A moment in September
A quiet scene at the Great Divide Ranch in Montana. I drove there alone to help democracy by volunteering with Project Vote Smart. More about my trip, and Vote Smart’s important work, below.
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The name of this weekly posting is Becoming. Why do I call it that?
The word came to me when I was setting up my Substack account. Maybe it was given me by the Universe. It fits.
It describes what I am trying to do with these weekly words, and it describes me.
I am becoming. I am me In my space Where I need to be. The space where I want to be, Where I am becoming.
I ask the Universe to keep me on track while I merrily go off the rails. The way out and back is long and full of surprises, strange switchbacks, tasty morsels.
Morsels, like crumbs left to mark a trail. . . . What does it matter if the birds eat the crumbs? It is so glorious to be lost.
Crumbs
Even a crumb, if you are sensitive, Can cause great distress. The crumbs of memory Are what we must bear. We thought we forgave— All but that last crumb. Knocked to the floor. Festering beneath, beneath. We wake up and the crumb still hurts, A piece of grit in our gizzard. We can’t dislodge it. Not without major surgery. So let's follow the oyster’s example. Coat the irritating grit with nacre. Give that rough memory A shiny, fresh habit.
On the road in fall
Once upon a time, I drove from Portland to the Great Divide Ranch in Montana, where I volunteered for an organization called Project Vote Smart.
During a warm September, I joined a number of other volunteers who lived in cabins and bunkhouses and gathered in a central place to cook dinner and eat. Unfortunately, the cook had died suddenly just before I visited, so we ate a lot of lasagna from Costco.
Project Vote Smart, now known as simply Vote Smart, has a simple mission. Its volunteers gather information about candidates like speeches and votes, including financial information and which organizations support them. Things like the ratings the politician might get from an organization like the NRA, or their votes on obscure legislation that pours out yet more cream for fat cats to lap up.
In my week at the ranch, I wrote some PR copy and also entered some information, but I can’t remember much about that. The organizers knew I was disabled, so they lent me a golf cart, which was a lot of fun to ride all over the ranch.
The founder of Project Vote Smart, Richard Kimble* delighted in giving tours of the sprawling ranch and explaining the history of place. He and his wife, Adelaide, were the perfect hosts. The weather was lovely.
*No, Richard Kimble is not the Fugitive. In 1986, after Sen Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., retired, he ran for the open Arizona Senate seat but was defeated by John McCain. His father, William “Bill” Kimble, was the majority leader of the Arizona Senate, then ran, also unsuccessfully, as a Democratic candidate for governor in 1954.
Not too long after I visited, the Kimballs sold the ranch and moved the entire operation to Drake University in Iowa. Fewer mountains, but still icy cold winters.
Most of the volunteers are still college students, although there are always older volunteers like me.
Fittingly, Vote Smart had started out at a college, Oregon State University in Corvallis, in 1992. Arizona Senator John McCain was on the founding board, along with a bipartisan group including former presidents Carter and Ford, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and Democratic U.S. Sens. George McGovern and William Proxmire.
Getting to the Great Divide
The drive to Montana was solitary and long, with vast swatches of fields and, always, brooding blue mountains in the distance. I ate at diners, stayed in small motels and was entranced by the eastern stretches of the Columbia Gorge.
While I drove, I listened to audio CDs of the novel Going Bovine, by Libby Bray, about a high school student’s hallucinatory response to mad cow disease. The surreal atmosphere, golden grass and shadowy mountains, outside my car windows mirrored the mesmerizing landscape of his dreams.
And, this well-received young adult novel features a road trip itself. The boy, Cameron Smith, and his companions, including a garden gnome imbued with the spirit of the Norse god Balder, travel from Texas to New Orleans to Florida. At least in his dreams.
Fall colors
In 2016, I drove from Boston to Vermont, visiting a daughter in each place. My daughter Maggie, and her husband, Jeff Holden, were living in Cambridge while she had a teaching fellowship at Harvard Law. My grandson, August (Augie), was just a few months old.
It was October in New England, famous for its fall color.
Leaving Boston, I drove to Chester, Vermont, where my other daughter, Lyza, lives in the country with her longtime boyfriend, Bryan Fox. Some neighbors of hers rented a big old house to me, where I got to use the massive fireplace and rattle around in a very large space. Outside, expansive lawns were rimmed with fences and trees.
Of course, the colors in the autumn landscape were gorgeous. While Lyza worked, I explored the roads in the neighborhood. They were mostly gravel, but have been so well tended that they were not rutted or even very dusty. (Many of these roads were washed out in the flooding of July 2023. Road crews are rebuilding them.)
I loved the ride to Chester from Boston. Without GPS, it would’ve been difficult, as there were many quirky detours. I stopped in Concord for lunch and a look at Walden Pond. I didn’t get out of the car and walk, as it was just me and the walker.
The landscape was a revelation to me, New England foliage and small towns hundreds of years older than most of Oregon’s cities.
No more driving now
It’s been three years and more since I last drove a car. Do I miss it? Yes, but . . . I don’t have time to be driving places.
What if I had the van with the hand controls . . . no, my life is too full. I have rich memories of places I drove, road trips that I took with the walker in the back.
And besides, Sulky, the new wheelchair, and I are comfortable riding the Trimet bus. At least until the rain begins in earnest.
What are you curious about?
This is an exercise. Or just a diversion. Here’s how it works:
List seven things. Some of them may be questions.
Then, play with your ideas:
• Write • Draw • Meditate
Here’s a list
• Where rabbits go in the winter • Why I can’t remember faces • Life in Mongolia • Redwork • How hard is it to play the tuba? • Earwax • The texture of tangerines
Finding your list is not about comparing, or listing attributes, or being critical. It’s about feeling and intuition. Yes, you want the items in your list to be an unusual and surprising mix. But most important: How does each of those images or concepts make you feel? Do they stay in separate compartments, or do they run together, visions of one crashing into another?
One more list
• Flowing blue ocean • Glass of milk • Cattails by a lake • Old wool blankets, scratchy but warm • Spools • Keys • Montreal When I think of spools, this quilt comes to mind. Each of this quilt’s 108 blocks is a spool that has a little picture in the center.
A detail gives a better view of the variety of images. This is a quilt top, not yet layered and quilted. All the blocks were pieced by hand.
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Staying present
How often I find myself thinking about what I have to do next, or in the next hour, or the next day, or the coming week, while mechanically performing some mundane task like putting on my shoes or chopping cabbage.
Sometimes I willingly enter the daydream of how I am going to solve a problem, make a speech, write a poem.
But other times, and I wish they were more often, I pull myself back into the present. I watch my hands as they tie the shoes or manipulate the cleaver. I notice the deep colors of the red cabbage, the contrast with the white cutting board, the faint scent of the vegetable.
Sometimes a little mantra comes to mind: “om, shanti, shanti, shanti,” as my yoga teacher, Nurit, intones. Or I hear a scrap of a song. Even a prayer: “Thank you, God.” Or, “May I be filled with loving-kindness.”
Now I am in the present, wrapped in sensation like a cozy eiderdown, noticing. This is living, for real.
And now, to rest
Take care of yourself this week. The season is changing inexorably. Welcome autumn’s cool breath on your neck. Laugh at the leaves that spin on the breeze. Dance, dance as the equinox approaches.
I wrote in an exercise this week: Come to me now, Spirit. You are ever there anyway. Caress me, knit up my frailties, soothe my anxiety. The way is clear; set me adrift in that direction.
Orient me toward my North Star.
—30—
Beautiful lines...”I ask the Universe to keep me on track while I merrily go off the rails. The way out and back is long and full of surprises, strange switchbacks, tasty morsels. // Morsels, like crumbs left to mark a trail. . . . What does it matter if the birds eat the crumbs? It is so glorious to be lost.” I enjoyed your lists at the bottom.
For a long time, I dreamed of being a van dweller and exploring the country. I love road trips and Sundays drive. I've insisted that my husband and I do a Sunday drive every week, just to leave the screens and chores behind. He's always surprised how wonderful it is just to see new vistas along the way. Now we don't do long road trips any more unless visiting family. I miss them, but Jeff was the one driving all the time. And he commuted between Truckee and San Jose every week, so it was like a postman's holiday for him. This post of yours was so wonderful. Thank you.