Earlier this summer, the kids in one of the creative writing camps I teach through The Cabin Idaho (a Boise-based literary center) came up with an imaginary troll named Evil Knievel that haunts the tiny, hobbit-looking supply closet in one of the classrooms there.
It’s a total hobbit hole, only rectangular.
Naturally, after the kids had invented it, they wanted to feed it.
So they started drawing pictures of food and slipping them under the door for the troll.
I love the arid, mountain landscapes of the West. I love the native wildflower and animal species that live in mountain ecosystems. I love the aridity of the desert. I love its total lack of humidity and 100+ degree heat.
But with the aridity of the western landscape comes fire season with its forest fires and wildfires.
Last summer there were forest fires burning in Idaho and two adjoining states at around the same time. The smoke from all of them was blowing down into Boise. For weeks, the city was ensconced in a hazy layer of burning, lung-clogging smoke.
This is normal.
It’s like that in every state in the West.
The moon is a good time no matter what time of day or night you see it.
It is my favorite spherical object. It is like the little black dress of the landscape.
Observe.
Here is a moon that is part Yin-yang of the landscape.
John Keats was someone for whom, and around whom, my life revolved for a certain period of time in my early twenties. And because we don’t often acknowledge who we were or have been enough when we think of who we are, I want to tell our story.
By our story, I mean both I and Keats story and I and poetry’s story, for they intersect quite a bit.
The wildflowers here in the foothills outside Boise have been pretty spectacular this spring.
One of my favorite wildflowers — wild flax — has started blooming:
Wild flax is amazing because it is blue, and I have a perpetual hard on for all blue flowers, like these alpine forget-me-nots. It is also amazing because it is one of many species first described by Meriwether Lewis on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The Cabin Idaho asked me to teach a writing camp for kids this summer in conjunction with The Peregrine Fund’s World Center for Birds of Prey. Yesterday afternoon I and two awesome Cabin staff (Katie & Ashley) met with the education coordinator at the center for a tour and planning session.
I mentioned that I found the book A Feathered River Across The Sky about the extinction of the passenger pigeon deeply moving and was planning a writing activity around passenger pigeons and other extinct bird species.
The education coordinator mentioned that though they deal primarily with birds of prey, they had a passenger pigeon in their specimen collection.
Naturally, I got super excited when he mentioned that we also might be able to swing by the specimen collection to view it.
A few years ago, I went through a period where I could not write.
I was severely depressed for over a year and lived in a kind of waking agony. And because sadness is about the absence of what you love and value, I could not write.
At the beginning of the dream, there were a thousand bikers going up the sides of the heavily-slimed, heavily-trafficked streets of Flagstaff Mountain. Cars were moving as if they were in an artery and were all riding up smoothly like blood.
The whole time everything was blue and cold outside like being inside of an iceberg. It wasn’t cold out, but the atmosphere was painted like we were underwater or that everything was breathing in a slightly blue feeling.
The walker always finds solitude, but most especially at night. There is something about walking alone at night. I love it. When you walk at night, you are cocooned in silence. You can be alone, anonymous.
At night, people can’t see you, and you can’t see them. There are no people, and therefore no politeness to people. Politeness is a form of acknowledging you are not alone.
In the dark, we can be easy in ourselves without the expectations of others.You can walk among the houses without walking among them.
hannahrodabaugh.com 