Fire Stories, October 9th 2017

It was the dancer Martha Graham who said fire was the test of gold, adversity, and of strong men, and surely the past week has been a testament to that. I was awoken at 4 in the morning on Monday the 9th of October 2017 by a staticy, urgent recorded phone call on the land line commanding: "Be prepared to evacuate. Wild fires raging! Repeat! Be on high alert, evacuations in progress!" I had smelled smoke earlier that night, even stepping outside to see if something in the back had caught fire, but could not see anything, so assumed there was a fire somewhere far away and went back to sleep. After that emergency phone call, I did not sleep again for twenty hours.


What do you put in one suitcase? A life-long collector, my small house is filled with art, bird wall pockets, salt and pepper shakers, teapots, vintage pitchers, mermaids, octopi-themed ceramics, etc. etc. Since my neighborhood in Sonoma was not under mandatory evacuation, I had much more time to pack up than the people who fled Santa Rosa and Napa with only the clothes on their back. My two dogs of course would be priority. After that, the material things: passport, a bulging scrapbook of old photos, before the cellphone digitalized snapshots, a favorite skirt, a large octopus plate that I carried around Italy in my backpack and that made it home in one piece, a framed photo of my mother when she was 18 in Australia hugging a koala. I was too overwhelmed to start loading the suitcase up with more treasures, and it remained half full for the next many days as I vagabonded the Bay Area, staying with kind souls in Berkeley and Mill Valley, not knowing if my house would still be standing when I returned to Sonoma.




I have lived in the Bay Area for many decades now. I was in San Francisco 1989 when the big earthquake happened on a very hot day in October and terrified everyone with its strength and destruction and aftershocks. In October in 1991, I stood at the end of my block in Oakland and watched in horror as houses in the hills were literally exploding from the heat as the Oakland Firestorm swept through. I was married standing on a rock in Yosemite on New Years Day of 1997 as the park was being evacuated during the beginning of the disastrous El Niño flooding that would take place over the next two days. But this North Bay fire? It is a monster.


Over the past week, almost two hundred thousand acres of our county's most beautiful places have burned. At certain points there were 19 separate wild fires burning at once, many zero percent contained after two or three days. Four fires from Napa and Sonoma merged into one giant fire breathing dragon. 1 out of every 10 people in Sonoma County are evacuees. 5700 structures have burned to the ground. So many people have lost everything. And those who are still in harms way, who evacuated either voluntarily or by order, live in a constant state of anxiety. Most people I talk with have been obsessively watching the news, whipped into a fearful despair hearing about "winds picking up" or flinching every time the cell phone pings with a new evacuation notice from Nixle. "Please don't let it be my neighborhood."


I have seen so many surreal sights during this time: cows wandering around a steaming blackened field, myself trying for normalcy by walking near my house with a mask on and seeing the hills on fire, little spots of orange flame amidst dense tornadoes of smoke. The bees who usually zoom and buzz, drinking in a circle around the bird baths were dopey and staggering from the smoke. The sky was raining ash. You take a shower: campfire smell. You come inside the sealed off house: burnt fireplace smell. How do the birds and animals manage to function, their lungs so much smaller? I go to work an hour south of my house, dogs and suitcase perpetually in the car, to try and connect with others and get away from the smoke. Yesterday, a nurse from Santa Rosa and a man from Napa both showed up at the flower shop at the same time to buy flowers for the people who were hosting them while they were evacuated. As they were trading stories, I raised my hand and said: "Sonoma" and we all three spontaneously hugged and started crying. It is the un-knowing that wears on you. But we are indeed the lucky ones who still may have a house to come home to. Fingers crossed. Knock on wood.


I drove an hour north yesterday evening to stay at a hotel and for the first time in a week, I saw the stars at night. When I was about half-way there, I realized I no longer needed to wear my mask. 80% of the guests at the hotel were refugees from this fire, and their stories were heartbreaking: "I jumped in my car with my wife that first night, without even having time to pack. We were going to head to shelter at my son's house. Then we heard that he lost his house too." Many of the firefighters who have not slept in days continue to battle this giant, even after losing their own homes. Every single person I encounter has either lost their own house, or has friends who have lost everything. The farm where I buy my produce burned. My favorite two hiking trails burned. Even if the nearby vineyards did not burn, their crops are tainted by ash. Napa and Sonoma, both dependent upon tourism, are like ghost towns. The scope of this fire is mind-boggling, and it will be a shock to see the aftermath, the post-apocalypse reality of what now I can only picture in my imagination.


Friends and neighbors and co-workers have been so supportive, supplying fire updates, places to stay, general kindness. I want to think that if my house is still standing after almost a whole week, dare I think it may indeed survive? It is supposed to rain on Thursday. Meanwhile: the dogs, the suitcase, and the mask remain in the car.

Opening of my second novel, RADIANCE

Prologue

            The Driver slapped himself hard on his right cheek to stay awake.  He yawned and reached out to turn on the radio. Elvis was singing “All Shook Up” and the driver sang along, imitating The King’s classic staccato delivery, hiccoughing along with my hands are shaky and my knees are week. Enjoying this, he turned the radio up louder.  It was sleeting and he had to keep swiping at his windshield to make a porthole through which he might possibly be able navigate this crappy road.  The road was called the Golden Road because the dirt in this part of Maine had a strange yellow tinge.

            The Driver had driven The Golden Road five days a week for the past decade, in all conditions,  and it never got any prettier.  He should not have had that third beer after he punched out, but the job was punishing. Even the name of his Union embarrassed him, The International Brotherhood of Pulp.  He had lost track of how many logs he and the others had gotten onto the conveyer belt that day for processing, but if the pain in his lower back was any gauge, the answer was too many. He yearned for an easier job, but the paper mill was the only game in town. At least his thirty mile commute from the Millinocket Mill was paved. He slapped himself again and shook his head, taking in a great gulp of air through his mouth.  Sometimes he wanted to just keep driving, chance the storied unpaved stretch of The Golden Road that led right on up to Canada, to the St. Zacharie Border Crossing, one of the few with no inspections.  He would just drive right through and begin again.

            The Driver’s chin bobbed down onto his chest and the next thing he knew, the car was on the other side of the road, aimed at a birch tree.  He snapped to, swearing and grappling wildly for the steering wheel,  righting the car only seconds before it would have ploughed into the tree.  He was wide awake now, heart galloping.  Dion sang The Wanderer and the driver sat forward in his seat, downed the dregs of some cold coffee,  and gave himself a loud pep talk.  After a few minutes, he saw something coming towards him, and even though the beast was far away, he could tell by its sideways lope and eerie nonchalance that it was a coyote. He slowed down and swiped at the windshield again, rolling down the passenger window just a crack, which immediately sent icy rivulets streaming down the interior glass but did little to help his view.  As he got closer he saw that the coyote was a mangy, half-starved thing, an elder, and also that there was something glowing in front of its muzzle. What the hell? Was the beast carrying a flashlight?

            The driver rubbed his eyes. In the soupy early dark, the object gave off a dull glow, not green exactly, but not pure white either.  The coyote continued coming straight at the driver,  walking steadily down the middle of the road, his head bowed against the sleet, or perhaps from the weight of whatever was clamped between his teeth. The driver slowed to a halt now to try and get a better look at the object. He recognized it first as a bone, and then, if he was not mistaken, a human bone, a small femur,  one end broken and jagged, the other notched where it had once fit into the joint.  And this bone: it glowed.

            The coyote stopped walking and sat down in front of the car. It dropped the bone and looked up at the driver,  then shook the moisture out of its coat, lay on its stomach, and began to gnaw methodically on the bright treasure. The driver honked and pulled out to go around the animal, gunning the car and not looking back. The next day he would tell himself he had imagined the whole thing, that it was the beer, that he should not try to make that drive when he was exhausted. And the driver of the logging truck that came up that same road two hours later and saw something small and glowing off on the shoulder would think it was a torn woolen scarf, knitted with some sort of glinting, metallic yarn. Gradually, as animals and time nibbled away at the femur bone, the next passerby who saw it at night would mistake it for a some spilt paint,  small but surprisingly bright there on the side of the road.   The old coyote had long since returned to the woods, where the others in its pack mostly slept during the day. At dusk, a female checked in on her three new pups.  Each had been born with six toes instead of the normal four, so their paws were big and cumbersome, and they licked at them often to remove the now that hardened there. The pups were eager to emerge from the den, and they stretched and tumbled out into the night, each carrying a small bone between its teeth, picked from the larger hoard piled deep inside, bones that radiated with a strange and persistent light.

POTUS 2017: No Experience Required

I think I am in a little bit in shock. I knew this day was, ostensibly, coming, but somehow I held out hope that regulations would prevail and triumph over questionable electoral votes. After all, hope is what gave us President Obama, one of one of the greatest Presidents in my lifetime.   I am trying to squelch the anxious feeling I have had pretty much since DJT "won" the election in November. As I plan for the protest march in Oakland tomorrow, I am excited to have the opportunity to be a part of this peaceful protest, which I believe will be a massive one across the country, excited to feel proactive rather than appalled or helpless, which have been the dominate emotions of late.
Some are saying liberals' indignation is just sour grapes at losing. Give him a chance, say they. But I do not believe  this unqualified, reality TV star, scofflaw, and narcissist actually won this election. What do we as a people do when there is documentation by our our intelligence branches, that Russia hacked our election to get this man into office? Do we shrug and say, "Oh well, let's just wait and see what he does?" We are already seeing what he does via the cabinet of deplorables he is picking, billionaires whose only qualification is that they donated to his campaign, climate change deniers, racists, and game show hosts. Our government should be "by the people, for the people," not a business venture, not some sort of bad joke.
Today, the country inaugurated a politically inexperienced man who has never held any kind of office to run the most powerful nation in the world. Can you think of any other position, even the most basic, where previous experience would not be required? Moreover, we inaugurated a man who does not pay taxes, when every other American citizen is required by law to do so. This makes him a law breaker. But not this alone: there are seventy-five lawsuits pending against him at this very moment, everything from sexual assault on a minor, to not paying people who have completed work for him, to fraud, and the list goes on. Lying about divesting potential financial conflict of interests, lying about Russia's role in his taking office, lying about damning things he has said, even though they have been recorded on video. When a president does not think the rules apply to him, that is a very dangerous place for a nation. Despots and dictators start out in such a fashion.  Within an hour of taking office, Climate Change and Health Care vanished from the Whitehouse Website.
But the main reason I will protest tomorrow is because that is one of my rights as an American. I fear for our country. Just because one man finds hard cold facts in conflict with his agenda, does not mean that those facts don't exist. Facts are not debatable. I do not want to see my country turn into a place of prejudice, censorship, ignorance, anti-intellectualism, disregard for Nature, a place where the wealthy take and take, where the less fortunate are bullied. I want a government who respects all genders and all races and religions. "Truthiness" should not be in a leader's lexicon. Love trumps hate. Let freedom ring. I'll see you, fellow resisters, at this and future, protests.

New Poem

New poem:

Real Time
By: Jill Koenigsdorf

The first rains
make diary
of the path.
The smudged, deep-clawed print
of Coyote giving
chase.
The precise punctures
of walking stick-
& crisscross hieroglyphs
of birds.
I measure time by birds-
First, the singing, then
what they carry.
Nesting materials:
horse hair for sturdiness,
dryer lint for comfort
Later,
the job of nourishing,
bugs, worm, a dozen times an hour.
The larger birds assess the two fatalities below-
Raccoons.
How did they die in tandem? Almost
touching?
I measure time by their transformation
The elements loosening
a tail, a paw
A scapula rests in the culvert
like an ivory moth.
Until one evening, they are only bones-
teeth so bright
in grin or grimace
under that mushroom moon,
Edgeless &
exploding spores.

New Poem

New poem:

Real Time
By: Jill Koenigsdorf

The first rains
make diary
of the path.
The smudged, deep-clawed print
of Coyote giving
chase.
The precise punctures
of walking stick-
& crisscross hieroglyphs
of birds.
I measure time by birds-
First, the singing, then
what they carry.
Nesting materials:
horse hair for sturdiness,
dryer lint for comfort
Later,
the job of nourishing,
bugs, worm, a dozen times an hour.
The larger birds assess the two fatalities below-
Raccoons.
How did they die in tandem? Almost
touching?
I measure time by their transformation
The elements loosening
a tail, a paw
A scapula rests in the culvert
like an ivory moth.
Until one evening, they are only bones-
teeth so bright
in grin or grimace
under that mushroom moon,
Edgeless &
exploding spores.

Unobscure Objects of Desire

            When I was a child, I used to believe that all the objects in our house interacted while we humans slept. The dolls threw a tea party, the pieces on the onyx chessboard cavorted, and the dish ran away with the spoon. I was too young to understand words like “anthropomorphize,” but it wouldn’t have mattered because in my mind, I was not attributing personality traits to, for example,  my father’s Shriner’s fez; no: my father’s Shriner’s fez innately possessed them. It follows then that I would grow up to be a collector of objects, things that I find wondrous. Judging from the popularity of Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” one might even presume that anyone with every square inch of wall space covered with art and 1930’s bird wall pockets is somehow not as evolved. The book suggests we “get rid of anything that does not spark joy.” But what if everything I have purposefully collected over my lifetime sparks joy?  Seeing the life within individual objects, imagining the stories the older pieces have to tell and the hands they have passed through, keeps the joy sparking.

            In the past, I have had a booth space at various antiques shops from Albuquerque to Sebastopol. Collectors are unique bunch, and one is either born with the collecting gene, or one is not. If it’s in your DNA, you will see nothing odd about getting up at dawn to wander through the homes of the newly deceased at an estate sale in search of old treasures. In a world where austerity is lauded and the general public might not differentiate between a collector and a hoarder, my passion for specific “stuff” is perhaps outmoded. The key word here is specific. Collectors have very precise things they surround themselves with, very exacting criteria. In fact, the particularity of the collector never ceases to amaze me.  I have had regular customers who had me keep an eye out for:  iron bells, but only ones with rust on them, crumb butlers, Victorian post-mortem daguerreotypes, shaving brushes, but only boar bristle ones, and the list goes on. One customer entered the shop with a Geiger counter on the hunt for Vaseline glass, the real stuff being made in the 18oos with uranium for a lovely glow.  

            My own collections are: teapots (the rule being that they have to actually be functional,) anything with a mermaid on it, anything with a flying fish on it, salt and pepper shakers, birds’ nests, bird wall pockets, metal pitchers, old tins for storing tea, glove molds, anything with an octopus on it,  vintage Hawaiiana, Moroccan tea glasses, and charm bracelets. I also collect Zuni Fetishes, but I see these more as art or sculpture, as artifact. The idea that one needs the medicine that a particular animal has to offer resonates with me, and the carvings are beautiful things, small and alive.  Many Zuni carvers say they can pick up the stone and see the animal inside, knowing immediately what they are going to carve, the attributes it carries: the joy of hummingbird, the self-esteem of moose, the introspection of bear and so on. These carvings are perhaps the epitome of noticing the life an object projects, the reflection it sets in motion.

             

Old objects can send you back to a very specific time and place, a mixing bowl like the one your mother made cookie dough in, an old pirate-chest bank like the one your brother saved his paper-route money in, a pink princess telephone, a Beatles bubblegum card.  I  see a Ouija board and am sent reeling back to the séance circle of some slumber party circa fifth grade where we “called back” both Walt Disney and Jimi Hendrix, and each of them “gave us a sign,” that they were in the room. I can come across one of those old wooden peg clothespins, roll it over in my hand and recall my mother hanging the laundry on the line, talking with our neighbor over the fence, curlers in her pretty hair. Many times a day at the various antique shops where I sold, customers would see something and exclaim: I had this same train set when I was a boy!  Or: We had this same clock on the wall in our kitchen!  There is always a note of pleasure in these reunions,  perhaps from the satisfaction of knowing a part of their pasts survived changing tastes and times, and is still seen as something of value.

          

  For some, all this color and visual stimulation is too much, but for others, the space is magic, not clutter.  A friend of mine once said: I like coming to your house because every time I look around, the eye rests on something new and interesting. There is an order to my  clusters of creamers, a tidiness to my row of teapots.  So for me: less is not more.

Let French Ring

I am so heartsick about the bombings in Paris that occurred on Friday. I know many other countries deal with such atrocities even more consistently than Paris, and of course, my heart goes out to them as well, but I have always felt such a connection to and admiration for Paris. It is indeed a city of dreams, be they romanticized or realistic. I lived there as a young woman, and have returned whenever I can manage it. As Ernest Hemingway said: "If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast." I have two "Parisian Moms" to whom I dedicated my first novel, one who lives here in California, and one who now lives in Toulouse but happened to be in Paris when the attacks occurred. They were the first I reached out to after the terrible news started trickling in. 

Paris is an old, old city. It has survived so many atrocities, the Nazi occupation comes to mind, but still Paris remains a place where intellect, freedom, beauty, art, history, all are revered. There, now,  the word is that the biggest act of resistance they can enact is to continue to live their lives in the way they always have, working and playing in the light, never cowering in the shadows, to embrace their very special version of joie de vivre that the world loves them for, that makes them French.

I wrote this piece for a local paper in 2007 when Bush called France "ungrateful" and "cowardly" for not backing him on the invasion of Iraq. He said we should remove French from our lexicon, though Bush would not have used that word exactly. So I wrote this piece as satire, and today, it seems a good time to bring it out again. Vive La France!

“Let French Ring”

By: Jill Koenigsdorf

            It was a beautiful spring day and the sunlight was streaming in through the glass of my Freedom Doors and the fragrance of Freedom Lilacs was wafting into the kitchen.  My boyfriend and I only moments before had exchanged deep and lingeringFreedom kisses, and he was now out back, thinning the Freedom Ivy while I ground some Freedom Roast.  Birds were chirping, spring fashion was arriving at the malls, much of it designed by big-name Freedom designers from abroad, and, except for a pesky couple of million scofflaws and naysayers who had been protesting this “war on our terms,” (most of them probably foreigners,) one could almost believe that all was right with the world.  Perhaps, in a swift and forceful way, a way that would harm nary an Iraqi civilian nor a U.S. GI, a way that would both “shock and awe,”  America could, at long last, open blind eyes around the globe to the joys of democracy.   Democracy by any means necessary! Why in God’s name wasn’t EVERYONE on board with us?  I always thought the Pope was just automatically patriotic, but no! Heck, all great nations have been colonizers at one time or another, why were we getting so much flack for it now? The road to liberty is never without its bumps, I thought, spritzing a little Freedom perfume on my wrist.   The country of Turkey not wanting to be a launching pad, I could maybe understand, but I was truly baffled by the Gaul’s lack of team spirit in this America-at-War thing. 

I have always been a Freedomphile, to the point where I wore a beret in high school and wrote many college papers on topics ranging from: “The Freedom Resistance Movement in World War II” to “The Freedom Surrealist Movement in Paris in the 1920’s” to  “Freedom New Wave Cinema in the Sixties.”  I knew that those Gauls had given us everything from the Chevrolet, to the Statue of Liberty to a virtual blueprint for our Declaration of Independence to the invention of the MOVIES, for goshsakes, so I was saddened by the lack of the ole liberté, fraternité, and egalité they were exhibiting now!   Sure they were America’s friends and friends should be able to tell you when you’re making mistakes, but as Our Leader, or maybe it was someone else, once said: “Yer either fer us or agin’ us.” 

When my boyfriend came back inside and saw the state I was in, he put on a lovely classical  c.d. and soon the soothing strains of Freedom Horn and Freedom Harp filled the house.  We engaged in some more deep, soulful Freedom kisses to the point where I had to say “Honey, we’re going to have to unwrap a Freedom envelope tout suite if we don’t stop or conception will  certainly occur!”   We agreed to take the proverbial cold shower, and certainly all the news of war put a damper on any thoughts of romance.  We read the Sunday paper with heavy hearts, as it was filled with the grainy images the all powerful had allowed the embedded press to publish, fuzzy images of tanks in sandstorms and buildings obscured behind clouds of black smoke and a blur of white flags. It was all such a downer!  But as I poured some good old Canadian maple syrup on my Freedom toast, I thought to myself, hey, relax, congress would never have approved a war budget of eighty BILLION dollars unless they had confidence in our president’s motives and foresight.  So who was I to worry? “Ours is not to question why/Ours is but to do or die.”  Maybe the President said that one too and I must say, blind faith is certainly a lot less taxing for most folks in the long haul!

“Honey,” I said to the boyfriend, topping off his Freedom Roast, I thought I’d make Freedom Onion Soup with Freedom Fries and Freedom Dip for supper, can you swing by the grocery store?”

“Sure thing,” he said.

“Just pick out a nice bottle of Freedom wine you think would go with that menu.  And please stop by the Freedom Laundry for your shirts on the way.   Oh! And we’re also out of Freedom Dressing.”

He looked so sweet, yet slightly weary driving off to market.  No, this war was not going to be easy on any of us.  Sure, here we have clean drinking water and electricity and shelter and are not being invaded, but psychologically, it’s taking its toll.  And the hassle at the airports!  But I just know this one’s going to be an easy-in/easy-out type situation, because if we learned just one thing from that Vietnam thing, that would be: “keep it short, cut your losses, and bail.”  As I squirted some Joy into the sink, I told myself not be be such a Gloomy Gus.  I recalled one day long ago being upset that one girl didn’t want to come to my birthday party.  My mother hugged me and said: “Now Dearie, you can’t be EVERYONE’S best friend!” And I guess that’s sort of what America has to remember now: you can’t please ALL the people, ALL the time, and there will always be some party-poopers, both on the homefront and abroad.   Still, it was too bad about France.  I’d always liked that place.  We were planning a trip there this summer and, after much agonizing, had decided to go ahead with it, war or no war.  Maybe we could even act as ambassadors of a sort, show them we’re NOT that stereotype of the “Ugly American.”  I began to get excited about my mission: to teach, not to condemn.  But to do that, I knew I’d have to speak their language, at least a little bit.  I have to say I was somewhat amazed that no where in my entire Yellow Pages did I see a listing for what I needed: Freedom Lessons.