Layla Belongs to the Wild
Circuiting the yard in the midnight hour, sniffing where the squirrels had been furiously burying nuts in the daytime, raising her head to listen to the urban wildlife off in the distance, she is taking her last turn for the evening. Those squeals in the night when the wildlife sense now’s the season for doing the dirty deed ahead of spring deliveries, she hears them. She and I both know January is upon us, time when the temperature drops deep below freezing for nights on end and the ground becomes brittle under her paws for a long stretch of days.
When the beasts of the city set about their private matters, even as they make their courting noises, she’ll be hearing all of it and taking mental notes.
In this present place and time, Americans may choose to be largely removed from the world we inhabit. May as well inhabit a space station for the distance we’ve put between ourselves and the outside world. Some say that lifestyle may be coming forcibly to an end, and there are rude signs they could be right.
Layla belongs to the wild. Though she hangs out with us for her entertainment, her dreams remain buried in artic snow drifts. We crank up the heat, pull on our sweaters and wool socks in the morning and Layla jumps for living joy to feel the temperature plunge. Setting out on morning walks, the cold shocks my face, and she comes alive in the freezing wind. Sun, bright as it is, can’t do much against the winter to knock it back, and she’s about the only creature in the neighborhood who is thrilled with it all.
Though the birds haven’t fled; they’re still around us, the song birds still discuss morning matters, the crows gang up in the trees, the geese come in V-shaped waves, honking the while and the cormorants, not having left for South America this year, are nose-diving the lake, muddied brown from a torrential weekend rain. In times past, two inches or more of rain would have buried our world in white powder, but not this year. The cormorants, spending as much time diving as swimming, are forever drying their wings, making them easy to distinguish from the ducks. They also ride a lot lower in the water, with only their periscope necks, elongated beaks and a bit of a back to show–until going for a next flip and a dive.
The seagulls arrived this morning as well. They come in every year. Presently, they’re circling the air like mad above the water, catching the sunlight on their wings, dive-bombing each other, splash landing on the water then lifting off again. The first year I noticed them, I interpreted their retreat from the Potomac as a reaction to the cold. Though here they are again, so perhaps they’re keeping a different schedule. Or possibly, the Potomac is raging and too angry for feeding, what with the flood from the large storm arriving from West Virginia. In any case, the gulls seem particularly energized this year. By late spring they’ll be gone again–back to the river whence they came.
Heron on a downed tree
A blue heron is carefully pacing the downed tree to where it meets the water in stealthy search of a midmorning snack. Reminds me of the poem, Blue Heron, though I don’t feel the same heartbreak I did that first winter we lived through. The sorrow remains, but the pain’s become more of an ache than a sharp stabbing. I hope not to be writing another book of poems like Love in Winter Missing Ryan. The cold descending from the north that year was primeval in its brutality, and it married my desire to be buried in the snow’s oblivion, unlike the lake creatures I watched through that long midnight season.
Winters in the Mid-Atlantic have become warmer than they were a few decades ago, and I suspect we won’t be walking across the plain of a frozen lake this year–seems not likely. Layla would love it; Mojo and Maddie certainly did.
Maddie in the snow. Photo taken 2004
In the middle of a bitter cold spell, as in the past when it was difficult to imagine warmth anywhere, discussions about global warming could sound ridiculous, but not so much when the changes are becoming more obvious year over year. Though subtlety isn’t a well-practiced art in this country, and it may well take more to startle us than has happened thus far.
In many respects, Hurricane Sandy helped wake New York and New Jersey out of complacency–sensitizing their citizens to circumstances that the folks on the Outer Banks and further south have always lived with. A different kind of winter is coming, and the Seven Kingdoms might well want to pay attention.
When we return inside after her midnight prowl, Layla finds a small square of carpet to curl up beside me, polite ball of fur pressed against my leg so I know she’s there, though her ears are attuned even with her eyes closed. She hears the fox screaming for love and ignores the late straggler geese honking through on their way to Tripp’s Island for nesting, waiting on spring.
Layla has purpose in her life–intense interest in meeting the people she encounters on her walks–she prefers walking on her hind legs to greet them–nosing every single bush, spots of grass and rock for evidence of the passage of previous canines–and making me think she loves me above all else in the world. Though the wild is where her heart lies.
The Prince of Tides
One should read a book like this in one sitting, long as it takes, all seven hundred pages. One sitting. That way you can finish one scene and roll on to the next, circle back to the first, and jump back again without losing the pace. Otherwise, the jumps can feel abrupt, like a writer’s artifice instead of a storyteller’s tale. If you don’t stop to consider, but read it like a long drink, it will climb inside you like the longest kind of hike in the wild, outside your own life and time. Thinking back on the volumes, scenes and chapters of all the stories I’ve read, this seems like the best method to absorb a book’s essence. Call the boss, tell him you’ve contracted a coronavirus and read the damn book.
After being so buried in books in my own youth, it’s hard to criticize kids seen lost in their iPhones. I’ll agree that reading brought me a fuller idea of the world than Facebook, gaming, texting, et al. could ever deliver, but the underlying drive to withdraw into a sheltered place for long periods of time could well be the same instinct.
In my youth, I was completely able to do this. Days, if it the book captured me. Lord of the Rings in a week, week and a half, all three books. Wham bam thank you ma’am. And after, when I walked outside to clear my head I was so deeply infused with Tolkien’s world it inspired a first attempt at a novel, a fantasy naturally. One day I’ll dig up the map I created for my world; it’s in a roll in the attic somewhere.
So it’s a complement to Conroy to say his novel brought back that pleasure to escape the world for a while living inside his story.
I read novels slower now. Partly because I’m thinking about more than plot and story–and that’s not necessarily a good thing. After all the editing I’ve done these past few years, it’s as if I’m bringing my work home with me. I’ve developed habits that inhibit the more straightforward, plunge-ahead reads that I once loved. I read with a more critical ear to the words. Is the dialog stilted? Are the characters consistent or do they dissolve from being unreal? Would a person really act like that? And I’m often replacing words in my head, like I might do for my own stories.
Editing my stories has numbed me to the freedom of falling totally into the world of a novel, sad to say. Reading a sentence, should the prepositional phrase begin or follow the subject and verb? Is that language in keeping with the character’s story? Is this the right time or did the writer lose track of the clock? God! please, not another exclamation point.
Still thinking about The Prince of Tides, Conroy employs a writing style that appeals to me. Switching scenes abruptly isn’t guaranteed to be graceful, yet it’s an excellent way to energize a story. Not ‘look at how clever the great writer is at jumps’ but swerves that accelerate the story will propel the plot. One advantage of a good scene switch is that you get to jump time, place and even characters–instead of simply writing “in the morning” it’s obviously morning because they’re eating breakfast–and the author isn’t forced to explain every last detail of a scene or even conclude it before moving on to the next. Coming back around later to fill in with a flourish or two works to polish the story. Read aloud, a story takes on its true momentum. And jumps work like beats in a song’s rhythm.
The first writer I noted being able to jump scenes was Roger Zelazny. His genre was sci-fi but his writing went a lot further. He was a master at not giving you everything in one bite. Even how he began his first novel in the Amber series–Nine Princes in Amber–where you have no idea who the hell this person was or where. To pull that off well was Zelazny’s calling card as a writer. I suspect Corwin, his protagonist, who’s a wisecracking American guy’s guy, shares his personality with the author.
“In his stories, Roger Zelazny frequently portrayed characters from myth, depicted in the modern or a future world. Zelazny included many anachronisms, such as cigarette-smoking and references to modern drama, in his work. His crisp, minimalistic dialogue also seems to be somewhat influenced by the style of wisecracking hardboiled crime authors, such as Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. The tension between the ancient and the modern, surreal and familiar was what drove most of his work.
“[Zelazny] also often experimented with form in his stories. The novel Doorways in the Sand practices a flashback technique in which most chapters open with a scene, typically involving peril, not implied by the end of the previous chapter. Once the scene is established, the narrator backtracks to the events leading up to it, then follows through to the end of the chapter, whereupon the next chapter jumps ahead to another dramatic non-sequitur.”
In The Prince of Tides, Conroy delves into Tom’s childhood for so long at times you lose track of his present day circumstance. And as much as he works to charm the reader into caring about Lowenstein–and Tom’s sister–even his lost brother–the stories of childhood comprise the heart of the book–seen through Tom’s eyes–the three children growing up wild in the low country.
If you strip away the outer wrapping plot of Tom’s discussions with his sister’s psychiatrist (the afore-mentioned Lowenstein) you still have a novel with great heart to it. I suspect today’s minimalists would skip the wrapping.
Unlike Zelazny’s Corwin, Conroy presents Tom Wingo as from the new school of sensitive men, though he argues with Lowenstein that 80s feminists and their cohorts (co-conspirators?) were carrying it too far. Conroy nearly apologizes–actually Tom protests–several times in the story that real men can indeed be sensitive then goes about knocking his own argument. Though I would have loved the opportunity, debating Conroy at a dinner party would have been a heavyweight challenge given how well he argued with himself.
As should we all if we want to not take ourselves any more seriously than the folks around us do.
Going fishing