Skip to main content

At Year's End

December 2010
Dear Friends,

Once upon a summer’s day, on an island in northern Minnesota, I wrote letters on birch bark to my grandchildren.  It seemed somehow ancient; almost clay-tablet old.  A piece of bark.  A tube of stain.  Shared symbols.

I am doing something like that now, making words appear on paper, connecting what we are thinking here, in our house, with what you are doing in yours.  If we want to, we can make little perturbations electronically, and send the signals, almost instantaneously, almost anywhere, a world away.  The signals become words again, and the words tie us together. 

This summer Mari and I drove through Canada, west to Seattle and Portland, befriended by strangers, tasting the sweet wines of early frost, to stand at the edge of the slowly drifting continent, catching and savoring Dungeness crab, laughing with friends, reading books.  We came back through Montana and North Dakota, driving through the grasslands where the first peoples walked, catching our breath at wild horses, remembering history, feeling small on the earth, talking.

The words are like a web, an invisible net over the surface of the continents and the seas, not denying distances, but quicker than them, playing with them, but something like birch bark letters, even so.  We are thinking about you, else you would not be reading these words, wishing you well across the miles of grass and time since we saw you last. 

Outside it is cold; inside warm.  We are dipping into the short days of the year, old enough now to know that the stillness before another spring is a good thing.  From time to time, Mari and I spontaneously surprise each other, saying similar words to each other about how the years have been kind to us; how we continue to enjoy each other; that we are content, and glad.  The words are warm.  The web is strong.  

                                                                                 Conrad and Mari

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Caliche Busters and Government Work

When I was young and both stronger and smarter than I am now, I put my might and brain to work doing nothing useful, unless it might be thought that hand/foot/eye coordination might come in handy.  Those were skills to be learned and practiced.   I found an iron bar our grandfather had shaped in his blacksmith shop.  He took old car, truck, or wagon axles, and made tools from them for digging post holes.  He sharpened one end to a tip, and the other to a blade.  Washington State, like many places, had a hard layer of soil, probably created by water and limestone, or some such materials, that made digging holes a miserable chore.  The bar chipped through the natural concrete so that a shovel could take it up.   I found Grandpa's iron bar, and since I was young and dumb and strong--or so I thought--decided to punch a hole down to hardpan and ultimate truth.  I knew how to do that.  Raise the bar vertically with both hands, and then slam in straight down.  On the second try, aimi
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w
Post a Comment
Read more