DRY CRIK Journal

It was important once
to climb the peak –
avoid looking down
and imagining the mess
after the fall.

My name is in the book
with many others:
the pregnant girl
I held in thin air,
in the chimney

near the top – we know
she had no business there,
no reason other
than keeping-up with him.
It was important then.

We were close
for an instant
above Rae Lakes,
mules and horses
grazing between them,

gripped intensely
by the next step down.
Her name and face are lost,
but not my promise
to stay off peaks.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:07 AM | Permalink

Truth lingers in tracks stamped in the earth
by the water, by the gate, where the breeze
plays steadily on the ridge. She is shy,

half-embarrassed that you have not seen her
naked, that you can’t relax, that you may be afraid
to know her, afraid to look through her eyes

if she shows herself. Each print embossed
repeatedly, you can see where she fumbled
with the latch, changed her mind and left

you to yourself, yet you can feel her
watching through the manzanita leaves
from the far hillside. There are no secrets

here. Wind and rain may work old tracks
away, but now that she has seen you,
you have become the hunted.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:09 AM | Permalink

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 4:25 PM | Permalink

                    Every so often we hear the current of night music
                    from the gods who swim and fly like we once did.
                               - Jim Harrison (“Midnight Blues Planet”)

Few at a time, we learned words early, felt
them resonate coming and going, leaving
and landing like planes and rockets
through a sea of amniotic fluid. Some
keep listening in the dark for more, yearning
for an explanation – good Girl and Boy
Scouts busy before their transformations.

Through the jagged granite teeth at the top
of the Sierras, the wind can whine eerily,
pass through the flesh, reach for another
chord as flames dance. You begin to grin,
being small is so pleasant – and you listen
carefully, hoping to bring the song home
just to lose it coming off the mountain.

In love with the flesh, we understand
the physical, the dust and dirt decomposition,
all the micro-elements ingested by roots,
seasoned with a dash of soul dispersed
in fruits and so on… forever one – a song
too long for the movie they’re selling, even for
the gods who swim and fly like we once did.

She says it is so quiet here, so black at night –
and I remember walking beneath streetlamps,
waking to the purr of a city sleeping, distant
sirens, another song of being small, but more
helpless than insignificant in the big cage spun

– Otis Redding and the rest of us, just
waiting for our numbers to be drawn.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:54 AM | Permalink

It doesn’t rain much, red skies rare at dawn
with snow on Redwood Mountain peeking –
overseeing rows of ridges folded into the creek

like an accordion greening, left on its side beneath
a new battalion of clouds pressing eastward,
blushing scarlet off the barn roof, the autumn

sycamores and this keyboard for an instant.
Quickly science fiction, I am an alien awash
in ever-changing hues of crimson, just arrived

on a cloud, glowing now like a light bulb
as the sky turns gray. ‘A sign,’ I say silently
to myself, ‘for any damn thing to happen!’

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 9:19 AM | Permalink

Sometimes it pays to look a way off –
go alone, trace the trail, find the spot –
practice being there from here. You

are naked and warm, nothing else –
no watch, no phone – just you,
whoever you are, just you.

You will hear voices there, even
from here, but if you dare disconnect
your lifelines and go in the flesh,

it is indeed another world
that takes you in, accommodates
your clumsiness, or not, it’s wild.

As you learn to look close-up,
old words come, old voices –
woodpeckers bickering in an oak.

Pretty soon, someone says, ‘Look
at me!’ and you remember
who you were, what you dreamed.

Sometimes it pays to look off –
nothing monetary, but like poetry,
you may not want to come back.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:06 AM | Permalink

Blue Thanksgiving, a raft of fog at dawn
between the peaks drifts upcanyon, drips
off lime and lemon leaves – no white frost.
Last night’s logs, gray ash – old smudge pot
cold but ready to reenlist, don flaming helmet
to purr like a kitten beside the grapefruit,
a month away from ripe red juice.

The earth has opened-up, deep with rain –
it breathes off trees and grass, all exhaling
a damp, azure veil between us and the world.
About the harvest, packing the last bushel or
lug box to the shed – pass the jug and grin
with familiar faces, between swallows, lucky
and humble to look up at once upon a time.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:37 AM | Permalink

Somewhere in my head, twenty swords drawn
at once by a ruthless, toothless bunch, one-eying
my reticence – not all my reasonable excuses,

not the rainy holiday traffic stacked and smeared
red across a pickup’s windshield, not the calf
that needs doctoring, but more like the everyday

broke horse in the far corner come saddling –
I’m fine where I am. Visalia has become a city
trying to survive on services spread across

a thousand acres of farm ground planted
to houses, many empty boxes. Just off Lover’s
Lane where my mother must have parked

in high school, the Hmong’s ripe late-tomatoes
staked in tall green rows, lit like Christmas trees,
will fill a lug where the construction stopped

on sandy loam – he’s a second-class throwback
even the city fathers have to admire. I prepare
to walk the plank: need jacket, hat and glasses,

cigarettes and messy cup of coffee as I map
the long way in to see if he got his crop off –
something else, something more than business.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How we crave to celebrate
each small accomplishment,
raise a glass to the outside gods

who let the music happen.
The sycamores want to turn
yellow, orange and brown,

let their water run backwards
into the creek, get naked and bare
gray limbs against the green,

the blue and white cumulus,
after rain. Come Thanksgiving,
each day becomes a marvel

in the making, the prolonged
undressing with eyes wide
beyond beliefs, beyond self

to find meek and humble
comforting, to be absorbed
by a landscape changing.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:13 AM | Permalink

Even the sleek, young cows
like having time to think, more
willing to help get the job done
to stay awhile longer
in these hills – the sort is easy.

Except for a single set of tracks
through the dew on new green,
first light glints, each blade afire
and twinkling like starlight
to turn the world on its head,

to stop the clock and pause
for a breath or two, for the flesh
to ingest, for a glimpse
in this poem for going slow –
an unfinished noun, like home,

like the Kaweah peaks dressing
and undressing snow, each sheet
slipping downstream a little,
revealing granite, or stripped
at once to flood – we never know

what is yet left to see of wild
extremes, of truth, of natural
beauty – the sole business of
poetry – before we go. Even
cows like having time to think.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:14 AM | Permalink

Wild Grape
Greasy Creek
November 11, 2010

Fall colors at Grapevine spring have encased these two Blue Oaks for as long as I can remember, using the their (dead) trunks and limbs for a trellis. Willow in the foreground, Live Oak to the right.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 11:21 AM | Permalink

...and another branding under our belts yesterday - quarter of an inch at daylight, half-inch now, fire in the woodstove, we're enjoying the morning inside.

We are so thankful for our neighbors who give-up a day to help us brand, or several days in the course of a season, or many months over the course of our years here. We try to pay them back when they brand their calves, trading labor like has been done in this community of ranches for generations.

I often wonder why the world can't work this way, take this template as its own because it works, and has worked over the long run. I wouldn't dream of telling my neighbor how to run his ranch, nor he consider telling us how to harvest our grass best. We might discuss it, but out of respect for one another, we're not compelled to manage more than we have. It's common sense, an endangered resource in domestic and global politics that begs the question: why?

But we're tickled today, a real Thanksqiving that includes our neighbors, friends and family. Thanks for all your help and let 'er rain!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 9:05 AM | Permalink

Chad Lawerence, Zack Shaver, Clarence Holdbrooks

Clarence & Rags

Zack & Banjo

We branded a little bunch this morning, a nice slow dance: two young men on two young horses, little calves, one at a time. Close to the house, we wanted to make sure that we had all our parts, that syringes worked, etc. before we mark some more on Friday. Beautiful day!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:56 PM | Permalink

California Buckeye
Greasy Creek
November 11, 2010

Poison Oak
Greasy Creek
November 11, 2010

Terribly allergic to Poison Oak, I don't know much about these little balls, whether or not they are seed pods. I do know that this particular climbing species is more potent, can cause more severe rections, than the standard rockpile variety that looks more like willow limbs this time of year. 12-15 feet tall, the base of this one is about four inches in diameter with bark like an oak. Stay clear!

Poison Oak in Manzanita
Greasy Creek
November 11, 2010

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:13 AM | Permalink

                            These lakes and cliffs
                            still remember me...
                                      - Norman Schaefer (“Upper Basin”)

Imagine the people they have known –
feet felt slipping in the scree, the dreams
released within the reflected light of stars

off granite, near the top of the world.
The air is thin, the Milky Way a smear.
Time is kind, it wears so slowly

that each peak is a monument to young
memory etched upon its face, interred
here. Awesome! to be so well known.

                                      - for Norman

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:48 AM | Permalink

There seems to always be the discussion of when we had green grass last year, or the year before, one that usually concludes hazily. But this journal serves that function photographically, and our rain events quantitatively.

Sulphur Ridge from the Lower Field

Sulphur Peak

November 11, 2010

Of little nutritional value, last year’s regular rainfall left us with plenty of old feed to carry-over that helps hold moisture and also serves as protection from frost. And though it doesn’t appear from a distance that there’s much green on the hillsides beneath it, the new grass is coming along just fine. High temperatures have been in the mid-60s with a rain forecast for next weekend. It’s been like spring.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:20 AM | Permalink

We can’t see the Sierras from Dry Creek, but we look to the mountains as a gauge of our winters and future summers from our higher ground. The last storm brought nearly an inch of rainfall in Greasy at 2,000-3,000 feet and left in a little snow on the Kaweahs and the Great Western Divide.

The base of the elephant on Alta Peak is skirted by the Panther Gap Trail beginning at Wolverton, running above and parallel with the High Sierra Trail that begins at Crescent Meadow in Giant Forest, both headed across Buck Creek Canyon towards Bearpaw Meadow and Kaweah Gap (10,700').

Alta Peak 11,204') (elephant, barely visible in this photo) far left to right, Triple Divide Peak (12,634'), Lion Rock, Mt. Stewart (12,025'), Black Spur (North of Kaweah Gap), Lawson Peak, Eagle Scout Peak (12,000'), Kaweah Queen (13,282'), Black Kaweah (13,583'), Red Kaweah (13,720'), Lippincott Mountain, and Mt.Kaweah (13,802'). Sawtooth Peak (12,343') lies farther to the south, east of Mineral King.

Sawtooth through Remy Gap

Coincidently, I just received "The Sunny Top of California" by Norman Shaefer, my high school roommate my freshman year at boarding school. This is a wonderful collection of hands-on, Sierra Nevada Poems in the Snyderesque tradition:

Wind and melting snow,
crumbling spurs.
Boulders scattered like rubbish,
Charybdis: dark, alone.
Plants and animals biding their time,
follow the retreating ice.
Pines march up morraines
warmed by the sun.
Pearl white cumuli
boil overhead.
I climb toward cloudland
everything a/tilt.
Bouldering and mountaineering,
my body groes stronger.
Sleeping by streams,
my mind opens and clears.
Those years of higher learning
at boarding school and college:
better to have spent them here
reading the mountains like a book.

                - © 2010 Norman Schaefer

La Alameda Press
9636 Guadalupe Trail NW
Albuquerque, NM 87114
http://www.laalamedapress.com
$14 plus S&H. 108 pp.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It was one long poem unfurling
like a river in half-sleep, wrapping
the planet in a ribbon of voices –

old and new, foreign and domestic
accents, a rolling glint of silver
peaked upon each aquamarine

wave like the beat of a song
flowing above the clouds, sounding
the last groans of unknown soldiers

calling home, impatient lovers
and the outcasts cursed to howling
mixed in peace with the sublime.

When it rains, when windows streak
tears of grief and joy, we are relieved
to be human, to be vulnerable again.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:38 AM | Permalink

It was my mother’s father
in the green Studebaker pickup
that towed our Buick
out of Mill Creek in Fifty-five
who first named Owl Peak to me

and I ask her if she knew him,
old Indian woman with the story
born back then on the Cutler ranch,
as If I could peek through the years
to see the man with a man’s eyes.

Afraid to ask too much, I
touch gently a willow clavicle
as she remembers with surprise
and grins – running back across
the field to the forest of oaks

along the St. Johns, little girl
past the barn and the great Valley Oak
with four-foot rounds I split
for him when it laid down –
both looking up like children.

                                    for Marie Wilcox

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:24 AM | Permalink

Another volatile rainstorm left .62” in the gauge this morning – currently low clouds along the foothills eclipsing the sun, temperatures near 60 degrees.

Robbin has started our first fire of the season in the woodstove, a symbolic gesture we share with reverence as our grass season is well underway, our psyches so intertwined with rain and the promise of grass that we can look forward now to branding calves and getting a jump on the work that’s always waiting. It’s been a long weekend, a long week before to make time for the weekend, and the several months of feeding to keep the cows in shape to cycle for when we put the bulls out at the end of the month. Our season has officially begun!

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 10:02 AM | Permalink

Marie Wilcox - Owl Peak story

Marie Wilcox was born on the Cutler Ranch between Visalia and Ivanhoe and attended the Elbow Creek School.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

http://timberoncowboy.blogspot.com
"The Life of a Cowboy with NF2" - Rusty McCall

http://thedeeperwell.wordpress.com
Perspectives on an artful life from Three Rivers artist, Elsah Cort.

http://www.yearoflivingvirtuously.com
"A Meditation on the Search for Meaning in an Ordinary Life" from author and artist, Teresa Jordan

http://forthearchives.wordpress.com
Risking some bias, "Chronicles of the Everyday" from Jessica Dofflemyer, writer and single mother on the island of Kauai.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:06 AM | Permalink

Ideals, so simple, in that slice of time
war babies were hatched, Rockwellesque
imprints that don’t fit the hydra-headed,

loose ends of our contemporary minds
looking for the quick and convenient,
something new to do. No old hats left

to wear outside, no black or white
designations, even the Snidelys have
shaved the look in their eyes. It is easy

to wander off to work alone, let the mind go
to make its fortune, to face the Herculean
with golden sword, red kerchief slung

with enough for the long way back
renewed, with something done – a living
art within the shell of the more mundane.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 7:31 AM | Permalink

Highs yesterday were in the mid-80s, the grass is jumping out of the old feed, cows are filling-up, calves growing.

The Kaweahs with a little snow.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 5:07 AM | Permalink

I remember now when we rode together,
the rock atop the ridge in Buckeye
for serious conversations – all the trails

that lead to Railroad spring, the miracle
of water. Mallards rising from the cattails
on a cloudy Sabbath missing Sunday school –

real-live ascension, places almost holy
once you got there - got to get away
from duty and responsibility. Sometimes

a part of us is left behind like tracks.
It hangs in the oaks, sticks like colored
lichen to the rocks with others, places

that have drawn best thoughts together,
and we go there, revisit all the generations
who have come to feel the same thing.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 4:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Little fuzzy, but there's the heron, like part of the oak.

Posted by John Dofflemyer at 6:51 AM | Permalink