This multiple-part series is from a longer work-in-progress I’ve begun that recounts my experiences in Recapture Canyon in southeast Utah.  Woven throughout the longer narrative are my ideas about language’s part in evolution, culture, and relationship–including what language reveals about and how it affects the ways we treat with people who live with what I call “brain variables”–conditions of the brain that require those of us with “normal” brains to make an extra efforts to travel beyond ourselves in order to encounter and stand with the people that live with them. As with some of my longer series, this may not be an easy read. It certainly hasn’t been an easy write.  I respectfully request that readers not download this piece.  If you are in need of any language or information in this series, please email me at pk dot wizadmin at gmail dot com to request a copy.

On Thanksgiving Eve, Sky, our family dog, died of conditions related to old age.  If she’d reached her birthday at December’s end, she’d have turned fourteen years old.  Up to four or five weeks before her death, Sky still raced my fourteen-year-old daughter around the yard, loping creakily on arthritic hips.  Running must have hurt but when she threw herself into the competition her blue eyes sparked and her mouth curled back along her muzzle into a wide, tongue-lolling grin.  During those runs she felt herself part of a pack and like a good Siberian husky jockeyed to take lead position. She’d become deaf over the last year; to draw her attention we shouted her name and clapped our hands.  She turned and looked but seemed unsure that she’d really heard anything. I suspect that in the last few weeks she’d started going blind.

Once the cold weather set in she declined rapidly.  She couldn’t keep food down then stopped eating completely. We worried that she might have cancer but the local vet paid us a house call and found no evidence of an ailment of that sort.  What was wrong with her, then?  She’s the equivalent of ninety-four years old, he said, coming to the end of her life.  During the last few weeks, when my daughter took Sky off her cable, the old dog kept up her routine of patrolling the west fence line at a tottering pace.  My daughter followed her patiently, waiting when Sky dropped to the ground to rest then lifting the old dog to her feet so that she could complete a duty she still felt intent on performing.

Sky had never been an ideal family pet. She posed danger to neighbors’ cats and other animals.  When she was a puppy, she attacked our next-door neighbor’s manx kitten. If my neighbor hadn’t struck her with a shovel he had in hand Sky would have killed that kitten, even though she was a pup herself.  Sky and that cat waged war throughout the seven or so years they lived next door to each other.  The cat came into the yard to invade her space and to torment her.  Twice, Sky caught him in the yard when she was running loose, nearly killing him a second time and then a third.  One day I heard commotion and stepped outside to find she’d treed the cat, who was panting heavily and looked to be going into shock. His wild-eyed, gape-mouthed expression suggested that she might have done him harm but he lived to taunt her another day.  She did catch and execute a feral cat that had unwisely taken up residence in our yard.  A little over a year ago, after we’d left Utah Valley for the rural life in southeast Utah, I returned from a trip to discover that she’d hurt herself, perhaps while trying to jump on top of her outdoor shelter.  She could barely walk so I told the kids to leave her off her cable.  She liked this arrangement and took to the shade of a juniper tree growing in our backyard.  I didn’t think she could get very far and let my attention lapse.  Two hours later I discovered her a block up the street, exiting a neighbor’s orchard with a freshly killed black cat clamped in her mouth. I’m not a big fan of cats, but Sky’s drive to kill them appalled and repulsed me. Our own two cats lived in the yard knowing she’d put an end to them if ever she caught them.

Still, she kept watch over the house and policed our acre-and-a-half on the edge of the desert, letting us know when something was amiss.  In the spring, we moved her house near the garden to deter rabbits.  But we could never trust her to remain in the yard or not kill other creatures.  In our agricultural neighborhood, where chickens, cats, lambs and goat kids abound, this meant that she had to stay on her cable unless one of us was outside with her to keep an eye on her every minute.

When we saw the end coming, we released her from the cable–this time, for good, because she was no longer a threat. I threw a heavy, pink baby afghan over the old dog.  We brought her inside the garage to keep watch over her.  For the next two days, I looked in on her as often as I could.  Her breathing became increasingly rough, wheezing, and irregular. Each of us took turns checking on her, but she still managed to slip away between spot-checks.  We intended to be with her at the very end, but on one of my checks I discovered that she’d died. I alerted my husband.  He hurried into the basement to examine her and declared that yes, she’d gone.  My son and I wrapped her in a sheet. He lifted her–the old dog had weighed over seventy pounds months earlier but much of that that evaporated over the course of her dying–and moved her onto a plywood board outdoors.  Then he and I set to work cleaning up the basement where she’d died.  It was a solemn duty.  The atmosphere of the house altered at her departure. I don’t know quite how to put it, but immediately upon our discovery of her death some kind of space opened.  It was as if part of our identity as a family had sheared off. At one point, my husband sat down beside me.  “There is one fewer of us,” he said.  “Can you feel that?” “Yes. Yes I can,” I said. “It’s surprising.”

The next day was Thanksgiving, but none of us felt like celebrating. Before everyone else awoke I headed for Crossfire Canyon (Recapture), my mind a knot containing several strings of snarled thought.  Sky’s decline and death was only the most recently added strand. Since July, my husband Mark had been waging a battle against mental illness that was, at least in part, the result of his highly expressive personality’s reaction to various medications he’d been prescribed since his hemorrhagic stroke in 2010.  The significant brain injuries he suffered from the big stroke itself and subsequent brain surgery and his wild reactions to medications converged, each probably contributing to his haywire behavior. The stroke has lingering effects, but increasingly, I think his introduction to common medications is the prime trigger for his really precipitous personality changes. Before his first, daily-basis dance with prescription meds, he was pretty much himself as I have known him over two decades. Since the addition of several chemical compounds to his system, it has become increasingly evident that he has developed some flavor of rapid-cycling, bi-polar or bi-polar-like disposition, .

An MRI for the 2010 stroke revealed that he had an underlying, probably genetic mutation called cerebral cavernous malformations. CCMs are malformed, often thin-walled blood vessels in the brain that are given to rupturing or seeping.  Many folks who have CCMs have one, a couple–maybe half a dozen present in their brains.  Mark has somewhere between one and two hundred. Not only had they laid him bare to the impossible-to-miss event but also they had previously caused twenty or more smaller, “asymptomatic” strokes. Last July, his mental disarray reached “King Lear” proportions. On the one-year anniversary of the 2010 stroke, I found myself parking the car along a less populated street while my husband shouted at me and out the car window, cursing and challenging God.  His speech so closely resembled the Act III, Scene II storm-whipped ravings of the Shakespearian king that I began orienting myself by that paradigm:

Lear.  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once
That make ingrateful man!

Yes–it was that bad. Moments before I pulled the car to a stop, as he had been driving at me with his words, listing all the ways I had thwarted his plans over the years, he asked if I was listening.  “Yes,” I said, quietly.  “You think I’ve betrayed you.”  “You all have!” he thundered, meaning not only me but also the kids and perhaps scores of other shadowy folk inhabiting the court of his high-minded irrationality.  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.

Following this paroxysm, he became withdrawn, though highly agitated.  He couldn’t sleep. The next day, as I sat at my computer working, he rose from a failed nap and approached me, the look in his eyes disturbing enough to prompt me to prepare for another outburst.  But he didn’t rant.  “Do you think I’m … unintelligent?” he asked.  His tone was sharp and very cold. “I think you’re brilliant,” I said, keeping it simple. It was the truth. His eyes reflected nothing but a glitter of disdainful doubt.  “Did you ever even like me?” he asked.  “I love you,” I said. “I always have.” He didn’t respond except to turn away and head down into the basement to his “man cave”.

I sat staring at the computer screen, shocked and frightened. Obviously, something had gone very wrong and it wasn’t getting better. Before these two episodes, in the wake of his first prescription and then his stroke which brought another round of prescriptions, he’d experienced a few personality shifts that were short-lived, in part because I called attention to them and he, trusting me, experimented on himself to figure out which medications were the culprits. Once he had isolated the offending drug, he quit it and shortly returned to equilibrium. But this was different. This time, I was the focus of his paranoia.  This meant that my ability to help him had weakened. Not having any close-in experience with the psychological condition that’s perhaps unwisely labeled mental illness, I had no idea what had toppled him from his throne of rationality except that perhaps he was having a late-blooming adverse reaction to one or more of the medications he’d been prescribed since the 2010 stroke.  This was not my husband who had just asked such starkly accusatory questions–it was someone as far opposite of my husband as I’d known him during twenty-one years of marriage as R. L. Stevenson’s Mr. Hyde was of Dr. Jekyll. I didn’t know what to do to help this man.

I sat mentally examining his words, turning them over and over, considering what they might signify.  Behind me on my bookshelf sat my personal journals, which, up to about eight years ago, I kept faithfully. Contained therein is a record of our marriage from its beginning, and, I thought, language that might have the potency to reach him–if any words could. I decided to go after him.  To prepare for what I knew would be a long ordeal, I took a deep drink of water, used the bathroom, and changed my nineteen-year-old, special needs daughter’s diaper. I told my son, “Something’s wrong with Dad.  I’m going down to talk to him.  I want you to stay alert. If I tell you to call 911, I want you to do it immediately. Don’t pay attention to what he says–listen to me.” I stood at the head of the stairs to the basement, hesitant. “I’ve never faced a dragon like this,” I said to my son. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” Then I went down the stairs, mentally loosening up any imaginings I had about what could happen, limbering my own mental state.

To read part two, go here.

(Edited 1/13/2012 at noon to correct spelling, etc. errors and cut down the intro.)

(Photo found and added 1/13/2012 at 12:25.)

How ugly you all are,
An all-over ugly!

Iris bulbs unearthed and scythed
Of top leaves,
I lay your twisted, tuberous
Bodies across a gutted paper sack
And take a moment to grimace
At your grotesquery.

Dirt clings to your stringy reaching roots.
Not even warm water and bleach
Can pretty the rough hide of your skin.
Poor horrid hags!

But wait—don’t droop,
Shrivel dry in shame.

For I know your secret.

You keep it like a locket,
Or maybe a pearl,
Deep in the water of your flesh—
A tiara of petals, jewels of silk,
A blush pressed within paper wings.
Each spring, you rise
Slim-necked as swans and slender-leaved
To curve rainbows into blossoms.

Yes, majesty resides in these lumps,
These commoner dumplings—
Children of the coronet.

Who would guess such a spectacle
But those who’ve already seen
The princess curled within the peasant—
The goddess in the hag flower.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah E. Page graduated Cum Laude from Brigham Young University with a B.A. in English in 2007 and is pursuing her Master of Science and certification in Secondary English at Southern Connecticut State University. Her poetry has been published in Noctua Review, Mormon Artist, Inscape: A Journal of Literature and Art, and included in the anthology Fire in the Pasture: Twenty-First Century Mormon Poets. When not scribbling novels or taking pictures of the ragged aster and other weeds running rampant in her garden, she enjoys getting lost on long walks in the Naugatuck State Forest.

*This is, of course, a variation on the common adage to “make like a tree and branch out,” and the less common adage, used primarily among canines (the dogs, not the teeth), “make like a tree and bark.” Puns about leaves will not be tolerated.

___________________________________________________________________________

Professor Percival P. Pennywhistle despises children and loathes nature, which often gets on his shoes and under his fingernails, but he recognizes that both are important enough to be addressed, and so he writes poetry and other things for children, some of it about nature. Bits and pieces of his work can be found here, and he can also be reached on Facebook and via email at pennywhistlestop@gmail.com. The poems published on WIZ come from Poems for the Precocious and Alphabet Stew: Poems in a Particular Order. Other projects in development include Mythiphus, Me Grimms and Melancholies, Kid Viscous and the Mysterious Substance, Jonah P. Juniper and getting Ben Crowder to be his illustrator.

Nature-based flash fiction or short stories running between 100 and 1300 words are also welcome.  Excerpts from longer stories or novels up to 1300 words are encouraged–though pieces may run longer if they can be broken into multiple parts.

Please read WIZ’s submissions guide before sending your work.  Then electronically submit your work either to wilderness@motleyvision.org or to pk.wizadmin@gmail.com.

Coming soon to a mailbox (or computer) near you: Dialogue’s environmental issue.  Several Wilderness Interface Zone contributors are included therein–congratulations, friends! Frequent WIZ contributor Steven Peck guest edited this issue.

Table of contents:

Page     Author     Title
Mary Toscano     Front Cover
Inside Cover, Title Page
v     Edwin Firmage, Jr.     Letters
1     Steven L. Peck     Why Nature Matters: A Special Issue of Dialogue on Mormonism and the Environment
6     George B. Handley     Faith and the Ethics of Climate Change
36     Craig D. Galli     Enoch’s Vision and Gaia: An LDS Perspective on Environmental Stewardship
57     Bryan V. Wallis     Flexibility in the Ecology of Ideas: Revelatory Religion and the Environment
67     Jason M. Brown     Whither Environmental Theology
87     Bart H. Welling     ”The Blood of Every Beast”: Mormonism and the Question of the Animal
118     Mary Toscano     A Perch, A Foothold, A Float
119     Patricia Gunter Karamesines     Why Joseph Went to the Woods: Rootstock for LDS Literary Nature Writers
134     Adam S. Miller     Recompense
143     Ron Madson     Grandpa’s Hat
148     Sarah Dunster     Gaius
150     Harlow Soderborg Clark     Easter Sermons
152     Jon Ogden     Seasonal Ritual
153     Jonathon Penny     Winterscape: Prairie
154     Karen Kelsay     Mother Willow
155     Sandra Skouson     Girl Without a Mother to Her Big Brother
156     Mary Toscano     The Tightrope Walker
157     Hugo Olaiz     The Birth of Tragedy
161     David G. Pace     American Trinity
177     Benjamin E. Park     Image and Reality in the Utah Zion
180     Polly Aird     Not Just Buchanan’s Blunder
190     Rob Fergus     Scry Me a River
196     Mary Toscano     Wherever He May Go
197     Peter L. McMurray     This Little Light of Ours: Ecologies of Revelation

Can’t wait to get my copy.   I’m very happy to see so many WIZards’ work appearing in the issue, including poems from WIZ’s 2010 Spring Poetry Runoff.

Only complaint: The cover girl or boy polar bear is cute, but I would have put hummingbirds up front.

Just sayin’.

An earth in step with brimming clouds above
Renews a onetime halted suitor’s dance,
Accepting rain’s entreating poet’s love,
Penned once again in arcing rainbow’s glance.

Cold voices from this blanket world rise up
To sing away with birds where snows still cling,
And stirred to drink new season’s refilled cup,
our slumbering earth steps thawing into spring.

______________________________________________________________________

Nathan Meidell is a blissfully wedded, stay-at-home father and student who enjoys escaping into the literature of his childhood, as well as trying to create some of his own.  You can read sporadically updated thoughts on art and writing from his blog, Palabras Ardientes.  You can read more of his poetry published at WIZ here.

*contest entry*

Rocky hills
blush green from
unexpected rain

Shy poppies
bloom
in spite of themselves.

_________________________________________________________________

To read Judith’s bio and more of her poetry on WIZ go here, here, and here.

*contest entry*

________________________________________________________________

To read Barry’s bio and another of his poems on WIZ, go here.

*contest entry*

“He’s laughing.”
“Sorry. It’s just such a good quote.”
“I’ll look for it in the paper.”

An hour later the reporter stops short of his car.
Behold
Three night-lit deer on the lawn,
Across the street three more in the retention basin.

Beautification eaters.
Beautification.
Deer, watchers,
What do they see?
Pasture? Food? Pests?

“Do you have deer in your yard?”
His mother will ask this – many times –
When she sees a deer
Or remembers the buck sitting under the swing set,
Rising in the shadow, walking into moonlight
Moving downhill into the garden.
“They don’t come down this far.
We live too far from the mountain,”
He always says.

Yet they do come down.
He pictures the deer he will see tomorrow
At the top of Lindon hill
As he pedals to work,
Sees the red patch scraped of fur.
Hide? Muscle? Jerky?

Instead he looks at the life before him
Prays them safe passage across the highway
Safe from himself, from other drivers,
Safe passage up the mountain,

And drives away from their green pastures.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Harlow Clark lives works and writes in a subdivided orchard in Pleasant Grove, Utah where people plant fruit trees in memory of those the developer displaced, and deer don’t generally visit. He mostly writes a combination of Marxist literary criticism–”the spirit of Groucho is upon me”–and personal essay. He is a prolific stringer for local papers, 1500-2000 articles and photos published. “Beautification” grew out of a city council discussion he was covering.

*contest entry*

The swelling earth, the dusting rain
waking the buds of branches. Brave
Green—that bright, defiant color
of the lovers’ month.

And secrets in the woods; I come
here often, whispering the names
I know. I sit on wet grass, under
branches that bloom white for my mother
and my father, while the crescent wanes
in the lovers’ month.

___________________________________________________________________

Sarah Dunster is the  mother of six children, age eight and under. They are adorable, and they bring light to her life, but writing is what keeps her sane.  Sarah’s childhood journals are littered with poems, and she wrote her first novel when she was nine years old. Poetry has always been the essential way that Sarah connects to her own emotions through writing, and the most visceral poems that she writes are usually heavy on themes of nature. In addition to poetry and fiction, Sarah’s hobbies and interests include (but are not limited to), singing, skiing, guitar, piano, environmentalism, psychology, and Toblerone.

To read another poem by Sarah published on WIZ, go here.

*contest entry*