Leaf Peeping

It feels as though family-time has come at a premium of late.  My work always conspires to pull time away from us.  But lately, because my wife and daughter are cast in another Flagstaff Youth Theater production (Narnia), our weekends have been somewhat compromised by long rehearsals the past few weeks, too.

So today we ditched church, including our monthly obligation to lead singing, and went for donuts and then for a lovely long walk in the woods together, just the three of us and the dog, to peep some leaves up toward Brookbank's Tank.  

We were rewarded with a near-perfect morning: 47 degrees, bluebird skies, a light breeze, and a million aspens exploding in color!

Pink Car Hill

My fondness for wandering around in the woods looking at stuff has not diminished as I have aged, in fact it's probably grown more intense as I've found that, as an adult, I can wander farther afield without concern for having the right "permissions" to do so... my wife understands my propensity to sometimes wander a little off track now and again when I'm out riding in the woods... my mother did too, for the record, but I think she worried more actively about her overdue, errant 10-year-old son than my wife does about her overdue, errant 46-year-old husband.

As a kid, the Prescott National Forest near Walker, Arizona, where we had a summer cabin for about 40 years, was littered with rusty old hulks of broken-down and abandoned early-20th-century to depression-era cars.  As we rode our motorcycles around in the woods, my family and I identified each locale and every major turn in the road by naming the wrecked car or rusting tractor or yellow-tallus mine-tailings or dilapidated cabin found prominently nearby.

Thus the woods are filled with this sound

The other day, while we were out riding together on the Arizona Trail, my daughter and I stopped off to the side of one of the trails we ride regularly to inspect a little check-dam she made a springtime or two ago.  She was pleased to find that it was working well, holding back a small pool of bubbly, dark-green water.  Nevertheless, she added a rock or two to the top of the dam to stem the water's egress due to the pool's rising tide.

And then, as she was crossing back to the bank where I was sitting, she slipped and fell in.

Two Hundred

I officially started putting real content on this blog back in 2009, hopeful, at the time, that it would become "a place for me to write, to practice writing," in order to keep my pencil sharp, so to speak.  

Prior to the founding of this website, through no fault of my own, I'd lost every single one of my regular, recurring writing gigs, those that paid and those that didn't.  Thus left otherwise without options, my choices were simple: either I was going to stop writing, or I would need to find a new place to be published.  And thus: I signed up for a blog: rockychrysler.blogspot.com. "A place to practice, a place to just write.  For lack of any other venue, like millions of other writers, by default This Blog will be the place."

And, I'm happy to say, it has been.

Archival Footage: C. H. Ellis

C. H. Ellis

In 1983, when I was 16, I wrote a term paper about my great-great grandfather for my sophomore Arizona Government class. Some thirty years later, I think it's still a worthy bio which recalls the life of an uncommon and compassionate individual, Dr. Clarence Harmon [C. H.] Ellis, who was my father's father's father's father-in-law (and the origin of my daughter's middle-name: Ellise).  

I am pleased to be one of his many descendants.

I scanned (.pdf) the fragile 30-year-old onion-skin papers that this report was typed on earlier today and have included the complete text below, with but a few necessary revisions and a number of freshly-added photos and links. 

Rainy day. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Rainy day. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Forked trail. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Mushroom patch. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Brown bracken. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Long puddle. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Wild flowers. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Tall grass. Fat bike. Not another soul.

Archival Footage: June was getting old

Flamingo Flakes by Billy Schenck

When I was young I wrote poems.  Mostly bad poems. I did not intend for them to be bad.  I had hoped for them to be good. 

But they were not.  

However, they are not too-terribly-bad either, I suppose, particularly when considering the shallow depth of the well from which they were drawn at the time.

I stumbled upon a few of them recently, in an tattered manila file tucked away in the back of a closet.

Below are some of the sad, angsty lines I wrote between 1986 and 1991.  Back when I was in my 20s and thought I knew it all...

---

Payson, Springtime, 1976

Heaven's not filled
with Earth's departed souls
now is it.
The faucet's trough-plink
old hand's country signal's bad
flipping static.
Stockyard's smell
all rotten bales.
It's not in pictures
horse's self-defecation drying
cracked open like this.

There's a horsepath near a Payson ranch
rutted rental-inches into the planet
showing papersack gravel laid open
beneath grass-woven soil.

None talk much
less run until they have sight of it
tail-to-nose waiting
sniffing clover and wild flowers
or walking in sleep toward it
transfixed on this appointed path
the yearling's new faces
the ancients' breathing sensing
again able to move limbs quickly
smoothly to the gate.

The yellow line of teeth
the bridled lips pulled back
wanting.

---

Fly Lady Bug

Sitting watching clouds fly past the moon

It must be hoards
just swarms of bugs
that are disappointed by this moon
and all moons.

To spend your days
flying gyres upward toward
the sky
just to have the light taken away each night
by a paleness only the clouds can see
sharply enough to fly past.

That's why you seek out
the street-light below where I am perched
ape-like on my balcony wall
to loop and dive and crash
around this sodium-vapor sun.

If I open the door
you'll follow me inside
to the bedroom
and loop and dive and crash
around my lamplight.
I'll find you there when I retire
lying dead on my sheets.
Empty shells with little wings.

I'll come inside and join you soon
someday later tonight
and we'll lie together
and you'll hold me
and I'll think: this is what I came here for.

---

Reason. And other functions.

I've been listening to my own voice
echo down stairwells
for so long

now let me rock
with my feet up on the bed
and crack nuts in my hand
while I listen to your voice

as you sit
knelt at the foot of the bed
late at night near me

I watch your eyes
in this blue darkness and see them
grey areas with fire behind them
like eclipsing moons

Your lashes make shadows on the floor.
They reach down beneath the floorboards
and under the window's sill
and pick dandelions outside

You talk about me how
I'm the kind of man who
gets paid
for doing what he loves most:

taking things apart.
And about Jack Nicholson
and how you know why he went to the Cuckoo's Nest

And about Sartre
and Python. Laura Petrie
Hitchcock's body
How growie things reproduce themselves
almost without gratification
and without
and almost always without

'Til it makes you look
like those are nearly tears
between your lashes
reflecting this night's brightness

When I know it's just sleep
or the lack of it there

And you make me wonder
as I listen to your exposition;

Will you understand me
when I lay down beside you
to whisper my love?

---

June was getting old

June was getting old
she said
looking softly down his arm to the floor
speaking slowly purposefully
that there is this thing, yes.
reading the same books
looking out through twinned eyes
always at this too-obvious-letters-written-man
who rode to forget
then forgot to ride
slept no further or sooner than
whenever you're ready to leave
spake ice-cream talk to you
before you ever heard it
sent love letters within himself
and imagined your tears dried by them
and you never knew
me
who talks mainly for joy
the who-you-are of it all
then for intimacy
finally for solace
who still waits 'til hope subsides
paces and yearns to prove indispensable
like drinking water for kisses
esoteric iodine tablets 

intended to remove
the browns from the greys
who hunts for words
and becomes galvanized into 

this being
alone
who never quite gets each dream 

to fall in place
in this great-green-dream-hopper
instead it yields bitterness
a kind of bile in the throat
kinked like a hose
spitting sputtering

out the smallest hole's 

path
of least resistance