HOW BURNERS COULD SAVE AMERICA

by jim holt

Here’s a portrait of one of my heroes: a guy my age (old), wearing only a long leather work apron, welder’s helmet and gloves, welding part of a two-story structure in the desert.

It was 1998, my first visit to Burning Man.

The sight perplexed me. The flood of questions that washed up inside my brain (I now realize) surged as part of the ocean of logic I had acquired and cultivated over a lifetime of conventional living.

Why weld naked? Why weld in the desert? Why weld at all out here when everything will be dismantled in less than two weeks? Why such a large structure? Why a structure?

The answers have come to me after a dozen consecutive trips to Black Rock City, most of them intuitive.

The answers, however, if embraced by the bulk of Americans, would serve the country well in its effort to achieve self-sufficiency, to acquire alternative energy, to practice conservation and to perpetuate sustainability.

In one of those early years at Burning Man, I was invited to stop for breakfast by one of my neighbors. It was delicious. Spicy scrambled eggs, some sausages, toast, reggae music (everything smells and tastes better out there).

“How are you powering all this?” I asked.

Answer: a solar panel recharged a deep-cycle battery that, through a power converter, allowed him to plug in his toaster, stove and music box.

Brilliant.

Now, at home I do the same thing daily, powering up my laptop and other wee electronic devices with just a pillow-sized solar panel, allowing me to exit off the grid for at least part of the time.

Also, in the process of “leaving no trace” in the Black Rock Desert, ten days of every year, I’ve learned how to conserve water.

One of my inflatable beds somehow got punctured (don’t ask … could be any number of intriguing incriminating stories) so I rolled up each of the four sides of the mattress and placed it under my outdoor shower to collect the dirty water. Leaving the shower bag of water on the hood of my car all day enabled me to have a nice hot shower at the end of the day.

I just left the collected water exposed during the day and, of course, it all evaporated into the desert air.

I could do the same here at home (and if my neighbors are reading this – relax – I’d put up a curtain).

Before Burning Man and before this lesson in shower water, I never would have thought to water my plants with the greenish collected water that remains after I steam broccoli in a wok. Now, I do and that’s a pint less disappearing into the sewer.

A lot of the conservation and sustainability lessons learned at Burning Man come about due to problem solving. Everything is problem solving out there, miles from anything.

My car battery died one year. I started to panic and worry but then I remembered the lessons I had learned up until that point. I opened the hood, clipped my solar panel to the battery and let the sun do what it does. Problem solved.

Another year, I had to file a newspaper story (that’s before I gave up trying to articulate and describe something that was better left un-described and merely embraced) … but how in the middle of the desert?

I found a burner whose trailer was filled with people typing at laptops, all online.

How so? I asked.

He powered an uplink satellite system with propane. Brilliant. Burning Man is about gift giving so brought him beer. Even more brilliant.

If every American saved their shower water and charged their laptops by the sun a significant amount of oil would stay in the ground and a significant amount of water would stay in the lake. That deserves bringing them each a beer, I think.

I saw a burner on one of the Survivor TV episodes (she wore a necklace that had a pendant of ‘the man’ ) and I thought “that stands to reason … being out there you learn a lot about surviving’. What she learned, she probably shared with others. That’s what I’m thinking.

Me?

I’m enrolling in a welding course at the local college.

HIGH POINTS

By jim holt

He’s on the higher fence
pole and
between the smaller fences
of the cold gardens.

It’s the highest place to be.

The snow could come
and he’d look down on it
from that spot in the garden.

He runs along the wires,
sometimes,
but if the winter should come
he knows where to go.

——
I wrote this in Toronto Dec. 3, 1977 … 32 years ago to the day … cripes cripes cripes holy cripes.

TURTLE PONDS ON THE MOON

By jim holt

I am water.

Well, most of me is water.

Most of the world I live in is water.

So, according to my math, which I admit can be a bit wonky – think of a calculator that has a couple of dead keys, say the 7 and 3 keys – that would be my math.

According to my math, the majority of our knowable tangible universe is water.

My calculator (subtract necessary amounts of 7 and 3) says the looming water crisis over scarcity will make the worldwide oil grab by state-aligned corporations look like a housewife tug-of-war at the grocery store over ice cream.

Water wars.

I wonder if they’re already shoring up sides on the moon over frozen ponds of weightless dark water.

I’d like to put turtles in there and let them handle things.

I AM A SCARECROW IN A PUMPKIN PATCH OF STONE

By jim holt

It took me years to find the Pumpkin Patch.

This would be the Pumpkin Patch inside the Anza-Borrego Desert, my favorite desert.

Over the course of more than two decades, I unfolded the same Anza-Borrego Desert map on the hood of various cars – some rented, some destroyed, some scratched going through nail-like desert brush, the car owned by my hiking partner’s Korean girlfriend which overheated and exploded, my Jeep – all of them gone.

Every hike was an adventure. The Pumpkin Patch, however, remained elusive. The photos of which were hypnotic – perfectly rounded balls of stone, depicted on page 108 in the quintessential Anza-Borrego Desert hiking book by Lowell & Diana Lindsay.

How? What? Why?

The stone balls were all sizes, some the size of basketballs, some the size of soccer balls, baseballs (pretty much all your ball sports and all of the world’s fruit) grapefruit-sized balls, melons …. And, of course, pumpkins.

Wrecking balls of naturally formed stone sat with nothing to do, nothing to destroy, scattered over a sandy patch of desert – somewhere.

How did they form so perfectly rounded in the middle of nowhere? Was it the wind? But, the wind erodes all rock and stone and naked crazy Extreme Desert Hikers.

Was it rain? Rain – you gotta be kidding. It’s a fricking desert. Well, maybe flashfloods but then again it would water eroding and wearing away all manner of rock and creature.

The sun? Now we’re just getting silly.

After a few failed attempts to find the patch, I cared less about ‘How’ and ‘Why’ and focused solely on the ‘Where.’

On my birthday, in 1996, the day I turned 41, Stevie and I ventured out across the wash to find the Pumpkin Patch yet again. Instead, we found 17 Palms – an oasis of palms, 17 of them (really, we counted).

There was a wooden barrel wedged in the elbow of one separating palm. The Post Office. Hikers left notes, photos, postcards, sunglasses…. There was a notepad and a pen for anyone wishing to contribute. I can’t remember what I wrote in the log. It may very well have been something about trying to find the Pumpkin Patch.

That was at the height of summer. Temps were well over 110F, about 115F. We had been hiking all day. Relaxing in the oasis shade of quietly clicking palms overhead was peaceful.

We got up and headed back, leaving the Pumpkin Patch for yet another day. I had get back for my birthday dinner.

I felt extremely proud and grateful to have been able to hike several miles in scorching heat on the day I turned 41.

A few years later, I went pumpkin hunting with a friend visiting from England. His name was also Steve. But that Steve was a Repo Man who worked in London. We tried approaching the patch from the south, got lost in the wash trying to find a shortcut – there are no shortcuts in the desert.

On June 14, 2003, two friends visiting from Canada, were intrigued about the elusive pumpkins and decided to join me in my search despite triple-digit heat.

My pals – Dan, an artist who leaves both talent and trouble on each canvas, and Chris, who honored me deeply by trusting my advice that hiking through Death Valley and the Mojave would be wise around the time his father died – both wanted to find the pumpkins of stone.

Unfolding the desert map yet again, we decided to drive beyond the point I had always entered the desert from the road. This, of course, was the answer to the riddle – find the appropriate access road. Duh.

I was an idiot. But, I was an idiot (if I can be honest) who enjoyed never having found it, who enjoyed the foreplay of leaving my footprints all around the perimeter of the Pumpkin Patch – from the north one year, from the west when I turned 41 ….

I was an idiot who enjoyed getting naked and lost in the desert.

When we arrived at the Pumpkin Patch, having simply followed the dirt road from S-22, there it was – a solar system of stone orbs planted peacefully in their place, as content it seemed as perfectly round men who had simply grown old and then tired, who then sat down in the sand where they had stopped in their orbiting ….

There wasn’t one ‘pumpkin’ that could have been considered the sun in that system … stone balls as round as tractor wheels remained in their stopped orbit around balls as big as basketballs and, of course, pumpkins….

So, naturally, I sat down among them. I was home.

And, then, as is my desert way, I got naked among the pumpkins – until Chris spotted an shiny SUV of mom, dad, a girl, boy and one dog slowly driving to the Pumpkin Patch from the road. I pulled my shorts on behind a wrecking ball of stone and popped up, once again human and respectable.

So easy to find and yet I had made it so difficult to actually get to. Why? Because I enjoyed the search, I preferred being lost.

Now I have a photo of me settled in that Patch of stone solar system …

I’m now 54. out of work … I spend my days still trying to drum up freelance work … I work on my book … I bump around the kitchen … each time stopping at the backdoor … darting out to stop birds eating the grass seed. ….. that’s my job these days … I’m a scarecrow.

How did I get this way?

The wind? The sun? Money? Love? A force as fierce and sudden as a flashflood somehow?

Who knows how anything is molded really?

I like to think it’s a million mysterious forces that sculpt us into something angular and awkward and bent tree-limb-down by age … sometimes left completely rounded … it’s this subtle process of erosion about which I remain intrigued …

Pulled by the gentle tug of Jupiter’s gravity? Maybe.

Worn down by dehydration, drop by drop of water not consumed? Perhaps.

I don’t know how it works. I’m not that bright.

When I got naked at sunset atop the Kelso Dunes, in the East Mojave Desert … Chris, somewhere on the same dune crest, did the same. It was around the time his father died and just before he married.

Perhaps it’s just about timing.

I just felt it was the right thing to do … I sat down where I stopped and let the erosion begin.

Sometimes, when I stare at the back yard, watching brave wee shoots of grass piercing through this desert patch of land, I think of a hiker stumbling on my notes left at 17 Palms … I chuckle thinking someone would actually mail back to me some of the mail I left in the Post Office barrel.

I could very easily have written: I’m trying to find the Pumpkin Patch. The thing itself is strange and beguiling … the forces that mold them escape me … the process to find them is what molds me …strangely, I am found in my being lost.

Get out of here, you birds!

MY PHOTO DRAWER: JAMES HONG 11Apr07

(click my CELEBS page for photo)

UPDATE: Actor James Hong one of several celebrities who turned out for the Beverly Hills Film Festival in April 2007.

DEEP SEAS

by jim holt

itty bitty shark in my hands
- the smell of blood
through all of my finest meals

you offer me wine

there’s been so much wine
our swordfish hearts
are one.

——
I wrote this on Aug. 16, 1985, in Ottawa, the summer i worked for the paper in Smiths Falls.

I SAW A SPIDER DIE

By jim holt

I saw a spider die last night.

I didn’t kill it. It wasn’t held captive. It just chose to die in front of me.

You would think that a guy who has lived for more than half a century would have witnessed such an event before. But, I’ve never watched any wild insect just stop living.

I was doing the dishes. Lots of water. (I like to rinse the dishes before I put them in the dish washer … if I don’t then wee bits of food just galvanize right on the plate … dishwashers are the second most useless machines created) …. Anyway, as I lifted a plate to wash … a spider, apparently hiding under the lip of the plate, scooted away from me and from the sink, scurrying to behind a small vase of blue glass…..

I never like to kill any creature (except for cockroaches, of course, and anyone who has lived with cockroaches could be the staunchest Christian and even still cut me some slack on this score … ) but I was too busy rinsing and brushing.

The spider stayed behind the blue glass.

After loading up the dishwasher, I peeked around the vase thinking that perhaps I hadn’t really seen a spider go there. I had. It was there. I moved the vase and the spider hobbled over to behind a second vase.

Now I was into wiping the counter and putting things away, bringing over bigger pots and items that required heavy manual cleaning. And, as I scrubbed a pot, the spider crawled out in the open … about an inch from his vase …. I’m not a spider expert but I could tell its head was angled in my direction.

Was it looking at me?

If it was dying and knew, intuitively, that it was dying, what would it lose exposing itself?

Was it communicating – one creature to another creature – with nothing to lose and everything to gain with sharing life’s most definitive moment?

Was it old and tired of a lifetime hiding from flies, hiding from people?

About 15 minutes had transpired from the time I first saw it. The spider – still in the open – stark black on a white ceramic tile – curled in its legs and collapsed.

Is it sleeping?

That was my first thought. My second thought was ‘ does it feel that comfortable in my presence that it would just decide to sleep exposed in the open.’?

After all the dishes were put away and the kitchen wiped down and clean. I went back to check on sleepy-head with his eight crumpled legs.

It looks dead, I thought.

It was.

Complex creatures – spiders and human dishwashers.

The most useless machine? Car alarms. Of course.

MY PHOTO DRAWER: LESLIE NIELSEN 23Oct03

(click my CELEBS page for photo)

UPDATE: Canadian funny man Leslie Nielsen was presented the Award of Excellence by ACTRA at the home of Canada’s Consul General in Los Angeles. Fellow Canadians, Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and Love Story Director Arthur Hiller, showed up for the event.

THE YOUNG DOCTOR

by jim holt

It has nothing to do with elves,
it has nothing to do with
summer,
Mexico or any design of that
place we wanted to hang
on my wall,
nothing at all.

But, I did sweat so badly
one time
like a hot fish turning in my bed
when the desert was near
and the ocean was far away,
when you touched my leather face
to test my authenticity
as a pre-historic bird.

We were the doves of our
own time.

—-
i wrote this for P.D. in Toronto Jan. 13, 1984.

FIND THE GNOME

By jim holt

Find the garden gnome hiding somewhere in this picture. Go ahead. It’s fun.

Somewhere in this photo there should be a smiling gnome resting on his rake ….

Should be.

Are you looking?

Somewhere …. Somewhere …. If you look long and hard, there’s a garden gnome hiding in this photo of red flowers ….

Naw, I’m only messin’ with you.

There’s no gnome. That’s the whole point of these blogs I’ve been posting for the last couple of years.

It’s been a long long time since my mother’s yard has been home to a jolly portly wee guy in lederhosen, laughing at life among the wee firs …

Who’s laughing now? Right? Right?

Still looking, aren’t you?

Give it up, buddy. Face it. They’re just gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.

Where do they go? Right? Where DO they go? Am I right? These garden gnomes we love.

You like the wee party truck idea, don’t you? I know. I know.

Some days I wish I could just dwindle down to just a foot-and-a-half tall, get me a groovy leather vest, some John Lennon glasses, floppy rave-type hat, floppy knee-high matching boots, maybe a beer stein … just so I could stand in my mom’s front garden for a couple of nights until the party truck comes by …

Ooohhh …. Don’t know about the gnome party truck?

(In case you missed the first couple of blogs … the on-going theory here at Bloghouser is that all the garden gnomes in all the neighborhood yards go missing at night when the gnome party truck – the size of those motorized kids’ Jeeps – drives by, scouring the neighborhood waving waiting gnomes to join them).

Anyway, some days I’d like to be able to call the gnome home my home.

Forget the mile-high club … I say, give me an invite to the knee-high club. I think garden gnomes have got a pretty good thing going on … vehemently protecting the secret of their disappearance.

I spotted a garden gnome recently – in of all places, a garden. Can you believe it? A garden gnome still found in a bloody garden. Un-frickin’believable, I know.

It was the middle of the day …. Front yard …. There he stood, flanked by pink impatiens on his left and pink impatiens on his right … looking both pretty – and funky – in pink … boots like elf slippers, floppy hat of course (was there ever a time when those bloody hats actually stood erect? A weighty question perhaps for another day) … so there he was, smiling, looking up at me as I dared to walk up the driveway and stand over the little guy … there he was smiling, rosy cheeks …..

I looked around …. Squatted down in front of him (to give anyone watching the impression I was admiring some handiwork) ….

That smirk … oh that smirk …

“You’re hiding something, aren’t you buddy? Some big big secret, eh? A big big secret for a little guy, eh? Eh? Oh yeah, you know something.”

Of course he said nothing.

They’re trained like that. Trained to make it look like they’re working in your garden when in actual fact all they ever do is hold rakes and shovels and beer steins in just the right way so that you think they’re working …. They’re not.

“C’mon, buddy….. I’m onto you. You and your diminutive pals all vanishing without a trace and real human – ok, I’ll say it, tall – people are expected not to notice or ask questions …. Well, I’m asking …. What’s it all about? …. Eh? …. Big guy?”

Silence.

Oh, they’re so crafty …. To say nothing of smug … that smirk.

“C’mon … c’mon …. It’s just you and me. I won’t tell anyone … you guys disappear, meet at a secret location, hook up with garden chick gnomes, doff your lederhosen and kerchiefs, leave them in a tiny heap by some watering hole … yeah? Yeah? Is that it? Is that it?

Again, nothing.

Oh they’re good at keeping their mouths shut … Freemasons have nothing on these guys. Every now and then some wayward mason gets drunk and spills the beans on his memorizing pals only to end up disappearing … well, garden gnomes have never said a word and they ALL go missing.

Genius. Sheer, genius.

“Ok, buddy,” that’s what I said to this garden gnome I actually spotted in someone’s yard. “Ok, buddy. I’m hip to you.”

(I gave him one of those eye-to-eye hand gestures … where I make a peace sign with my fingers, then point them at my eyes and then point them at his eyes, then my eyes, then his eyes …)

“Are we good? Are we? Look at my eyes, fella’.”

At this point, he’s smiling up at me, hands on his hips.

“This isn’t over.” I tell him. “I’ll be back.”

I went back the next day with a shopping list of questions. I parked my car, got out, walked confidently over to the pink impatiens …..

You guessed it, my friend. You guessed it. You’ve obviously been there yourself. Yep. Gone.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

I stood there looking at the empty space between the pink impatiens …. Shaking my head, hands on hips, I looked up at the sky in wonder, shaking my head and I couldn’t help smiling….

I was suddenly aware of a larger being looking down and seeing in His garden, by the pink impatiens, a tiny figure of a person, kind of portly, standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the sky, pretending to work ….