The wolf

His name is Orion, at Mission Wolf. You can help sponsor him, which is a mere but necessary drop in the karma bucket if you ask me. Read more here.

Obsessed with the color of smoke and the color of blood.

My dog got injured last week. It was Martin Luther King Day. Not going to go into the hows and whys. And he's fine, and I'm fine, and we're all fine, all 11 of us not counting the chickens, which would make 22 of us, not counting the pigeons, which would make 154 or so of us, depending on what babies have hatched and are now swaddled under the down of pigeon parents.

So maybe it's the color of pigeons, or the average color of pigeons, and the color of blood. My dog, Slam, the black one, got a rip in his leg that was a bona fide rip. No more details for the squeamish out there, and I guess for me, because I keep seeing that sight: the red state within the black fur, really. It was shaped like the state of ohio. I did not take a picture. But I am living with a whole slideshow, can't erase it. And thus, somehow, am obsessed on a kind of neuronical level with the colors red and black and gray and silver and red. And dark red.

In the book right now, there are mechanations on the main gal's part of clean up the cabin. The bathroom towels are to be cleaned, only the wolf steals them while she's got her back turned. The wolf being the house wolf, whose name is Hamish, after the ham sandwiches he preferred, at first, to anything else. Ham is a kind of pinkish reddish color and this wolf is an ashy to fog color of grey and silver. And the towels, I have written, are salmon pink. I can't get away from it. To get my mind off things and into things I make treasuries, like all the other happy obsessives on etsy (we're a happy, obsessive, global slumber party, aren't we). And lately they are all red and grey. For samplings, keep going.

Olive

Town of Olive before the reservoir, showing towns and land now submerged (in blue) and land now owned by New York City (in green), from town of Olive archives.

Yesterday was Olive Day, a yearly fete at Davis Park for the whole giant little village that seems to be the official town of Olive (population 4,579 as of 2000). I was an author guest at the Olive Free Library booth, brought my books and basked in the questions, eyeing the table of vintage cookbooks for later (bought 5). The library ladies are sharp, hospitable, enterprising, and in a book club — and Russian Lover is one of their picks. Another book club, based nearby and held, lordy, at a B&B I've always wanted to escape to, is reading it too. Can't wait to sit with both. Promise me you olive gals won't hold back.

Part of the fare at the library table on Olive day. What you can't see: apples to the left, baked goods to the left of them, books all around.

At Olive Day the sheriff was holding court,  food booths included alligator and chicken (mixed together, I wondered, before or after being dispatched), and there were handcrafts and try-this's. It was 9/11. Kids ran around and got their faces painted. Sheep nosed for treats from their little exhibition paddock. EMTs sat at their HowToBeSafe table —some, no doubt, recalling the day and its aftermath not that many years back. A fellow chortled into a bullhorn about getting down and dirty in the upcoming egg toss. A tiny brown pony in a tiny western saddle got led around with a succession of kids, its head bobbing quickly as it fought the urge to trot.

Not the toolbox at Olive Day, but a green one I loved.

It was festive and somber at the same time, which made it kind of dreamy. I get into a heightened state when doing a reading or appearance, so the whole scene was bright brights and dark darks. There were those odds and ends that enhance the carny, grubby feel so often crusted under the edge of the cake dish, like a cloudy looking woman with ash colored hair who'd laid out a scatter of objects on a tarp on the ground. I picked up a rusty green toolbox (love toolboxes). This one had a sticker on it that had been torn off, leaving a fuzzy scar. I opened the lid and found rust, cobwebs, a dank smell. So the box was uncharmingly wrecked. The woman, the seller, perked up and rose from her lawn chair when I opened the lid — it signified interest. But she wanted a lot for it. Without thinking, in fiction not vintage mode (etiquette out the window), I said, No. That much? Really? Said it too abruptly to temper it. She was offended, and so overreached to justify: The box is a military antique. The green is U.S. military green. They are the only ones allowed to use that green.
Like UPS brown? I played.
No, she said.

None of what she said was true. It was so not true that I somehow wanted to help her save some kind of face. I wondered if she was trying to connect with the vaguely patriotic (not so vague for some) tone of the day by selling military-looking things.

The box was olive colored. I offered, well you've got an Olive green box. That's right for Olive day. She saw no connection there and frowned. It's true, it was a terrible effort. She dropped me for the tweens riffling through her pile of string bracelets, dollars in their hands. I went back to wandering. There is something about being the guest writer that turns me aimless when otherwise I'd be mission-ready, hunting for vintage, trying all the food, shuffling around in jeans and boots.

There were a lot of American flags. There was an art exhibit. There were rows and rows of cherry 1950s cars I couldn't quite get to. There were fresh apples two for fifty, barbecue ladled into giant white buns, a sportsman booth with dozens of pelts strung up along the edge of the tent, many with heads and paws attached, and a murky tank of some kind of fish. There was a timber wolf pelt, which threw me back into my book for about three minutes, sent me scribbling some notes before I headed for the coffee stand.

And two currents ran under the whole thing. One was 9/11, which some people chose to bring up in conversation between hot dogs and pieces of home-baked pie. The other, literally, involved water, the currents of it, running from the Esopus into the giant reservoir that sits like a hole in this part of Ulster County, being snared into tunnels and aqueducts and sent southwards to the city, away from here. In the Olive town offices on the other side of the parking lot, there are framed photos and documents dating back to when much of Olive was first emptied of whole towns and townspeople and then razed to make the reservoir and give NYC fresh water. Thousands were displaced. People tell stories about families watching their homesteads and farms burn to the ground, about a man who jumped out of a hayloft as the barn was torched beneath him, and then ran right back into the barn. It didn't happen that long ago. It happened to grandparents, great grandparents. And if Olive has a bit of an underdog feeling this might partially be why.

Giles general store, pre reservoir days, town of Olive archives. 

Building the reservoir, town of olive archives

I often run along the road over part of the reservoir, a road known around here as the lemon squeeze. It used to be the main way home. But they closed it after 9/11, for security reasons they said, and locals had to drive the long way home and once again felt like the city owned their lives. I run above the waters of the reservoir and the phantoms of hamlets.

Shokan village, under water, town of Olive archives.

To the right, as you head out, there's a long swath of lawn-struck hillside and woods crouched along the base of it, turkeys lacing the edge as they hunt for food. To the left is the reservoir. Lack of rain has exposed bare bars of land in the water. People stand at the edge, looking for foundations exposed. There's talk of a church steeple visible somewhere, but I'm told that's a myth. The city was, mostly, effective. Still, you find this.

Old foundation exposed by low water levels, Ashokan. Taken by K. Barbariantz, 2008.

Back at the library booth the ladies were still energized and people were buying those vintage cookbooks and children's books in bulk, and the donations were coming in, and the raffle tickets were flying out. I bought my vintage cookbooks, two apples, said thank you, headed home.

Life with dogs

I have a goal of 4 pages a day in order to finish the novel by the end of October. Okay, say mid November. The year begins today and ends on Thanksgiving, in my mind. Lately I've met the goal by hammering out 4 pages of triplespaced-narrow-margined-throw-in-another-line-break text. Text with stretch marks. But since I'm crashing headlong into my birthday I'm determined to meet the daily quota.

So this morning I was trying to write a scene in which the wolf, the old male patriarchal geriatric wolf, is trying to deal with the endless presence of the woman, the young, curly-haired, not-entirely-close-to-nature woman who has nevertheless cast her lot in with a bunch of close-to-nature types. I'm giving a lot away here, kind of, so sorry. But the scene has not been going well. It has run aground a number of times. The wolf and the woman really don't have a way to communicate. This is not a mystical rocky mountain high fantasy I'm writing here, it's a skewed tale that presumes very little. That's what I seem to do. But the scene has no been going well.

And this morning what bashed the fragile wisp that is fiction writing's delicate eggshell head into the distracto wall was one of our dogs. Canis germanus fangus biggus distractus. Specifically, the male patriarchal dog. The father of litters that includes amazing working dogs who have successfully done all sorts of Rin Tin Tin-like things.

Papa is a big hero dog in own right and has accomplished many titles and numbers and certificates and honors, and has giant saucer eyes that would, if they could, speak volumes.

This morning as he lay on the kitchen floor he decided volumes had to be spoken.  He tried, over and over again, to get my attention — dramatically jumping to his feet and whining if I did so much as shift in my chair.  When the writing is not happening I tend to shift a lot. So there was a lot of canine activity happening as well. We fed on each other in that strange reciprocal feedback loop called getting nothing done because we're getting nothing done. Eventually his whine successfully pitched his needs in my direction, right into my brain, at peak velocity, where it ran around, chasing my words into the dark corners to huddle and wait.

This is entirely natural. It is as natural as the way I abuse metaphors daily. He is a working dog. He has ideas and drive. I am a working writer. I have ideas and drive. What was driving me this morning, and not fast enough, was the idea of a wolf trying to deal with a human. The wolf, in this story, came first in the cabin they live in. How does this wolf assert its territory? He pisses on things. He was taking aim at her down coat (specifically L.L. Bean ripstop navy blue nylon, a leftover from her early college days) when the whining turned to barking. It turned out, of course, that Papa needed to go out and take a piss. So who, I wonder, looks the dumbest here?

I have yet to get back to that scene. The time is now. arrivedoggi.

Etsy wolf item of the day


wolf switchplate (antiquarium)


and the view that works like a metaphor, more so.