I take my writing cues from what I refer to as The Ol’ Cowpoke Cosmos. I do so, in part because whenever I peer deep out into It, I’m reminded of the infinite creative possibilities of words, of musical arrangements. Moreover, the Midwest cowboy kid in me flashes back to those Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Red Ryder connect-the-dots (connect-the-stars) coloring books--every time we draw an accurate line between two objects or entities, we’re rewarded with an infinitesimally enhanced glimpse of the so-called bigger picture. It’s my simple metaphor for living a writerly life. (You require more complexity? More elucidation? Read Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking, the quintessential poets of all time.)
As we speak--May 22--I’m packing for the 1200 mile drive back to my childhood homeground, Hurley, Wisconsin. I turn 55--double nickels--this Thursday and at the request of my 85 year old Mother and 80 year old Father, we’re celebrating this seemingly numerologically significant moment-in-time together. My folks have lived at 505 Poplar Street since their marriage 59 years ago--Mom was born next door at 507 Poplar. The landscapes--both inner and outer--have changed little since I took Horace Greeley’s advice 33 years ago this summer.
It’s a difficult time to leave our little place here unattended for 8-9 days. Lots of spring chores, even without running cattle, which we do not. So I’ve been frantically trying to scratch entries off the Do-Before-We-Leave list, which I scripted 2 weeks ago and have been adding to ever since. Fixing fence, spraying weeks, shoveling by hand a year’s worth of horse apples out of the corrals, moving old hay around, watering trees, mowing lawn, and, generally-speaking doing the spring cleaning. Which includes, after dark and into the a.m., mucking out my 10-by-10-foot writing niche. It’s a slow process (will likely take the remainder of the year) because--during this archeological dig’s excavations--I find myself (yes, find myself!) stopping to read old letters, manuscripts, publications, you-name-it. Among recent artifacts that have surfaced (yes, again, surfaced) is a bound collection titled HEADWATERS: Montana Writers On Water & Wilderness, published a decade ago in 1996. It offers contributions, testimonies, from 50 writers, including Wallace McRae, Richard Hugo, Annick Smith, who compiled and edited the anthology, James Lee Burke, James Welch, Mary Blew, and --surprise me all to hell--yours truly!
To reiterate and sum up, I’m coming AARP-card-packing 55. AARP, I have decided, stands for Ain’t Able to Remember Poop. As in, I’d forgotten orchestrating for Annick my little poetry-essay--From The West Branch West--printed in HEADWATERS. Moreover, I refuse to deem it mere happenstance that I unearthed it a few days prior to going back to Hurley, where I’ll certainly visit--not fish, but simply visit--the Montreal River, as well as Cominski Crick, where I first wet a line 50-plus years ago with my Dad. As I mentioned, the landscape remains pretty much intact. Finally, I now can cross one more scribble off my Do-Before-We-Leave list--number 13, Western Folklife Center website entry--thanks to being graced once again by a Cowpoke Cosmos prodding, a Musical Universe cue; thanks to the serendipitous linkages between 3 or 4 dots.
FROM THE WEST BRANCH WEST
Either rumor or approximate recall from grade school zoology has it the human body is composed of 80 percent water, give or take 10 percent. At 45 years of age (plus change), fifteen of which I tried hard to fit 8-second rides to rank bareback broncs in the rodeo arena, I’m not feeling quite that fluid these days. In fact, you might say my fast snappy rapids have meandered into a dead eddy. That high-percentage H2o Figure fits me precisely, however, because were it not for streams--rivers and cricks--I wouldn’t have pursued the life’s passions that sustain me and which, I choose to believe, chose me.
A few years ago, I came face-to-hard-analytical-face with a need to trace what seemed an inexplicable poetic lineage/pedigree back to its headwaters. I’d grown up in a bookless home. The language I loved in my formative years was not printed on the page, but spoken from the stage--the stage being the trout streams snaking through thick forests of northern Wisconsin, the actors being my father, his fishing partners and/or the old-timers who I found far more “poetic” than kids my own age. Thus I chose to hang close to their ways and words every chance I could, most always to the brass horn’s roar and chatter, to drum-rumble and cymbal-clash, to the wind section’s susurrus and the strings’ allegretto purl from the river’s orchestra pit.
The Montreal was the only actual river amidst dozens of cricks near my hometown of Hurley. And of its two branches, we fished the West exclusively because raw sewage polluted the East. So it was the West branch of the Montreal where I reveled in the most intimate Father-Son moments of my childhood. In a quest to return to those memories and learn where they, in turn, would take me, I was drawn to write a piece about catching my first trout. I was 4 or 5 years old, directly proportionate to the poor high-bushed fingerling’s length in inches. The poem begins with my dad hoisting me onto his back to carry me through dog-hair alders and swamp into one of his secret stretches of water. “Montreal River,” did not, however, ring truly and fluidly to the stanza, so, remembering Richard Hugo’s mandate that poets don’t owe allegiance to the facts but to the music, I changed the name to “Cominski Crick.”
In any case, I let the story make its run and strip line at will from the reel until I found myself chasing it downstream right to the source of my first love for that music Hugo so often praised as poetry’s soul. In the midst of my mad scramble along the bank, I recalled my constant curiosity, my inquisitiveness: “Dad, what’s this big red and white fly in your hat band, what’s the name of that bird making the funny noise, what kind of tree is this, what do you call those purple flowers….” And he would answer--as only the poem could recollect--employing locutions and alliterations that turned his simple responses into song, a cappella, enthralling my ear always with awe.
Words Growing Wild in the Woods
A boy thrilled with his first horse,
I climbed aboard my father hunkering in hip boots
below the graveled road berm, Cominski Crick
funneling to a rusty culvert. Hooking
an arm behind one of my knees, he lifted
with a grunt and laugh, his creel harness creaking,
splitshot clattering in our bait boxes.
I dreamed a Robin Hood-Paladin-Sinbad life
from those shoulders. His jugular pulse rumbled
into the riffle of my pulse, my thin wrists
against his Adam’s apple--a whiskered knuckle
prickly as cucumbers in our garden
where I picked nightcrawlers, wet and moonlit,
glistening between vines across the black soil.
Eye-level with an array of flies, every crayon
color fastened to the silk band
of his tattered fedora, the hat my mother vowed
a thousand times to burn, I learned to love
the sound of words in the woods--Jock Scott,
Silver Doctor, Mickey Finn, Quill Gordon, Gray
Ghost booming in his voice through the spruce.
At five, my life rhymed with first flights
bursting into birdsong. I loved
the piquant smell of fiddleheads and trilliums,
hickory and maple leaf humus, the petite
bouquets of arbutus we picked for Mom.
I loved the power of my father’s stride
thigh-deep against the surge of dark swirls.
Perched offshore on boulder--safe from wanderlust
but not from currents coiling below--
I prayed to the apostles for a ten-pounder
to test the steel of my telescopic pole,
while Dad, working the water upstream and down,
stayed always in earshot--alert and calling to me
after each beaver splash between us.
I still go home to relearn my first love for words
echoing through those woods: I caught one!
Dad! I caught one! Dad! Dad!
skipping like thin flat stones down the crick--
and him galloping through popples, splitshot ticking,
to find me leaping for a fingerling, my first
brookie twirling from a willow like a jewel.
I met Norman MacLean (forgive me Monsignor for I have sinned--I caught my first brook trout on garden hackle at the end of a bait-casting rig) at a reading he gave in Missoula in the mid-seventies. After waiting my turn in a long autograph line, I was delighted that he made an effort to learn my passions instead of scribbling the generic “best wishes.” Though I don’t recall our exchange, I must have said something to cue him to my precise evolutionary development. He wrote: “For Paul Zarzyski--Poet, Rodeo Rider, Fly Fisherman, in ascending order.”
How could he have known that the “rodeo rider” facet of my make-up would someday serve as the synapse between poetry and river romance?
The Augusta perf at 2, we’d place again
then sneak off to our secret Dearborn River spot.
We’d take some chips and beer and cheese,
skinny-dip, dry off in the breeze,
build a fire, fry the trout we caught.
(From “The Bucking Horse Moon”)
I thank my lucky poetic-cowpoke-piscatorial stars for the West Branch of the Montreal, and for the moments I spent there with my father tuning my tympanum to the lilt of words that would later ignite a craving to write poetry, which in turn would lure me to Montana to study, and become fishing partners, with Dick Hugo, which would draw me, my first spring in Missoula, up Miller Creek to the Oral Zumwalt Rodeo, causing me to catch the bronco-bug and cross trails with fellow Slavic buckin’ hoss twisters and fly fishermen, Kim Zupan and Joe Podgurski, whose friendship encouraged me to spur the passions on all the harder until I’ve come full circle.
…does the river---like a train, like a life--have its own
mysterious roundhouse way of circling back?
(From “A Song Moment for Ian Tyson”)
Because I met my first loves on the banks of a river and ever since have been lured toward music and beauty.
I left home barely
soon enough to make one good
bucking horse ride
across a vast canvas of Russell landscape
backdropped by Heart Butte under a fuchsia sky
in Cascade, Montana.
Through these cottonwoods,
high above the Missouri River’s silent swirls,
the flicking together of leaves
is the applause of small green hands, children
thrilled by a winning ride, by their wildest wish
beginning, as everything begins, with luck
of the draw, with a breeze in the heat,
with whispering hope--a first breath
blessed by myth, or birth, in the West.
(From “Luck of the Draw”)
