in the countryside — from farm work to landscape work to house building house dismantling treework sugaring painting stone building snow-shoveling dirt-shoveling junk jobs. If it needed doing and no one else would do it, we did it. Made a living. Pushed our way forward, and people always people helped us. Many many communities.


I'm about to release the next four chapters of a bibliography detailing the last many years of Longhouse showing what we have printed and released to this date — 400 items, which comes to over 1000 poets over forty years at networking and out of those 1000 poets I can't think of much trouble except here and there. We all survived. We kept small. Our motto: if it makes sense we want it. If it doesn't, it'd better be real interesting. We cared nothing about holding a ratio of women to men to black to white. Immaterial. Just make it float. Many many people lent a hand. Earlier in the spring, still in winter coats, I met a friend who we are working with on our next book project. Out of his old coat, in a sleepy parking lot, he handed me notes for a manuscript that he is holding as an executor. I took it. He asked me the cost on the book. I told him. His next unexpected move was to unroll half of that amount we would need, in cash, into my hands. We nodded. Job done. Better than a handshake. Certainly better than any contract. If I cheat him, I'm the cheater.

So what happened down here in this river valley, after all? Some people got out of hand. The simplest thing in the world to do. And as simple to repair. You just stop and know what you've done and act on it. A bunch of knuckleheads get caught on our land cutting trees and acting bigger than their britches. They're meaning to do well, but they're ignorant as to where they are. Stop them. Okay. Now try to talk to them, reason with them. They want nothing to do with that, and now here's your problem. Watch it escalate for the next year. Listen to them tell their own version of the story, spread as bad gum gossip. When here's the only version: you were trespassing, damaging land, and you should have stopped, apologized and mended ways. It's simple.


Woman who steals rocks is next up and she's heard about the first ruckus. No problem with her wanting rocks on our land, but why not ask us first? She doesn't think she has to because "it isn't your land", she informs us, though it is. Go check the town land map, I offer as advice. Check the town records just who pays the taxes on this land. Believe me because I'm telling you, politely. She doesn't. Calls me the Most Unfriendliest Man in All the World. I think of using it as a book title. Asks me if she has to dump her bucket of rocks out? I say, of course not, keep them, but maybe ask next time you wish to come and take. She calls me the Most Unfriendliest so-so again, even after I say take the rocks. Scowls. Drives away. Before she gets too far I ask my wife to try her hand at smoothing things over with the woman; the woman leaves her, as well, in a huff. The woman then calls the town clerk when she gets home. The town clerk is away and a young man is substituting in her place. The Friendliest Woman in the world asks about our property and the river and its land mass, "who owns this?" The young man is in uncharted waters. He says things he shouldn't say, mostso to this woman. This woman takes what she hears as verbatim and calls my wife and they begin a screaming match on the phone. The woman's husband, who knows nothing of what has occurred with me on the river, jumps into the act and begins to scream, too. They are both working on the information given by the young man at the town clerk's office. He's a nice fellow. A school chum once upon a time with our son, but he's over his head, and so is this screaming couple. All are now fueled on misinformation. When the screaming stops, and a day later, I wrote and asked the couple to come by for a talk. Nothing doing. The young man working at the town clerk position loses his job for an undisclosed reason. The mess just gets bigger and bigger.


This woman now teams up with another woman, never mind the folks kicked off our land for woodcutting, and the buzz is "You (Arnolds) don't let people on your land." Funny, we have the only unposted swimming hole on the whole road from here in Vermont to Massachusetts. There aren't many, but they're all posted, but not ours. The person who tells us we don't let people on our land uses our swimming hole. I have very intelligent friends who just about now in this story are asking me, "Bob, what in the fuck are you doing dealing with these people for?" Because they're my community. It's what we got. I'm in my home.


You Don't Let People On Your Land woman has a true chip on her shoulder. Though a somewhat friend with my wife this won't stop the woman to pick a fight with my wife. You see her three sons have built a fine looking circle of rocks and quarter down on our land, they think hidden from our view, and this all happened after Hurricane Irene. Quite a time for us all. The young men have made a special place to meet and have parties. It isn't on their land, it's on our land, but that doesn't seem to matter to them. They like the spot. It's along a brook that feeds the river. This brook happens to be on their own land as well. No matter. They like it right here, stay here. Their mother knows it's our land but the three sons are out of the house, out of her hair. Little do they all know we hike our land, all of it, and discover the stone council ring. It's well-built, made of hefty stone, some elaborate chair models and a circle campfire. Very King Arthur. Because of the Hurricane and all that we went through, we let this go since winter is coming on. It'll disband on its own probably over the winter. We don't say a word.


In the spring we discover the council ring is larger, the campfire is larger, looks dangerous, is dangerous, it has been a dry spring. No one is thinking about the danger of fires. My wife while hiking up to our mailbox one morning meets this mother and tells her about the campfire and says it was a good thing after the Hurricane, drew together people and raw emotions, but now we'd like the land returned to the way we like it. No more dangerous fires. The trash is everywhere, please pick it up etc. The mother cares nothing about hearing any of this. It's been a good thing, why stop it? is her plan. My wife says, fine, we'll be here Thursday (it's now Monday) to see it's cleaned up and put back to its original way. Please tell your sons.


This mother doesn't tell her sons because her sons told us they weren't told a thing. We find this out when we arrive to dismantle the site and meet one son bewildered by the news and shaking enough to go fetch his older brother who comes down swearing and fussing and calling me an "Asshole", four times, itching for a fight. No one told him either. I shook his hand when he arrived, and with those same hands took the camp site apart right before his eyes. He showed no interest in helping. Because of his assault and his mother's neglect and enabling, my wife called the law and the law came out from town, investigated, and posted a no trespassing order on our land only for these two family members. There are two others sons, but they caused no problem (other than taking part in the campfire).


In our experience, the mother and the oldest son cared nothing about respecting what we wished for our land, nor willing to return the respect for us allowing their use and now returning the land to its original way. And of course it only got worse. Weeks down the road, one morning, again my wife was hiking up for mail and the woman lay in wait, with a friend of her's briefly hanging around. This friend saw the start of things before she took off. How the woman provoked an argument with my wife who wished to avoid any contact except a friendly hand wave (it's pathetic for me to think of how much grace my wife still could share). The woman admonished my wife for calling the law in, putting up the trespassing order, and of course she's mocking its rule. My wife tried to explain how she patiently went through the reasonable route of asking the woman and her sons to clean up their mess from our land and depart. Simple? Nah, of course not. The woman screamed "Fuck You!" at my wife, stormed across the road onto our land, broke the trespass law and began to jump up and down on trash she often throws from her land onto our land and screamed some more, "I'm Trespassing, I'm trespassing. Call the police! Call the police!" she sang like a crow. Arms flailing. My wife shook off the swear words, studied the woman jumping up and down and noticed and was reminded by her trash on our land, saw this woman's personality had grown way out of proportion and was now a threat, and said, "I will." And she did.


The chaos that has ensued since then is a carnival ride out in a big black nowhere. Elsewhere I detail what the law has done. Law, court appearances by the woman, bogus witnesses she has enlisted that had nothing at all to do with the altercation with my wife, scowling looks by all the family at us, from other neighbors, cars that drive by us dangerously fast. Loud car horns in the night passing our house. Fun and games. The lousiest form of gossip about us, like how we have brought "a law suit against" this woman. All untrue. It's the State of Vermont who has taken a close look at this woman, her son and their actions and they are drawing a bead. I wonder almost every day what keeps her from coming to see us, except she can't (court order, not my order) and talking this out, mediating as they say, apologizing, and rebuilding a relationship. It's simple if you can do it. Except it gets worse and worse. Not one person on this road ever comes close to us to ask what in the world is going on? Of course they have heard things. No, this care and query will arrive instead from Scotland, Japan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Venezuela, Florida and other world locations. An old friend from the Berkshires says, "watch your back." Only the oldest friend we have in the valley, who lives two miles up river from us in the village, and is the oldest person in this valley and a person whose family owned all the homes in the village once upon a time, so she has seen some things, been through some things, knows the region with a fine crystal ball, asks Susan, "Why are they picking on you, dearie?" When she hears why, she winces and then winks and says, "I'm your witness."


I have friends who ask about my earlier essay and this landlocked land I wrote about. Lots of good people have little property spots and they're landlocked. Tough to get to. Often they need help and an abiding landowner to let them slip through. You bet, I'm all for it. I've done it with abiding landowners all my life down here. But the landowner I was writing about in my essay was someone looking for a land grab; something more when she sold her house and property and then this extra landlocked piece, and it didn't seem to bother her in the least to tell the realtor to just go through our land. There wasn't some cabin in the woods there that some old prospector or hermit couldn't get to because the big bad wolf wouldn't let it happen. It was a landowner reaping more for her benefit and against our wishes of not wanting one more driveway and development where it was quite happily wild and content.


Over this summer, those "fireworks" folks I've written about from time to time, who neighbor south of us, sauntered up the road while Susan and I were on the river cutting an old downed maple tree on the rocky shore. Lots of work. They asked if we knew where our boundary line ran with theirs because they saw a swimming spot right in the vicinity of the border. Not only did we know where it was, twenty-five years ago we taught our son how to swim there. We later abandoned it like good Indians and found another swimming hole and another, moving our tent around. Leaving the places unharmed. Grown in. We told them, "Sure — the boundary line runs right through the swimming hole and it's on both our properties." They asked, "Is it okay if we make a small path down and swim there?" We said, "Absolutely, go ahead. We used to swim there all the time." End of story. Very simple. They thanked us and walked away. They came for something, got it, left. We didn't hold it against them. We don't hold anything against anybody playing fair. We wanted to show them how easy it was to ask and how easy it is to move along.


Bob Arnold
8 September '12

top photo : "susan & eleanor"

photos & art © bob arnold

HABITAT ~

THE ROCK IS MY HOME

another essay on rural life and neighborhood

"Keep you heart clear and transparent
And you will never be bound."

— Ryokan

____________________________________

Here's one thing I can tell you — I'm never wrong, when I'm right; and I'm never right, when I'm wrong. Yes, it sounds like a country bumpkin simpleton message. But just try to live it, straight down the middle. Knowing how to admit and stand true when you are correct, and knowing how to back down gracefully and admit when you are wrong. Mistakes. Lies. If it gets to lies, and you believe in your lies and have convinced others of your lies, it's a bad spot. Best to awaken.


Believe me — in this time of bizarre weather patterns, rising political and social fanatics, alienation to one and all — I'd rather be together than apart.


This is where the second part of my essay on rural life and neighbors has taken me. Taken us. I'm thinking of Susan, too. In fact she will be a key player in this tale.


I'll link for those that don't know my first essay on rural life and neighbors:

http://longhousepoetryandpublishers.blogspot.com/search/label/Hurricane%20Irene

and move on. After reading that essay, you might want to read this one.


You know of the neighbor who stole our rocks, who defied our owning and honoring our property rights. It should be measured that we don't care so much about ownership. It isn't a power game and the fact of owning. But owning a piece of property which we are attempting to protect and keep as natural and free as possible, is our intent. Free as natural, not necessarily free for man to do as they bloody well please.


Along with this rock-hustling neighbor, there was the small gang of tree cutters and interlopers on our land believing they were doing "good" by, of course, having absolutely no communication with us, who own the land, and work the land and should be included in anything to be done on our land. They didn't think so. In fact when confronted, they bullied their way past us and stormed away. Why talk? Why learn anything? Why show grace?

“Thought is only a flash between two long nights, but this flash is everything.”
— Henri Poincare

Let me introduce that we had a reputable town realtor trying to sell a landlocked piece of property on an abutting neighbor's land, and this neighbor was selling out and thought she could make a little more by selling a little extra. Naturally, she didn't want to use her property for access to her own landlocked haven. That would mean opening an old woods road past her home that would wind up and go past a neighboring home, and they certainly didn't want to see this old road taken up. So she told the realtor, and the realtor just went ahead, that they could track through our land, up back, out of sight; and actually advertise the piece of property this way, and show this access route through our land to all prospective buyers. Crazy, huh? But true. I want to think the reputable realtor didn't know these shenanigans were being carried out this way, and I'm pretty sure he didn't, because the field worker realtor was either let go or fired shortly thereafter for his truancy act. Yes, he had convinced prospective buyers this would be their way through to the landlocked piece, right through our land. Where we have a woodlot. Where we go to cut wood, hauled out by a truck. They were probably imagining our small woods road could be their road. No one, again, came to ask, came to talk. It was only after this realty company was caught in their stupidity that this neighbor selling-out came to visit us to propose, properly, what she wanted to have happen. As soon as we said it wasn't a good idea, she rolled up her map and was heading out the door. No need to be friendly, no need to be neighborly, no need to catch up on other news. When she sold her house and land, and her deceased husband had been a friend and a fine fiddle of a man, she made sure she left the new owners with all the historical "facts" of people and places in this river valley.


Those new neighbors shot bottle rocket and headbanger fireworks into our woodlot, though they have two spacious mowings to expand their resources and showcase their entertainment. Since fireworks are illegal in Vermont — and I thought we all lived out here in the woods because we like it quiet — we all had a talk and we all agreed it'd be best to snuff the fireworks. Now they strike, from time to time, a resonant gong which ripples on all the woods leaves, and through the rain, past the snow. Kind of nice.

“The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought, and attended to my answer.” — Henry David Thoreau

This brings us to the woman up river from our place who accosted my wife in the road one morning after being served a "Notice Against Trespass" papers by the sheriff's department for trespassing on our land previously, starting fires, leaving trash, enabling other family members to do as they wished on our land, and finally swearing at the top of her lungs at my wife, "Fuck You!" My wife was hiking up to our mailbox and returning home, purposely walking along the roadside on our side of our land and staying clear. The woman taunted her over. The mistake she made is someone else was there, and I'll get to that down the line. My wife had already endured this woman's mocking and disregard for our land and wishes. The woman hadn't taken part with that other gang of woodcutters on our land, but she was there as it happened and was also there when my wife arrived and asked everyone to leave the land, cutting tools and all. This woman wasn't ignorant after that point as to who owned the land. Still, she used it as she wished. She has also used the swimming hole on our land, and we never had any problem with that, or anyone else using it. The pine needle path down to the swimming hole has always been there for anyone to use. It’s a country thing.


Long before the bullying incident we fully communicated with the woman and her family members about their trespassing and damage to our property, and we were ignored, dismissed and finally assaulted by all parties; so, folks, what would you like us to do? No one should ever be allowed to run over someone else.


Now here comes the rub.


After one woman stole rocks to her heart's content on our land and disregarded our attempt to educate her as to whose land it was and how easy it would have been to simply ask permission (and it would have been given); after overly zealous woodcutters and a dutiful neighborhood cleanup crew stormed onto our property and made damage and then felt no need to talk and reconcile after their assault; long after the neighbor and her realtor squad, and her neighbor and friend who now wouldn't benefit from this landlocked sale; after the fireworks folks who bought one of my books (Yokel) and read it and then worried by email "Will you write a poem about us?" (be careful, poets). After some of this crew then talked and bemused and instigated a whole other bunch, who we don't know at all, but we see them, they're the ones who don't know us but speak about us. Load all of them into a sauce pan and what do you get? Including the guy who a few weeks ago took spruce saw logs from two trees I dropped on our land and I'll share with him the lumber we get off his portable mill — they sure look good — but he joined this sauce pan bunch to sign a petition to the "good character" of the woman up river who accosted my wife, let her sons run amok on our land, screamed "Fuck You!" From now on let’s call this woman the Defendant. The court, not us, has said she is.

"The actions of men are the best interpreters of their thoughts"

— John Locke

The story gets wider. Well over twenty years ago, before a good deal of these people even moved out here, I organized, yes momentarily solo, a grassroots organization to stop a co-generated power plant from moving into this river valley and ruining for good this habitat. I raised a solo ruckus for one day until my wife joined, and then we quickly enlisted some neighbors, and this reverberated rapidly throughout the woodlands until we had the webbing of at least three other neighboring towns. Where the co-generated plant was to go was on a sawmill property, still active, and the lumberman was a friend. Not only to me, but my family of five generations lumbermen. Most of them thought and lived just like this man: business. A co-generated plant was good for business, which is true if you don't live ten miles away from the nearest business to tie in your facility. So we all fought the madcap plan for this one out in the boonies. Our community of neighbors drew together tightly, we all wanted to save our homes and quality of life. It was exhilarating. The co-generated business minds were from faraway Michigan. These suits sent out their henchmen to work the towns over, smaller communities, individuals. Sweetener was added (money) and nobody budged. More exhilaration, more bonding, a tight hold was won. Long story short, we beat the pants off the corporation. The owner of the business actually made a personal call to me and told me his news, and furthered it by complimenting me, and those I worked with, on just what a community could show. They left. Where to? A week ago I was down in my old home ground of the Berkshires and this plant, I heard, had set up at the old G.E. plant in Pittsfield. Already a long ruined spot, though tied nicely to an urban locale and service. Ideal for a co-generated plant. My family had a lumberyard a stone's throw from the plant at one time and I remember unloading boxcars from the same rails that ran through the plant. Small world. There is a proper place to put a co-generated plant. There are also people who will protect mother earth.


Today one or two of those people I grass-rooted with, maybe three, are on this petition the Defendant up the road is passing around to showcase her stable and neighborly character. I don't at all doubt she has one with any of them. It's not my position to doubt. But I can tell you she is a threatening, menacing, and a pathological liar when dealing with us. It's a shame. If the court, the state's attorney, the fine sheriff's department are able to do their job thoroughly, this will all be found. The witness list, which is only a witness list on this woman's character, has been now spoiled by the Defendant introducing the 'fact' some of the people signing the petition have had a difficult time with us. No shit. I just described it all above. Come to me personally and my wife or I will elaborate the scenario for you. These "witnesses" seem to confuse whom exactly is the victim(s) here.



“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.” — John Wooden




For the state's attorney and the sheriff(s), they only care who was a "witness" that day when the Defendant accosted my wife in the road and hurled verbal abuse and trespassed. My wife has studied the list of names. NO ONE was anywhere nearby, or some weren’t even in Vermont! when the event happened. My wife only wishes there were witnesses, and those witnesses could be petitioned and be interviewed by the state and the lawmakers.


But what is curious about this list of mighty "19 witnesses" — while none are even holding a shred of merit about the accosting and cause, the Defendant has left off the very ONE witness who was there. Back to the early part of my story where I say there was a third party, just leaving after a visit with the Defendant, but she was there long enough to hear the woman accost my wife and provoke an argument. She was left OFF the witness list for obvious reasons by the Defendant: she will be pulled in by the law, be known, and be asked questions pertinent to that day. If she is wise enough to tell the truth, she'll tell the same story my wife has told. It won't be pretty about this Defendant.


The State of Vermont prosecutor offered the Defendant the diversion-program wherein she must admit to the fact of her trespass and actions, which means she violated our "notice against trespass." She could have stated, "okay it was a bad hair day, and I did do everything she [Susan] said" etc., the Defendant would then have to do brief community work and/or write a letter of apology. The whole criminal case would be removed from all records upon completion of the Defendant's court required duties. Pretty mellow.


Instead, she denied any wrong doing, absolute. In my opinion, a terrible decision on her part, and the state continued with prosecuting. This was not our wish. We had hoped she would admit to her actions, mend fences with us, and move along as neighbors. Instead she has thrown up a smoke-screen of "19 witnesses", many, I believe, ignorant to what she was attempting to do here, and now the state's attorney is obligated to waste many days, time, and tax payers money to investigate. They will find out no one (but our one witness, and a friend of the Defendant) was at the scene of the crime that morning with my wife, and all have been used. The Defendant will then raise a stink that none of her "19" are factual witnesses, but some have had trouble with us as well. Can you see how "trouble" starts down here? It's selfish, manipulated, provoked, instigated, bullied, and it breeds contempt. That contempt in the wrong hands, untruthful hands, gathers a mob.


Just in case, by an off-chance, someone from our neighborhood cares to read this essay — please understand what is happening here: we and our land have been assaulted, now lied about by cowards, and lied about further into the community. Not once, twice or three times, but in a pattern. The Defendant in this most egregious case is actually spreading rumors that we are filing a lawsuit against her, when the truth is the state of Vermont is charging her and her actions as criminal. This is their decision after studying the case and her actions. Any sheriff visiting your home (neighbor), or interviewing you, is the Defendant's doing. She supplied your name as one of her "19 witnesses". Lucky you. You've just been manipulated by the Defendant the same way the truth has.

“Anger is one letter away from danger.” —Eleanor Roosevelt

Once upon a time, quite long ago, I was hired by neighbors to put down an interior sun room floor on the back of their house. I worked the first day on this, installing v-joint 2 x 6 tongue & groove spruce. The folks had been away all day and when they returned I was gone, but they called concerned that I had maybe put the floor down wrong for them. The last time I had done this for people they liked the v-joint exposed, rather than boards flush. In hindsight I should have asked, in hindsight the customers should have told me, but we made things work. I went back to the job to work late into the night right after my supper and apologized to the people, and they were fine about it, and all was well again. I took up what flooring had been put down and made things right. They helped me along by understanding mistakes do get made. A fluency returned. The trouble with the Defendant, her trespassing, her foul language, her son's foul language and belligerency, all could be handled by talking. Admitting their mistakes. Repairing some very bad moves, and continuing. This can't always work this way, but in this case, I believe it could.


Like the "19 witnesses" believe, I would agree the woman can be a positive example and offer much good to a community. I've seen her away from this region, at a college arboretum in fact, like us, at the end of a long winter in the woods, enjoying the fragrances and sight of everything-spring. Like many out here she has a green thumb for gardening and renewal. Unfortunately, like some out here, she has a stubborn streak and selfishness to do as she pleases, which has contributed to enabling her family to strike out against us, with little regard to the consequences. As if there are no consequences. Not one of the "19 witnesses" ever took the time, or care, to approach us first, before signing this petition of goodwill about the woman's character, to listen to what may have happened on our end of things. It maybe won't surprise you to know that half of these "19 witnesses" are parties to the escapades I've described where trouble and abuse were involved on our land, and the other half I don't even know or have ever met. In fact, one person I notice as a "witness" to the woman's "good character" described her to me, with his own enthusiasm, just a month ago, in the most unflattering and derogatory language. Ain't life grand?

“To live outside the law you must be honest.” — Bob Dylan

One can even surmise that while the state may prove all "19 witnesses" immaterial in regard to the assault by the Defendant to my wife, and her trespassing onto our land (because none were present), and all to our benefit; there is no benefit remaining when you have a mob mentality formed and gaining purchase for one, while going against and assisting the demeaning of those who are the victim(s).


It's like watching a legendary and quite aged and brittle minded actor on a stage, demeaning a President of the United States (Barack Obama) who does not demean. It's not playing fair. It's playing to the crowd, it's playing to the mob, it's people ganging up with their insecurities and grudges and contempt. Don't be fooled by numbers. A zero's beautiful emptiness and roundness (O) holds up all the rest of the numbers.


We're all used to politicians sometimes lying. State's attorneys and the like are politicians and we await to see if they will actually do their job, or veer from the truth, not settle this case where it belongs fixed square in the teeth. So far they are running a tight ship and barring no expense and time. We haven't provoked this time and expense: a Defendant wanting to smoke screen and lie has done that for them. I'm being so candid and bold at this juncture because I don't like how any of it smells. Only the sheriffs seem on the up and up to us. They drive out, investigate, work the bushes and rattle the cages. You have to rattle cages when you're in a lie. And I never want cops roaming these woods since the woods culture has always had the ability to take care of itself. With a code and civility and fairness. No more. Just look at what we experience with political events. Hoopla and stretching the truth is one thing to empower the troops. Down right malicious lies and mockery and personal assassinations is quite another.

"If it is acceptable for leaders to take drastic action on the basis of a lie, without an acknowledgement or an apology when they are found out, what should we teach our children?" — Bishop Desmond Tutu

We sense a kangaroo court out here, a bubbling to the surface timid lynch mob, with a roiling rooster romper room list of grudges. Those who believe they can live as they wish and where they wish and how they wish. It's just the woods, who cares? "The Arnolds hassle us," we have heard this said. You mean after you've been stealing, woodcutting and damaging, building fires, trashing, swearing, marauding, threatening, shooting fire into our woods et al. You mean that? You mean you got "hassled" from us over that?


This is where I live. This is whom we live amongst. Certainly not everyone is this way. The crybabies and grudge masters always stand out.


Over twenty years ago when we won our homeland back from the co-generated planners, we celebrated, but it wasn't long before my wife and I saw a small group and then another small group break off and want to start their own grass-roots movement. They couldn't do it, naturally, without trying to malign or blackball the original group. That's when I decided I was done with this community, mostso the types that operate this way. I'd keep individual friends and acquaintances, and we have. But we retreated. I'd build a few more stone walls for people and put on a few more roofs and cut a few more difficult trees as a worker for hire, but I was done. We raised a son, meshed with the public school years, we started a bookshop, deepened our publishing house, worked on our two-century old house, I wrote a bunch of books, and we traveled all over the country by saddle tramp trains. I also worked with a neighbor and his fantastic yet poorly planned and failing junkyard, until he was driven out of this valley on a rail.


How about the neighbors with the fireworks? — we offered awhile ago they come by for a visit at our picnic table for some lemonade & pie. They never answered. Though we hear their gong rise out of what appears to be from nowhere right where we sit, where the sun is warm.


Bob Arnold
7 September '12

“Once a word has been allowed to escape, it cannot be recalled.”— Horace

photo © bob arnold