Seeing Things

By Gerry Eugene

Seeing Things is collection of lyrical narratives that focus on joy, grief, courage, fear, love.

The twenty-three visions in this collection wrestle with the universal verities of our lives. Each chapter of the volume is a stand-alone vision, yet the chapters work together to create a single voice, building and spotlighting the strength we all must find as we move through our lives.

The book focuses on the drawing-in of family, friends, and nature in those moments that shape us in the crucible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Next Chapter
• Release date: Jan 16, 2023

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Seeing Things

SEEING THINGS

GERRY EUGENE

Copyright (C) 2023 Gerry Eugene

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2023 by Next Chapter

Published 2023 by Next Chapter

Edited by Graham (Fading Street Services)

Cover art by Lordan June Pinote

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author's permission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges permission to print the following articles where earlier versions of works appeared:

CrossCurrents Humanities Magazine: Cats and The Lessons they Say to Us and the Lessons They Hear Us Say.

Newsletter of the Friends of William Stafford: Speech Delivered 1/22/04 at Wenatchee Valley College for the First Annual William Stafford Memorial Poetry Celebration

Pontoon: An Anthology of Washington State Poets: To Whiskey.

Practice: New Writing Plus Art: Diet.

To Jack and Derek for their careful reading in the early days, I offer my great thanks.

To Archangel corax, he of the lapidary eyes and generous heart, I offer my extreme gratitude.

And I offer my profound thanks, as well, to Alyne Bailey, romance novelist extraordinaire, without whom there could not have been enough light to see my way through this project.

I dedicate Seeing Things to Al Lane.

CONTENTS

The Borneo Mustang

Kyuusu and the Physical World

Diet

Bully

Sarah

Mickey Hardcase

The Lessons We Give Them and the Lessons They Hear Us Give

Making Root Beer

In the Mind’s Eye

Small Flame in Iowa

Innocent Questions

Speech Delivered for the Annual William Stafford Memorial Poetry Celebration

Cats

Benny

Tea Matters

Some Creeks South and East of Spokane

Open Letter to a New Teaching Assistant

Three Words

Gun Times

Fishing: An Overview, 1987

The Anatomy of Rhetoric

Elizabeth

Seeing Things

About the Author

THE BORNEO MUSTANG

Great Nature has another thing to do

To you and me, so take the lively air,

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

-Theodore Roethke

My first summer home from college, I worked in an ice cream factory. In a gymnasium-sized freezer, I stacked sleeves of ice cream novelties on pallets and then moved those pallets into reefer rigs backed up to the airtight doors on the loading dock. The factory laid off the college kids in mid-August, so I traveled to the Boundary Waters for a canoe trip. I had never journeyed by canoe, but I cheerfully spent my savings from the factory job on a backpack, compass, topological maps, sleeping bag, tent, freeze-dried food, tiny butane stove, poncho, harmonica, and deet. I was nineteen and eager to rough it in the land of lakes, where voyagers can paddle from Minnesota to Hudson Bay.

My canoe companion was Jimmy Johansson. We met when we were five years old and remained friends through a mutual interest in art, music, literature, nature, fishing, and booze. Our debarkation point was Ely, a town full of canoe-trip outfitters. We rode the Greyhound north through Iowa and Minnesota—a long, mind-numbing day. When we arrived in Ely, we arranged first thing to rent a canoe. We ate steaks and potatoes at a local restaurant, and then in the dark of night we walked out of town to find a place to sleep. With so much camping equipment, we saw no reason to pay for a motel room.

About two miles out of town we saw, off to the side of the road in the dim starlight, a clearing in the trees. Jimmy and I crawled through a barbed wire fence and laid out our sleeping bags. We built a small fire. From my pack I pulled a bota of brandy. The brandy was cheap, and the bota’s latex lining had dissolved in it. The latex and the bota’s cured leather made the brandy taste utterly wretched. We drank it, and soon we passed out, oblivious to the owls, coyotes, wolves, and whip-poor-wills.

In the minutes of false dawn, I came awake to find that a cricket had crawled into my mouth. Shuddering, I spat it out. I lay on the ground, my head resounding, stomach churning, world spinning. I heard then, not far off, a stick snap. I heard a grumble and mumble from deep in some bestial throat. I heard very heavy footsteps drawing nearer and nearer.

I lay still as I could, my pulse drumming in my ears. I felt a new sensation—a tingling terror, electrical and pulsing. I was zipped immobile into my bag. I could smell the approaching bear. I felt his warm breath on my face. I felt then his wet nose push on my neck just below my right ear. Against the lids of my closed eyes, red light flashed like strobes. I imagined this bear tearing my head free of my body and batting it around between the jack pines. I felt as though I had no arms or legs, like a trout reeled from the lake and tossed onto the dock to twitch and flop.

As you can guess, I survived. Inexplicably, the bear did not attack me. He walked on. Just two yards away, Jimmy slept obliviously. The bear’s visit murdered sleep for me, and I waited for full-dawn, miserable, exhausted, and relieved. Later, as we walked from our campsite, we saw we had pitched camp on the edge of the city dump. No wonder the bear came close in the night.

Never before had I felt such fear, but I would again, and we all have felt it by our fourth decade, for survival is not without close calls. These confrontations with the heart in terror create, perhaps, a commonality and bridge between people, a shared territory in extremis.

Three days later I was an old hand in the stern of a canoe. As though born to it, I C-stroked and J-stroked across lake after lake. I learned to agree with my canoe partner on a point of land and paddle toward it, thus making our efforts cooperative rather than exhausting. We skimmed through the beautiful lakes, heard loons in the morning and wolves at night, saw moose in the brush, watched ospreys and eagles ride the thermals above the Iron Range. We portaged between lakes and paddled north across the boundary into Canada.

On the fourth day we negotiated a narrow, shallow isthmus. The water was no more than three feet deep. Ahead and off to the right side, Jimmy spotted a little creature swimming away from us. It appeared to be a muskrat or small beaver, maybe ten inches long. We could make out more of its wake than its body. We decided to take a closer look. We glided closer until the little swimmer was just beside our canoe and to our right, midway between me in the stern and Jimmy in the prow. We saw, then, that we had observed not a small rodent swimming, but rather just the nose of a bear walking though the water. The bear stood up and towered over us, dripping on us, and gazing back and forth at Jimmy and me. Jimmy held his paddle in both hands. God, Jimmy, don’t hit him, I stage-whispered. Again, I felt the electricity of terror. I saw my limbs tremble. The bear placed his paws on the gunwale of the canoe. He lifted his muzzle to the sky and opened his jaws wide. I could see his fangs and his tongue and the cavern of his maw. I heard his huge claws click and rasp the edge of the canoe. He uttered a sound very much like a yawn. I was impaled by fear. After several centuries-long moments, the bear released our canoe and swam around behind me. I felt, for the first time in my life, my scalp tighten and constrict. I knew my hair was standing up. The bear came into sight on the left. It waded to shore and sat down on a sandy spot. Around him, monarch butterflies rolled lazily in the air. Small waves washed gently on the rocks. I heard the hum of mosquitoes as they flew to us from the trees, and I heard the soft call of mourning doves across the lake.

One of my favorite aunts, Patsy Clark, grew up in the Carolinas. Through inheritance and business acumen, she made a fortune. I often stayed with her and my Uncle Bruce when they were alive, and I was young. In their retirement years, they lived on the shores of a lake in the Canadian Rockies, and I would ride my motorcycle north from Spokane to visit. I loved listening to Aunt Patsy’s stories. She filled her narratives with colorful southern phrases. If but one piece of chicken remained on the platter in the center of the table, she would say, by way of encouraging me, Put your paw on it and growl.

In the winters, Aunt Patsy and Uncle Bruce would leave Canada and live in their Spokane home. On Thanksgiving and Christmas, I’d stay with them there, and they would take me to the Spokane Club for dinner. The yearly dues at the Spokane Club exceed my current annual income as an English instructor. We would line up for our turn at the club’s buffet table, cheek to jowl with members of Spokane’s oldest and wealthiest families. If Aunt Patsy saw some particularly attractive crab legs or caviar or smoked salmon, she’d shout, Quick! Grab it all before the hoarders get here! I have held fast to this phrase. I use it often. I love its self-mocking, double-barreled, mirror-image irony and joie de vivre. And I love the truth in it.

The first days of June have arrived here in the Cascades’ foothills. In my part of the world, late spring is the finest time to ride a motorcycle. The cold of early spring has passed; it no longer penetrates the leather jacket and chaps. It no longer numbs the fingers on the throttle and clutch. Nor has the heat of summer become so intense that the engine’s heat becomes intolerable as I wait for traffic lights to change. In early spring, our valley is beautiful. Most trees in these parts are ornamentals, not native, and they are blooming now, in early June. The foothills have not yet turned brown. They still look fuzzy and green.

In late spring, I like to ride out to neighboring small towns. I’ll see, as I cruise along, the rural high schools, their marquees emblazoned with the motto of the graduating class. As often as not, that motto is Carpe diem, Seize the day. I always laugh when I see that motto.

Carpe diem is, traditionally, an occasion for poetry. The term itself is telescoped. It means more than Seize the day. I have read many such poems, and they have one common theme: Since life is short and death is certain and old age is crippling, let us take advantage of our beautiful young bodies, and seizing the day, let us make wild love right here, right now. Carpe diem is simply the abbreviation for Take this opportunity to have sex. Don’t accept my word on this; do what I have done and spend thirty-five years reading poetry. You’ll find I’m right. Sometimes I think high school principals are unaware of the full implications of Carpe diem’s exhortation. Other times, I’m certain they know.

Before my sister and brother-in-law had children, they traveled. They worked on the road for Broadway productions. For several years, Chorus Line International was their life. My sister worked in wardrobe and Dan, my brother-in-law, in lighting. In the summer of 1980, their company staged the show in Portland, and I took it into my head to ride a 400cc Yamaha Special from Spokane to visit them. Driving a car, one would not wish the ride any longer. On a small motorcycle, I felt numb and wrung out by the time I reached the Columbia gorge. The wind in the gorge is strong, and I rode canted toward the river to compensate. Hour upon hour I clung to the buzzing, vibrating little motorcycle. When I stopped for gas, I found I could barely walk. Stupidly, I pushed on.

The Columbia is our region’s largest river, and it cuts directly through the Cascades. Many smaller tributaries feed it on its way to the Pacific. The smaller mountain rivers spill out of Washington and Oregon from higher elevation, and in these mountains, weather follows the valleys. I rode west on the major four-lane highway, leaning into the powerful wind, my right boot almost rubbing the pavement. Nearly comatose from exhaustion, I approached the confluence where the Deschutes gorge meets the Columbia gorge. I was going seventy. I whipped onto the bridge, and a sudden williwaw of wind from the Deschutes hit me from the left. Already leaning right, I felt the bike begin to lie down. Somehow, I tore through it before I toppled. I stood on the left foot peg, pulling the bike upright, and made it across the bridge. I drove onto the shoulder of the highway and stopped. I lowered the kickstand and dismounted. After a moment of trembling, I sat down on the ground. That night I rented a room in The Dalles. I walked to the closest theater and watched Return of the Jedi.

While I pursued my first graduate degree in Iowa City, my roommate, Mike Elgin, had more money than I had. He rented a big house, a nice one, and he let me live in it for a nominal fee. He owned a roadster. He ate prime rib and drank excellent wine. He filled the nice house with art, antiques, expensive Persian rugs, state-of-the-art stereos, and shiny treasures. He dated women who were expensive to maintain. He had a taste for the good things, and he loved the hedonistic life. I pursued a degree in rhetoric, he in ceramics.

Like many of us, Mike was more enamored of wanting than having. Desire, for Mike, was far sweeter than possession. When fixated on a target—a particular Guatemalan coffee, the newest waterbed, two front-row-center concert tickets, a blonde in the library—he would laugh out loud and shout, Wild horses! I loved the idea of these wild horses of desire, and the phrase stayed with me through generations that ensued.

Before we graduated, Mike fell in love with the idea of marriage. In my group, his wedding was the event of the season, of course. Mike saw—for the first time in years—the interior of a church. I was an usher, and I undertook my role with a studied lack of gravitas.

Mike rented the country club for the reception. In the beverage line, gilded cherubs pissed champagne into rented crystal. The region’s best rock group played until the wee hours. By previous arrangement, we had agreed that I could remain in the house only until Mike and his bride returned from the tropical honeymoon islands. His wife wanted me out, and I could not blame her, though I hated to move away from the style of living that long habit let me think I somehow deserved. They left for the South Pacific, and I stayed alone in their house, surrounded now by piles of loot collected from the bridal shower and wedding.

Laboring under the stupid belief that I was in a race, I saddled myself with an overload of courses year ‘round. At that time, copy machines were becoming common in libraries. Grad students paid a nickel per page to make copies of articles in professional journals. This technology made our lives easier. We could take the information home and study it there late into the night. We could underline passages and write in the margins. We could have it near at hand as we hunched over our huge, throbbing, electric typewriters. Two days following the wedding, after many hours of staring at arcane prose photocopied from The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I had ceased my labors for the night. No doubt I helped myself to a modest slab of Mike’s Stilton cheese, a small snifter of his Armagnac VSOP, maybe one of his smuggled Cuban cigars.

I drifted into bed, tired and satisfied from a day and a night of work well done. In the quiet, tree-lined street outside, a car pulled up, but its engine continued to run. Car doors opened but did not close. Footsteps sounded on the front porch. The screen door on the front porch opened, but no one rang the bell or knocked upon the wooden front door. I heard the doorknob rattle. I knew then that burglars had come, that the house was being robbed. People in general supposed I had moved out, that the house was untenanted during Mike’s honeymoon. The piles of treasure were too attractive for some thieves to resist. So, what should I do? Should I stay in bed and let the robbers smell my throat? Mike had a fancy shotgun in his closet, a pump-action ten-gauge goose gun with filigree scrollwork and a burl-wood stock. I scrambled out of bed, padded across the hall, and pulled the shotgun from Mike’s bedroom closet. I jacked it open and saw it was unloaded. I decided not to take time to hunt for shells, and dressed in my tighty-whities, I pounded down the stairs and toward the big, oval window on the front door, brandishing the gun and roaring like a maddened grad student. I heard a voice shout, It’s Eugene and he’s got a gun! Then I heard the screen door close. I heard tennis shoes slap the wood of the front porch. I heard car doors slam and tires screech. I stood panting, cradling the heavy ordinance, staring at my reflection in the glass, and not recognizing myself at all.

Sometimes in emergencies we can’t react, and other times we can. Sometimes we watch as from a distance the sudden events that collapse onto us, and other times we fight for our lives.

To Whiskey

When I was young and newly

given up to you,

one night I walked

to the outskirts of camp

and saw the green lawn

unfold like a bluegrass field

and decided against

your pleadings and promises

that I should walk upon it,

but slept with you instead—

while lightning bugs shone about our tent.

And in the bright morning

after you had left

only the taste

of your wanton self through me,

I found that the lawn’s verge

was a limestone cliff’s edge,

and I saw the tops of oak trees

two hundred feet below

that you had promised was soft lawn,

and I saw the space yawn up at me,

and I should have known you then,

Killer, I should have known you then.

One of my great joys in recent years has been the opportunity to cultivate pen pals and friends through email. I’ve a pen pal, a good friend, at Purdue University. He’s a professor of classics, a fellow tea enthusiast, and a gifted and generous correspondent. I’ve used, in our letters, wild horses to describe my excitement as we close in on some rare and desirable dian hong or an especially esoteric Yixing teapot. He says that his students refer to zealots, enthusiasts, and fanatics as having gone utterly Borneo. I like this term, and I’ve connected it to wild horses in order to refer to a certain and very special species of impatience and terror conjoined.

I’ve survived my share of close calls, those described here—and many others besides. Who has not? But they shrink to insignificance compared to one endless close call. There's a voice, my friend, which augered into my mind seven years ago last month when I first began living under a sentence of death. Or rather, it drilled into my brain when the sentence of death we all endure came home to me in the sudden clarity of a medical diagnosis of terminal cancer. It shouts ceaselessly, Now! Now! Now! Tomorrow evaporated (poof!) and never came back. Tomorrow does not exist. Seven years ago, waiting became anathema, unthinkable. Even in restaurants, waiting for a slice of pie, I want to leap to my feet and shout, What seems to be the holdup here? Sweet Christ, can't you people hurry up?

Yes, it's ridiculous and maddening. The Borneo mustang syndrome is not pleasant. You know that. It sprang to birth from pain and terror and lives on buoyed by terror and pain. Every object, person, and event in my life took on a strange, vibrating glow and has never shed it since. My eyes snap open in the morning, and the voice screeches, My God! Hurry! Now! Now! Now! It is indeed a madness, but shaking me roughly and saying, Snap out of it, fool will not work, no better than it worked when I tried that approach on my friends Lance Hoagland, Mickey Hardcase, and Elizabeth when they too found themselves chained to their own larger-than-life dragons. I’ll introduce you to them soon.

I have considered myself a dead man walking for seven years, and doctors almost tap their feet in their impatience to see it all run its course. This is the genesis of my Borneo mustang, and it is, in a wild, unpleasant, and convoluted fashion, beautiful beyond belief—at least from my perspective. The voice says, Look at it. Breathe it. Grab it all while you can. Soak it in. And I obey. The voice called me out of the closet. The voice called me to the corners of the earth—its jungles and shrines and far-off seas. It compels me to make friends around the globe—friendship being life's single sweetest blessing and the main purpose of the evolution of the human mind.

But from the perspective of those around me, my Borneo mustang is an oddball's exasperating quirk. I tell you these things so you can understand the single oddest part of Gerry Eugene’s vast arena of peccadilloes—not to suck up sympathy, but simply to tell you. Seven years ago I wrote the following poem, and nothing really has changed since then.

Trying to speak clearly,

Trying to wrap my scarred tongue around words

That not