Thoughts on entropy and other fragments and miscellany

  A broken coffee cup and a ripped old grey tee shirt. Two more useless pieces of garbage that have outlived their jobs. I find an odd freedom these days when I throw things away, or toss them into the recycling pail.
 I spend a few days in the Sierras and when I return home dust has settled on everything in my house. Cobwebs are starting to form in the corners. The roses in the elegant vase a friend brought by just last week have dropped their petals on the table and they are now dull and faded, the vibrant red of just a short time ago is gone.
 The cracks in the pavement in front of my house have plants growing in them. This is the strange fecund power of nature. Life will take hold where ever it can. I drive over these little weeds, as do countless others, every day. Still they thrive somehow. The street is slowly wearing out. Given enough time without maintenance the roads in my neighborhood will completely decay. It will take an enormous amount of time, but the outcome is inevitable. And that goes for everything we see; cars and houses, buildings and mountains and even our sun and galaxy. Every star and stone and black hole is slowly, but most definitely, wearing away.
  Without some sort of input of work, in the case of our bodies food, nothing stays in order. Disorder eventually rules. What about the little plants growing up through the the road you might ask. Aren't they going against the natural progression towards death by flourishing?  Well, they are, but only because something else is supplying them with fuel; the sun and the minerals in the tiny patch of soil that built up where the pavement separated allows for the growth. The minuscule amount of energy these weeds receive from the sun is enough to ensure a short but ordered life. But the sun is losing energy, most of it being wasted by being blasted off into empty space.  Earth only receives a tiny fraction of its awesome output.
  As usual, the great Peter Atkins summarizes it best. He is a cheerleader for the Second Law of Thermodynamics and explains it better than I can, "Like it or not, purposeless decay into disorder is the spring of all change, even when that change is exquisite or results in seemingly purposeful action."

  If the sun were to go dark, just flick off, and it would take us about eight minutes to know, that being how long it takes the light to travel the 93 million miles to Earth, our decent into decay would be pretty quick. We would probably struggle in darkness for less than few years, if that, but our limited resources would quickly be depleted and with no new growth the atmosphere would be altered and the end would be wickedly cold and brutal. Fortunately that's not the way it's going to happen, the real scenario is going to be much more dynamic.
   Before it runs out of fuel and collapses in on itself our dying star is going to expand so much that Earth's orbit will be inside its massive body. But long before that, as the sun starts its death song, our oceans will boil away and our protective atmosphere will be blown out into interstellar space. And before the edge of the growing ball reaches our humble planet, Earth will be nothing more than a barren scorched rock. Life will have already been snuffed out.

   After an hour of walking I'm am taking a rest on a fallen dead tree. A giant log with the bark long eaten away leaving the wood as smooth as a varnished tabletop. What kind of tree it is I can't tell. I am no expert.  But I'm in the woods of the Western Sierras surrounded by cedar and sugar pines. So the odds are good it's a conifer of some type. How long it lived or how long it's been lying here on the bank of the Merced is a mystery to me. I dare not even guess.
  The poet and naturalist Gary Snyder says that it takes a tree about the same amount of time to decompose as it did to live. I'm probably sitting on wood that is over a hundred years old. Most likely its older judging from the size of the trunk.
  It doesn't take long for the ants to discover me. They are large and black and they hurry in every direction occasionally climbing over me. A minor nuisance but I get the impression that they would pick me apart if they could.   Of course I am big and powerful so they go about their work of finding an easier food source. But it's not always going to be this way.
  It would probably be the ants that got me first if I keeled over and slid off the log on to the forest floor. Ants and other nameless and uncountable bugs. And of course the ones who do the real work of hastening decomposition, bacteria. They would get down to business right away, as soon as I quit breathing and hit the ground. I would be attacked by both sides, the bacteria in the thick soil as well as my own special family that I carry around in my gut and intestines. They will have already started processing the rich feast that I had become the second my heart quit beating.
   Other opportunists are out there too. Squirrels and chipmunks might not pay too much attention to my prone form but the Ravens would. Ravens, and Crows for that matter, get their sometimes evil reputations as carrion eaters because they were often the first visitors to bloody battlefields. A flock of Ravens is called an Unkindness. And a flock of Crows is called a Murder. Historically these intelligent and playful birds have gotten a bad rap.
  Ravens would find me and start to pick away at the delicate spots; eyes, mouth, nose.
  What else could happen? If I'm not found for a while, which is not probable, too many people know approximately where I am, and start to become foetid I'll surely attract that other clever scavenger, coyote. What a windfall I would be to the wild dogs. They would scare off the Ravens and hog me to themselves. In fact, coyotes follow Ravens knowing that there are spoils to be found. The Ravens would wait in the branches until the coyotes had their fill and then they would resume their eating. It's a reciprocal relationship, the coyotes would have ripped through the tough flesh and muscle exposing the more tender and juicer innards providing the Ravens with easier access to the nourishing delicacies.

   Jane Hirshfield says in a poem called Tool Use In Animals,

    For a long time it was thought
    the birds were warning: Panther! Panther!
    Then someone understood. The birds were scavengers.
    The cry was "Human! Human!"

  Of course if a black bear caught wind of my stench, that would change the dynamic a bit. The beast at the top of the food chain would scare off the dogs and birds for as long as she wanted. If there were cubs involved there might not be much left of me after a few days. There are worse outcomes than having a legacy that involves a few content fat bears digesting me as they lumber through the Sierra forest.
  A mountain lion might share the feast if it found me while I was still fresh. Or if it was the cause of my sudden demise. They prefer their meat still warm and rarely have to bother with rancid flesh. If a mountain lion attacked me my death would probably be swift and painless, except for the fear, and after the initial feeding it would drag the leftovers to a concealed spot and cover me with leaves and brush to keep me relatively fresh.
   After a few weeks, if the weather stays hot, I'd be unrecognizable. At that point I would hope I'm not found. I've provided many meals to many animals. Fair is fair. I've been reduced to a pile of bones that will slowly blend in with the forest floor. Bacteria and bugs will continue to return me to the system.
    A couple of years later having endured rain and snow, heat and cold, there may be scraps of my clothes, faded and torn, scattered around a spot where a patch of a Spring flowers are growing, taking advantage of the extra nutrients of what's left of my remains. The last of me feeding lupine and indian pink. There are worse fates.
 Where do these dreary and morbid thoughts come from on such a beautiful Sierra summer day? Why the grim ponderings? Often times my mind is a complete mystery to me. Its workings as alien as a dark star.
  I do think it's healthy to contemplate our extinguishment. Otherwise we are fooling ourselves with a false sense of invincibility. We are certainly not eternal. Time is the ultimate equalizer.
  I now eye the two Ravens in a nearby Incense Cedar with slight suspicion. But they ignore me completely and do not appear sinister at all. They quork at each other and then glide away through the trees. I'm alone again listening to the sounds of the river.
   I walk away from the water into the trees. This is an interesting spot. I'm not on a maintained trail. I'm in a patch forest that is very close to old growth. It has probably never been logged. There are no signs of a fire burning through here so it's been lush for a long time. But there are fallen trees, blowdowns, thickets. It's slow going as I wander in the dense underbrush of ferns, manzanita and numerous young pines.
   The woods look pretty much the same in every direction. However, I'm in no danger of getting lost. I can hear the Merced behind me. The sky is clear and the sun is way past noon and starting its westward decent.  If I continue in a straight line I will eventually start to climb Wawona Dome. I'm pulled toward the heights but I don't have enough time today. Besides there's an easier way, so maybe next year.
  I lose track of time. Have I been standing under these quiet old pines for fifteen minutes or two hours? It's hard to tell. Time turns elastic. Probably somewhere in between. I opt to stay a little longer and relish in my solitude. How rare to have time and a place where the only interruptions are squirrels and the slight wind in the treetops.
  Reluctantly I turn back in the direction of the trail and the river. If I keep a slow enough pace and take several rest stops to listen to birds and survey tree trunks I will be back at the cabin by dinner time. And cold beer awaits.

  The next day I'm driving through and then out of the Sierras, these great mountains of the west. I am so far from my old hills of New England. I've spent half my life now in the west. But I feel like I still have so much to see and learn. It's big out here. The Boston Pops come up on my iPod. The album is called Pops Roundup. I say album because it was one that my parents had forty-five years ago. It is full of bombastic versions of old western classics and cowboy movie theme songs. It's a bold album that contains grand arrangements but not without a touch of melancholy or even pathos. Some of the songs are part of Americana now; Red River Valley, Home on the Range, Mexicali Rose, The Streets of Laredo, and this music was among the first pieces of art that sparked an interest in me to someday visit what I thought of as cowboy country. That and watching John Wayne and Gary Cooper movies with Dad and Mide.
 Even so, when I first drove over the Rockies and then saw the open spaces of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, it was with amazement that I took in the vistas. Nothing could really prepare a kid from the gentle hills of the Berkshires for the grandness of the land of those states. I couldn't imagine riding a horse or being in a covered wagon all the way from Denver to California.
  But the landscape had a certain familiarity to me. Perhaps it was all those movies or maybe it was because I had just started reading Ed Abbey. I had read The Monkey Wrench Gang years before but it was now his essays that I was caught up in. Not that there was much time for reading. There was too much to see. And I still haven't come close to grasping it all.
  Over the years I've been able to explore more. Arizona certainly is as west as you can get as far as attitude goes. I met real cowboys in Flagstaff and Prescott, as I did at a rodeo in Wyoming.
  At a lonely diner in Montana I sat with real ranch hands. I expected the Duke to walk in any minute. And I realized that no matter how many times you heard the words Big Sky there was nothing like seeing it for real. I'll refrain from trying to describe it here.
  Of course, California is my western home now. Even though the beach near my house faces south. In order for me to watch the sunset into the ocean I have to drive the 101 north for a while. Santa Barbara confused me for the first few months I was here. It took some getting used to the landscape where the sun sets up the coast and rose down the coast. But I've grown accustomed to it.
  In the winter months as our hemisphere tilts away from the sun I can go out at low tide and see a cliched California sunset. But to me it still seems like I'm looking north. No wonder at one time people thought the earth was flat. Our senses can confuse us regularly. It's only when I fly over Santa Barbara that I see the elbow of land that juts into the Pacific. I need a large frame in order keep my bearings steady.

  Driving west from Yosemite with my father's music blaring on the jeep's stereo I stop occasionally to take a few notes, stretch my legs and drink water. I watch the scene change from pine forests at four thousand feet to brown fields with patches of rock at two thousand feet to the massive farms of the San Joaquin Valley. Wineries will start to pop up as I get closer to Paso Robles.
  Dad liked this drive. We took it once. With mom and a bunch of friends we spent a week in Yosemite, 1994, or there about. In the Park he was intrigued by the unfamiliar (to him) trees and flowers. He spent mornings in the field near our cabin, limping on a bad hip, inspecting flowers that were new to him, lupine, Indian pink and others that blanketed the yard. It was a big snow year and most of the spring flowers were blooming late into July. The meadows along the Glacier Point Road were explosions of color. And along the riverbanks in the Valley we spent an afternoon with a guidebook learning the names of the bright little blooms. Dad wanted to take some back with him, to Pittsfield, and see if they'd grow in the backyard. He was disappointed to find out that it was unlawful to pick the flowers in the Park. We looked in the gift shops for seed packets but all they had were sequoia seedlings. And as we knew they only grow on west facing slopes at three to four thousand feet. Pittsfield was out of the question.
  I start the Pops album over to listen to it one more time. Arthur Fiedler's interpretation of the western myth. I remember listening to these songs on the Hi-Fi in the living room on Ridge Avenue and daydreaming about riding horses or panning for gold. I was thrilled when I found the CD in a used record store decades later. Now with the Sierras in my rearview mirror I have to laugh. I don't think I ever would have made a good cowboy. It's too much like work. I would be better at playing a cowboy on TV.
  I told Dad after I had met Stuart Whitman in a bar that he looked like a real cowboy in a western shirt and jeans. And Dad said that maybe he was. And I had to admit that he sure talked like a cowboy, or maybe more like a gentleman rancher. 
  As a kid I was confronted with many intriguing and alluring reasons to want to visit, or perhaps live in, the west in general or California specifically. Watching the Rose Parade and then the Rose Bowl on TV, when outside the window was snow and cold and there were three foot long icicles hanging from the roof, bordered on torture. Cheerleaders in the sunshine waving pompoms in their red skimpy outfits with tiny white boots simply boggled my impressionable mind. Dreary didn't begin to describe the grey skies, snow banks, steaming car exhaust, running noses, cold feet and wet gloves that I encountered on the way to school the next morning. Perhaps, I thought, there was another way to live.
  And then a few weeks later, after a morning of scraping ice and shoveling snow, sitting with dad and watching Bing Crosby's clambake from Pebble Beach and seeing Jack and Arnie strolling green fairways as the sun set into the dark blue Pacific Ocean produced an ache in my chest that wouldn't completely go away until years later when I stood on those very bluffs. Not, of course, to play golf but simply to see for myself if it was as beautiful in person as it was on tv. And I found it to be wilder and more majestic than I could have imagined.
  My first few visits to California were just that, visits. I saw Long Beach and Los Angeles and drove through Santa Barbara without stopping and without an inkling that a few years later I would call this city my home. I was more intrigued with San Francisco and Marin County. The city by the bay glowed at night with a strange allure and I felt I could lose myself in its mysteries for a long time. Every neighborhood was its own world and turning a corner on to a random street brought endless surprises. Haight Ashbury was still slightly loony back then (and kind of still is) and I realized that I was about as far away from Park Square in downtown Pittsfield as I could get.
   But when I got back to work, in fact at a hotel across the street from the oddly named park, my thoughts continually drifted back to California. I couldn't stop dreaming of Big Sur and the coast highway, charming little romantic restaurants in Carmel, the Carrizo Plain out behind San Luis Obispo, the calm quiet of Big Bear Lake and the dunes at Pismo Beach. I thought about the warm winter nights wandering in and out of the bars and clubs along Second Street in Belmont Shores. Their windows were open and the music from the live bands flowed out into the streets. It was a scene so foreign to me that I couldn't make it back to where I was staying until the last song was over and a sassy blue-eyed bartender pulled my drink. "Come flirt with me again tomorrow." She would tease and I'd walk the few blocks to my friend's house my brain spinning with possibilities.
   When I finally did move here I decided to give myself a year to see if I would like it. It took much less time than that to form a decision. I was in our new place for less than a week when on a Sunday afternoon I set out to explore Santa Barbara. I walked out on Stern's Wharf and over past the marina. It was a beautiful day and the harbor was busy with sailboats. Pelicans cruised the shoreline and surfers glided on top of gentle waves. I made my way to State Street and stopped in the first bar I came across. It was called Rocky's. Being so close to the beach it was easy to wander from the sand to a bar stool. There were more bathing suits than not. Nobody wore shoes. People sat in the large open windows drinking and yelling and laughing. A band started playing a blend of hippie surf songs and folk rock. I ordered a tall double Stoli and tonic, such was my capacity in those days. Two girls in the tiniest bikinis I had ever seen jumped up on the bar and started dancing. I took a large gulp of my refreshing drink and thought to myself, I think I'll be comfortable here on the left coast. Rocky's is long long gone now but somehow I'm still here.

   I often wonder what I've done to be so lucky to have a coterie of such beautiful muses. I've more than my share and each one delights me and brings out slightly different ideas and thoughts. On a recent afternoon in the grip of fine whiskey and while listening to a charming explanation of an art I know nothing about I grasped more firmly than normal the fact that I have enormous gaps in my education. Gaping abysses of ignorance that I fear I have no hope of ever crossing. As I thought about how much I have to learn and understand I became momentarily vertiginous. I have stood at this edge of this canyon many times before.
  It's taken me a long time to comprehend that I will never finish learning. And I've been fretting over this for many years. Ever since the only true genius I think I have ever met told me that she had days where the enormity of existence and the vastness of the universe was so mind numbingly distracting that she could barely get out of bed. And this was a woman who had more pure energy for concentration and work than I could ever muster up.  So I've often wondered if there was even the slightest hope that I could someday attain a level of personal education that was at least in some way a respectable reflection of my crooked path of study. In other words, how could I distill all my learning into a coherent philosophy of life?
  One of my most constant inspirations, who has fueled much of my thoughts on my struggle to grab it all, Joanna Wu, has told me time and time again to just be satisfied with all the things I've been lucky enough to hold on to for a while. To be grateful for everything that came my way and not to worry about those things outside the realm of my energies.
  But I know there's so much more. And there are things I could spend a lifetime, or two, strictly devoted to studying. Such as; Shakespeare, Bach, Ravens, Haiku, travel, KM, space, Faulkner, Mingus, the list is endless. It grows daily. I could spend ten years just reading the books Jim Harrison mentions in his novels. I have museums to visit and concerts to go to, trails to walk and books to write. And time continues to slither off to where ever it is that it goes. My days zip by with ferocious speed and it seems like I leave so much undone as my desk piles up with letters and bills and books.
"You should meditate." Says a stunning friend who claims the practice of emptying out her mind actually helps her get more done. "But get more of what done?" I ask and get the answer I expected. She tells me she's more relaxed and focused. Well, I've tried, with yet another muse, to sit and breathe and clear my thoughts but my disposition isn't suited to emptying out my brain. I am just the opposite. Thoughts rush in and soon I feel like I'm neglecting my real inner work of actually learning something. I open my eyes and see a fat physics book sitting on the bookshelf that needs reading, and an unwritten letter has been taking shape for days that I had better write it before those ideas dissipate completely. I put on Brahms and the music makes my heart expand in a way unlike sitting quietly counting my exhalations. It doesn't take long before I'm flooded with energy and am able to chip away at the unclimbable mountain that is my future. And I will make what meager gains I can with my limited capacity for truly focused study, knowing full well that I will leave behind a library of unread books, un-listened to symphonies, unwritten poems, full wine bottles and unburned fires. And that will be that.