My Geography

I love the mountain forests. They are pretty, comfortable, a break from the flat expanses of our coast. But still somehow foreign. I’d dare to say alien, but we are too close to Roswell to use that metaphor without any irony.

When we drive down out of the mountains, an internal syncopation with the trees falls silent. The high desert unfolds around me, and I feel a new rhythm, pulsing in harmony with something inside me. I glance back at the mountains in the distance. Past the tumbleweeds and dry grass to the mesas and ridges and peaks. I look forward to the rolling desert. 

The green and blue I see in the distance are illusions. Those are shadow colors playing through the brittle brown valleys. Seussian yucca flowers dried upon their stalks dance along the edges of the road, bent like Kokopelli the trickster, blowing their pipes. A song to lead me home.

Dreambox: a Visit to Tinkertown

“I did this while you were watching television.” —Ross Ward, creator of Tinkertown.

A room added on to another room. And another. And another. Until I lose count of how many rooms (the website says 22) and porches and connections make up this ramshackle mountain home. Some rooms have walls of wood. Some are composites of concrete and empty glass bottles — the open ends left pointing out so we can tuck messages and wishes inside as we pass by. Some floors are also concrete. Some are hard-packed dirt. Old license plates have been hammered down to cover gaps or jagged bits where two seams of the floor don’t line up quite right. Every room is filled with something. Collections of oddball Americana or dolls or a dry-docked boat. Here and there are mechanical contraptions that move and sing when you drop in a quarter.

The most impressive collection is made up of hundreds of hand-carved and painted wooden figurines, all made by the same man over forty-odd years. A whole town and a circus, filled with characters. Like a Mordillo soccer scene made into little wooden people. I could look all day and still not see every individual carving in the scenes. I make do by trying to see everything that moves when I press a button. The jump-roping girl, the flying Mary Poppins, the hammering blacksmith, the slowly opening coffin lid.

The people visiting this quirky place are mixed. A businessman, middle-class tourists from Texas and Japan, a handful of Mennonites, among many others. We all find the place strange. It’s dusty. Piled in a garage, we might call it junk. Laid out with love on the counters and in boxes and every nook and cranny, it’s not so much a museum as it is the fertile imagination of one man. Imagination given a form that continues on in his memory.

ABAW: Summerland by Michael Chabon

Summerland by Michael Chabon

Hyperion Books 2002 (library copy)

Baseball is a beautifully simple and complicated game, filling our lives with useful metaphors. In the story of eleven-year-old Ethan Feld, his friends Jennifer T. Rideout and Thor Wignutt, baseball brings them together, sets them off on an unexpected adventure, and helps them to understand and cope with the joy and pain of their young lives. Every character in this story is missing something or someone. The characters hover at edges, never feeling completely part of one thing or another. In this story they are called shadowtails, part this, part that, and their liminality gives them the power to move through the universe in interesting ways. Chabon creatively redeploys familiar folk tales and mythologies in this adventure that will appeal to adults and kids. The baseball is populated with ferishers (like fairies, but don’t call them that), a diminutive giant, a heartbroken troll, a helpful werefox with no pants, a homemade zeppelina, an orange Saab with a a funny name, one very sad and sensitive sasquatch, and a talent scout named Chiron “Ringfinger” Brown who might just have been the hero-trainer you associate with Hercules. The prose is also colorful and bemusing, the careful words wrapping around us and transporting us with the magic of the Summerlands.

Ethan, who thinks the world is just the world, is unexpectedly recruited to be a hero, to save the tree that supports the four worlds that make up our known universe. He’s up against Coyote, the changer, who has kidnapped Ethan’s dad, and wants to poison the tree and bring about the end of the worlds, Ragged Rock, the end times. Nothing is simple in this story. Coyote isn’t all bad, for instance. He did invent baseball, after all. And even the good people make some bad decisions. Sometimes, in baseball like in life, a game, an inning, even an at-bat can change everything. When Ethan learns to accept the things that hurt him, he’s able to use that pain as a power source to finally swing for homeruns.

I listened to a few chapters of Summerland on audiobook read by the author (which I enjoyed) before deciding I had to share it with the Sonars.  We read this one out loud together, and none of us wanted it to end. Easily one of my favorite books I’ve read this year, perhaps for several years.

ABAW: The Magnificent Steam Carnival of Professor Pelusian Minus by Sean and Connor Hayden

A Book A Week, occasionally more!

The Magnificent Steam Carnival of Professor Pelusian Minus

By Sean Hayden and Connor Hayden

Episode 1: First Flight (Echelon Press, ePub edition, 2011, promotional)

Episode 2: Second Chance (Echelon Press, ePub edition, 2011, purchased copy)

Episode 3: Third Time (Echelon Press, ePub edition, 2011, purchased copy)

If dastardly villains and the clank of coal-powered steam engines — plus just a hint of magic — appeals to you, then you’ll enjoy the storytelling of the father and son team of Sean and Hayden Connor. Our heroes are Dane and Paige Ellis, twin steamsmiths snatched from their cradles by Professor Minus’s dimwitted henchman Abraham, then raised under the metal fist (really!) of Minus to maintain the curious contraptions of the carnival. The twins love their carnival family (except for the diabolical Minus) but dream of a better life. Paige and Dane are clever with machines, too clever perhaps because Minus works them to exhaustion and exploits their ideas for his own increasingly criminal benefit. Minus controls Dane’s growing rebelliousness with an explosive collar around the neck of his dear sister. Mechanical shminions, brass birds, and flying twins make for a fun steampunk serial.

Sonar X8 is enjoying the series now, and we are looking forward to future episodes.

An Intersection in the Middle of Nowhere

US285 and TX FM 1776 cross in the middle of the desert. The only sign of civilization within sight of the road is an idle pump jack.

From a distance the brown of the grass is distinguishable from the brown of the rocky soil below by a yellowish tint and the movement made by the hot wind. The taller mesquite and sagebrush bushes make a thin layer of green, a pale imitation of years past. The lower bushes are crumbly brown where they haven’t been burnt away in the slashing pockets of a grass fire.

A dust devil points a crooked finger high into the sky as if it wants to snatch a hawk from the air. But there is no hawk today. The flat road shimmers and undulates, the mirage shaken up into splashes by the waves of heat off the pavement.

I see no sign of the tarantulas that covered the pavement a few summers ago. Today there is no thunderstorm rolling across the ridges to make gullywashers in the erstwhile arroyos, to drive to the roadbed the desert spiders, safer from the flash flood even if more vulnerable to the odd car tire.

On the next rise, the green of a heavily irrigated alfalfa field jumps out of nowhere, surpising me with its garish obscenity against the landscape drowning in dryness.