Pandora's Amphora #1

Fen study continues in prospect basin

World fen expert and study lead, Dr. David Cooper from Colorado State University, talks about San Miguel County's longitudinal fen study while standing in Prospect Basin's  Buckbean Fen last Saturday.

FEN TOUR ... Wonderful to see the Prospect Fen Study continuing thanks to Dr. David Cooper and the Telluride Institute (TI), 

in collaboration with Colorado State University (CSU), Patagonia Inc., the Telluride Ski Area, the Town of Mountain Village and Sheep Mountain Alliance ... Some 20 folks did a TI walkabout while listening to Dr. Cooper, Dr. John Hribljan from the University of Nebraska Omaha, his graduate student Kate Miller, and Peruvian researcher Eduardo Oyague Passuni working on his doctorate from CSU ... They did a presentation at the Wilkinson Public Library terrace on Friday, Aug. 11th, reviewing the on-going work on fen hydrologic processes in Prospect Basin in order to better understand the importance of winter snowpack and monsoon rains on fen water tables. The team also presented on fen carbon dynamics that illustrate the excellent current conditions of the fen complex’s peat accumulation processes ... They elaborated even more on the fen tour, as Miller's work will likely enable the team to measure the carbon sequestration happening in the Prospect Basin fens as well as identifying the small modifications that can make the difference between a net accumulation or a net release of carbon from the sites. That, in turn, has large ramifications for how we value fens as repositories for carbon sequestering and their ultimate importance as we walk down this rocky road of Climate Change. The library presentation should be available to see soon.

Dr. John Hribljan helping explain Kate Miller's work on measuring carbon dioxide from the fens  with new technology. Miller stands directly behind him.

Photo above of  Eduardo Oyague Passuni explaining figures from his research on his computer to tour participants.

Fen butterfly on Queen's Crown (Rhodiola rhodanthus). According to Dr. Cooper, the insect-fen plant associations have not been studied in the Prospect Basin Fens -- a future project for some enterprising entomologist.

Buckbean Fen (Photo courtesy of the Telluride Institute)

PANDORA'S AMPHORA ... I've been writing a column in Telluride newspapers for 40+ years (until let go by the recent out-of-the-area owners of the advertising-cash cow monopoly-publication that currently passes for a community newspaper) ... Itki* began as Pandora's Box, speaking to the historic town of Pandora wiped out by an avalanche that was located at the head of Telluride's box canyon near the millsite. Pandora's Box was an arts column when I was first appointed as director of the Telluride Council for the Arts & Humanities in 1981 ... Then, when I took over as editor of the old Telluride Times, itki* became an op-ed column that ran in the Telluride Mountain Journal, the San Miguel Journal and the Telluride Watch (while Pandora's Box had a second run in the Daily Planet). I also had a long-running column Looking South from Lone Cone in Cortez's Four Corners Free Press , as well as various short-lived columns in other regional publications (like my early historical column Mining the Gold in Telluride, Remembering Aztlán for the Montrose-based Whole Life Network, and The Slope for the Colorado Poets Center's Colorado Poet)... The Pandora's Box myth was Greek poet Hesiod's patriarchal reinterpretation of the ancient fertility goddess Pandora (παν δορα = all gifts). He suggested that a woman opened a container "left in the care of her husband" releasing all manner of emotional and physical curses, including death, on humankind. Only itki* wasn't a "box" but a "πιθος" -- originally a large clay jar containing a human body for burying and eventually used for storage of wine, oil, grain and other provisions. "Pithos" got mistranslated into "box" in English. And, because of the rhyme, I'm going to change pithos to amphora, which is also a large Greek clay vase used for the transport of wine, oil and grains, particularly by ship, where they have been found in many Mediterranean shipwrecks. Since I was first baptized at St. Paul of the Shipwreck in San Francisco, the correspondences were intriguing ... This will be an occasional column appearing here on by blogspot using my favorite San Francisco columnist Herb Caen's three-dot journalism style.

ANDREW SCHELLING ... Got to hear Naropa scholar and Colorado poet Andrew Schelling of Boulder read poems of his own and translations from the Sanskrit at Lithic Books in Fruita. A brilliant researcher and teacher, Andrew has a raft of important books that he has authored. Check his bio and bibliography HERE ... I got an autographed copy of his new book of poems, The Facts at Dog Tank Springs (Dos Madres, Ohio, 2020) -- from a site he loves to visit on Cedar Mesa. Itki's* in memory of Dale Pendell, a Northern California poet, psychonaut and editor who published the influential Sixties/Seventies mag Kyoi/Kuksu, Among Pendell's many books are his three pharmacopeia volumes about sacred plants -- a hugely influential series for those of us interested in entheogens ... Like Pendell, Schelling is a very important figure in the ethnolinguistic movement in American poetics.

An excerpt from 'Third Party Mountain Dog":

Not hunter-gatherer

but scavenge-monger

constructivists...

O ancient western lineage 

your red pot designs...

out at the edge of Chaco

bent juniper baked clay

______________________________________________

*itki

“Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” 

As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate. Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even gender-neutral objects are in some way alive.

Remembering Finn Thilo Trommer

Rosemerry, Finn's mother, has been writing through her loss and grief and helping us all understand the power of love to overcome even the most  devastating of tragedies. Many of you came join us for  this memorial to honor Finn and how he touched us. Here is one of the many poems Rosemerry has written in the wake of his passing:

The Unheard

 I do not hear his shrieks of laughter

escaping from his room.

I don’t hear his hand beating time against the table.

I don’t hear the luff of his breath

as I stand beside him while he sleeps.

I don’t hear the fear in his voice

when he begs me, please mom, please.

 

I hear the rain on the rooftop,

a morse code of love I don’t know how to translate

except in shades of green.

I hear cars on the highway,

and remember life is moving.

I hear the whir of the hummingbird wings

and the black notes of crows

and the silence where the boy

no longer grows.

 

If you ask me do I hear his voice,

I would tell you no.

But that is only partly true.

I do not hear his voice in words.

I don’t hear it the way perhaps I wish to.

But I hear him inside me, not a whisper,

but a voice that sounds startlingly like my own,

a voice that sounds like rain on the roof,

like cars on the highway, like hummingbird wings,

like crows, like the silence

where my love for the boy still grows.

Iris & Aurora Visit

My daughter Iris Willow and granddaughter Aurora "RoRo"  Willow Fan came for a visit to Norwood  this last week.  We had a wonderful time catching up on our lives, divergent as they are. They live in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood, enjoying all the amenities of a large city. Here's a slice of photos from our time together.

RoRo  at the AirBnB that we stayed at after picking my family up at the Grand Junction airport with itki's fairy stump in the driveway

We stopped at Gateway Canyon Resort taking the back way home from Grand Junction to Norwood and walked the grounds, finding this metal kaleidoscope on a manicured patio.

We had a late lunch at the restaurant that was open at Gateway Resort. 

RoRo did a show for us at the outdoor stage  in the Gateway Resort complex, dancing and displaying her papers

When we got to the Farmhouse in Norwood, Iris and RoRo got to play Tri-Ominos, a puzzle game I found in the Free Box in Telluride

We got to go up to Telluride for a nice dinner with Auntie Sara Friedberg where RoRo got to draw on the chalkboard walls of the bathroom

On the way to Montrose to rent a car for the second leg  of the journey, which took them to Glenwood Springs to see one of Iris's classmates at Colorado State University, RoRo fell asleep. 

And then Iris drove off for Glenwood

Shelton: A Fork in the Road

 

A Fork in the Road

Posted in Confessions of a Grandpa, Personal History, Watch columns by Peter Shelton on July 5, 2022

[Now, with the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe, this column of Peter's, from 2013, has fresh resonance, to go along with the anger and disappointment in America’s rearward direction.]

As the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade came and went last week, I thought, inevitably, about the abortion I caused, struggled with, decided on and went through with, in 1967, six years before the Supreme Court made the procedure legal. 

Not I alone, of course. My girlfriend had something to do with it. A lot to do with it, yes. And my mother. And my father. And a doctor I never met, who ended the pregnancy on a cold Sunday afternoon in December.

We could scarcely have been more naïve. It was my first physical relationship, the summer before starting college. That’s no excuse, but it was a fact as we explored and experimented and ended up, late that fall, with a couple of missed periods.

This girl, I’ll call her M., couldn’t tell her mother, so together we sat down with mine. There were some tears, but after the initial shock I remember the conversation settling, as most did in our house, into a reasoned examination of the options.

I had thought my dad would be the most ardent about getting an abortion. It had only been a matter of months since he’d given me some fatherly advice, expressing his hopes for my college years. He said those four years had been for him the freest, the most open-ended of his life, and he wished the same unencumbered time for me.

But Dad seemed intrigued when I brought up the possibility of our keeping the baby and my joining the Navy. He had been in the Navy during the war. We lived on the coast; we shared a love of boats and the ocean. (He was also a real straight arrow when it came to knowingly breaking the law.)

On the other side of the world Vietnam was raging. I had a student deferment, but nobody knew what might happen long term with the draft, and maybe, I thought, this was a fork in the road, the first in my young life, fate nudging me off the path most expected. I was more than willing to get married. I thought that was the outcome M. and I were headed for, whether or not we became parents at 18.

M. was not demonstrative on the Navy option. (We’d barely had time to talk ourselves.) She had also been more or less silent on the option of taking the pregnancy to term and giving the baby up for adoption. She was in college, too, at a branch of the University of California closer to home. Given the weight of emotion and the psychic exhaustion in the room after a time, I think she just wanted to do what was best for all of us. And by the next morning that best thing clearly was to terminate the pregnancy.

My mother was the one who, once the decision was made, steeled herself to action. She had friends, friends whose daughters had “gotten into trouble” and had to be rescued. M. and I knew nothing of this world; we would have been at a complete loss had we been on our own. Mom took over, arranged everything. She wasn’t happy about it, but she believed it was the correct solution. She was fond of M., but she knew it was mostly about the sex. She had warned me, gently, at the outset of the relationship. Too gently, I guess.

It was hard for me to think straight as I paced the alley behind the surreptitious clinic. It was too soon for perspective. But if I had been able to see the bigger picture, I would have realized how many lives were in fact saved that day: mine, M.’s (we parted, amicably, about two years after the abortion), probably M.’s mother’s, too – a single woman perched unsteadily on a financial and emotional edge. 

Our decision also saved, or made possible, the life Ellen and I found together, starting in our mid 20s. And the lives of our dearly anticipated children and grandchildren.

I couldn’t see the future then, of course. I walked up and down, numb and anguished both at the same time, while M. and my mother were inside.

I remember there was a lot of broken glass in the alley. As I walked, I stared hard at the shards, like stars in a black asphalt sky, reflecting the sun on an unusually brilliant early-winter day.

Roe v Wade

An Antipoem

                        -for Nicanor Parra

If we compress space & time 

itki* takes us back to the Parisian coffeehouses 

& tobacco dens of the Enlightenment

where debate was the addiction

Where the entrenched religious

& young turk rationalists duked itki* out

denying or defending the New World

bestseller of the day:

Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France

(aka Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit

Missionaries in New France 1610-1791)

released annually in 70 some volumes of Latin

French & Italian

These vigorous disputes

against a backdrop of the Old World’s

embrace of the divine right of kings 

centered on pressing arguments

for & against liberté, égalité, fraternité

Enlightened catalysts 

that led to the French Revolution

& inspired the American one

As Graber & Wengrow explain

in The Dawn of Everything (2021):

“...scandalized missionaries frequently

reported that [native] American women

were considered to have full control

over their own bodies, and that

unmarried women had sexual liberty

and married women could divorce at will.

This, for Jesuits, was an outrage.

Such sinful conduct, they believed,

was just the extension of a more general 

principle of freedom, rooted in natural

dispositions which they saw as inherently

pernicious.”

So itki* is today with our

johnny-come-lately 

neo-Jesuit “orginalists”

_____________________________________________________

* “Ki” is a grammatical neologism Indigenous science writer Robin Wall Kimmerer advocates for using in place of “it”, “its”, “it’s” or “itself” to help correct English’s objectification of phenomena. The neologist term is harvested from the last syllable of a longer word in Potawatomi for an “earth being.” As a pre-school teacher I learned that we humans learn best by going through the known to the unknown. Instead of substituting “ki” for “it”, I’ve chosen to add the Indigenous neologism to our neutral English pronoun as a suffix, changing the way we speak of things in English from inanimate to animate. Indeed, that syllable, “ki”, is a Potawatomi suffix meaning “from the living earth.” Thus, itki means that even gender-neutral objects are in some way alive.

Vaudeville at the Transfer Warehouse

Telluride Arts, Telluride Theatre and the Wilkinson Public Library hosted a wonderful community Vaudeville event  at the Transfer Warehouse again Thursday, June 23rd, that drew a full house.  

Marko & Sally (Ryan & Meaghan?) were emcees, and did a lot of playful sketches and intros, especially a song skit called Stud & Babe. A bellydancer, my neighbor Tia performed a wild masked dance  and used twirling ribbons very impressively.  The We 3 a cappela choir of Amy, Leah and Joana did sumptuous harmonies. 

 A lovely fellow whose name I didn't catch had a  rollicking Lift Ticket song that had everybody singing along. Tim and Ek of Ragged Soles performed original music, as well as Ethan (solo) and For My Family (guitars, violin and singer).  Audience members competed for a demonstration of "Stupid Human Tricks" and Penelope Gleason won the prize for her facial movements.

The finale 

was Logan  & Nicko 

doing a burlesque skit

Logan was a 

wild dancer

The audience 

ate it up

Joanna Spindler did a wonderful piece that she premiered at the Telluride Mushroom Festival last year. I performed my Forever Wild piece about the town's saving of the Valley Floor

Forever Wild

The revolution's 

in the evolutions of the DNA solutions

Not the human convolutions of political pollutions

No bloke should have to choke 

to breathe the bloody smoke

& endure all the dope our dis-urban folk 

are force-fed & white-bred to buy buy buy buy

Rednecks know how the cattle go

& the sheep & the pigs at the rodeo

where the 4H ranch kids show & sell

their darling pets to the slaughterhouse vets

Hell, yes!

for grand prize ribbons & barbequed ribs

You better bet 

Daddy 

keeps a rifle loaded in his pickup

& if you’re a predator

he ain’t no host

As for Mama

she’s kicking up her heels at the Hitchin’ Post

so she can catch a little living

before the oven turns to toast

If we fast-food forward

where we seem to be headed

even the best will be bedded

in a sunset Sony big screen faux-dream

Mad Max Halloween

where they’ve stolen all the treats

in streets stripped of stars

chockfull of cars

on their way to the bars

The trick for the tramp

will be holding the lamp

so’s to be half slick enough

to slip past the thick stuff

they pour in our path

Fame. Fortune. The amenity math

whose sum shines so bright

there’s no time for fright

‘Cuz if you fall on your face

you’re out of the race

Look, you can't kick the habit 

if you can’t take the heat

So let's eat, McRedeye sez

the sweet meat of anger

that feeds into action

to halt the reaction of corporate factions

Fleecing the flocks & shaking their fists

Unleashing their chickenhawks

for pre-emptive hits

Time to call “Bullshit”

& Seattle their trade talks

Like Telluride did to that Blues & bruised

fat cat plan

to supersize & infill

the glacial till of the Valley Floor

No way said the townsfolk

who scraped, borrowed, begged 

& bought the sucker

An owner’s weighted bait

we refused to swallow 

or follow hook, line and sinker

to the gondola mandala big pond stinker

No, we realized right from the start

what shaded our eyes

& kept people apart

And you could too

You could dare to dream

To band together senior and teen

for the good of the land

Take an Earth First! stand

Toss a wrench in the machine

Let’s cut to the heart

with a smart green blade

& come to the aid of those who oppose

greed’s bottom line charade

Let’s embrace what’s wild

Pray for open space’s saving grace

Surround your town like we did our town

Where seven generations from now

we will enjoy free-roaming elk

Not a docile herd of cow

No jerkoff forest slum

No white boy trophy rum

Just the mountains’ mother

HUMMMMMMMMM

Jack Miller RIP

 

Jack Miller's Shrine at his place on Hastings Mesa.

Friends held a marvelous memorial for an amazing man -- climber, adventurer, explorer, maker and friend to many. Many of us got to tell stories about this gentle giant who was not only a bonafide hero for saving the life of a friend stuck on the cliffs at Yosemite with a broken bone, unable to move.

For me he was the best Green I knew, backing me up when I needed political support. A man of deep beliefs, integrity and action. 

But a wild fellow who led me on an adventure at the legendary kickass cowboy bar in Ridgway called the Little Chef, where we "prosted" with a German fellow late into the day and then made it back to his digs on the Mesa, three of us on a snowmobile, so drunk we fell over every 20 feet, laughing with each tumble.

Lots of stories. Lots of memories. A friend for all seasons.

Jack Miller