America the Beautiful--and Canada, Too

Here's my Alaska poem.

State of Mind

Now I’ve been to Alaska
State of gold prospectors
(call them miners
but most mined only
stones and starvation)
State of claim jumpers who
Killed Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian
Carvers of the great totems—
Raven, Bear, Eagle, Frog, Beaver—
Signifying clan history
State of animal trappers
Hunting fur species to near extinction
To supply adornments
State of fishers
Taking from the mouths of natives
To feed their conquerors
State of mastodons and mammoths
Lying around making petroleum
Sucked out of the ground
Converted to disease, death and damnation
State of indescribable beauty
Humongous plots
Where no man
Will ever go
(thank God)
Where I feel like
A flea on the ear of a
Southbound hound
Hitching a ride
On a friendly whale
Don’t think
Just ride

July 17
Aboard the Norwegian Star

The chosen photos are in a slide show in the sidebar, including captions. They speak for themselves, and are best viewed at full size so, as a reminder, single click on the slide show to enlarge the photos. When the window opens click on the "full screen" button near the upper left corner, then move your cursor near the bottom of the screen to open the play menu and click on the "play" button (shaped like a sideways triangle). You can also choose the number of seconds for each shot to play, which you will want to do in order to read some of the longer captions. Or press the "pause" icon as needed. Press the X to stop, then the back button a couple times to return to this post. Good luck.

I'm still recuperating from my vacation (today I have a raging headache) so perhaps tomorrow I'll be able to give you the highlights of my trip. The short version: it was awesome!

Oh yeah, be sure the read the Peace Quote, also in the sidebar. It's better than my poem, and written by a 4th grader. Brilliant.

Reports of My Death Are Premature

I'm back. I'm tired. I'm fat. I'll write in the morning. Meanwhile, Patti Digh has published my obituary (an exercise in living the life you want to live). Read the one for Nancy Lee Hixson first, to get inspired.

Greetings from Juneau!

I'm sitting in the restaurant at the top of the Norwegian Star, enjoying the view along with my lunch, and waiting for us to shove off northward again in about an hour. I'm about to run out of battery power and have no plug, so I will leave you for now with a refresher course on Henry David Thoreau, as taken from The Writer's Almanac from a couple days ago.

"It's the birthday of the man who said: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." That's Henry David Thoreau, (books by this author) born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts (1817). He grew up exploring the woods and fields of Massachusetts, encouraged by his mother to learn as much as he could from nature. He went to Harvard, but he didn't like it very much — he refused a diploma since it cost five dollars. He worked for a while in his father's pencil factory, and as a public school teacher, and he became close friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1841, the Emersons invited Thoreau to live with them and work as a handyman and gardener, and he helped take care of their children, taking them on nature walks and telling them stories. Thoreau stayed with the Emersons for two years, and during that time he worked on his writing, and through Emerson, became friends with many of the Transcendentalists. In 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife rented some property from Emerson and moved to the area. When he first met Thoreau in 1842, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his journal: "Mr. Thoreau dined with us yesterday. He is a singular character — a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior." The two became good friends, and Thoreau planted a garden for the Hawthornes and did maintenance work for Ellery Channing and his wife.

In 1844, Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond. Walden Pond was a pristine, 61-acre pond, surrounded by woods, and Emerson agreed to let his friend live on the land and build a cabin there. People often assume that Thoreau went out into the wilderness to write his famous treatise on nature, but in fact, he was living less than two miles from the village of Concord. He had regular dinners with friends, continued to do odd jobs for the Emersons, and had frequent visitors. The book he was so committed to writing at Walden Pond was called A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, about a trip he had taken with his brother. He finished it and published it himself, but it was a flop — he sold fewer than 300 copies.

But during the two years he was at Walden Pond, he also kept a journal, and after he left, he put it together as a manuscript. In 1854, he published Walden, or Life in the Woods, which has become a beloved classic.

The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941, making it the oldest society devoted to an American author. It's also the largest. Every July, there is a four-day gathering at Walden Pond to celebrate Thoreau's birthday.

In the conclusion to Walden, Thoreau wrote, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."

Here, here.