Everyone Needs a Hobby, I Guess.

 For a while I had a YouTube channel called FOM+T (Fat Old Man Plus Tech), which I enjoyed doing and which, after maybe two years, had nearly 400 subscribers.  I had posted a few videos to YouTube over the years randomly,  but I thought it might be interesting to share my thoughts on the contemporary world, a world I think was pretty well described sixty years or more ago by Teilhard de Chardin, Alvin Toffler, and Marshall McLuhan.  So, encouraged by a couple of friends, I bought a cheap tripod to hold my phone and started a new adventure.  What I had to say about the modern world, that the modern world is pretty much the same as it's ever been except that we're on a time line with an exponential curve, and that can be disconcerting, really didn't take too many videos, and I started delving into the popular genre of unboxing and review videos.  Now, I like a good bit of kit,

so it was convenient to have an excuse to buy some of the big and small new things and to share my thoughts and feelings on camera. It was a pretty laid-back channel, with coffee and the occasional cigarette disrupting the seriousness of it all.

Then came my adventure with the virulent virus, and I spent hours lying in bed thinking I was thinking although mostly I was delirious.  When I read my emails or journal entries from those days and nights, I can't recognize what I was writing as English.  But I thought I was re-evaluating the things in my life, and I filled a big box with stuff that no longer served me.  For the most part I was right about those things, although the friend who was taking the stuff to the free store pulled a few things out that she knew I would regret losing, and she was right.  I won't miss the boots that were too small.

One of the things I thought I would quit was my YouTube channel.  After all that time, I still didn't have even a thousand subscribers.  I had made only about $5 with the Amazon Affiliate Program, and I thought that if I quit YouTube I would have more time to read and write and draw or something, to do things that were more 'productive'.  So I deleted the Fat Old Man and his Tech unboxings.

Except, I didn't find the things I did instead to be more productive.  I made a rather desultory blog about some of the folks I have known, a project that is a result of the memories I had while I was under the spell of the virus.  I have drawn a bit more.  About reading, I guess McLuhan was right.  I do still read, but I spend more time watching videos of authors discussing their ideas, a medium in which I can see their faces and hear their thoughts directly.  And, I found that my ponderings as I prepared for a video were some of my most productive times, even if no video resulted.

So, I have forgiven myself for not being a wonderfully serious and productive fat old man and accepted that is alright to make videost that are less than Fellini quality if I enjoy it as a hobby. 

 I have a friend who makes furniture from discarded lumber as a hobby.  His hobby is more useful than mine, I suspect, but his takes up more room, and I live in a tin can.  I like to pretend it's a space pirate ship.  Waking and sleeping delusions get confused in my old mind.  So what?  You're only old once.

Crazy Irish Monks

 

Not all of my peregrinations have been on foot, following the example of St. Chad.  Twenty-one years ago today, someone who now seems like another person in another lifetime naively settled into a 15-foot long skin-on-frame kayak and started what would be a three-year-long exploration of the waters of Northwest Washington.  That person, whose descendant is writing this story, had no idea what he was getting into as he began a journey that would go from Anacortes to Seattle and Olympia and Port Angeles and Neah Bay and parts of the west and south coasts of Vancouver Island and past the submarines to the end of the Hood Canal.

The voyage started innocently enough, as many voyages do, in an armchair with a book.  The book was Tim Severin's The Brendan Voyage, and the earlier version of me was intrigued, to say the least.  I had begun to explore rivers by kayak, inspired by Rat in The Wind in the Willows, which is certainly one of the best books ever written.  I had paddled the Rio Grande and the Chama and a few other rivers in New Mexico, and many rivers in Arkansas, including the entirety, almost (I skipped parts of the impounded lakes and a bit of the lower river where it is contained by levees) of the White River, one of the most sacred rivers I have ever known.  I would almost certainly have had a wonderful life if I had continued to explore those streams.  But the idea of going forth on the salt in a skin-on-frame boat was romantic, and I found online a crazy German-American, Ralph Hoehn, who imported Pouch kayaks.  They are narrower and more manoeuvrable than the more famous Kleppers, and faster. They're not so fast as the 17- 18-foot fibreglass boats that are also very popular, but at 15-feet, Brendan, as I called my soon-faded Pouch, had a hull speed I could maintain, and skin-on-frame boats are also more compliant and less tiring in rough water.  I paddled that little wonder as many as 55 nautical miles a day, and we went through some very rough water together.

Little did I know that what I had thought would be a vacation of a few weeks would lead to years among the firs of the edge of the world.

It would be nine centuries before any other Europeans would cross the Atlantic.  Some say Brendan and his companions were looking for 'the Isle of the Blessed' or even the Garden of Eden, but even though I found several very blessed isles in my imitation of Brendan and it might be argued that I live in a very edenic garden, I prefer the story that he set forth just to see what was there.  There has certainly been a lot to see out here in the corner of the country.

Will I ever go back to Arkansas' rivers?  Well, I don't really expect to, but I ain't dead yet.  If I could find another red boat, a Wilderness Systems Shaman like the one I paddled the White to the Mississippi,  I might be lured to go forth again.  There ain't nothing so good as messin' about in boats.

Searching for lost times.

I don't usually share my journals, but this seemed like a good post for Peregrinations, and I was too lazy to write it up any other way.  So:

I was up past my bedtime last night looking at YouTube Videos of places where I spent my life in the past.  Rivers.  Mountains.  Monasteries.  Many of the videos were made by  idiots, people who made no effort to learn about the places they were videoing, but at least the visuals were good.  Although one video of hiking along the Buffalo River Trail, was kinda pixely and green, I choose a screen catch from it of the waterfall that was for years my favourite rettreat and camping site for my journal, because it kinda shows how such memories work'.  

The best videos were of 'natural' places.  The Buffalo is still green.  The Chama is still brown.  The Edisto is still black.  But Christ in the Desert has been improved beyond   belief. The austerity of the desert has been replaced with garish 'icons'.  But they are not icons, they're bill boards.  I remember being shocked when Philip,  the abbot by the time I got there, and someone who had and has had a very different vision from Aerled's, started using a little Mattel keyboard to set the pitch for the chants.  Lore and I were both appalled.  Now there's an organ.  Everything is much more normal, and there are solar panels everywhere.  Sheep are back, which I find particularly nostalgic.  I can't believe I gave the poncho that Aerled wove for Lore to Cassidy for his baby.  Oh well.  YouTube says Signma males value their friends.

The challenge for me is to make sense of how much I have changed.   The changes pretty much parallel what has happened at Christ in the Desert.  I ordered a tent yesterday.  The temptation is to move back into a tent, with candles for light and maybe just my phone and a solar charger  But then there's my OV-Z.   Where do I draw the line?  Do I need to draw a line?  

The rivers lookedt the same in the twenty minutes or so of YouTube videos,  But iI know from even the short time I spent on them that they are always changing.  I was particular intrigued by one White River video of the upper river, between Boston and Fayetteville, where there has been very little effort of control it.  I hadn't ever seen anyone else on that stretch of the river, which is a meandering  and wild thing.  Lower down, beginning at Lake Sequoia in Fayetteville, we feeble folk have tried to control it at least since the time of steam boats.  Our efforts are often washed away.  Actually, they are always washed away, if we could only see them from a longer time scale.  The Bull Shoals dam, the levele at Augusta,  the lock and dam at Montgomery Point where the sacred White River joins the Mississippi, all these will be washed away. They have no choice.  Time, like an ever -rolling stream, bears all its sons away.

Those structures along the sacred White River may have a consciousness that I don't understand, and they may think they have some choice in how they spend their time. before they join the flood of lost times. I (cue Puck or Zorba) think I do.

Thirty or so years ago, when I spent time at Christ in the Desert Monastery, there was no electricity.  The guest rooms had wood stove and kerosene lamps.  On winter evenings in room 6 of the guest house, I would shiver as I wrote and drew in paper journals. Winter Matins in Nakashima's austere church had only one lamp in a corner.; one of the monks threw another log into the wood stove to mark the hours.  There were no solar-powered electric lights on the cliffs above to compete with rosy-fingered dawn, mirrored on the sandstone. There were no clumsy attempts at iconography on the walls.  It was Christ in the Desert, not Christ in the Glam.

Now I write about those times on a computer, and think about sharing my thoughts about those times on the internet, and I wonder two things:  whether I would really gain anything by trading  my computer for ink and paper in an effort to regain the sort of wildness of a river without levees and dams; and whether the real attraction I find thinking of those times past is that then I still thought I had a long future.  Were I forty-five again, and going to the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, it might seem just as magic as it did in 1991.  And were I forty-five again, I might find the changes just as disturbing when I reached seventy-five again.  

I would love, I think, to be able to go back to the Monastery and talk to Father Christian, one of the monks who was there at the founding,  now the abbot, and ask how he feels about the changes, but I  probably won't.  I no longer have a car, and I'm too old  to hitch hike from Santa Fe to north of Abiqui and then to walk the 13 miles along Forest Road 151 to the bell, which I could pull to summon the guest master.

Oh well.   Please, pass me a madeleine.