Were You at Woodstock?

Just about a month after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, another big cultural event happened in August----Woodstock. As you recall from previous posts, I was working as a waitress on Fishers Island in the Long Island Sound that summer. Here is what I've written about that trip (in every sense of the word) off-island:

"I left Fishers Island only once that summer of ’69 to go with Mitch and Rob,  their sister Carol and her boyfriend Hans. We piled into Hans’s car at the ferry dock on the other side and drove to a music festival he knew about in upstate New York. Hans was the kind of guy who, though not very hip himself, always knew the latest, hippest things—where to get the best weed, or who the up-and coming bands were that no one else had heard of yet. He already knew this festival was going to be so big you wouldn’t even need a ticket to get in.

“There are gonna be so many fuckin’ people there,” Hans said. “They’ll never be able to take all the tickets. It’ll be free for the people.”

Woodstock wasn’t a place yet in our minds, just the road was, pulling us along with thousands of others to something, someplace, some experience. The 17^th century Japanese poet Basho had said, “The journey itself is home,” and it was the journey itself, not the performances of rock’s luminaries, that is most memorable for me. The trip became its own home with a traffic jam of epic proportions, surrounded by tens of thousands of people just like us, our new family, our new tribe.

We happily walked the mile or so from where we left the car to carry all our gear (Hans’s gear) alongside our new tribe, which was going to save the world through music, peace, love, and drugs. Hans had found an old Army tent from his Boy Scout days in his parents’ garage, and had filled a cooler with over twenty sandwiches—whole wheat peanut butter and jelly, whole wheat humus and cheese, whole wheat cheese, and three with juicy slabs of ham. A big pot of brown rice still in the pot took up the rest of the room in the cooler.

Self-sufficient in our tent, we were escaping the confines of the old society. At our neatly laid out site, we even had a couple of folding lawn chairs Hans had grabbed from his parents’ porch. Cool people from all over the country stopped by to share joints and food. This was what the new world was going to look like, we told ourselves.
Somehow I got close enough to the stage that first night to see Joan Baez perform. How many nights in high school had I played her record over and over on my little orange plastic record player in my room, and now here she was, tiny on the big stage, singing "I Shall Be Released" in that pure voice that could echo through a teenage life. And the next night, Janis played and wailed. Janis Joplin, who sang it for us middle-class white girls who knew there was another life out there.

By the third night, though, the tent was leaking, the sandwiches were gone, and the family togetherness was wearing off.  Mitch was tripping and morose. Rob was tripping and even more of a loudmouth than he usually was. Hans and Carol just made out constantly for two days; rumor had it she was still a virgin. I got tired of wandering around dirty crowds in the mud, having the same boring conversation with different people: “Yeah, it’s really cool, man.” “Yeah, they were fuckin’ awesome.”  “Yeah, the outhouses suck.”

All those thousands turned out to not necessarily be just like me. But even if they smelled bad and raged on about absurdities and were right in your face, you had to love them as in: “C’mon people now, smile on your brother. Everybody get together, gonna love one another right now.”

It was all about sharing, not just sex, but your food and stash and what we would call in the ‘80s, your personal space. And the only way to turn down their offerings, no matter how undesirable, was to say nonchalantly, “I’m cool, man.”

In other words, we had to be nice, at least we women did, or we would earn that most terrible of epithets—an uptight chick.   Turn down another hit of acid, or tell someone rummaging in your tent to get lost, or push away from the embrace of a stranger and the tongue forced into your mouth, and you could later hear someone say about you, “She’s uptight, man.”

I didn’t get it. Here we were supposed to be creating a new society, and we chicks were getting the same message we had gotten when we wore little white gloves in the 1950s—be nice. I didn’t want to be nice. I wanted to do my own trip, not somebody else’s version of it. I wanted to be on the road that was mine." 

(Italicized text excerpted from "On Our Own Road" from Hullabaloo on the Space Coast: A Memoir of Place by Linda S. Buckmaster, copyright 2012.)

Island Meadow

Ah, summer in Maine--there's nothing like it. Below is my friend and writing buddy Elizabeth Garber's poem that captures the intoxication of hanging out on a summer day. She wrote it on Great Spruce Head Island in Penobscot Bay, which was the summer home of the painter Fairfield Porter. The family offers an annual Art Week Residency for a dozen visual artists and one poet, which is how Elizabeth and I got to be there for different summers.

To best appreciate the poem, you need to hear Elizabeth read it in her soft, warm voice, but here is the next best thing. The form  is an old French one called a villanelle. I'll let you google it.

Island Meadow

For days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed,

where butterflies rode perfumed thermals for the joy of flight.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave.

While bees foraged in their urgent work, barging with greed

into indolent globes of milky blooms, Victorian pink and white,

for days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed.

I stepped through summer’s shimmer, orange jolts of hawkweed,

crisp currents of blueberries under foot, sweet fern, knee height.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave.

Mornings in my darkened cabin, I woke to days eclipsed of need,

pillow glancing towards dawn’s fingers, streaking golden delight.

For days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed.

Butterflies dipped, drank, stroked avalanche of blooms to feed;

a chase, a flutter, a cascade of gauze wings leaping out of sight.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave.

Waking from a dream, happiness flooded, my Beloved held me,

our bodies merged like butterflies, only meadow filled my sight.

For days I lay there, drugged amidst the blooming milkweed.

I nestled like a deer in the shining grass and could not leave. 

("Island Meadow," copyright Elizabeth Garber, 2012, www.elizabethgarberpoetry.com)

This photo is from Bear Island, which is in the same archipelago as Great Spruce Head, just across the gut from it, in fact. This island was the summer home of Buckminster Fuller when he was growing up, and his family, who has owned the island for over a hundred years, rent the four cottages on it for part of the summer. http://bearislandmaine.com/Welcome.html This is the view out one of the windows of the cottage three other writer/artists and I rented for a retreat last month. No electricity, water hand drawn from the well, and quiet.

 

MEN WALK ON MOON

Well, I was so busy with summer in Maine that I forgot all about Neil Armstrong's walk as the first man on the moon on July 20, 1969. I'll bet you forgot, too. Where were on you that date and did you care that we had made it to the moon?

I can tell you that I was working as a waitress on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound, and I couldn't have cared less, to use a favorite expression of my father's. Despite growing up in the shadow of Cape Canaveral rocket gantries, I was almost 19 and in the process of rejecting my roots in the space industry, as it were. The space race, I could have told anyone who would have listened, was just more wasted money in the military-industrial complex, money that could have been spent on eliminating poverty, racism, and war. Rockets were a sort of immature interest to be ignored by anyone who was as cool as I was as a hippie chick in '69.

But when the usual day-late arrival of The New York Times landed on the Fisher Island ferry dock with the mail, and I saw the giant headline "MEN WALK ON MOON" and the smaller headline "A Powdery Surface is Closely Explored,"  I read all the front page articles and the inside "jumps" before I carefully re-folded the paper and delivered it to the country club where I worked. After all, during my entire growing-up, this was what everyone on the Space Coast most cared about. And I felt just the tiniest bit of snobbish pride that I knew all about what a launch entailed. I realized that I had an identity with a time and place I didn't know I wanted.

Now, over forty years later, I can see that it is rather remarkable we had met President Kennedy's goal of landing a man on the moon before the end of the sixties. When he announced in 1961 the pursuit of the Next Frontier, the point was to beat the Soviets, of course. But how often these days do our leaders make a goal and we actually make it -- on time (although I won't say on budget)? And what do we have in this current national climate that everyone, even a disaffected youth, can all celebrate together? http://tv.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0720.html#article

No Particular Place to Go

Ah--summertime, and the blogging thins out. 

The other evening I was driving through the beautiful warm night  in an effort to relax my dog, Max, who is intensely freaked by thunderstorms and firecrackers. I knew the Searsport Fourth of July fireworks (re-scheduled to the sixth, thanks to the fog) would begin any minute, so I drove us to Northport and back, slowly with "no particular place to go." 

The night air flew around the car and Max's ears flapped outside the window. I enjoyed the car's hum, so self-contained and private. What can be better than a warm night ride? Here is an excerpt on the topic:

"In the early days before my brother was born, when it was just me and no car air conditioning, my parents drove all night through the Southwest to escape the heat of the day. It was the beginning of the aerospace industry, and my father followed the jobs around the country with his GI Bill engineering degree—Long Beach, Norfolk, Maryland, and later, Cape Canaveral.

It would have been some kind of Chevrolet coupe we were in, second-hand.  That’s what he always drove, and I still associate the rounded lines and grinning grills of the early 1950s models with the possibilities of family.

 In the mornings, we pulled into a motel where I amused myself with books and dolls while they slept. My mother woke late morning and took me to the pool so my father, the driver, could get a few more hours’ sleep. After lunch in the car, he would tell jokes and sing loudly in what he called his “whiskey tenor.” “When the moon hits the eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore,” he sang, never finishing a whole song.

We drove through the afternoon and evening, the desert landscape rolling by. After a long sunset, the funnel of the headlights revealed just what was necessary to know of the road ahead. My parents talked through the night quietly or not at all, my four-year-old self witness to this dashboard light intimacy.

Eventually I climbed into the rounded window shelf above the back seat and hypnotized myself with the passing lights fading away into darkness as the radio played softly and my father sang along from time to time. Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Flatt and Scruggs, music that was always best with a bit of nighttime static behind it conveying great distances, distances traveled and those left to go.

I was too young to have understood the situations they were singing about in those songs, but the music told me everything  I needed to know. The “high lonesome sound” drifted around the car while the hot air poured through my father’s window, his elbow languishing on the door. The singer’s plaintive story-telling, the dobro’s call, the pedal steel guitar pulling long and low, the fiddle alternating between joy and sorrow—this was life, I came to imagine, or at least my father’s idea of life. My mother preferred show tunes with a happily ever after.

I couldn’t have explained it until much later, but it was through that car radio I first learned about loneliness and longing and loss, real or imagined. I heard how they wrapped around each other in harmony and traveled together with us through the hot night on invisible waves of air."

(Excerpt from "On On Our Own Road" in Hullabaloo on the Space Coast: A Memoir of Place, copyright Linda Buckmaster, 2012). 

 

Monhegan, Shamans, and Chants

                A couple of weeks ago, I was out on Monhegan Island. For the past thirty-odd years, I have been getting out there most summers, either for a day hike or as much as a week. This time, it was two nights in the Rose Room at Tribler Cottage (www.triblercottage.com)with my son Eben (age 30).

                We spent our time doing what you do on Monhegan—hiking the trails and cliffs, catching up on the new art, checking out this past winter’s blowdowns of trees in the dense woods. We ran into my friend, Monroe Maine artist Kenny Cole, who was in the middle of his five-week Monhegan Artist Residency (www.kennycole.com). Over beers while waiting for our crabcake burgers on Fish Beach, we talked about the challenges and joys of artist residencies.

After Kenny left, Eben and I were joined at the communal  picnic table by a shaman from Miami who works for the Miami Beach school district. Since I was born in Miami, we had a lot to talk about. The guy had a great attitude, was super friendly, and the burgers were perfect with just the right amount of tarter sauce.

                We also ran into artist Dyan Berk (www.dyanberk.com ) , who used to live on the island year-round. Her house out there, by the way, is for sale.

                Eben and I hiked to Burnt Head by way of Lobster Cove. Here is a poem I “got” on Burnt Head a few years ago and is in my collection, Heart Song & Other Legacies.

Chant

                          "I contain multitudes."

                         Walt Whitman

I am an architecture

of skins, the bones

of other creatures twisting

through me.

I am the snakes and the lizards and

the one-eyed crocodiles.

I am the lesser known species

of birds and the brush

that sustains them.

I am the saltwater fish

and the freshwater fish

and those that swim

in the brackish places in between.

I am the small mammals that gnaw

and nibble in the night.

I am the Bengal tiger resting, heavy

eyes drooping to sleep.

I am all hopping things -

red-backed spiders and rabbits

and toads that live under drains.

I am the blue whale and the harbor

seal, the starfish curling

over sea urchin prey.

I am the flight of the albatross over

open waters. I am

the gulls and the crows mourning

for this world.

I am those multitudes

that fly and crawl and run and limp.

I am all

these things.

                       

(“Chant” from Heart Song & Other Legacies, Illuminated Sea Press, copyright Linda Buckmaster, 2007)

Reading in Camden

I'll be part of a celebration for the 100th anniversary of the discovery of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay at the Whitehall Inn in Camden, Maine.  There will be events all summer with readings, films, guided walks, and more.

I'm on Wednesday, July 11 at 7 p.m. with fellow poets Ellen Goldsmith, Leonore Hildebrandt, Richard Miles, and Elizabeth Garber. We'll each be reading from Millay's work and some of our own. I'll be reading a couple of her sonnets.

If you haven't read Millay since high school, she's worth taking a new look at. Here is the whole list of events:

http://www.whitehall-inn.com/images/Millay%20Calendar%20rev6-1-12..pdf

Longleaf and Palmettos

Speaking of indy bookstores, another of my local favorites, Left Bank Books (www.leftbankbookshop.com) is moving to Belfast. Hooray! That brings to four the number of independent bookstores located in downtown Belfast—not bad for a city of 6,692.

Marsha, Lindsay, and Barb at Left Bank have been my go-to folks for ordering special books for my writing project. The latest is Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray (Milkweed Editions, 1999). Ray grew up in a junkyard owned by her family in southern Georgia in longleaf pine country. (The term “cracker” has lots of stories attached to its genealogy and has come to mean poor white country folk in Georgia and interior Florida.)

Longleaf pine, or Georgia pine, ecosystems stretch into northern Florida. Like so many ecosystems, this one has been destroyed so that today its remaining 10,000 acres of virgin forest are less than 0.001 of what was once there. Ray is an ecologist who writes like a poet. Although the pine-y woods of north Florida are much different than palmettos—the dominant ecosystem where I grew up—I can relate to her love of the flat, open land with lots of sky. As she writes of an approaching thunderstorm: “Everything that comes you see coming. That’s because the land is so wide . . . flat as a book, vulnerable as a child.”

Although they don’t seem vulnerable, palmettos are.  I can’t imagine how many hundreds of thousands of acres of that landscape have been bulldozed over the past fifty years to make way for the Florida of the tourist brochure. Ubiquitous as memory from the Everglades to South Carolina, palmettos are commonly viewed as trash plants, but they function to stitch and hold the thin sandy soil in place. I write:

“Like an open palm of remembrance with many thin waving fingers, the palmetto’s fan-shaped leaves spread three feet across. Its leathery fronds rustle and smack each other in any little breeze, quick to bend and move. The serrated edges and massing habit make a walk through a stand without a trail a painful experience. Impenetrable for humans except by machete, palmettos’  dominance in the natural landscape is what makes an area wild, whether it’s an empty lot or the Canaveral National Seashore.” 

(Italicized excerpt from “Prologue: Palmettos” in Hullabaloo on the Space Coast: A Memoir of Place by Linda S. Buckmaster, copyright 2012.)