In 1992 I decided I wanted to hunt again, after many years of not being around weapons. But the thought of firing a high powered rifle at a deer or elk still made me queasy. The local archery range was a wonderful system of trails through a forest of redwoods and manzanita brush a short distance from Santa Cruz. My friend Walter Smith and I spent long hours there, and my boyhood love of archery was rekindled.
That fall Larry Yien and I went for an archery elk hunt on a ranch in the Colorado Rockies. One morning we were out of our tents and in the woods before daylight, and split up to hunt separately. As the Eastern sky took its time going from starry dark to faint light, I crested a gradual rise and stopped to be quiet and listen and look.
As the light became lighter, the fir branches surrounding me visibly drooped with dewdrops. As the first orange sliver of sun pushed its tiny arc above the mountain to the East, a dewdrop in front of my nose caught that sunlight and became a rainbow that for a long moment occupied my entire vision. Awake now, and having just been taught by the world around me to notice such a thing, that world exploded quietly, with a patience that moved slowly yet wasted no instant, into a galaxy of rainbows refracted in the dewdrops.
This stuff happens to me all the time; the world just flat knocks my socks off. And anything that birds do – especially flight – amazes me. Pelicans circling with one eye on the water, then diving for dinner in a collapse of wings, a comically ungainly splash and a struggling takeoff, or flying in V formation along the California coast, never fail to remind me of Robinson Jeffers’ line in his poem “Boats in a Fog” about watching a file of fishing boats bucking waves and wind offshore: “...a flight of pelicans/ is nothing lovelier to look at...” Or Canada geese, in Oregon where I live now. A few years ago Kit and Kim Phelps hired me to build a small addition to the old farmhouse on their place. One wintry evening I was working alone on the roof, trying to get the plywood sheathing in place before dark. It had been raining off and on all day. With the quick temperature changes we’re used to in that place, sometimes the surface of the plywood would turn icy as I was nailing it in place. Timm Turrentine, my friend and helper, was sick that day, but I was almost done. Just a couple more sheets...
In the last light of day, the western sky did what it often does there in the open spaces around Lostine: it burned. With the urgency of getting the roof covered before dark, and getting out of my freezing coveralls, I wasn’t in the mood to pay attention to the sky.
Neither was the sky in a mood to ignore me. Clouds in bulbous, tubular streams stretched from the southern to the northern horizon, then flamed pink, orange, red, purple, charcoal, against the azure-going-to-indigo sky. The scene gave me a shiver that was not from cold.
Then I heard them, coming out of the sunset: a V of Canada geese, forced close to the ground by low clouds, were headed straight for me, kneeling there on the roof. Okay, some things you can ignore, some you can’t. They barely cleared the ridge of the roof I was working on. As they passed a few feet above me I watched individual feathers on their wings move. I heard the sibilance of those feathers’ sliding across one another as they did the work of flight, against the very nearby symphony of their honking.
The violent wonderment in the way I saw and heard the sky and the geese was a direct result, 40 years on, of another moment in Tho An, a couple of hours after the moment of the screaming baby boy and the old man’s hateful stare that ended my religion and all the other Big Ideas that made up the fabric of my life before that April day in 1966. That was the infinite moment when the burst of automatic fire went between those of us standing around the well, and I saw in a blinding lapse of my habitual stupidity (as in “young and stupid”) how easy it is to die, how lucky I was to still be alive, and how precious life is, every moment of every day.
Religion was replaced, in that moment of my life, by a greater gift: a love of life as we have it, from rainbows in dewdrops to geese in flight to simply breathing, walking, kissing....
If you ask me, I traded up.
Since that change in the way I see things, Life is what matters: the blood and breath coursing through me, through other humans, through my dog and my friends’ horses and other creatures who live with us and by us. And just the living of it: working at something that serves life, such as providing food or shelter; playing music or playing with children, and of course loving. Not fighting. Loving.
I don’t believe in anything else: no ism, no ology, just... life. Any idea which I see as tending towards life, I support. Any idea which I see as trying to pull humans towards conflict – especially in the name of any ism or “national interest” (which usually means defending some sort of economic interest), I oppose. Any idea that wants to put a weapon in the hands of young men, or boys, or young women, or girls, and assigns a human target to that young armed person, I oppose. The way I see it, all those ideas lean towards, or march towards, or sprint towards, Death.
I take this stance as a warrior. I am not a pacifist. I would still fight – fiercely and well - to defend my wife, my friends, my neighbors. But our nation is now using wars in such a way as to increase the numbers of people who call us “the enemy,” along with the strength of their resolve to destroy us.
For anyone who has read Sun Tzu’s 2,500-year-old (give or take)The Art of War, or who has studied martial arts for twenty-plus years as I have, our current politico-military posture in the world is just plain lousy military strategy. It robs us of our money, our blood, our youth, even of the vast reservoir of international good will which we (North) Americans owned after World War II.
As a warrior, I oppose it.
