Can Sawant and Socialism End the Seattle Freeze?

Photojournalist W. Eugene Smith in Seattle, 1976. When I asked Gene whether skyrocketing costs of equipment and supplies might gentrify photography into a medium only the rich could afford, thereby purging it of its humanitarian vision, a few of Seattle's vindictively intolerant Ansel Adams disciples shouted both of us down, denouncing us for our mutual recognition that art and politics are inseparable. (The negatives from which this hitherto unpublished image is made miraculously survived the 1983 fire and were dug out of the rubble the following year.) M2 Leica, 35mm f/2 Summicron, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure unrecorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2013. (Click on image to view it full size.)

*

SOCIALIST KSHAMA SAWANT'S stunning victory in a Seattle city council election is forcing me to reconsider my longstanding hatred of what was undoubtedly the most xenophobic and politically hypocritical town in the United States.

Seattle's xenophobia, specifically its legendary hostility to people not born locally, was so venomous it has given birth to at least three web sites, I Hate Seattle,  Seattle Shmeng and the original, Seattle Sucks, which is seemingly no longer available on-line. The townspeople's hypocrisy, even more glaring, was measured by the huge gap between their haughty claims to progressive politics and environmental enlightenment versus the ugly reality of their malice toward lower-income people – particularly as demonstrated by their (carefully closeted) bigotry and their relentless opposition to tax reform and adequate mass transit.

The results of Seattle's bogus progressiveness, which because of the way the town dominates the state legislature actually afflict the entire state, include the most regressive state tax structure in the nation and a regional transit system that, as I noted in a comment on the aforelinked article's discussion thread, is nearly a half-century behind those of comparable areas.

One of these areas is metropolitan Portland, Oregon, which has a transit system that is considered a national model of forward-looking effectiveness.

But the fact newly elected Seattle City Councilwoman Sawant is not only a declared Marxian socialist who makes no secret of her radicalism but is an immigrant as well suggests a sociological change in Seattle that may be of unprecedented magnitude. Indeed it suggests Seattle is at last on the brink of evolving into a genuine city, with all the cosmopolitan open-mindedness that gives urban living its great potential.

That said, my loathing of Seattle is too justified by ugly facts, too long-standing and too intense for me to set it aside without a lot of further reflection.

I first wrote of my animosity toward Seattle in a 1984 Village Voice piece, a brief but bitterly truthful summation of the four bottomlessly miserable years I dwelt there, 1972-1976. In terms of unabated loneliness, these were by far the worst years of my life.

The Voice account provoked Seattleites to an unsurprising frenzy of censorship, angry headlines and venomous letters to local editors. In predictable submission to the malignant Scandinavian/Lutheran puritanism that lurked beneath Seattle's seemingly benign surface, the local reprints suppressed my best turns of phrase – especially those describing Seattle from the perspective of a shunned and ostracized outlander. Some of the better passages are thus restored here:

(Seattle is) no place for dedicated urbanites. Indeed, anyone tempted to move there should first read Raymond Gastil's Cultural Regions of the United States, a University of Washington press book which accurately equates the xenophobic quagmires of Puget Sound with the intellectual barrens of Ohio.

There are the wonderfully enlightened, culture-loving middle-class professionals who will call you to your face a “fucking East Coast intellectual” and invite you to “go back where you belong,” with even stronger language, occasionally accompanied by threats of physical violence. And then there's the prevalent ethos of “mellow,”  which means any conversation beyond a rudimentary cataloging of new possessions and recent conquests – his new wife, her new man, his new skis, her new boat – is “too heavy, man.”

New York males should be especially wary. Seattle women – they're still called “girls”  out in the Evergreen state – won't look at you twice unless you're blond, tall and built like a lumberjack. But that only gets you in the door. You've also got to wow the ladies with body language, man, which means dancing like John Travolta and never forgetting the taboo on conversation. Otherwise you'll spend the night (which ends promptly at 1:45 a.m.) getting sloshed on 3.2 salmon piss while you watch some plad-shirted executive cowboy try to seduce his prom-queen secretary out of her lip-reader jeans.

Like so many others who have encountered the infamous Seattle Freeze, at first I blamed myself. Then I met other outlanders and began to realize we were all despised merely because we had moved there from somewhere else. That I was born in the Borough of Brooklyn and came to Washington state from Manhattan made the locals' hatefulness that much worse. In Seattle, someone whose birth certificate was issued by the City of “Jew York” – a term I first heard during an unpleasant exchange of insults with a self-proclaimed Seattle “poet” in 1972 – is even more reviled than someone from California.

***

My initial encounter with the region's carefully closeted but nevertheless intense bigotry – in this instance, the same anti-Semitism revealed by the damning of my birthplace as “Jew York,”  was in Bellingham rather than Seattle. It was November of 1970 and I had just learned to my horror I was homeless – that an unreliable sub-lessor had abandoned my wonderful Chelsea apartment five months earlier, that it had thus reverted to the landlord and left me without a place to live. Now with only a little money remaining after a summer and fall of chasing the Back-to-the-Land-Movement/agricultural-commune/resurrection-of-the-Goddess story through the rural Pacific Northwest, I had rented a room in a Bellingham boarding house and was desperately looking for work.

Obviously my first choice was the local daily, The Bellingham Herald. Because this was not the South, where my Civil Rights Movement activities had made me persona non grata at every mainstream paper but The Oak Ridger, I assumed that even if I did not find immediate employment, I'd be welcomed as a fellow professional, just as I had been on every Northeastern paper to which I had ever applied. Hence I typed up a resume, then phoned the lover who had managed to save my files and books from the Manhattan apartment debacle and asked her to please send me the recent clippings of my work. 

When they arrived a few days later, I phoned The Herald's managing editor, a guy named Fowler, and asked if he had any openings for reporters, as in those pre-Watergate days most newspapers did. He said yes, we made an appointment for an interview, and I assumed I would soon be on my way toward earning the exit money that would get me back to the City.

But as soon as Fowler saw where I had worked, he bristled with rejection. “We don't like your kind out here,” he said. “Do yourself a favor and catch the next flight back to New York.”

At the time I dismissed his reaction as that of a small-minded managing editor of a small newspaper in a small town that – despite its reputation as a “hippie Mecca” (a description famously applied by The Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1970) – obviously remained as small-minded as any Southern Klanville.

Now of course I recognize the Seattle Freeze is misnamed – that with the notable exception of Tacoma, it should include the entire Puget Sound area.

To encounter that same hostility from the newsroom boss of the state's largest-circulation newspaper, as I did in 1973, was particularly shocking; I had repeatedly found the better newspapers – note again my experience at The Oak Ridger – to be sanctuaries of reason even in realms of unabashed prejudice. But the managing editor of The Seattle Times, Henry MacLeod, rejected me with essentially the same message that had been snarled at me by Fowler. MacLeod was perfectly polite, as Seattleites usually are when they're deliberately inflicting psychological injury, but the sentiments were identical. “All your experience is East Coast experience,” MacLeod said, “and that doesn't count out here. We do things differently. You'll be a lot happier if you go back where you came from.”

***

The we-don't-want-you-here vandalism to which I was subjected so many times in Seattle began in Bellingham too, though there was only one major incident in the two years I resided there. While I never learned the identity of the perpetrator(s), it was already clear to me there were people in the local Counterculture community who vindictively envied my photographic and verbal skills, fervently hated me for my New York origin and were probably infuriated by my classroom performance as an unapologetic intellectual at Western Washington State College as well. Whatever my alleged offense,  it prompted some unknown person(s) to break into my rental house, disconnect the oil-burning heater's chimney-pipe, turn the stove up to high, leave my dog Dingo locked inside and nearly murder him with the stove's sooty outpouring of carbon monoxide.

It was New Years Eve, the last day of 1971, a night I remember as improbably clear and invigoratingly cold. I was attending a big party at a local tavern, was photographing the festivities, had connected with a young woman there and under normal circumstances would not have been home until late the next morning. But – fortunately for Dingo – I ran out of film. So about 12:30 a.m., I went back to the house for more. Thus an exigency of photography saved his life. But the house itself, everything in it blackened by soot and reeking of partially combusted petroleum, was rendered unlivable for the entire month of January. Happy 1972.

Dingo was a very protective half Malemute/half German shepherd, about 85 pounds of no-nonsense canine, and obviously the perpetrator(s) knew him well enough to fool him with phony friendship – a dishonest skill Seattlites seem to possess in abundance. Just as obviously, the intent of the crime was to kill Dingo and frighten me into leaving town. But as the Ku Klux Klan learned in East Tennessee, I'm not easily scared into retreat. Instead I contacted my real friends – a locally born Jewish businessman named Les and his Chicago-born fiancée Gabrielle, also a single mother named Billie who shortly afterward moved to California for graduate school and whom I regret to say I later lost track of (as I remember she too was from someplace in the Middle West) – and they willingly granted dog and man the necessary accommodations until I made the house habitable again.

In subsequent years, while I worked, resided and attended school in Seattle, all four of the tires on my automobile were slashed twice, once in 1974 and once in 1976, and the two right-side tires of a Volkswagen belonging to my then-lover, a woman from California, were cut beyond repair in 1975. Scribbled notes stuck under my windshield-wipers in the '74 and '76 incidents made the vandals' intent unmistakable: one said “go back where you came from,” the other said “we don't want you here.”

***

In 1975 I was assaulted during a post-opening party at which I was one of the honored guests. I was one of three participants in a show at King and King, a Seattle gallery that flourished during the mid-'70s but closed years ago. My presence in the exhibition was a courageous act on the part of the proprietors given that all my photography in those days was social-documentary work – an utterly taboo medium in a town where Ansel Adams is a cult messiah, his Zone System is the cult's biblical or qur'anic equivalent and any use of film to depict the human condition is considered a sacrilegious mixing of politics and art.

However it was not my photos that triggered the assailant's rage. Those he merely scorned, his “why don't you go back where you belong” routine a typical expression of Seattle xenophobia. Now, eavesdropping on my conversation with other guests, he somehow got the utterly mistaken notion I was badmouthing the hostess and tried to ambush me with a wild right hook aimed at the side of my face. He was at least a foot taller than I, built like a runner or a bicycle racer who also lifted weights, a blond, handsome, obviously athletic specimen of Homo Sapiens Seattlus, equally suitable for a Nazi recruiting poster or an advertisement for a trendy health club. If his wrecking-ball fist had landed with its intended force, I have no doubt he would have knocked me down if not out cold.

But in those days my peripheral vision was still good and I saw the punch coming and stepped inside his reach and all he did was knock my glasses off my face and send them flying across the room. I poked a couple of intentionally distracting left jabs upward toward his chin and launched a full-power karate kick at his balls. Yes I intended to hurt him – badly. The viciousness of his sneak attack warranted no less. I assumed the kick would drop him to the floor, where I would kick him again as he screamed and writhed and clutched his ruptured nuts: welcome to the jungle, motherfucker.

Alas the kick foundered in the tsunami of onlookers who washed over both of us and pulled us apart.

One of these onlookers was a pretty woman whose eloquent reaction to my photographic collages – see “Sandwiches for Mind and Spirit” – had aroused my interest both intellectually and physically. But now she turned on me, exactly the sort of treachery I had come to expect from Seattleites of whatever gender. She shrilly denounced me for my attempt at self-defense, yelling something like “you bastard you tried to kick him you fucking New Yorkers always fight dirty,” at which point I sensed I was in danger of becoming the object of a lynching and quickly departed.

As in this incident, Seattle-born women often seemed breathtakingly cruel to me. This was a profound shock because women elsewhere, particularly in the Northeast but even in the South, had generally regarded me as good company. Many Northeastern women – I can say it now at age 73 without seeming boastful – forthrightly acknowledged they were sexually aroused by my intellect and my ability to share its content. There's also the fact I genuinely like women, that I regard women as intrinsically better human beings than men and usually more interesting as well. 

But in Seattle, even if the women managed to be somewhat intellectually accomplished, they viewed intellectuality as an exclusively female domain. They dismissed male intellectuals – especially those of us who genuinely relish female companionship – as repulsively effeminate. Thus they retained the mating habits of high-school prom queens, insisting on men with the bodies of professional athletes and jock-strapped minds to match. Most of these women also made no secret of their contempt for what they considered “East-Coast-type” males – smallish, slight of build, with dark eyes, curly dark brown hair, coal-black beard and Manhattan's signature intensity – in other words, men much like myself.

Because Seattleites so often assumed I was Jewish, I soon recognized this almost fanatical aversion to physical features like mine as implicitly anti-Semitic – yet another of the fascist instincts that lurked beneath the allegedly “progressive” facade of Pugetopolis politics.

***

By the spring of 1974 I was beginning to sing to myself that Bob Dylan line that goes, “I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough,” but then by a strange quirk of fate I was offered the opportunity to became the founding photographer of The Seattle Sun, which would enable me to showcase my camera work as never before. It also put me more or less at the town's (pseudo) bohemian center, which I assumed would open doors both professionally and socially.

But the hatred actually intensified.

One of the unsuccessful contenders for my job was a smugly handsome local boy of about age 20, a typical Ansel Adams disciple named Nick who had no discernible photojournalistic talent and even less verbal skill but had the physique, carriage and blond cowlick of a male model. The local women on the staff didn't give a damn he was professionally incompetent; they merely wanted him around as a boy-toy to pretty up the office. Eventually – over vehement protests of two of The Sun's three outlander women (one of whom was my source inside the struggle) – the local women prevailed. They didn't care it flushed the paper's photographic quality down the toilet. For them, alternative journalism was more about having fun than producing great work. In any case, being from Seattle – or Texas – they wouldn't have recognized or understood quality social documentary photography even if it were handed them as the visual epic entitled The Family of Man. Just like Barbie wants Ken, and just as mindlessly, they wanted Nick no matter what. And when they finally got him – when his mediocre pictures began replacing my work on the cover – I knew The Sun had started to set.

So it was back to singing that Bob Dylan line. It took me another 18 months to get out of Seattle – I still had five quarters of school to complete before I got my bachelor of arts degree from Fairhaven College, and along the way I had acquired some private photography students to whom I felt strongly obligated – but by the fall of 1976 I was gone from Emeraldville. I was never there again save for occasional visits with friends, never more than an overnight stay.

***

The South, where I spent about two thirds of my boyhood, was despite its xenophobic history infinitely more accepting of me than Seattle ever was. In 1957, obviously a Yankee, I immediately found part-time work on The Knoxville Journal with samples of writing I had done in Michigan for The Grand Rapids Herald and later for The Grand Rapids Press. Though I was the carpet-bagger son of a carpet-bagger mortgage-banker, though I bore the odium of a child of divorce, I was nevertheless during my senior year at Knox County's Holston High School voted “Boy Most Likely to Succeed.”

Seattle was therefore hands down the most viciously hostile place I have ever been. Considering those places include several locales in the the Ku Klux South –  one of which is this same Jacksonville that still honors slave-trader, Confederate general and KKK-Founder Nathan Bedford Forest – Seattle's hatefulness was surely without peer anywhere in the United States.

Since then I have continued to criticize Seattle relentlessly, focusing on its political deficiencies as revealed by its opposition to adequate transit and tax reform.

In fairness, I should note that Tacoma and its suburbs, formerly staunchly pro-transit, have now become more anti-transit than Seattle, actually damning public transport as a form of welfare, denouncing transit users as parasites and voting two years in a row to kill the local transit authority by ruinously downsizing its bus service.  But I still regard Tacoma as infinitely more cosmopolitan than Seattle. I have lived in Tacoma twice, 1978-1982 and again from late 2004 onward, and never once have Tacomans made me feel unwelcome.

Indeed three of my closest longtime friends are Tacomans, Mary whom I met at Western in 1971; Jim whom I met immediately after I moved to Tacoma in 1978; and another woman, Gretchen, a working artist, whom I met here in 1979. (After I sort of nudged Jim and Mary toward one another, they were wed in 1983. Not only do they remain happily married; they are also, for me, de facto family.) Thus Tacoma has become my home – that is, the closest approximation to home I will ever know in this lifetime after gentrification permanently exiled me from New York City.

But the point here is that now after the election of City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, whose open affiliation with the revolutionary Socialist Alternative Party proves her to be what I consider a real socialist, I have to reconsider my attitude toward Seattle. No matter how repugnant I have found it in the past, Seattle now seems to be transcending its xenopobic bigotry and reaching out to the peoples of the nation and the world by offering a true alternative to capitalism. Perhaps Emeraldville is at last approaching the sociological maturity that will make it a genuine Emerald City. Let us hope – especially for Councilwoman Sawant's sake – this turn of events is not merely another Seattle deception.

*****

My Contributions to Last Week's Dialogues on Other Websites

“Does Hillary's Silence on Iran Show Neocon Pull on Her Presidential Run?”  Truthout's Robert Naiman challenges Hillary to declare her true self. Applauding Naiman's astute analysis, I cite the facts revealed by Jeff Sharlet in The Family, which prove Hillary to be not just a closet Republican but a secret collaborator in the JesuNazi effort to make the United States a Christian theocracy.

“We Need More Than Words” Thom Hartmann discusses how a recent speech by President Obama “cut right to the core of some of the biggest issues in our nation, but we need more than words to fix this broken system.” I reply the only sure lesson of the past six years is that any promise uttered or implied by Obama the Orator is sure to be a Big Lie – that to imagine he will not again always serve the One Percent by shape-shifting into Barack the Betrayer is to prove one's self a fool. The result is a notably civilized discussion on one of the Internet's  best news blogs.

LB/8 December 2013 

-30-

From My Memoirs: 'The Woman on the Hill'

Moonlight in the Meadow. Photographic collage by Loren Bliss copyright 2013.

*

IT WAS LATE fall, maybe two weeks before Hallowe'en, and the wind was full of leaves and the prophecy of winter. I was still living in Whatcom County on the Sumas River at the foot of Sumas Mountain, and I had driven into Bellingham to listen to some people I knew play live music -- mostly original stoner blues with acid-rock undertones -- at a place called Cal's: an improbable tavern peopled equally by gnarly commercial fishers of both genders and the more genuinely adventuresome younger bohemians -- nearly all of them female -- from Western Washington University and Fairhaven College. An interesting mix, both intellectually and visually: older men with heavy beards and pirate ear-rings and the weather-beaten faces of years at sea and somewhere decades back abandoned degrees in literature and philosophy, older women with the kind of untamed Rhiannon-long hair that has all but vanished since the '70s and the easy loose-limbed joy-in-their-bodies grace that comes from the delicious and uninterrupted flourishing of pagan shamelessness -- most of the men and women people who came here as back-to-the-landers and after their individual communes fell apart took up salmon fishing -- some as couples working gill-netters, others as crew members on seiners, one of the women ranked among the best boat engineers in the entire fleet, in any case everyone enjoying a permanent divorce from the bourgeois ratrace, and the young women from the college watching the men with distant and mostly unrequited lust and watching the older women with unabashed envy ("I wish I was free enough to arch my back and fling my arms and swirl my hair like that") and sometimes one of the younger women asking, and the older women actually saying to the younger women, “okay, honey, here let me show you how to do it,” and everybody despite the age differences united and snug in contented noise and smoky amber beerlight and most of all bound together in a vaguely coital mass of dancing bodies joined by throbbing chords and outrageously apt lyrics:

“Gotta find me a womin
with a chain saw
Cause winter is a-comin on...” 

My dogs Sadie and LeeRoy always enjoyed nighttime trips to town -- even if they had to spend three or four hours locked in my pickup or car -- partly because they loved the ride, partly because they knew it meant a two-mile run down the bay and back after the tavern closed, or maybe a walk of nearly the same distance on one of the paths that traversed the nearby wooded ridges: in either instance the means by which I regained pass-the-tests sobriety before the 25-mile drive home. So Sadie and LeeRoy were there in the cab of my yellow Datsun truck when last call moved the party from Cal's to various private residences -- I had been invited to one such gathering but was in a strangely hollow mood and chose to be alone with my dogs instead -- and because the moon was aging but still swollen and astonishingly gibbous and sailing through broken clouds and undeniably charged with the potential of magic, I chose not to walk along the bay past the tolling gong-buoy at Post Point but rather to climb the path through an abandoned apple orchard to a hilltop meadow that a century ago had held a farmhouse and there amidst the weeds and overgrown foundation rubble listen to the wind roar and bluster in the nearby evergreens and watch the shadows dance in the hide-and-seek light.

 

It felt very secure there, welcoming even. I let the dogs run free knowing they would soon return and after I had been there maybe 15 minutes they came back as expected and took positions to my left and right, darker sentinels invisible in the dappled darkness. Now absolved of any need for watchfulness I sprawled on my back amidst the seasonally crumpled bracken. I was delighted by the unusually large moon and the erratically alternating ice-dark/snow-bright light-show of the clouds, and suddenly I wished I dared undress to be closer to the earth and air and darkness, perhaps even to dance in the curiously wavering light, but I thought about the chill and about all the headline reasons I dast not yield to pagan whim (“old drunken pervo claims religion prompted nakedness on college hill”) and so begrudgingly I submitted to the weather and the tyranny of civilization.

 

I had lain thus for maybe another half hour when Sadie and LeeRoy suddenly stood and LeeRoy grumbled and Sadie muttered and chuffed, not the low infinitely menacing seismic rumble with which they warded off known threats but an almost interrogatory sound: "we are dogs and as you can tell by our voices we are very big dogs and we are here and we don't think you mean us any harm but we're not sure and its our job to find out so please tell us so we don't have to bite you." Mutter; chuff; then again the deeper Rottweilian grumble of LeeRoy; by the focused intensity of their ears and noses something directional, perhaps coming up the slope from the opposite side of the ridge. I now sat up and scanned the unstable darkness with peripheral vision -- the old military night-operations trick -- but saw nothing and could hear no other sound than the dogs and the omnipresent wind: perhaps it was another dog, perhaps I should put them back on their leashes. But -- very uncharacteristically -- I did nothing; I sat motionless waiting to see who or what might come out of the adjacent trees and cross the tangled meadow that had been the long-ago farmhouse lawn, now under this indecisive sky one moment all moon-bright shining autumnal cobwebs and phantom-white clumps of blown thistle and pearly everlasting, the next moment again one with the forest in undifferentiated darkness.

 

A long cloud covered the moon. The woman who came from the woods moved along the path so quietly I never heard her at all, and when the moon was again unveiled she was standing to my left no more than a car's length away, and while Sadie was holding back skeptically, LeeRoy was already stepping forward swinging his strong proud undocked tail, the fresh moonlight flaring gleefully in his eyes, momentary green fire, a normal canine phenomenon some nevertheless regard as Satanic, hence the fundamentalist Christian missionary housewife who rebuked me one evening in my own front yard: "I saw it. I saw it. Your dog showed me his demon eyes. You really are a witch." But of course there was nothing like that from this woman who emerged from the darkness: she saw LeeRoy's eyes and laughed, a warm sensual inviting laugh, and said "your bigger dog's eyes are really heavy they could be very upsetting to some people."

It was a chilly night and the woman wore a long thick shawl, dark, probably wool, over her head and shoulders, and the wind tugged constantly at its fringes. Beneath that was a dark sweater and a heavy dark dress, probably also wool; the dress came nearly to her ankles, which I could see were booted in high soft leather moccasins, the lighter beads in their beadwork reflecting warm little pinpoints of the ambient light: in such footwear a woods-person can cover ground with absolute silence; no wonder I had not heard her approach. She had some kind of shoulder bag too, like a large purse on a diagonal strap, its bulk apparent beneath her shawl. I briefly wondered if maybe she was one of the local homeless.

 

Now she spoke with the dogs, her voice a musical murmur, her words carried away by the wind. After she had at last persuaded Sadie to kiss her outstretched hand she turned her full attention to me. Her face remained in shadow beneath the shawl, though I could see she had dark hair, decades uncut like the older women at Cal's, and I wondered if perhaps she had been among them.

 

"Okay if I hang around?" she asked.

 

"Certainly," I said.

 

She sat perhaps eight feet away on a natural chair I had not noticed, its cushion a slight elevation that might have been an abandoned gopher mound overgrown with bracken already crushed, the chair's back a dark lump, perhaps a section cut from the trunk of a big maple, a round of firewood lost years before when the path was still a road into deeper forests and finally into the mountains themselves.

 

"I usually come here at night to think," she said. "I've been coming here for a couple of years and this is the first time there's been anybody else."

 

"I just came up here to run the dogs and mellow out a little before the long drive home -- I live out in the county but I came in tonight for the live music at Cal's. I hope I didn't frighten you."

 

"No I actually watched you for quite a while before I let you know I was here. But I saw your dogs right away and as soon as I saw them I knew you were fine. Besides I'd seen you earlier at Cal's. We know some of the same people. But I had work to do tonight and you got there just as I was leaving.”

 

LeeRoy was by this time lying beside her, his great black bulk as close to her as he could get, his chin resting on one of her feet.

 

We talked about dogs for a while -- a dog she had raised from puppyhood had recently died of old age, and she was hoping another dog would soon find her. We talked about what we each did for a living -- she said she was a painter and a sometimes college student and she worked freelance for several Bellingham printers doing commercial art, and I knew at least the painter part was true because I was downwind and intermingled with her subtle perfume -- a hint of sandalwood and perhaps some musk I could not name -- I had caught the tell-tale scent of turpentine, and when I asked if she worked in oils, she said yes not many people do anymore, how did you know?, and I told her. A little later she asked me if I had a wife or a lover waiting at home and I said no I had been alone for ten years and she said she had broken up in June with someone she had been with for a long time and thought it would be a long time before she allowed herself such vulnerability again. "It's lonely," she said, "but lonely is less painful than misunderstood and mistrusted." Shielded by the variable night we began sharing parts of ourselves we normally would not have disclosed without the prerequisite of weeks and months of familiarity.

 

Then she said she had brought cookies and wine for herself because the moon was so huge and low and strangely shaped and she wanted to consume the cookies and wine as a kind of offering and would I join her? Yes of course I said and she apologized that she had only one glass and did I mind sharing it and I said not at all that just makes it more sacramental which is how it has felt ever since you got here. You must be pagan she said and I said yes I am and she said "then you will understand what I am doing" and fumbled in her beaded shoulder bag and brought out a dark bottle of wine and a wine glass and a cork-screw. She uncorked the bottle and poured the glass full and re-corked the bottle and set the bottle beside her on the grass and stood and LeeRoy grumbled that he had to move. She switched the glass to her left hand and made an invoking pentagram over it and lifted the glass to the moon and flicked the wine onto the grass around us and turned to me and said "blessed be." Then she said "you'll have to come closer if we're going to share this glass -- here there's actually room for two of us against this log." We sat; it was as she had said and as comfortable as any sofa. Sadie and LeeRoy moved close to us: I pictured stone age people gathered with their canine companions at the edge of some primeval forest, then remembered the ruined foundation nearby and thought of some apocalyptic aftermath: Knossos, Albion, the Death of Electric Man, humankind driven back into the forest and rediscovering the Goddess. Meanwhile she poured the glass full again. She drank and I drank; it was a good wine, probably a valpolicella, seemingly black as ink even in brightest moments of moonlight, and she drank and I drank and we both ate her cookies which were round and thick and tasty and made of oatmeal and raisins and peanut butter and perhaps other more elemental nutrients and she drank and I drank and then drinking and eating we drifted into a long conversation that gradually became more molecular than verbal and then expanded beyond physical limits into a dialogue I am still convinced was pure telepathy: I remember it not as an impassioned sharing of words but rather as a mutually eloquent transmission of images so nakedly honest I was astounded -- and yet it was so dreamlike that the next day I could remember only the vaguest details of its content. In fact I discovered to my profound sadness I could not even remember her name.

 

I never truly saw her face, only the glimpses allowed by the peek-a-boo moon and the ever-changing veil of clouds. Nor, beyond holding hands as we talked, and embracing one another when we parted, did we physically touch -- of this I am absolutely certain -- yet it was as if we had been intimate to a mutual depth few humans ever imagine, much less achieve. I do not even clearly remember our parting: only that it was somehow both fulfilled and empty, as if each of us had passed some pivotal milestone, some turning point, absolutely vital yet forever unattainable without this strange encounter on a windblown October hilltop, an end and a beginning sealed in a passionate hug that is my only vivid recollection of the entire finale: my face briefly buried in her hair, my arms around the rough wool in which she was clad, the combined scents of sandalwood and musk and turpentine and even a trace of wood smoke that told me how she heated her dwelling; and most of all the shawl falling away to reveal the great dark sweet cloud of her hair itself. Yet I remember nothing whatsoever of my farewell words to her, and I have only the vaguest memory of her farewell words to me. I am certain they were powerfully positive, nurturing, strengthening, healing: I can feel their potency even now, 13 years after the fact, and I would love to be able to write them down and add them to this narrative, but they are beyond my reach, seemingly gone forever.

 

The night does not come back into clear focus until I was at the foot of the long hill. I was unlocking my truck and my dogs were waiting for me to open the door and I was again wondering if I was sober enough to dare attempt the lengthy drive home. It was very late. The sky had blown clear and the moon though noticeably more aged was now even larger and more yellow and westering toward the mountains far across the bay. Orion was already high in the southeast. I pulled the door open. Sadie climbed into the cab and claimed the seat under the passenger window. LeeRoy grinned, wagged his tail and flared his daemon eyes like some James Harris in quadruped. In my mind I heard again the hilltop woman’s laughter, and just for the tiniest instant it seemed there was a trace of sandalwood on the pre-dawn wind.

 

LB/ posted 4 April 2013 (Copyright 9 December 2005 reproduction without permission prohibited.)

-30-