Toad Haul

We show up at dusk at the road barrier just outside Richmond Park on a day neither the fog nor the shock of the tragedies in Japan ever abated. A small knot of the "wellies and anorak set" plus two in suits, quickly identified as town councilmen for the Richmond Park, Ham and Petersham districts, David William and Brian Miller, all hold blue buckets and survey the knee-high chicken wire fence lining Church Road that was to corral the migrating toads. It was our charge, as the newly inducted Toad Patrol, to carry the common toads, or bufo bufo across the road and further them on their journey to their ancestral spawning pond, now apparently enclosed in the Sultan of Brunei's estate.

"There are holes in the wall they can wriggle through," says Jonathan Fray, who lives just down the road. He and his partner, Diane Slater, instigated this amphibian rescue effort, after watching hundreds of their numbers squashed on this road last year. Alison, the Ecology Officer from the Richmond Borough Environment Directorate, is handing out Risk Assessment forms to the Patrol, warning us that we had a high risk of colliding with fast cars and a medium-to-high risk of drowning in deep water as well as contacting toad poisons. This gets my attention.

I'm directed to the supplementary sheet which whimsically cites a one Miss Ormerod, a Victorian lady who determines to find out for herself what it was like to eat a great crested newt. Now whether she was sampling what MacBeth's weird sisters evidently found to be a revelatory delicacy, or looking for an equivalent of our blowfish sushi experience--a slight tingling of the lips, but short of convulsions, wasn't specified in the handout. Only that it was not recommended that we try licking a toad, lest we endure the foaming at the mouth and shivering fits that beset Miss Ormerod. Oh these wacky Brits. They're only reserved on the outside, just propose a lip smack with a toad and see how fast they break into smiles.

As it turns out, the poison toads emit from their 'warts' is pretty much their only defense from predators-- not being as spry as frogs. Still a toad has to be pushed pretty far before he releases his amines and alkaloids (one of them, omethyl bufotenine, is said to be a potent hallucinogen). As in, teeth clamping down on his back. I'm put at ease by Alison coming forward with a bufo male who clings to her wool jacket and looks about quite calmly at our huddle, even as she picks up his feet to show us the knobs beneath his long toes that identify him as a male. A councilman surfaces with a female, twice the size of the male and rather more anxious to be on her way, quite bulging with eggs, like an overstuffed soft-sided valise.

A biker speeds through in the deepening dusk, and then a few more, ignoring the Traffic Diversion sign. David William calls after them, "You can't ride through here," but is largely ignored. One stops and asks why not. Evidently not all residents share the concern of Froglife, the booster association trying to avert amphibian disaster. This little group has transported hundreds of toads across Church Road in the last few weeks, while Froglife reports forty thousand more toad lives saved across Britain each season.

But two toads is all it was to be tonight. Diane says it may not be warm or wet enough tonight for the hoardes to emerge. "If you can see your breath," Jonathan adds, "you probably won't see many toads." We walk the wire fence but see no movement among the fallen alder leaves, so will come back on a warmer, wetter evening.

Perhaps tonight as the Toad Patrol wend their separate ways back to the latest flash of unimaginable suffering around the planet, they will keep this little song from Wind in the Willows as the selvedge of their minds, and dream of carrying blue pailfulls of bufo bufo to safety: 'Helper and healer, I cheer--Small waifs in the woodland wet--Strays I find in it, wounds I bind in it--Bidding them all forget.'

Nutmeg, waterfall and lime time

A nutmeg scents my palm, the dark red flames of mace clinging to the glossy brown surface--as though Aubrey Beardsley on ganja had taken his brush to them. I hold it tightly as Vaughan says, "95% of the nutmeg crop was wiped out by Hurricane Ivan in 2004-- and a tree take 7 years to bear after planting. But we are resilient." He guides us through the nutmeg and banana cooperative plantations enroute to our hike to St. Margaret's Falls, first of the Seven Sisters in Grand Etang National Park.

Four of us have torn ourselves from the siren arms of the luxury resort on Pink Gin Beach to explore the precipitous verdant mountainsides of Grenada's interior. The road winds through forests of palm,

mahogany, and the few giant gommier trees spared both in 2004, and the sucker punch of Hurricane Emily the following year. We passed homes on stilts, some newer and in good repair, others rust-riven and bearing the clawmarks of hurricanes. Many have hibiscus-rimmed gardens with paw paw (papaya), a few cacao, nutmegs, sweet potatoes, corn, pigeon peas and callaloo, a dark vegetable that looks and tastes like bok choi. Plants flourish

in this rich volcanic and humus-dense soil. They say if you spit a watermelon seed, a vine bearing fruits will appear the next day.

Vaughan tells us about the traditionally cooperative nature of

the Grenada's cocoa, banana and nutmeg industries. "But the IMF aid after Ivan was a double-edged sword. It helped some more than others, and tested the bonds of the community." We walk past a colorful farm with beautiful golden cows, staked to keep them out of the crops. "We have a strong belief that we are not like crabs in a barrel who climb on each other's backs to escape from the bottom. Here, if one succeeds, he tries to pull the rest up with him."

His words spread warmth through my limbs like the balmy morning air, as we pass ginger, heliconia, and begonia blooming along the path. We reach Mitchell's Bar, closed but watched over by Bob Marley, and work our way through the giant bamboo and down rock steps, built in the 18th century to make carrying the harvest over this mountain a bit easier.

After boulder-hopping across a river, Vaughan points to a narrow muddy uphill track, and says we can carry on to St. Margaret's or take this side path to Honeymoon Falls. Happily, the others agree to head upriver to Honeymoon, which we reach in short order after Vaughan splits the river with his body to show us where to climb. We reach the pool at the bottom of the

50-meter falls and plunge into chill water. Without question, this is one of the most exhilarating moments of my life. The crashing sound and power of the waterfall were tremendous and swimming towards it, took all my strength to tread in place.

Resting on sun-struck boulders, we eat bananas and hear about "hashing," a local sport where the hasher blazes a trail with a cutlass, and the crowd follows, running, walking, however they want to ambulate to the finish line, which is nearly always a rum shack. "It's not a race, and the hasher always makes a route that everyone can manage. It's really all about what happens after everyone arrives."

On the way back, we meet Mitchell, struggling up the hill with the first trip to provision for the day. He smiles and tells us he started this outpost bar recently, and it's going well, but adds, "It's hard to do this all by myself, mon."

Perhaps he won't have to for long.

(For another sweet glimpse of this island, here's a video on the organic Grenada Chocolate Company, started by a guy in a hut and eleven others working with 18th-century equipment.

http://rococochocolates.com/blog/trevor-macdonald-meets-grenada-chocolate-mott/

Having world enough, and time

Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling ... of that something which you were born desiring and which, between the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?
~ C.S. Lewis

And so, I have flown from the Pacific around my ankles with the sandpipers' daily newsfeed to the banks of the Thames. Backwards in time to spend time with an old college friend, ex- ex-pat, entire soulmate. I haven't been in the UK since my Westmont semester abroad, when we larked about Canterbury, Cambridge, Edinburgh, the Lake District. 30+ years ago. The cultural divide still surprises, all the curious street names flooding by on the taxi ride from the airport (soon to be dredged up from the river bottom of my jet-lagged mind.) Leg stretching on the queen's walk along the facelifted river banks (why do I think of Sally Potter's film Orlando here?) I almost stumble on a streetwoman listing under a bridge, like a gray bird caught by a cat and released with a wing dislodged from it's breast, spare some change? spare some change? her three note song a whippoorwil's call. Day reflects off tower bridge, then dies in the lone apple tree's white blooms

Now it's 3 a.m. and I watch the waxing moon set over the inky Thames. A pre-dawn breeze riffles the surface of this liquid mixing chamber; molecules eddy through centuries-- barges, bards, bell tolls swirl through bridges as our attentions anchor the drifting past.

How what we love defines us

Laguna

The flag snagged on a jacaranda tree
just where the children’s tower
cuts a place for itself in blue
ocean swirls at the ankle
contained for a moment by the crumbling sea wall
festooned with purple seastars
and waving urchins. We have placed ourselves
in this bright bracelet they may call home.

Can we learn the language spoken in this garden?
Translate the sighs of mussels clinging to stones for all they’re worth,
or green anemones whose languid tentacles reach through water-bent light?
The eyes they don’t need bequeathed to other creatures,
they are all foam and salt, the steady
wave washing over with everything they need.
They are patient.
Waiting for bright fish who find themselves captive
to the sudden mouth singing.

The sea mirrors the sky, violet dyes sailors who knot and unknot
stranded in sand to the tune of the sinking sun, wait for
the blaze to ignite some dormant urge, just before drowning in a far horizon. Salt tingles the lips and tongues of those who dove beneath
breaking surf this afternoon--who tightened their lids against the sting
to thrill in the tumble of the wave moving them,
moving towards them all this time from Rangoon and Auckland-they coast on phonemes like blue glass from Bali.

It’s the spaces between the waves that draw me.
Before each singular note breaks and shimmers, the rest.
I abandon interpretation to the casual pelicans glide ,
the trio of spouts where slick dolphins rise like a descant,
breaking the mirror into a thousand shards of light.


(Forgot to post this poem when written on
4-13-08)

Not all traveling is done on legs

"Bodies act upon Light at a distance, and by their actions bend its rays."-  Newton

Sara Lippincot in her review of the new biography, Newton, by Peter Ackroyd, says

'He ate standing up

he slept in his clothes

and rode in his coach through London

with one arm out the right side,

one out the left.'

And who wouldn't want to sprout wings coaching through London., the Great Plague hovering. turning to the occult he found gravity. And changing clothes when writing the Calculus? Preposterous. He almost burned his house down leaving the alchemical fire burning...

how our eccentricities fan our genius.

A raid on the inarticulate

'You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.'

-TS Eliot, Four Quartets

Blocks of wood and shifting light, Maya Lin's 2 x 4 Landscape is a plea, a paen, an 

elegy.  My father, an engineer, my mother, a director

my cousin, an artist, another cousin, a linguist and her husband, a teacher, circle this hill tent, this elephant in a boa constrictor, this gathering wave of upended two by fours--pitched in Union Station--moving in the moment.

The nominal moment, plastic or potential: The product of a quantity and its distance from a reference point.. for the moment, we lose ourselves and word as reference point.

We are a turning force, rotating around this axis-  50,ooo boards swirling a solar system--words reach escape velocity.

It is all we have, what we can touch, and imagine, and what we've made of it.

Mother leaves to get answers from a local authority. Dad studies the shadows. I think of the liminal again. Where space and substance, inside and outside, text and meaning, walking and falling, meet-- holding each other in perfect equilibrium.

Hides over cliffs, hopes into harbors

Dateline: April 5, Dana Point, California.

"And the end of all our journeys will be to arrive where we first began, and to know the place for the first time."- TS Eliot

We drove. And drove. And drove. Through the side roads toward santa barbara and over la cumbre pass and stared into the Los Padres wilderness, intact since the spanish land grant in the 16th century. And tried to imagine how this land was saved from the changes that altered most of the character of california almost beyond recognition. Here, as always rise the chalky white hills and deep green oaks, the horizon gentling mountains, silver sage, and wildflowers of the fierce little wills.  

We descend to Santa Barbara, where I went to undergrad school, to the home of a college friend I hadn't seen for 14 years. Who recently lost her husband to cancer.  Peeling out of the car in a neighborhood festooned with bougainvillea, we opened the door connecting our parallel lives again. We held each other for a long time.

Then trundled down to Henry's Beach, where we had gotten ourselves thrillingly into mild trouble all those years ago. The amber hour just before dusk and the seabird shadows lengthening. Barbara hops on the rocks like a sandpiper. then it's back to the house for sushi and cat fights (Rumi gets his mojo back and tries to bogart her two cats' food-- gets taught some manners.)

We look at yearbooks with impossibly smooth faces, picnics on a perpetual lawn, and bunches of long-haired boys. Would we have had the heart for all that life has brought if a window had cracked open back then?  She says the ten years with her late husband were the best of her life.  I ached to hear her say that with such finality. As though only bleakness stretched before her. But how could one imagine oneself into a life alone after that kind of closeness?  She tells stories of his repartee, his preferences in wine, as though he were just in the other room, about to emerge after a nap or a smoke...

Barbara and Rumi and I left the next morning, to continue to Dana Point, the beachtown I grew up in, named for the B-list classics writer of "Two Years Before the Mast," Richard Henry Dana. (in place of the European grand tour his Harvard cohort took, he signed onto "the Pilgrim" to sail around the horn and wound up chronicling the mistreatment of sailors.  Melville said his account of sailing around Cape Horn was so vivid it must have been 'written with an icicle.' Although with Dana's eyesight compromised by measles, it's a wonder he was able to write at all...he wrote about the natives, hustled into missions tanning works and how they carried hides to these cliffs to pitch them into his waiting trade ship)

------

We arrive to the parental unit intact, smiling and relieved.  A quick trip to Laguna Beach tidepools and emerald waters and then Barbara is off to Salt Lake City via  John Wayne (International) Airport. It's hard not to smile at a town that takes so seriously a dead star astride his horse.  Maybe he's an icon for the edge of the west we have arrived at, or a patron saint herding aircraft in the sky keeping them from stampeding... In a way it makes more sense than naming an airport for a politician.

Driving home alone, the ocean on the starboard, the greening hills on my port, I think my patron might be Saint Lucy, who carried her eyes before her.  I see all the other times I've driven the coast highway, for 35plus years now stacking up on the shoulder.  I cannot say why I was drawn back here now, except to see it all more rightly. the parents, the place, the threads through my history, and where they will weave next--san luis obispo, paso robles, petaluma--or maybe another state or country that has the same warmth and liminal coast and feeling of coming home. 

They say when you circle back you are always one rung higher in a continuous spiral. I hold the moonsnail shell I scooped from the waves in Santa Barbara, and wonder if the shell is the house we've left behind, the spiral involute, ever tightening to a core that is me and you until all the sand settles and we leave the shell we don't need for the connecting sea.