Band of Thebes

Gretel Ehrlich on Facing the Wave

If you were a novelist you could retire after creating a character like Gretel Ehrlich. She has twice been struck by lightning (see A Match to the Heart). She has spent months dogsleding across Greenland (see This Cold Heaven). Born in Montecito, growing up staring at the Channel Islands from her bed, she transplanted herself forty years ago to an isolated stretch of the country's least populous state, Wyoming, where, between bouts of award-winning writing and freelance sheepherding, she deepened her love of all things Japanese. The themes of her brave and beautiful new book, Facing the Wave [Kindle], about the resilience of the coastal people in the aftermath of the tsunami, amplify ideas dating back at least to her 1989 essay "The Bridge to Heaven" (in Islands, the Universe, Home) recounting her December pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Osorezan. After an arduous, many-day journey, the truck's final passage was blocked by a locked gate and she decided to walk the rest of way in a blizzard -- twenty-six miles roundtrip. 

Okay, you say, so she's a brilliant writer, and a hearty traveler, but what makes her worthy of a great character in literature? Her original vision. Sunday night at Washington's Politics & Prose, during her first reading from the new book, she discussed witnessing, at a tiny inland river temple, survivors bringing bodies of the dead in wheelbarrows, and her reaction was, This is so cool. Not for her any wallowing in sorrow or sticky pieties of optimism. She writes, "neurotic suffering is only the flapping of ego." She believes in action, in "movement: life’s extraordinary experiences entwined with the ordinary, and from that littered ground, the courage to leap."

Her own action is to start a partnership between American architects and Japanese builders to get some fast, responsible housing for the more than 300,000 people still displaced. So far, no website where you can donate but as soon as it's up, you'll find a link on this site.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune says, "In sum, Facing the Wave is a masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims."

If somehow you are unfamiliar with her previous fourteen books of essays, travel, poetry, fiction, and biography, start with the new book or her powerful collection The Solace of Open Spaces or This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

She's on tour this week: Aspen, Santa Barbara, SF, Corte Madera, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and Portland. On March 11 she will appear on the PBS NewsHour, followed by readings the next two nights in Albany and Manchester, VT. 

15 Reasons Why

Eugenio, a pilot from northern Italy now living in Alaska, took us up for 42 minutes. Album here.

Trio

Friends old and new coming out to welcome me back to Alaska this week.

Gay Gardens (and the Men Who Love Them)

Readers charmed by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's 2009 memoir Our Life in Gardens [Kindle], about their thirty-two years at North Hill in Vermont, should look for Clyde 'Skip' Wachsberger's memoir Into the Garden with Charles [Kindle], covering twenty-eight years creating their sumptuous Adsworthy Garden in Orient, New York. They met through a personal ad when both men were over fifty and became inseparable. 

Chris Phillips highly recommends Skip's book, about which PW said:

"Wachsberger’s refreshing and heartfelt memoir invites the reader into a house, a garden, and two lives filled with affection and warmth. Sagging floorboards and rotting linoleum greet Wachsberger when, in 1983, he buys a 300-year-old house on Long Island. What will become a splendid garden is a “whole empty field around a clump of peonies.” The author, having “turned fifty without noticing how I had gotten there,” began “to grow around my loneliness the way a tree limb can grow through a chain-link fence, incorporating the sharp metal into its fiber without showing any outward signs of distress.” ... When Clyde met Charles, he found the “best friend who was also an affectionate lover, a friend who shared my deepest yearning to be someone special for someone special” he had been looking for. Together they form a union, produce a book (Of Leaf and Flower), and nurture a noteworthy garden. With a keen ear and eye for the anecdotal, Wachsberger sketches beautifully lucid picture in words, and his illustrative paintings add both beauty and emotional content to this candidly romantic memoir." 

Winterrowd died in September 2010,  Wachsberger died of prostate cancer in November 2011.

Morning Run

October Kayak

The sun was out, perfect for a quick trip, but the afternoon high was 38, meaning the not insignificant ice hadn't melted. With effort, I crashed through it to open water but could not explore the frozen coves. Last night I saw a documentary about naturist Aldo Leopold. If you've never read his Midwestern classic A Sand County Almanac, get it now. As one interviewee pointed out, the great trifecta is Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold.

Sea Lions

Disappointing day trip from Seward. Plenty of puffins and sea lions.

Male Zebra Finches In Longterm Pairs, Ignore Females

Yet another scientific study suggests that, contrary to endless heterocentric brainwashing, maybe nature's top priority isn't always reproduction. UC Berkeley's Dr. Julie Elie led a team researching zebra finches. Raised in same sex groups, more than half the males pair bonded with another male. They exhibited the same behavior as male-female pairs including singing to each other, preening, sitting closely side by side, nuzzling beaks, and sharing a nest. The BBC reports, "Same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex." Here's the kicker:

"In the next stage of their study, the scientists brought novel females to a group of bonded male-male pairs. Out of eight males that were engaged in same-sex pair-bonds, five ignored the females completely and continued to interact with their male partner.

"The findings indicate that, even in birds, the drive to find a mate is far more complicated than simply the need to reproduce.

"A pair-bond in socially monogamous species represents a cooperative partnership that may give advantages for survival," said Dr Elie. "Finding a social partner, whatever its sex, could be a priority."

The best book on the subject is Bruce Bagemihl's encyclopedic marvel, written for lay readers and scientists alike, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 

Below, a male-female pair demonstrate the one-step-forward two-steps-back nature of all flirting.

Surprise Visitor

Do not hug.

Author Argues Adventurer Everett Ruess Was Not Gay

Many adventure readers hadn't heard of the young wanderer Everett Ruess [right], who started ambling at sixteen and disappeared at twenty while hiking the Utah desert in November 1934, until Jon Krauker devoted several pages of Into the Wild to him for the obvious similarities with Christopher McCandless. Several profiles say people claim Ruess was gay, without citing reasons, so I had been very much anticipating yesterday's publication of Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer [[Kindle]] by David Roberts. Not anymore. Short of seeing the book firsthand, there's only this early review on Amazon by a reader from NYC to address the queer question:

"Roberts makes a determined effort to establish that Everett was not a homosexual as some have asserted and implies that if he were, it would somehow discredit him. In doing so, he glosses over a possible explanation of why Ruess felt unfit for conventional society and something that might even be insinuated in his death."

All told, you're better off waiting for Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, covering the complete life of a great writer-explorer who was absolutely gay. Overlook has moved the U.S. pub date from June to September. Until then, try his Penguin classics, Arabian Sands or The Marsh Arabs.

Afternoon Guests

Yesterday.

Midnight on the Solstice

Back in Alaska in time for 20 hours of daylight. The other four hours are a hazy blue.

Wyoming Postcard

So far, two days, two amazing hikes, and no coyote snares. Plenty of big horns.

Weekend in Virginia

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd.

African Pride

The fantastic new nature documentary African Cats is a dual portrait of two kinds of motherhood, a pride of female lions raising their cubs in a group, and Sita, a single cheetah rearing her five cubs alone. Gorgeously filmed, the movie has riveting twin plots as the cheetah struggles to feed and protect her too-many offspring from relentless hungry predators, and the group of lions deals with Fang, the snaggletoothed male who protects them but steals the zebra they have jointly cornered and taken down. A rival male, Kali, who travels surrounded by his four glorious and resentful sons, wants to kill Fang and all the baby cubs Fang sired to impregnate each female lion in the pride himself. Be careful of the subtext A stranger will kill your father, marry your mother, and murder you and be amazed at the persistence of the notion that only the males of the species are hunters. Awesome as this movie is, it is not recommended for gay adults with abandonment issues or any children under the age of 22. Kids 14 and under will burst into sobs whenever one of the moms gets dinner and children 14+ will use their parents' credit cards to order an adorable baby cheetah over the internet.

The brutal tension is perfectly broken by moments of beauty (storms sweeping across Kenya's savannah) or humor (an ostrich scaring off a full-grown cheetah).

May Day

Spring abundance everywhere yesterday morning in the city, especially along Riverside where they had an actual May Pole. But nothing, nothing, nothing could beat this sign in Central Park. The new law prohibits smoking in all NYC parks, pools, and beaches.

World's Fastest Solo Eiger Summit + Queer Climbing Clubs

Not off topic if it inspires you to get The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Or join one of these fourteen queer climbing clubs:

Georgia Dyno 'Mos -- Atlanta (100+ members since April 2010)

Glam Climb of Texas -- Austin

Lez Climb -- Bay Area lesbians

Flame and Flash -- Bay Area queers

Queerabiners -- Boston

Not So Trad -- London 

Heel Hookers -- Los Angeles

Crux -- New York

R.O.C. -- Orlando

Rock Out -- Richmond

St. Louis 'Mo Climbers -- St. Louis

Crag Crux Climbers -- Toronto

T.O. 'Mo Climbers -- Toronto

LGBT Rock Climbing Group -- Vancouver

Homo Climbtastic hosts the world's largest queer climbing gatherings, which gives it bragging rights to claim "HC is the goddamn center of the queer climbing universe." Last weekend they wrangled more than 70 lgbt folk from all over out to California to climb in Bishop.

Scenes from Spring Break 2011

Above, April 5. I'm sparing you the endless mud, fog, drizzle, sleet, slush, and hail. And I won't reinforce stereotypes by claiming this bald eagle is gay but I will say he is extremely fussy about his building materials for interior decor. Every morning he flew onto the same branch of our tallest cottonwood tree, broke off a large twig, and flew off to his distant nest. (Some days a talon grip, other days a beak hold.) Yesterday he brought a "friend." For those of you keeping track, sunset is now around 9:30pm. In June it will be 11:40pm. Click each image to enlarge.

 

Morning Fire

Woke to see huge plumes of black smoke rising over a warehouse in the shipyard. Viewers came from town and from the nearby Russian Old Believer villages. Downloading my photos I found two recent studies in white: Turnagain Arm and Macy's Calvin Klein video.

Sayonara, Key West