It’s fizzix, I reckon.

Whenever I’m trying to get my little toyota RV (the dolphin) to sit level, I use existing props. I pile rocks or stack wood or use curbs. I never get it really good and level, just enough to keep me from rolling out of my bunk or to keep me from piling into my lover, Kayla, if it’s the opposite way. It sucks to spend the night fighting gravity. I check how close to level I am by putting a marble in the center of the floor and watching it run. Genius, right? I must admit, most of the time I can’t find the marble. Kayla smirks while I search, she knows my habits and it makes her laugh.

The last two days, my mind has been at work in the creek below the farm. Nick and Liz are very aware of my migratory tendencies and I am wonderfully welcome here. Making the dipping hole in the creek is considered “farm improvement” and so I go down there with the shovel, take my clothes off and work. Usually when I’m naked, I’m not working, but this is an exception and I like it. I think back on all my other jobs in life and picture myself working naked. Moving furniture, security at the church, lifeguard, concrete work, landscaping, printing, golf course maintenance, night custodian, window washer on office buildings, waiter, construction, Marine — wow, I think I’ll go ahead and stick with swimming hole design as my naked vocation. It’s a good gig. Water comes from the springs and the winter storms, seeps into the gut of the ravine and swirls and curls through the roots and stones until it’s caught in the pool where I stand naked with my shovel. There are fish and crawdads and newts and efts that flutter and wink from the dark. Everything breathes. I stem the push of the water and create a space to think and soak. I shape the world, the world shapes me back.

I’m a pretender. I’m really quite good at it. I close my eyes and fly or swim through vastnessess that only my mind can allow; worlds within molecules. I wonder if this entire universe is but a speck, or atom, inside another universe. I don’t care if this is beyond science or anyone’s belief, I like it and I go there when I want. There’s a portion of my being that thrives on being lost in the mystery. I am made of imagination. It has allowed me true freedom, the kind that is indefinable and without counties and states and licenses and taxes and governors and institutions. I’m the child in class that is staring at the woods out the window. I’ve been gone for a long, long time. I travel through time, in fact, I leave time behind when I breathe deep and explore. It’s better that way.

In the room behind the house there are an incredible amount of spider webs. I like checking in with them, seeing what kind of catch they’ve accumulated. The flies are the specialty of the day, every day. I looked on the sill where a butterfly was perched, laced in web, with tattered wings. I was sure she was dead but noticed her tongue out and searching. A spider was half-way to the scene, waiting movement in order to locate. I reached my finger in the mix. The tongue explored and the butterfly stepped onto my hand. Outside, the sun was warm and the wings opened to catch heat. Halfway to the garden she took flight, wings still good enough to find a few last flowers before sunset. I thought about that butterfly’s journey and how much farther she must go to complete her mission of life. I thought about destiny and luck. I thought about the story she will tell the flowers as she moves through the currents of the wind. She’s important because she exists. I like it that I’m included in her diary …that one time, when I was caught inside a den of spiders, in a world without wind or flowers, I thought I was finished. Then this crazy thing happened, I was lifted by some being the size of a mountain and carried into the sun and I felt the wind and smelled my world again. It was like a dream. Strange things happen, they really do.

Show Your Teeth

Cannon is 4, he holds up four fingers with the thumb tucked when he says it. His folks let him be in the pool with me whenever they please. Cannon is safe with me. He’s safe with me anywhere.

Tonight I saw a meteor fall in the evening sky over Moreno Valley. It was the biggest light I’ve ever seen from a meteor. Green then white and then the colors of fire in an evening sky with a half moon. With so much light pollution, I just couldn’t believe how much light it created. I half expected to hear the impact and prepare for whatever that means. My lover, 300 miles north, saw the flash from her tent in Death Valley. The world is small in relation to the cosmos; so very, very tiny. I am smaller yet. And little Cannon, he’s smaller even then.

We talked in the pool, Cannon and I. He’s bright and worldly, like an animal. He was naked and full of that otterish disposition that I see in kids that love water. He was on my knees. In the midst of flying arms and flashing butt, he slowed for just a moment and said something I barely heard over his clamor. “All of Life is through my head.” I thought I heard it, but I couldn’t believe it came from his mouth. I slowed his wildness and asked him to say again. “All of Life is through my head.”

Do you hear this? Do you hear what my little love has said?

I asked him what he meant. I feared that too many questions would squelch the loveliness that had just flashed through the sky of the mind of the child. He said more, “All the things and the pictures and the dreams of the world are in my head.” And here I am laid low, a stumbling layman in the presence of God. Then the child’s eyes to the sky, “and that’s beautiful and that’s beautiful and that….” his finger pointing to eucalyptus trees and towhees and blue blue sky.

Are you here? I don’t think I’m the most intuitive of us all. I don’t claim to understand people. I struggle with being too cross with my judgements and too sure of my views. But when the bats fly over the New Mexican canyons I feel my heart become rivers. If the whale plunges from her world beneath and shows her belly to our sun, I will fall on my knees, I will worship. When pieces of the Universe fall and turn to fire over the hills in Southern Cal, I will listen, I mean I will damn listen and say, “I am here.” Then, when this child/god says to me, “All Life is through my head”, I will hear him and love him for his heart. I will follow him through the fire-hate we humans are tending. I will give him audience and room to speak and, in the end, I will trust him to bury me and bury me good and deep.

I asked him then if dreams were real. He told me so very honestly that he did not know. He said that some things were real and some things were made up. I agreed. I felt the time fleeting and I saw him falling away into the world I cannot reach; one where I’m included but not necessary. In these seconds that fall, I can’t help but chase and fail. It’s true, I’m no child. So he flew like the birds that are beautiful and I choked on my adulthood.

But give me words that mean something. Give me hearts that beat with fear of the wild wind. Give me eyes that look into the green and murky water and expect the swimming lions. Please, for the sake of the stars, allow me reverence at the altar of the wilderness. And send the storms. Save room for my knees so that I can worship. Hold me in the rip current and teach me the smallness of me. There are nights to weather and mosquitos to swat and accept, there are distances to cover, bones to break and pretty words to misplace in my buckbrush mind. There are friends to bury and races to lose. I have yet to be tired of a perfect morning, where my coffee is strong, my heart is full and my body finds purchase in the world into which it was born.

There is more to say, but probably less that I can say well. So instead, let me listen. Oh please let me have enough heartbeats to impress the ones that love me. I will fall down and pray to the children and the moon, give me heartbeats to show how much I love this wild, wild Earth. Listen, if to nothing else, that I love the whales and the tiny birds. That I love the little creeks in the aspens and that I’m a product of something good. And by good, I mean small but quite toothy. Also, please, if you don’t mind, call me an animal– nothing grand, perhaps a minnow or a beetle. Just call me something wild.

“All Life is through my head.” Things are beautiful. Follow the children. Show your teeth.

Fuzzy Dot

A Ghost in Every Window

There’s an old farm house down there where the road turns. There’s no one living in it, the barn swallows and owls roost, rats and mice and skunks shuffle through openings and go about their business in the secret way that animals do. The Coastal Cypress trees, their trunks obscured by ocean fog, mark the way to the cliffs above the waves. And the waves are working to move the land, they will never tire. They have a deal with the Sea: to throw themselves against the land until the last stone turns to sand, and the oceans all reunite.

In the dark, the house above the sea stands hollow. I wonder of it’s abandonment. I imagine that it has housed many hearts. I am dreaming now, creating maybes and might-have-beens. What ghosts are looking at me through warbling windows? What caused the separation of habitation and inhabitant? There is, I must admit, something beautiful about a structure returning to nature. There is not a single hint of paint. The wood is all the color of drift wood, both grey and green at the same time. And the bleak, scraped land is all around. Artichokes and Brussel sprouts are the crops of choice. Miles of plastics cover the crops and there’s not a hint of plant life save that which is planted and sprayed and plucked and processed. Farming here looks more like a science project. Maybe that’s why the house is empty; new people practicing new ways. Not too far down the road is a sign with the name of Donald Trump in gaudy red letters saying something about making America great. I feel an urge to drive down to the cliffs and watch the ocean, to look at something I know is true.

The low branches of the cypress are huge and rotten. Up 30 feet they are more solid, some of them droop all the way to the ground. Everything is drenched from the rain event last night. There was lightning over the ocean. Just before dark, when the sun was still coloring the upper terraces of the world, a whale surfaced and spouted, the flume hung white in the dark air for a full minute after the whale had passed. And in the night I thought of that whale out there in the dark — maybe hanging in the black with the storm overhead while the lightning spoke the language of the clouds. Maybe thinking bigger and deeper thoughts than any human could ever imagine. Maybe even mapping out the course of all things that have ever been and looking into the future by mirroring the past. Maybe understanding the way of things because it is a whale and not intimidated by vastness and expanse, and, in truth, a child of both those things. And I listened to the rain and thought of that whale and remembered the color of it’s breath as it hung in the air over the water and beneath the clouds that were still lighted by the last rays of the sun. But that was last night and this tree is tall. My nephew is with me and he’s watching me navigate. We are Jacks-in-the-beanstalk. We are climbing to the clouds. And one branch at a time and a 100 feet high and again and again to the sky. My nephew doesn’t talk too much, I think he’s too busy thinking to say a whole lot. He’s strong and listens as we move into the top-most branches. Coastal Cypress trees are cool because you can top out and stand above everything. Several pelicans fly over with a tiny black and white tern in their jet-wash. All the birds look at us, we are odd in their space. Far below is the RV, the dolphin, looking as tiny as ever. I can see my lover reading her book about octopuses in the broken sunlight. A couple miles away sits the abandoned farm house and the ghosts are in every window, looking out.

Looking out. And smiling.

The Ghost of my Grandad

Proem: This piece has been brewing. It began in my head, in the woods, over the hole my buddies dug. I worked for a couple days building an outhouse over the hole, all the while my thoughts collected and boiled.  It continued to steep in the woods by the creek. Down there where my rig was stuffed between the cedars and madrones like a tick on a dog’s haunch. It takes time and coffee and early morning blue to choke the words outa me. This morning things are lining up.

 

The ghost of my Grandfather payed me a visit today. He was in the cedars.( His blood is back in the earth now, so he goes where he pleases these days. Seems a Crabtree trait to do that — go where you please.) The day was beautiful, the woods busy. I was happy Grandad decided to check in on me.

He saw me hand cutting the cedar poles and tacking them down and measuring out the tin roof. He watched me leave my hammer on the ground and cuss and climb down and back up to the roof. This day full of estimates and guesstimates and re-conjured tricks-of-the-trade. I am, and always will be, a hack carpenter. I’m at my best with less codes and proper materials, more improvisation and crooked beams.

Gramps was there earlier, when the sky still held the stars in a belly of periwinkle. He saw me hear the owl call and he liked it. He always liked that I loved the birds. He loved the birds. He loved the birds before me, way back in 1905 when he was only 7 years old. Back when more rivers ran free to the sea, before the World Wars and Carbon dating and nuclear reactors. Before rocket ships and airplanes filled the sky. And then a more distant owl answered, muffled by the duff of the forest. Or maybe that was Grandpa himself, speaking owl speak, that one language that crosses over. Owls do cross over, you know? They don’t subscribe to petty realities. They are denizens of all spaces and they move softly on speckled wings, unfettered, with hearts that chase the midnight voles through bone-colored grasses.

Then by the creek. Gramps remembered his blood as he watched me drop into the cold pool below the deadfalls. A Blue Darner flew through the shade with the speed and patience of all great hunters.  And there with the lilting trout and the red crawdad I settled in to wait for my bones to chill. From under the water I could see the sky and the trees overhead. At the head of the pool, wedged flat and quiet between the layers of serpentine, I spotted the slick body of something different: An eft, waiting to become.

And when the day came down and I headed back to the company of my people, my Grandfather stayed back. He stood at the edge, where the cedars cast their shadows. I called out loud to him and told him I loved him. That I would not forget him. He stood there with a hand full of feathers and his hair was long and beautiful and his spirit was throughout.

Epilogue: Elmer Lindson Crabtree was born in 1898. He was a native, a Choctaw. He called himself an Indian. He died sitting up in a chair with a cup of coffee in his mitt and a pair of old, worn out boots on his feet. His dog, Barney, had been used in Vietnam to spot planes, and he could still spot planes from the back stoop of the house. There were tools in his shed of all sorts. The ones without handles were waiting against the wall, while Elmer worked with shaky hands to fashion new handles from old wood. He broke his back on a fall from an oil derrick when he was in his 40’s and he lived with a shake for the rest of his days. I still remember him threading hooks even with his tremors, just kinda waiting them out, and then giving me a smile when he got it. In one of those legend-like stories that everyone has about someone, he lifted the back of a car while his brother fitted a tire back on the studs after the jack had failed. Of course, I didn’t see that happen, but I told the story like it was gospel when I was a kid. He showed me how to catch songbirds in homemade live-traps, see them up close and then set them free. He told me that being an Indian had less to do with blood and more to do with heart…and that everyone was a native from somewhere. He roams the mountains. He watches the stars. He calls to the owls from the hollow, just the other side of this life.

A Child’s View of the Universe

It’s great. Lately, I get to hang with Cannon. He’s three and a few. He already holds sturdy opinions, albeit mostly about food and dinosaurs and poop. I love asking him questions. When he has the patience, which is difficult to have when you’re 3, he’ll give me the kind of stuff that I love to write down. You know, I mean kids are ridiculously awake! Kids are a swirling new universe of forming planets and streaking comets. As an observer —  perhaps this it the only way I might get by with calling myself a cosmologist — one might see the beginnings of solar systems forming in the eyes of a 3 year old mind after being asked just the right kind of question. Oh I try! I pay close attention to them. Most questions don’t make the cut, but every now and then I’ll nail it. It reminds me of stream fishing for tiny cutthroat trout way up in the backwoods of Colorado.

It’s similar because you gotta love it to do it in the first place. You know the day will include meadows and wet feet and aspens and cold mornings and bug bites and deep, crystal pools with pine root tangles and scratches and lost sunglasses and massive afternoon thunderstorms and tired legs and sunburned ears and little white fluttering cabbage butterflies and mossy stones and slippery logs and the impossibly beautiful, dot-bodied trout that wimple between dreams and reality. And it is the treasure just to see them and hold them for a second. If for no other reason, that and only that. 

So, if you’re willing to wait and try, sometimes you’ll get a real gem from one of these little people. Right now, Cannon is very interested in eggs. He realizes that they hold early life. He likes to know which animals lay them and why. We looked up a platypus and he studied it closely, he was very satisfied to know that they lay eggs. He also is intrigued by blood. I don’t blame him, blood is strange. Inner rivers that rush out from our heart with the power of healing and reviving. A specific kind of red that tastes of elements. It’s like the ocean. It’s like milk. It can leak out and we can make more out of water.  We can’t just exchange it, not necessarily, we must check the type. If we are sick, our blood tells the story. Blood is magic. So yeah, I get it. No wonder he points at scabs and talks with passion about tiny wounds.

I asked Cannon if he knew about his heart. He just looked at me like he does. I said, “you have one, where is it?” He looked down at his hands and put them together like he was cupping water, then he kind of opened them and spread his fingers. He was thinking and looking down and thinking some more. He looked up at me and with a little question on his face, pointed at the center of his tummy. I love it. I smiled and nodded and asked if I had one too. He pointed at my chest and told me for sure it was in there. I told him to take a listen and I pulled him close. I watched him hear my heart and I watched him understand. Planets forming, streaking comets, distant stars and hydrogen flashes. He pulled back and pointed again at my chest. No words. I nodded. He pointed to his mama, Summer, in the kitchen. “Her heart?” I nodded. And then he put his finger on his chest and looked down. There he was, thinking inward and outward, a wild and perfect mind in the world of his origin.

Heartbeats continue to happen in my chest. My heart’s been down the road for a while now. The children I know are running around with their tiny hearts clicking and whirring. I don’t need any more reasons than that to want to grow old. I wanna keep watching and laughing. I wanna ask the questions and watch the eyes of the kids as they gleam with the light from wherever it is that they came.

 

“We almost got eaten”

When I was 10 years old I rarely left the house without my butterfly net. If the family was heading off to vacation, I had my zoology kit in tow as well as my fishing rod and a few Golden Guide books (I remember my favorites: Pond Life and Mammals). I made it a point to memorize all the different members of the Mustelidae family. I’m not sure why I wanted to commit that to memory, I guess so I could identify a Fisher if I ever came snout to snout with one. I was, um, geeky. Silver-rimmed glasses and striped shirts, a butterfly net, a pocket knife and guide book in my pocket — that was me.

I don’t carry a butterfly net around anymore, but I do stare at the migrating monarchs. And I must admit that my heart skips a beat when a Cecropia moth floats past in the moonlight. I used to want to have everything. I wanted to hold the wild close. Things are different now. I want the wild to be and I want to be. Knowing things exist is a salve to my grow-up worries. I like seeing the tracks of the pumas in the washes where the piñon pines crowd between the boulders. I like the hidden valleys  where the ravens loop and grock in pairs overhead. The human world creeps. The wild world exists. Activists shout through megaphones. Protestors march. Twisted bristlecone trees study the sky as they have for a thousand years. A while back, a big ol’ Bow-head whale washed ashore with an ancient harpoon blade lodged in it’s skull. The whale was over 200 years old. I wonder the dreams of that old roamer! He might have seen the smoke clouds from the battles of the American Civil War. His mind, I’m sure, was an amazing map of the bottom of the sea.

What I’m getting at, or at least trying to get at, is that we live in the midst of something wonderful. As much as we try to be separate, we are not. This body of mine will turn to dirt, just like a pigeon’s body. It’s cool, man. I love that thought. I don’t care how important anyone thinks they are, they have the same destiny as a pigeon (no disrespect to the pigeon). No matter the quantity and quality of our selfies, no matter how big and burly our ego, nothing will stop our return to clay. You never know, it might feel good to be opinion free! To be phone-less. To be dirt.

A while back, I can’t remember how long, I was chatting with my buddy at a campfire. It was late and we were shining from a day well spent. The conversation was about dying and how long it takes to decompose — to turn back to dirt. We both decided that the quickest way would be to be eaten. But that’s tough to do these days, bodies are counted and there’s rules for getting people buried quickly and in a sanitary fashion.  ( NOTE: tiny tangent ahead — Also, hell, there’s lotsa money to be made off a dead dude! Oh let’s build a box that costs a few grand, then let’s make the hole we dig cost a bundle, and let’s fill that ol’ corpse up with some fluid that makes him last a loooong time in that fancy box in that costly hole. — End of tiny tangent.) So after we both decided that we’d like to be eaten, not any time soon, but eaten, like when we’re old and readier, we wandered off to bed down in the woods. Now, my buddy and I were living hand to mouth at the time. We often roosted in illegal sleeping areas and we would stash food here and there. Those of you that knew Joe Crowe also knew he was a grade A rouster. (Rouster-noun-a person capable of living off of very little. Someone used to sleeping in odd places and eating what is available in order to pursue a specific past time.   i.e.- climbing. ) So Joe and I wandered off into the woods and found an old log to snuggle under. In the middle of the night I woke up to being jostled. I had that immediate bad feeling that happens when you come out of a dead sleep to something that is dreadful. I was looking up at the belly of black bear who had stepped across me and was pawing at Joe’s bag. I looked at Joe and his eyes were wide open, his bag zipped, not a peep from his lips. Then, like Houdini escaping a straight-jacket, Joe produced a vest through the head-hole of his bag. The bear snatched the vest and ran off. Now, I’ve been scolded for the whole event. I never feed bears, I’m careful in the woods, I leave the wildlife alone. But when a bear rolls up and wants the honey packets that your rouster buddy has in the vest he’s sleeping in, you give the bear what he wants.

Joe looked at me after the bear bounded off into the dark and simply said, “we almost got eaten.”

Joe’s long gone. He froze to death on the end of his rope years ago. He didn’t get eaten. Looks like it’s up to me, but I’m still not ready. I wanna get older and readier.

Hold my M-40, I’ve gotta find my bird book

21 years ago, give or take a month or two, I came to a stop on a steep hillside.

my buddy, Brian, waited patiently for me to move, I was looking down

at a nest with two blue-ish eggs the size of jelly beans in a miniscule nest laced

into the branches of a dead mustard plant.

 

Brian moved to my side and asked me why I was stopped.

Time is of the essence during this kind of training, clocks tick

and superiors comb the terrain with high-powered lenses.

There is not space in the day for contemplative moments and tiny wonders.

 

But there we were, in the hinterlands above the pacific, as witnesses

of a secret place where life moved under blue-ish calcium husks

and where helicopters searched for two snipers in training

and where the Future stood on it’s tippy toes to look back and see how Now would arrive.

 

And Now arrived yesterday as I sat in line for a coffee, Brian at the wheel,

and we talked as old friends do, about anything, because we can.

and I pointed at the California Gnatcatcher in the spindles of a tree

as he looked under leaves for spiders, hiding from the rain.

Flight School

It’s not like I’m an expert at this or anything. I’ve never even really been able to say when it’s gonna happen or why it’s happening. Once when I was talking to Ruby (Ruby is 7 years old), she told me that she can do it whenever, but only just a little at a time. Flying might not be for everyone, but I personally don’t know why you wouldn’t want to. That fourth dimension that is so not linear, the movements in every direction. The blueness that is all around you. No wonder Ruby says she can fly, she’s so little and light; a bird in everyway. I remember her looking up with eyes made of sky and saying, “Tobe, um, how is the sky and the birds, I mean, are they hooked together?”  If you ever wanna melt my heart, and you’re talking to me and you wonder what words you can use to gain my attention, just ask me that kind of question. Hell if I know, little Ruby, but they might be connected from way down inside to the tip of their wings. No wonder the birds sing!

My younger brother Cory and I got our hands on a huge, red and blue umbrella. I was 4 years older than him and I could, especially then, talk him in to just about anything. This particularly pretty winter day was one of those ones that I remember like it was yesterday. We were on the roof of our two story house on Newland St., Ma and Pa still live there and maybe they are even sitting there right this moment remembering when 5 kids ran wild through every room and hall. But yeah, Cory and I were talking about flight and all the possible freedoms it offered. We could float to the hills and go fishing without even asking, you know, we can’t be blamed for floating up into the sky! Ma and Pa would understand, and besides, they’d be so proud that their sons had been so brave. But first a test flight, and Cory, as I explained to him, was smaller and lighter and so more suited for the job. Brave little dude furrowed his brow and looked at me as I, half believing it might actually work, nodded and gave him the thumbs up. Part of my theory was that if you left the umbrella down, kind of half collapsed, that it would flare open after you jumped and then drift up onto the breeze. Little Cory white-knuckled the hook handle and jumped up and out right after giving me the I’ll-see-you-after-I-float-back-to-earth look. Two things happened: The jump up made the umbrella snap in the closed position and Cory crashed into the cyprus bushes growing by the front porch. My mother, who was cleaning in the kitchen, saw my brother fall past the big front window. I covered my ears and ran down off the roof and towards the front yard. My ma ran out, still carrying the broom, and Cory thought she was coming to give him a whack for having jumped off the roof. I turned the corner in time to see my brother crawling like a hurt bird as my ma ran towards him with a broom. It all worked out. Cory had two sprained ankles and a sprained wrist along with some solid scratches on his forehead. I was grounded from the roof and any further flying experiments. My ma is still appalled to think my brother thought she was gonna beat him with a broom. I’ve learned that flight takes more than just a good imagination and that any such real attempt to fly should be left to birds, bats and aviation experts. Unless, of course, you happen to dream.

The majority of my flight dreams involve me doing something awkward in order to gain altitude. In my most common dream of flying, I gotta run in a straight line and then, slowly but surely, my strides become longer and longer. Sometimes I’m able to leap a really long way but I tend to turn sideways if I try to go too far. Flying takes great concentration, at least in my experience.

Swings are kind of like flying. If they’re big enough and over a river, you can feel birdlike for a second or two. Being in the tops of giant trees allows you to peek into the world of the birds as they move both above and below. Like when Markus and I broke out of the top of a giant cyprus tree in Golden Gate park and the ravens flew from all around and landed on branches and stared at the two of us. Their curiosity was obvious and they just couldn’t stop chattering lightly between themselves. Markus and I had to laugh. We just laughed and sat in the sun and looked out at the ocean where the surfers surfed and the seagulls seagulled and the boats boated. I think I climb trees because it separates me out from the rest of the world. Maybe it’s a little like flying.

I’m sure an orca would tell me that swimming is just as cool as flying. He would probably tell me about his forays under the ice where the world becomes aquamarine and the only sound is his thunderous heart. He might tell me of his hunting technique and how he has tipped icebergs and swallowed seals whole. And there would be stories of older orcas who dived to amazing depths and maybe he would roll his big pink tongue and tell me their names with reverence. I would want to know if he can see colors from sounds and if there are monsters in the depths and I would ask him about his preferences in music and love. Oh yeah, and I would wanna know about migration and whether or not he communicated with other worlds. I would ask him about his dreams and his terrors and if there are languages among the creatures of the sea. Does a whale from Japan have a heavy accent? Can he understand the tongues of the fish and the birds? Does he think about getting old and dying? The ocean is such a mystery, perhaps I might rather have the power of deep water diving, like a whale or elephant seal, so that I could bear witness to that wilder world.

Instead I am an earth dweller. A ground walker with an overactive imagination. I’m a dreamer of the flights of the birds and the deep water divers. I am forced to wait for the night so that I can fly while the stars, those wonderful conjurers, kick-start my dreams. I’m no more than a single soul, touched by a terribly beautiful world in which I have learned to stumble around and fall through loves and hurts and frights and wonders. I was a kid full of dreams who did a bunch of laps around the sun and became a kid full of dreams and wrinkles. I like Ruby’s take on things…that every time I leave the ground just a little bit, I am flying.

Oxygen Appreciation

There was this part of training when I was in the Marine Recon Indoctrination Program, called RIP for short, that I found particularly daunting. The corporal running the morning evolution would say it with a particularly wicked snarl on his lips, “oxygen appreciation, fellas, get ready.” Corporal Siedenswartz certainly had a way about him, and it wasn’t a pleasant way at all. Oxygen appreciation might consist of any number of different events, but you could count on one thing for sure, you would be counting every second of your existence until the drills were over. They all took place in a swim tank (that’s the term used for a swimming pool, since “swimming pool” has a note of pleasure to it, they used “swim tank” in it’s stead) and, most often but not always, there were props. The props might include ropes, different sized camouflage blouses and trousers, combat boots, cinderblocks, 45 lb. weight-lifting plates, helmets, 7 and a half lb. rubber rifles, and anything on the pool deck that might add chaos to the churning, gasping, wall-eyed debacle that was called training.

For almost 6 weeks, there were 4 of us. The 4 united by a strange and convoluted training regimen that was loaded with unknowns. Everyday was different. We did not know the schedule, only that the day would usually start in the zero-dark thirty and end when the bodies no longer performed the functions commanded of them. The 4 of us were men, not boys. We looked to one another to make it. Another thing to point out was that we had volunteered to be where we were. Recon is a volunteer unit, you can quit at any point in time and you will be sent away accordingly. Back to the normal Marine Corps.

“Looking to your left, looking to your right, making sure your buddy comes up on the other side, underwater crossover…GO!” Siedenswartz’ voice was always audible. The distance underwater varied from 25 meters to 50 meters. The time between intervals always collapsing down as the burn in the lungs created a panic in the heart of the 4 of us. To come up in the middle of a crossover would create a world of hurt that included burly instructors with tree-trunk legs entering the tank and riding the panicky fool to the wall. Once the instructors were in the water, the games became far more difficult. Each of us would swim under the shadow of the shark above us. Each of us knew that to come up would result in a struggle that would escalate and spread to the rest of  the 4. We learned the hard way, but by god, we learned. A kind of steel started to set in. As we ran like soaked rats to the chow hall, we would find peace in the quiet jokes about the instructors. Jokes they would never hear but might feel just a little when the 4 were in the water with our beady little eyes just above the surface and our hearts slow thumping like alligators. So used to the dreadful evolutions were we that panic became a far off world that took a very long journey to get to. More weights in the water. Tie and re-tie the knots in the ropes that waited down by the drain.

One morning we got to the tank and there was a heavy feeling amongst the instructors. I never figured out what had happened but it was probably personal. The had lives other than being professional bruisers, it’s just that the 4 of us hadn’t a clue what their lives were like. The bottom of the pool was dark and the sun was still a couple hours away. For warmups we would often lie on our backs with fins on our feet and do flutter-kicks while Siedenswartz walked around with a hose, blasting cold water in our faces. “I can’t hear the count! Start again.” We were told to find our boots on the bottom of the tank and put them on before we showed our cake-holes (mouths) above water. This meant, put the boots on the correct feet and have them tied because we might very well be going on a run straight out of the water.  –Ever ran with boots on the wrong feet? I have. It sucks.– We all surfaced with boots on, tied and ready. The 4 of us were Jamie Urlahb, Christian Regenhard, John C. Thomson, and my ownself, Tobias. Christian and I wore boots that were close to the same size. John’s feet were a couple sizes bigger and Jamie’s were bigger yet. In the meeting at the bottom of the tank, there was a quick sorting out. Time is of the essence when surface air is unavailable. We would do our best to quickly put all the rights to one side and all the lefts on the other, then it was a grab at sizes. It sucks more for a bigger footed guy to try and jam his foot into a too small boot than the other way around. –Ever seen a big guy go for a run in a too small pair of boots while you were running in a pair too big? I have, and it sucks.– These are precious seconds without air that make a big difference in the long run. It paid off to let it burn and sus it all out on the bottom, down there where all of our eyes seemed glazed and tiny bubbles collected around our mouths while our hearts thumped and thumped. At the surface, the instructors commented on the time we spent below. They joked that maybe we were starting to like it down there. That maybe it was more peaceful because they weren’t yelling at us. Maybe it was a little peaceful in that particular way. They told us to fetch the 45 lb. plate that was at the bottom. If you’re a water polo player, this would be your kinda gig. It takes a good amount of strength to get a plate that heavy off the bottom. It takes more to keep it at the surface. And it don’t matter who you are, it ain’t staying on the surface for long, especially when the object is to hold the plate free of the water. I went down and got the plate, half way up, Johnny met me and grabbed ahold. Levels, man, levels. The trick was we all were given the task to keep the plate up, but our legs were kicking into one another. The boots weren’t making it easier, that’s for sure. Somehow we kept it up long enough for Siedenswartz to get bored, “drop it, partner up!” Here I could continue to tell you about the different things we were told to do, but it’s easier to go to a pool and show you, so I ain’t doin’ it. Just know that it sucked, and in the end, we made it through that dark morning. There were more days and nights of dread and pain, but I believe that week and those hours were the pinnacle of what amounts to the most difficult moments of my life. To this day, I never enter a swimming pool without thinking of the tank and the living, walking, menace of  Siedenswartz. He pulled me aside once and said, “Crabtree, you’ll never have harder days than these…never in your life.” He might’ve been right about that, as long as we’re talking in the physical realm. I believe I’ve endured things heavier than that in the region of my heart. There’s a difference and I’m more suited to physical suffering. I guess I’d have to thank ol’ Siedenswartz for that.

One thing I can tell you, I do indeed like to breathe.